Bakos Katalin szerk.: Szivárvány Áruház és Nagyvilág, Káldor László (1905–1963) és Gábor Pál (1913–1992) (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2000/4)

"Parallel Lives:" László Káldor and Pál Gábor, two Hungarian graphic designers 1933-1963. Summary

"Parallel Lives": László Káldor and Pál Gábor, two Hungarian graphic designers 1933-1963 The Beginning. The Thirties Neither László Káldor, nor Pál Gábor attended an official training institution up to graduation, yet they did have path-setting great masters. Both studied with the interior decorator and furniture designer Gyula Kaesz. László Káldor was his pupil at the School of Applied Arts for two years. Pál Gábor was one of the first students of the "Atelier school of artistic design and workshop" founded in 1931, where Kaesz also taught interior decoration and furniture design, in the company of such outstanding artists as Lajos Kozma, who also instructed in the above two subjects as well as architecture, graphic designer Gusztáv Végh and typographer Albert Kner.

1 The first tangible sources of the two artists' careers are adverts they placed in the press about their designing work. Pál Gábor put up an ad in Reklámélet in 1934,

2 and László Káldor advertised in the same magazine in 1936.

3 It is noteworthy that Káldor worked with the graphic designer György Nemes. This collaboration connects Káldor's work with the approach of another modern school of design, "Műhely" [Workshop] led by Sándor Bortnyik

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, which was launched earlier than "Atelier". Nemes was notably one of the most talented students of Bortnyik. Both "Műhely" and "Atelier" advocated far more up-to-date art pedagogical and designing methods than the considerably conservative School of Applied Arts. They also adopted part of the guidelines of German Bauhaus adjusted to the local circumstances.

5 Káldor, who was eight years the senior of the other artist was already at work nearly ten years earlier than the ad in Reklámélet. He was employed by the furniture makers József Gróf and Sándor Faragó, probably after the two years at the School of Applied Arts. He is known to have visited Paris, but his career up to 1936, when he was 31, cannot be exactly reconstructed. His posthumous papers include the design of a chest of drawers with inlays, a typical piece of the furniture in somewhat modernized period styles produced by József Gróf. Pál Gábor was probably "architect in the morning, graphic designer in the afternoon in Ferenc Kende's and István Irsai's design office" at the time of the advert, as he wrote in his autobiography. He laid stress on noting later as well that the two disciplines were in constant interplay in his works. His early designs already reveal a conscious composition stressing the structure, which was to characterize both his figurai and purely typographical works later. Probably this outlook entailed his interest in typography or letter design that required enormous discipline and precision. Typography, which was traditionally a weak spot of Hungarian poster design, proved decisive in Gábor's career over the time. Just graduated from "Atelier," Gábor won a competition called to design the title page of the magazine of Franklin Society, Tükör [Mirror] (cat.no. G. II. 1, pi. 9.).

5 The inscription of elongated grotesque letters (inspired by Paul Renner's Futura type) is laid out in the diagonal pattern favoured by constructivist typography and harmoniously satisfies the task: the graphic design of the titlepage was to frame the given new photo. He made several titlepages for Reklámélet, an honouring task for graphic designers. A successful participation in a competition of exhibition design made it possible financially for Gábor to see the Paris World Exposition of 1937. He utilized the trip for further training: he attended the Académie Grand Chaumière, and in the studio of Victor Vasarely - who was the student of Sándor Bortnyik's "Műhely" in Budapest in 1929-30 under his original Hungarian name Győző Vásárhelyi - he got further training and work. Thus, similarly to László Káldor, Pál Gábor's career was also significantly tied to a former Bortnyik disciple. The start of both careers was determined by functionalism that had strengthened by the thirties via the teachings of Gyula Kaesz and Lajos Kozma who softened the rigour of constructivism with a stress on subtle care, elegance and quality of the materials on the one hand, and via the pupils of Sándor Bortnyik, a constructivist painter-graphic artist in 1921-22 and later a designer, developed under the influence of the Bauhaus. The program of both "Atelier" and "Műhely" included the universalness of form creation, the convertibility of two- and three-dimensional genres, drawing, architecture, interior design and object design. No documents survive of Pál Gábor's first years in Paris. He returned to Budapest in 1940. His work was then characterized by commercial posters and book covers designed for Cserépfalvi publishing house. The purely typographical titlepages are outstanding among them. It is a singular feature of Gábor's typography that he refers to the classical traditions of book art, transforming the old types and modernizing the regular layout of the page. Not wholly discarding the old rules, he steals playfulness, a decorative touch to the extremely simple letter compositions almost unnoticed. Similarly to Pál Gábor, Káldor also combined architecture, interior decoration and drawing. Together with György Nemes, he designed market pavilions for participants in the Budapest International Fair. To advertise their work, they designed a prospectus (cat.no. K. VII. 6, pi. 3.) with square pages and the fashionable spiral-binding patented in the '30s. The proportionately arranged cut-out pavilion and maquette photos, the white pages alternating with purely orange ones, the typography applied - all reveal the consistent constructivism of the two artists. The advertising prospectus is a small document revealing what an important experimental field pavilion architecture, as well as book and advert design, were for the "Bauhausstyle" the naturalization of which did not go without a hitch in Hungary;' In the second half of the thirties László Káldor was most prolific, working for a multitude of medium- and small-sized ventures and their products in Budapest. Well-versed in all fields of design, he planned business cards, invitations, commodity labels, packaging, posters, stationary, prospectuses. When he received a commission, he devoted much attention to the complex unit of all these to create an individual image for the firm. To exactly date these works would require more detailed researches into industry, economy and town history. The printed end products, the choice of the paper, were always of the highest quality. These ensembles are spectacular relics of Budapest's social and business life in the thirties, affording us an insight into fashion, the struggles of small- and medium-sized firms for business success. Káldor shaped the business program and profile of the entrepreneurs, people from the lower and middle classes who identified with a dynamic and up-to-date approach, offering this image as an effective visual argumentation in concord with the call of the times.