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

Apparently, everything changed in his lite after his homecoming from Paris in 1934. He might have felt that he had had to face a seething and changing world gushing forth visual and social information and to take a stand amidst them; but now, in more provincial and calm conditions, he had the impression that he had to turn to professional questions conceived narrowly: to line drawing, the sure running of which could produce refined portraits and suggestive nudes, and to still life. To be more precise, he sought to make use of a view from above. In this series of pictures with a particularly high view point, he, so to speak, laid out objects and pressed them down in plane. But it was not to the plane constructions of the Munka Circle that he returned; instead, he attempted to create a highly delicate balance between a terrifyingly unstable spatial situation resulting from changing points of view and a hieratic, static ordering of forms. It was selfenclosed, almost enigmatic compositions that he produced at this time - an important station in the career of the artist investigating the problem of spatial representation. These were the questions he had dwelled on in some of his early pictures using a high point of view. However, architecture continued to resist composition; though interesting, these works do not break away from the contingencies of spectacle. The real about-turn came when, together with Dezső Korniss, he began to systematically draw the peasant houses of Szentendre and the nearby Szigetmonostor, and their architectural details no one had paid any attention to before. A born artist, travelling in the countryside or cities, will always have his sketch book in his pocket to be able to record any picturesque motif or detail he might use later. Vajda and Korniss, however, set themselves another aim when, referring to the example of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, they called their method collection of motifs. Though they did not attempt to emulate the systematic and scholarly ordering of motifs of the two composers (they had no reason or opportunity to do so), the Bartókian analogy is justified. Apart from leaving an unparalleled treasure to the study of folklore, Bartók had incorporated elements and regularities of folksong in his own sovereign music, thereby creating a tradition-based but fundamentally modern world. In their intentions, both Vajda and Korniss aspired to this. It must not be forgotten that the concept of "folk art" they used is far from corresponding with either its day-to-day or scholarly meaning. They drew houses, porches, columns, window sills and frames stripped of all their environmental accessories not for their interest, ornamentation or "folk" character. This was all the more true of motifs cropping up later - the apple peals coiling on a plate, a duck, the cutwater of a IV, Returning Home from Pans Looking down from Church Hill V, Collecting Motifs in Szentendre and Szigetmonostor "...roaming the crooked streets of the town"