Frederick Antal and Peter Peri: Art, Scholarship and Social Purpose

Abstract

Tracing the lives of two Hungarian émigrés, the art historian Frederick Antal (1887–1954) and the artist Peter Peri (1899–1967), this article explores their attempts to place the visual arts at the centre of their political beliefs. Both men participated in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, after which they each settled in Germany. Antal edited the journal Kritische Berichte in Berlin while undertaking research on Italian Renaissance painting. Péri was a sculptor and printmaker associated with the Activists and other avant-garde groups in Central Europe. On the accession to power of the Nazi party in 1933, both men fled to England where they pursued their work in a different environment with very different institutional patterns. Antal became the leading practitioner of the social history of art in Britain, and a formative influence on Anthony Blunt and John Pope-Hennessy. Péri, who was already turning away from abstraction in art, revised his practice in England to develop a Realist manner employing industrial materials. This article does not attempt to analyse the forces that shaped their development. Instead, it presents a narrative of their careers that may serve to question the perceived major tendencies in European art and culture and their reception in Britain during the 1930s. Towards the end of their lives, the two figures were linked through their separate influence on the young John Berger. The character of Janos Lavin in Berger's first novel (A Painter of our Time, 1958) is a composite of the two Hungarians: a veiled tribute to both figures, whom Berger acknowledged as the inspiration behind his initial ideas on art and society.