Modern Hungarian Quality

I begin with a tactless list of names. The following artists are absent from the permanent exhibition of the Modern Hungarian Gallery in Pécs, Hungary’s second most important public collection of 20th-century art. They are all prominent Hungarian masters, some are really outstanding, important and exciting, and nearly all pursued their profession, or still do, at a high standard: Andor Dudits, Jenő Haranghy, Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch, Fülöp László, Sándor Nagy and Jenő Remsey from the beginning of the last century; Gyula Batthyány, Barna Basilides, Ernő Gebauer, Henrik Heintz, Ernő Jeges, Jenő Medveczky, Pál C. Molnár and Pekáry István from the inter-war period; Endre Domanovszky, Tibor Duray, Géza Fónyi, Gyula Hincz, György Kádár, Vladimir Szabó and Lajos Szalay from the years pre- and post-1945; László Bartha, László Gyémánt, János Kass, Ignác Kokas, István Mácsai, József Németh, László Patay, Mihály Schéner and Piroska Szántó from the 60s and 70s; Péter Földi, Tamás Galambos, György Jovián, Tamás Kárpáti, András Koncz, Győző Somogyi, Attila Szűcs and István ef. Zámbó from the period directly preceding and following the political changes of 1989; and Levente Baranyai, Eszter Csurka, Adrián Kupcsik, Erik Mátrai, László László Révész, Gábor Gerhes and József Szurcsik of today’s fashion sensitive world. These artists are not there, yet they are not absent. This overview is about that.

Let’s toy with an idea. What would have happened if the genealogy of the museum had not been closely connected to the bequeathed collections of Pál Gegesi-Kiss, Tamás Henrik, István Cserepes, Antal Deli, Kálmán Tompa and Rudolf Bedő, if the sheltered climate of the soft dictatorship and the separate-way ethos of the Pécs-Pannon private sphere had not brought to maturity this unrivalled cultural achievement? At best it would have become a provincial branch of the Hungarian National Gallery. At worst it would have come to nothing. The genetic code of the Pécs gallery is simply such that it would discard as an alien body: 1. conservative traditionalists; 2. nationalists referring to ethnic roots and 3. celebs pampered by various regimes and trends. The intellectual DNA of all the participants of the Modern Hungarian Gallery can be traced back to Csontváry, to the ‘non-official’, the ‘autonomous’ and the ‘possessed’. Gyula Benczúr’s line cannot be domesticated among these walls. The key to the display is an older, almost half a century old canon, which was composed clearly by Lajos Németh in 1968.

“Modern Hungarian art developed from the 1890s. … The beginning of the era was marked by the Millennium, the thousand year old historical Hungary’s self-deluding celebration and, as the other side of the coin, the misery of peasants and the socialist agrarian movements breaking out in revolts and strikes. Bourgeois then socialist radicalism, a senseless war and a temporarily victorious revolution closed the first third of the era. The second third was Hungarian history’s most depressing period. A tragic ‘glory’ – in the counter-revolutionary period after the defeated revolution it is in Hungary where fascism is manifested for the first time in Europe. That period ends with World War II. The third phase: the reconstruction of a destroyed country, remedy of centuries-old sins, great illusions, disappointments and achievements, and a complicated tangle of deeds. Three phases – contrasting social formulae, different political structures and educational situations. These are the phases of Hungary’s recent past, the formulae with which modern Hungary is being formed.”

This rhythmic scheme is valid for the over-all character of the Pécs collection, even if the author quoted above could not see into the future, could not foresee the fourth phase where ‘progress’ and ‘backwardness’ have become increasingly complicated, and where non-transparent power and relentless market relations have further entangled the net of left and right-wing, ‘urbanists’ and ‘populists’, the democratic and elitist views on art.

