Korsókra varázsolt legendák. Németh János figurális díszítésű edényei (Zalaegerszeg)

Legends on pitchers

sake. The starting point and the resultant of all of this, at the same time, is belief. Belief in a world where yes is yes, no is no, good means good and bad means bad. Where you cannot talk besides the point, where everything is exactly what is seems to be. Belief in a world, where everything has its own reason and purpose, according to the order created by God, in which nothing is for its own sake. The artist is convinced that this world, concerning its essence, still exists - not somewhere else but deep inside us, - moreover this means reality in contrast with what we can experience with our senses. We feel, can feel his pitchers, as authentic live objects, which directly continue the one-time guild pitchers and popular bottles, though they lost their original function, due to the changes in our lifestyle. They genuinely mediate the mentality and attitude towards life of their original medium. Archaising in their case is not only manner but conscious and consistent adherence to the experience and traditions treasured up throughout centuries. In the above mentioned interview the artist said about his first steps: "For me guild pitchers mean the state of-the art product of Hungarian pottery. Everything that I call earthenware, pottery appears in them: in form and materiality. A superb exhibition (János Németh saw it when he was a university student - L.K.) in the National Gallery displayed the masterpieces of Hungarian pottery, some hundred truly beautiful pitchers. They were made for occasions of considerable importance like christenings and weddings. They were put on the table at those times. That exhibition made me realise that those objects would disappear very soon. It was then that I decided to create my own guild pitchers. I started to make a study of them. ... Of course I knew that we couldn't consider them as consumer goods in the second half of the 20th century, though one can drink or eat from them. ... I put my own world onto those pitchers and bottles: genres and mythology." We must add that we extended this circle, since among János Németh's pitchers there are not only vessels decorated with sculpted reliefs, constituting an independent microcosm, due to their plastic world but also figurative works in great numbers and practically autonomous works of plastic art. Comparison with the guild pitchers draws attention to an important aspect. These old-time ornamental vessels were born in the spirit of virtuosity rather than in the spirit of functionality, and beyond their outstanding artistic quality they had symbolic meanings too: they were the symbols of a community's internal cohesion (we would like to stress the community not the trade). From such an approach, Németh's "guild pitchers" can be considered as the symbols of a community, based upon an (almost totally) vanished (peasant) mode of existence and the, more or less, exclusive and unified intellectual culture attached to it. From the point of view of forms and techniques, the entire collection of Németh's figurally decorated (or shaped) potteries can be arranged into six main groups. The ones belonging to different periods, despite the chronological overlapping, still fit into one of the groups, four groups are made up of potteries produced on a potter's wheel, the fifth group was partly produced on a potter's wheel, while the sixth consists of particular book-shaped bottles. The latter one, and two further groups carry figurai relief decoration on their sides. The potteries belonging to the third group have a human figure or an animal form on the "handle- lids", the fourth group is made up of pots of animal shapes (the artist calls them 'kaspó'), and the fifth group consists of pitchers modelling independent figures. The archetypes of every single group were the potteries of different shape and function of sometime potter's craft: jugs, pitchers, bottles, flasks, amphoras, pots, stew-pots and casseroles, with an amazing variety of contours, which please highly in themselves. Then the artist reinterprets the age-old forms and endows them with meanings, which totally or partly have some significant content beyond themselves. The first group, which is the biggest in terms of number, comprises mainly of wheeled pottery, decorated with sculpted relief and some four-sided earless bottles. The former ones are with handles (some of them even have two), opposite each other. The pieces in the collection's shape and size are varied, there are bellied pitchers, jugs with a handle or slender bottles, they can be short and tall and their weight differs accordingly. They are covered with bright or silklike green, cobalt blue or brown covering glaze, but one can find some pieces, where the artist used only a clay-glaze. Among their prototypes, there are the relief-decorated vessels of ancient Persian and Roman gold- and silversmiths, as well as former masterpieces of guild-potters. Sculp14