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

III. Panther and Lily Vajda's Montages Párduc és liliom / Panther and Lily, 1930-1933 (kat. 54.) PMMI Ferenczy Múzeum, Szentendre Tight composition, spaces broken down into planes and motifs affixed on them would remain fundamental elements of his art for quite some time, but he soon stepped beyond the dogmatic application of Constructivism. It is however difficult to trace the stations of his quest because no more than a handful of collages made in the more than four years of his Paris stay (1930-1934) have survived (apart from a drawing that turned up unexpectedly recently). On the basis of these what can safely be said is that he swapped the collage technique inspired by the Soviet Avant-Garde for a much freer method applying lines of force set against one another. A complete lack of mysteriousness, ominousness and eroticism differentiates these works from the Surrealist collages of the time. They are, or he wished them to be, expressions of not his personal desires, fears and anxieties but of those of the Earth. They are stills from the progress of the living and the dead, the Chinese, the Indians, the natives of Africa, Hungarian peasant women, rulers and prophets, of destitution and war, violence and defencelessness. Sometimes, Vajda contrasted pairs, such as a snarling beast vs. a young girl and a flower (Panther and Lily); at other times, he, so to speak, listed his motifs: women carrying jugs on their heads, Chinese children, an African with a machete in his hand in order to place them in the tension curve of a skull and a figure flogged until bleeding (The Whipped One). The majority of the protagonists of his collages came from among the "the insulted and the humiliated": little boys, infants, native girls are thrust to be preyed on by violence. These are his works that witness to his social awareness and leftist commitment. Moreover, they recall the editing techniques of Russian Avant-Garde cinema: flashing, they contrast contraries stuck one upon another - suggestive of the kind of films he could have made had he had a camera at his disposal.