Thus the message of Pécs can be well coded in the knowledge of Hungarian art’s entirety. Since the history of these phases and the country’s condition have largely put insoluble obstacles to free, sovereign and creative accomplishment, modernity could be authentically shown here if the works selected to be presented were somehow created in the background, behind the scenes and often in opposition to the mainstream. It would have been impossible to tailor a different dress from the available fabric. On the one hand, the core collection based mainly on private purchases ab ovo filtered out works that mischievously desired awards, were pressing ahead in a deliberating manner or were far too popular. On the other, the proportions of the original building’s interiors – contrasted rather than converted by the annex designed by István Kistelegdi – were more suitable for presenting works purchased for the private sphere than representing monumentalists aiming at being shown in public.

The ‘character’ of the collection – paintings intended for nice studies of the educated (a few statues added). The ‘behaviour’ of the collection – works that were created from knowledge, taste, thinking differently, civilian courage and a secularised approach, possible alternatives in seeking a separate peace. The ‘style’ of the collection – empathic respect for European (Euroatlantic after 1945) art movements, standing up for the eternal avant-garde on the part of the curators, whether works of plentiful or skimpy years were available.

Let’s look first at the prelude. Four paintings (and a statue by Márk Vedres that beautifully rhymes with one of the pictures) greet the visitor in the antehall to the rooms on the first floor. If museologist György Várkonyi and Gallery director József Sárkány when rearranging the exhibition dare display Female Nude with Coral Beads (1914) by Károly Ferenczy and József Rippl-Rónai’s Park with Nudes (1911-12) next to each other on the symbolic message wall opposite the entrance, they want to proclaim that the spirit of the art academy responsive to innovation and the lusciously bohemian western-like world (for example the changes from Art Nouveau to the bold colours of Fauve) prove to be victorious symbols and remain jointly valid achievements with respect to the future, even if, opposite them, the hazy vision of that early great recluse, László Mednyánszky, that fits no slot, otherwise refutes all the experiments of system creation (In the Garden, 1890s). Moreover, he also depicts iconographically the nightmare which explains the demise of the great zest seen at the beginning of the century (Riflemen with Two Dead Soldiers, 1915-18).

The task of the other five exhibition rooms is to continue this rhythm of Value preservation–Revolution–Separate way. The city’s mandate involves the incarnation of the third concept. It could not be otherwise, since that is what is mostly held. The seriousness of the undertaking is, however, emphasised by the fact that early modern works must assert themselves beside the aura of such masterpieces as the grief-stricken glimmer of István Réti’s Slicing the Bread (1906), the shadowless serenity of Adolf Fényes’s still life with a porcelain clock (around 1910) and, most of all, the deathly atmosphere sinking into rainbowy nothingness of Lajos Gulácsy’s dreaming opium smoker (1913-18).

The Eight and the Activists are lucky with these highly raised expectations. Admittedly, however many of my students I shepherded to see Bertalan Pór’s 1911 monumental composition Longing for Pure Love or Károly Kernstok’s stained glass designs (Designs for the Windows of the Schiffer Villa, 1911) they never got on their wavelength. They simply did not believe their pathos, their chiliastic ecstasy, their vigorous muscularity. Instead they believed in Dezső Czigány’s portrait Irén Jakab (1908), Béla Uitz’s Seated Woman (1918), József Nemes-Lam-pérth’s Still Life with Lamp (1916) and most of all they were fascinated, as I always was, by Róbert Berény’s Self Portrait with Top Hat (1907), by this masterpiece that can be decoded with difficulty, in which the painter strains and twists the contours to breaking point, sharpening the surfaces of rough colours, such that he still has energy left to reflect his own ego with parody and profundity, yet rationally. This painting is modernity itself, and not only for its manner pinched from Paris. Rather for the face having an effect of a sophisticated confession in which irony and self-irony, playing a role and contempt for a role mix. Slipping ‘internal existence’ and ‘seeing from the outside’ together is a 20th-century technique. But the almost romantic moulding of the two qualities comes from a different experience.

“A political approach to a nation and with it that of consciousness of belonging to it is something most harmful,” a great publicist, Rudolf Ungváry, has written recently. “When in political life they refer to ‘the Hungarians’, when they define what is ‘Hungarian’, maybe what is ‘more Hungarian’, that in itself is a shame. … When some representatives of the Right have committed the crime in the past and present whereby they appropriate the definition of ‘Hungarian’ they inevitably create the Hungarian who is not considered Hungarian on one side of the political divide, simply for having a different political opinion.”

