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

Within this variegated series we can distinguish between some tendencies. One example is the group of quasi-landscapes. It is important to note that, at the inception of the "Szentendre programme", Vajda had consciously rejected the idea of landscape, deeming it a subject matter far too inorganic and accidental compared to his concept, Even now, he would not relate to actual scenes, and created imaginary spaces, as, for instance, in Northern Landscape, one of his masterpieces. In the picture divided into a greyish blue and a brown surface by the horizon, a ship-like splintery shape floats among the puzzling forms resembling the sun, rocks, an iceberg. The fragility of individual existence, the inaccessibility of nature and the resulting extreme solitude have not been depicted in such heart-rending and forbidding delicacy since the seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich. In other pictures, monsters "are produced". A winged being with oversize head trots on a silver ground; cyclopses, beasts with owl and frog heads appear. This host obviously have their antecedents - think of the birds with empty eyeholes -, but it is also clear that Vajda would "not forgo his feelings," and proclaimed his anxieties and fears. In most cases, he was of course capable of mastering them. This period of his was hallmarked by the attitude Attila József described: finally, man "comes to rest / by that sad, sandy, sodden shore." Vajda too "looks around, and undistressed / nods his wise head, and hopes no more." (Translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner) As in this gesture, the basic tone of Vajda's works at this time became this coldness of aspiring to objectivity. Besides landscapes untrodden by human feet and the gallery of monsters, it is as though he concerned himself with the early, primary manifestations of art, the cave paintings and rock drawings, the ornaments inscribed in barks of wood. In several works (Black Torso, Composition with Cinnabar), the influence of the so-called x-ray style of painting by indigenous Australians can be observed; in others, he felt he could apply not only the motifs but also the symbols of North-American Indians, If Vajda had identified himself with an anonymous painter monk at an Athos monastery in 1935-1937, he now assumed the role of an aboriginal artist or a Hopi craftsman. As though he would not take knowledge of the past few thousand years of artistic development, as though he wanted to begin everything anew. He did as though, but he could not deny or undo his own reflectivity, and became a faithless shaman - this was the source of the cold, analytic gaze of some of the pictures. This is evidenced by the fact he had recourse to making copies, which derived from the principle of transparency: the proportions and details of the skull of Mummy Head from Peru, though in the negative, reappear in Bird with Translucent Body. Perhaps also due to these contradictions, he worked ceaselessly, even convulsively, sketching alternative pencil lines on drawings in ink. He left many unfinished - unfinished because they were impossible to finish, being attempts at reconstructing a world only traces of which had survived.