Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ANNUAL REPORT 2005 - A 2005. ÉV - TÍMEA TÜRK: Without Knocking: Janet Brooks Gerloff's Paintings to the Poems of Attila József

The American painter, Janet Brooks Gerloff, after finishing her studies at the University of North Colorado, moved in 1972 to Germany, where she received the Rhineland Art Award and became the member of both the Berlin Art Association and the European Academy for Sciences and Arts. Working in Aachen since the early 1990s, she focuses on reinterpretations of literary and musical pieces. Man and the human condition are at the centre of her paintings; her visual imagery is characterised by existential situations, human conflicts, moods and emotions. The portrait is a recurring motif in her cycles, along with literary artworks as a source of inspiration. Hence, after the visual articulation of Goethe's Faust and Schubert's Winterreise, she has turned, not surprisingly, to the poetry of Attila József. What seized Gerloff was the poet's extraordinary verbal expressivity, his linguistic imagery, which allowed the painter to sense the painful solitude, the endless pendulum between hope and desperation that the poems are about. Out of this artistic meeting

—four-handed poetry and painting

—w

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as born the Without Knocking cycle (fig. 72), which is not a mere illustration to Attila József's poems. Through the subjectivity of the painter's interpretation, concentrated into forty paintings, his most important poetic themes are addressed, and alongside the poem that provides the show's title, appear such works, by now emblematic in Hungarian literature, as Night in the Suburbs (1932), Mama (1934) and By the Danube (1936). 72 I AN ET BROOKS GERLOFF, .ICH LEG DICH AUF MEINEN STROHSACK HIN Tímea Türk