Veszprémi Nóra - Szücs György szerk.: Vajda Lajos (1908–1941) kiállítása (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2008/6)

Gábor Pataki: Panther and Lily: The Retrospective of Lajos Vajda

Born in a petite-bourgeois family, it was a decisive factor in Lajos Vajda's career that his family moved to Serbia in 1916. This was where he began drawing: he first copied Serbian war heroes and German cruisers after picture magazines; then, as his ability to observe matured, he made portraits of the members of his family. More important were the cultural influences: he became acquainted with Byzantine art, icon painting and Serbian folklore. This connection would not be eclipsed later: returning home, the family settled in Szentendre, the centre of Serbian culture in Hungary. From 1923, he attended the drawing school of the Hungarian National Jewish Cultural Society. Some of his works from this time demonstrate that he was not going to stay untouched by the Arcadian-Biblical Expressionism so popular among the artists of the period. His drawings and sketches became increasingly mature, the mellow realism of his portraits and landscapes, the confidence of his drawings of nudes and studies of landscapes demonstrated that recording what he saw was no difficulty for him, and that he was facile with the various techniques of art. His serious disease, the death of his mother and his conflict with his authoritarian father arrested his creativity for a long while. He could only start his studies at the Academy of Arts in 1928. His art-school companions (Dezső Korniss, György Képes, SándorTrauner) introduced him in Lajos Kassák's Munka (Work) circle. He participated at the various cultural programmes, debates, excursions the group organized - his leftist political views stemming here. In connection to the Avant-Garde tradition of the circle, Vajda had a taste of Constructivism, which he probably got to know from reproductions, perhaps the portfolios and personal accounts of Kassák. It was therefore no wonder that, in the beginning, shapes floating in space, much like those of Kassák's Bildarchitekturen (pictorial architectures) and Lisitzky's prouns, appear on his small-scale sketches. In the two more elaborated pictures of this period that have come down us (Film, Fics), static, hieratic plane forms take the place of dynamic structures, and the Cyrillic characters, which seemed somewhat exotic in the Hungary of the time, heightened the heroic reminiscences of these compositions of his. He however, unlike his companions who participated at the Munka events and made their appearance under the collective name Young Progressives (Korniss, Kepes, Trauner, Ernő Schubert), was not particularly impressed by the Russian Constructivists like Sterenberg or the French Esprit Nouveau and by the decorative plane, collage-enriched structures that so much characterized this late off-shoot of the Hungarian Avant-Garde. Expelled from art school due to the exhibition of the Young Progressives, where he too exhibited his work, he travelled to Paris in 1930. II, Drawn to Kassák's Munka Circle "...we rather put the emphasis on constructivism." "...a Hungarian of Jewish stock under Serbian influences" I. Vajda's First Steps