Veszprémi Nóra - Jávor Anna - Advisory - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2005-2007. 25/10 (MNG Budapest 2008)

LÓRÁND BERECZKY: The First Fifty Years - 50™ ANNIVERSARY OF THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - Éva BAJKAY: Collecting Avant-Garde - A Subjective History

Uitz left the country in the winter of 1919. After some quite prolific years in Vienna (1920-24), Moscow (1921) and Paris (1924-26), he applied for a residence permit in France, but, not getting it, he accepted the offer to teach at the Moscow Vhutemas, a sort of Bauhaus art school. After the gruesome decades and the Second World War, it would have been self-evident for him to return to Hungary dominated by the Soviet Army. Cultural minister Gyula Ortutay even invited him back. In 1947, on his sixtieth anniversary, several appreciative articles appeared in the press by among others Gábor Ö. Pogány.

5 In his famous book, The Revolutionaries of Hungarian Painting, published at the time, he still defended the moderns from the recurrent charges of thematic reworking, and somewhat over-appreciated the suggestive new creation of Uitz, demonstrating its influence on Gyula Derkovits and István Szőnyi.

6 In accordance with the community art programme announced and the culture-political directives in effect in Hungary at the time, he stated that Uitz had been able to unfold his innovative intentions under the conditions the Soviet Union provided - in this he was quite off the mark.

7 Why had Uitz not returned to Hungary, neither in 1948 nor in 1958? It is difficult to tell exactly, but he must have had good premonitions and informers. He had been charged with formalism in the Soviet Union in 1936, and he had every reason to fear coming home under Hungarian Stalinism. Personally, he must have wanted to return, because he did make a visit in 1958. Pogány was the director general of the National Gallery by then, and he took him round his just-completed permanent 19

th-century exhibition. By witness of the photos, they were hatching plans and vibrantly arguing over them.

8 (111. 2) In that year, the National Gallery housed major retrospectives of both the 19

th-century academic painter Gyula Benczúr and the surrealist Imre Amos (this occasioned the acquisition of much of his estate by the gallery). The director general promoted a "revolutionary art" through a grand exhibition at the Arts Hall in the midst of the cultural conditions of a restored Stalinism. This was meant as a kind of trial performance for the permanent 20

th-century show of the National Gallery, and it was presented in Moscow in 1958.

9 The conception focussed on labourer representation deemed as a revolutionary subject matter.

10 The selection to be displayed was expanded to include works of a higher aesthetic quality, such as those by Hungarian-Plains painters, The Eights, Gyula Derkovits and József Egry, as well as numerous other talented artists." Pogány took a position of cautious modernism,

12 implying that artists could even be abstract painters privately or in their studios, but were not to dabble in such retrograde formalist work officially. However, this was not a period to be dominated by Uitz or his likes, but by Sándor Ék, who returned to Hungary as an officer of the Red Army, and of whom Pogány published a monograph,

13 and who was and remained a pathetic imitator of Uitz. From 1949, he laid his hands on the Department of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts.

14 He bequeathed his agitprop posters to the National Gallery, which formed the core of its poster collection.

15 Step by step, cultural policy began to change from 1965. The debate on the modern and the relationship between Hungarian and international art had already taken place in the literary magazine Új írás (New Writing),

16 though at the same the art magazine Pogány edited, Művészet (Art), harshly attacked so-called decadence, and Pál Pátzay, an early colleague of Uitz, warned artists against the incest of isms.

17 In 1965, Pogány still defended so2. Béla Uitz and Gábor Ö. Pogány at the National Gallery, 1958 Photo: HNG Archive, inv. no.: 9810/1958 cialist realism in the Társadalmi Szemle}* though earlier on he had maintained his connection with the leader of the Activists, Lajos Kassák,

19 for whose Paris catalogue he had written an introduction, which was said to have cost him the most prestigious state honours, the Kossuth Prize. Through the offices of Vasarely, Kassák had by this time already had several exhibitions in Paris, at the Galerie Denise René, and actively participated in efforts to promote his work in Western Europe.

20 And at home, János Fajó curated his master's first exhibition. News may have reached Moscow through Uitz's wife (Kassák's sister) and others. In an attempt to replace the Munkácsy cult with that of a more modern painter, the National Gallery arranged a Derkovits retrospective in 1965, founded on acquisitions that had taken place earlier.

21 From the outset, the director general sought to acquire, apart from works by Derkovits, Uitzes, too. Thus a way was opened for broader researches on the so-called "revolutionary tradition" that would point beyond mere dogmatism; it seemed a cautious route could be taken for an attitude open towards modernism. Information gathered from foreign reference books and catalogues, sporadic travels urged a group of young artists to join up with the international.

22 For them, the rejection of figurai painting grew out of the soil of dictatorship, as a kind of reaction against the blockade of abstract art by state policy and public taste. This is a Central European phenomenon. Like the Poles, we Hungarians were lucky to have been able to rely on the constructivist innovations of the 1920s. The social and artistic Utopia of classical leftist avant-garde gradually became accepted under socialism, as aspirations basing themselves on this could be justified ideologi-