As it happened, the residents of Rooms VII and VIII in the Pécs Gallery, from Sándor Bortnyik to Béla Uitz, then from László Moholy-Nagy to Farkas Molnár, were drawn into this still revolving whirlpool. For some it was because they threw themselves into the revolutionary events with too much zeal and thus had to flee due to the 180-degree political turn, for some because although their faith remained the idea deceived them, and for some it was because their desired career was blocked due to the numerus clausus, while for others it was because all three factors simultaneously affected their lives.

The gallery has documented these tragic hairpin bends in such a fitting manner as neither the Hungarian National Gallery nor other smaller, regional collections have ever done before. Is the poster design Red Soldiers Forward (1919) by Béla Uitz pleasing? Would Farkas Molnár’s Red Cube House (1922) have been habitable at least in the form that Margit Pelényi and András Pázmány reconstructed it in 2009 for the exhibition Hungarians in the Bauhaus? Or is Hugó Scheiber’s self-portrait with cigar (c. 1928) regarded as of ‘alien heart’ because it features a small capitalist cosmopolitan, “distant from the values considered Hungarian” (read: “of Jewish race”) depicted in ‘Entente style’, i.e. in a cubist manner, looking into the eyes of the viewer? Inappropriate questions can only be answered incorrectly. The real questions are whether they are powerful, true and ours. The exhibition answers these questions affirmatively in every case. The curators Sárkány and Várkonyi clearly assert that a Hungarian is the person whose fundamental experiences are connected to this land, whose life has been shaped either positively or negatively by political formations established in this area. Blood is nothing, fate is everything.

It is a complicated issue and the permanent exhibition approaches the delicate matters sensitively, subtly and with unrelenting severity of knowledge. Moholy-Nagy is here because he would have never become what he did in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin if the 1919 turning point had not made his creative fantasy adopt a supersonic speed. Andor Weininger of German and southern Slav roots is here since the intention to construct an across-the-nations new universe was organically included in post-world-war Hungarian radicalism, even if it was in Germany, Holland or Canada – as a result of the sad but just decision of history.

Little Hungarian? Great Hungarian? Rooms IX and X are the most elegant in the Modern Hungarian Gallery. This is where artists, the “keepers of the tower”, who took note of the new conditions with rather sparse enthusiasm yet resigned to the rational facts are presented – those who, whether or not they liked Bethlen’s consolidation, still connected their style, wrapped in the painterly mantle of disappointed and gloomy passive resistance, to European art with invisible yet increasingly strong ties. They are the sophisticated citizens who took the guidance of the École de Paris seriously without caring about all the counter-suggestions, and at best their translations outdid their ideals – see Boat on the Danube (c. 1928) by Ödön Márffy or Fisherman at Lake Balaton (1937-38) by József Egry. They were the undercover socialists (perhaps communists) who, ignoring the ‘Trianon spirit’, astounded the official public with Weimar-like expressivity – see the outstanding painting Mimi (1928) by Frigyes Frank and, of course, Gyula Derkovits’s fishmonger (c. 1930). And there were those who, having been to Rome, learnt what they learnt (new plasticity, Novocentism, fascistic late Futurism), but when they created their panels for ordinary citizens created powerful modern works – Orphans (1932) by Béla Kontuly or Scene at the Fair (1936-37) by Vilmos Aba-Novák.

In Pécs those are mostly considered Hungarian who could have died if it had been up to the state (it sometimes happened) and whose identities were regularly, radically and by decree questioned. Room IX may as well be called that of Szentendre, but we won’t do that, since the official line, reflected by the shy small masters in the Society of Szentendre Painters, is not represented, unlike those who used the town as a spiritual and physical hiding place (Lajos Vajda, Imre Ámos, Margit Anna and the young Béla Bán), as well as Géza Vörös who joined them, the elderly János Kmetty (Still Life with Apples and Sunflowers) and most of all Jenő Barcsay who stressed his independent visual opinion with such powerful moral authenticity that it lasted even when the one-party state could neither swallow nor spit it out.

György Várkonyi writes in the preface to the catalogue, for the time being only in manuscript, that the exhibition “… sometimes conforms to the established caesuras of art history, sometimes makes links, sometimes observes the coherence of groups, schools and tendencies, and sometimes accentuates the paradoxical effect of opposite yet simultaneous phenomena. It does not abandon the task of telling a story, but necessarily dispenses with historical complexity aspiring to present entirety.”

What to do in this case? My years of experience tell me that a collection or anthology will not be valid and authentic from a recipient’s viewpoint if the curator’s concept is realised through thick and thin, only if the individual parts stand up for themselves. Ernő Gáll, editor-in-chief of the Cluj journal Korunk (Our Age), has allegedly said that each copy is worth as much as the weakest work published in the selection. In this respect never consider the best. After all, a masterpiece automatically excels. Yet drawing the bottom line represents the feeling for quality whereby an editor in charge of the full picture is able to differentiate between the main work and workshop creation, charisma and name card, as can assert these differences mercilessly.

Needless to say, in Pécs it can’t have been difficult to do a casting for the European School (Rooms XII-XIII). For where else would Ferenc Martyn’s powerful works be presented if not in the town where he lived and where small-minded church and museum policy has recently led to the closure of his apartment museum. Above Waters (1947) is one of the most beautiful among his very beautiful paintings. And who to select a masterpiece more easily from than Tihamér Gyarmathy, who was not only born in Pécs but left some 120 works to his hometown? Homogenous Substance, Central Radiation (1966) excels from even those. As can be seen, there was an interdisciplinary creative community whose members, including an imposing number of ‘Bauhausers’, swarmed from the town as if from a beehive. Much later in the 60s there were the young artists, also imposing in numbers, a semi-amateur, semi-avant-garde, semi-non-conformist and entirely interdisciplinary group, which they themselves and the profession referred to as the Pécs Workshop. Their achievement can subsequently be reconstructed only with difficulty. It can sometimes be seen in traces, though their actual creations don’t always have a convincing effect. Yet they – Károly Halász, Ferenc Ficzek, Károly Kismányoki, Kálmán Szíjártó and, most of all, Sándor Pincze-helyi – gave rise to the lively, freedom-smelling, creative atmosphere which appropriately developed as the counterpart of the far too official and over-managed culture of the capital.

It could be that their works (Room XIX) with regard to their innate value are primarily of art historical significance, but they clearly had a story to tell and the curators have arranged the missing links around them. The Pécs Workshop couldn’t have existed without Ferenc Lantos and his line in turn was intensified by Ilona Keserü, also of Pécs – Gravestones (1968), Room XV. Furthermore, Keserü acquired a sharp, bright, American-like context due to the contemporary representatives of hard edge – Imre Bak’s Composition (1969), János Fajó’s Rainbow (1969) and Embroidered Felt Cloak (1972) by Dezső Korniss.

As we move forward in time quality is becoming more dependent on artistic behaviour and is less and less considered as a technical issue. In the rooms on the ground floor you are struck by the makeshift cardboard construction of El Kazovsz–kij’s Desert Sandpit (1989), while magnetic power is implied in the unrestrained ellipse rendered with a house-painter’s brush in Ákos Birkás’s Head (1984), and the effect of János Vető’s Film (1985-88) lies in the use of randomly found materials and an unpolished, desolate approach. These match the somewhat effervescent apocalyptic feeling of “every whole has become broken”.

Yet quality is also quality in hell. That is the main lesson of the newly-arranged Modern Hungarian Gallery’s exhibition. The genetic code, the ‘Pécs particularity’, has proved the ability of preserving value, that rare talent in the museum world, in the period following the 1989-90 changes. On the second floor the ironic intellectualism of András Lengyel’s Book Panel Picture (1997), the mannerist perspective in inverted commas of Frigyes Kőnig’s Exclamation Mark (1992) and the heart-moving precision of Tamás Konok’s Graphidion (1995) are all message-bearing works. They make it clear that there is still something to lose.