Hungarian Art Research Articles

The Industrialist and the Artist: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the New Bauhaus in Chicago, 1918–46

Abstract In 1937, a group of businessmen organized as the Association of Arts and Industries, on the recommendation of German Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, invited the Hungarian artist and designer László Moholy-Nagy to Chicago to reestablish the Bauhaus school of design, which the Nazis had shut down in 1933. Moholy-Nagy, who was exiled in England at the time, had been a prominent member of the Bauhaus faculty. Although the New Bauhaus was forced to close in 1938 after less than a year in operation owing to the association's withdrawal of financial support, Container Corporation president Walter Paepcke helped Moholy establish the School of Design in Chicago in 1939, which retained the Bauhaus pedagogy and several members of its faculty. Moholy led the design school, which changed its name to the Institute of Design in 1944, until his death in 1946. Drawing on archival resources at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago, this essay looks at Moholy's immigration to the United States and his close relationship with Paepcke, an arts patron who created jobs for other Bauhaus designers including Herbert Bayer. Moholy and Paepcke attempted to incorporate the socialistic Bauhaus pedagogy with the practical demands of capitalistic American business. Their close personal and professional relationship reveals the limits and possibilities of such a cultural and economic fusion.

Festett oklevelek és kódexek a késő középkori Magyarországon a művészettörténész dilemmái

In 1523 the papal legate Tommaso de Vio corroborated the statutes of the Pest Confraternity of the Virgin. The large booklet-shape diploma is representatively executed: the first page carries floral ornamentation in addition to the text. The decoration and the titulus starting the textual part, however, are archaizing, in line with the practice of the papal chancellary, instead of adopting the then widely popular modern all’antica decoration. The style of the embellishment of a diploma depended on the type of the diploma. Hungarian art historiography has long been resorting to letters patent of nobility in its efforts to date and define the place of origin of the manuscripts from the time of King Matthias and the Jagiello age. That was how the manuscripts of provost of Székesfehérvár Domokos Kálmáncsehi – including the activity of the master of the Breviary Francesco Castello (OSZK, Cod. Lat. 446) – could be located to Buda, and three ornamental manuscripts with music (OSZK, A24; Bratislava, Archív mesta, EC Lad. 6; Zagreb, MR 2) could be proven to have ties to Buda in the early 16th century. The Bakócz Gradual (Esztergom, MS I. 1a.), the Erdődy Missal (Zagreb, RK 354) and the Gradual of Máté Tolnai (Pannonhalma, Caps LIV. F f.) as well as the overwhelming majority of letters patent issued in Buda between 1514 and 1525 were illumined by the so-called Bakócz monogrammist. The letters granting nobility and armorial bearings in the Jagiello age are not merely props for art history but also constitute a separate diplomatic genre.

An introspective pantheon

The Hungarian National Museum was founded in 1808 with an encyclopaedic scope, and its art collection – the Picture Gallery – was originally formed within this cross-disciplinary framework. The acquisition of objects classified as art was often motivated by historical interest or political significance, rather than aesthetic value. Nineteenth-century efforts to reshape this assemblage of objects as a fine art collection were hampered by the persistence of its historical context, especially in the case of the collection of Hungarian art. This article examines how this complex process was reflected in the permanent exhibitions of the Picture Gallery from the 1850s to the 1880s.

Surrealist Hybrids – Contemporary Hybrids Árpád Mezei and the Late Surrealist Theories of Hybridity

Abstract Árpád Mezei (1902-1998) was a Hungarian art theoretician and psychologist. In the 1940s he was co-founder of the Európai Iskola (European School), the most important assembly of progressive Hungarian artists and art theoreticians of the period. His readings in art theory and his friendship with the Surrealist painter and writer Marcel Jean (who lived in Budapest in the period between 1938 and 1945) had a strong impact on his intellectual profile: he co-authored with Marcel Jean three volumes that became important for the understanding of the international Surrealist movement. The paper analyses Mezei’s concepts and tries to reconstruct his interpretative framework where several aspects of culture including mythology, history, literature, art and history of architecture communicate with each other, and hybridity is one of the key concepts. Being used to describe contemporary shifts in culture and identity by authors like Peter Burke, hybridity is of great interest to contemporary culture. The paper points out possible links between late Surrealist theories of hybridity and contemporary culture.

Adalék Neményi Bertalan képzőművészeti gyűjteményéhez

The Budapest lawyer Dr. Bertalan Neményi (1892-1947) was one of the notable figures of Hungarian art collection in the interwar period. He was mainly drawn to contemporary Hungarian artists, so he had considerable numbers of works by József Rippl-Rónai, Lajos Gulácsy and Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka. The reconstruction of his collection is very difficult as the bulk disappeared at the end of WWII. In early 1944 he deposited a considerable segment of his collection in thirteen locked wooden crates in the safe of the Hungarian General Credit Bank. The safe was left intact by the siege of the city, but the corps of the Soviet army specialized for gathering art works plundered the safe. On 19 March 1945 Neményi asked help for the search after his collection. The list included 98 paintings, some 350 graphic sheets and 2000 books. Several of his treasures were not put in the bank but in homes of private persons. When Neményi died unexpectedly in 1947, the existing pieces of the collection got into the art trade. Some were also found there from the stock once deposited in the bank. Most of the bank deposits, however, went to Moscow. The paper tries the reconstruct the collection and the intellectual portrait of the collector with the help of archival sources first published here.

Hogyan indult a magyar műemléki topográfia?

The inventorying of historical monuments [Kunsttopographie / Denkmaltopographie] is the first major collective and joint undertaking of Hungarian art history and monument protection. Within this project, monuments in four and a half of Hungary’s 19 counties and the Buda districts of Budapest were processed and published in 12 volumes between 1953 and 1987, by adopting the conception of the Austrian inventory of monuments (Österreichische Kunsttopographie) published from 1907. Sufficient conditions for systematic work for this fundamentally important project for both art history and monument conservation were only given in the period specified above. In connection with the radical institutional changes brought about by the building out of a Soviet-type state administration from 1948, the paper reconstructs the series of events which made it possible – based on the excellent professional legacy and human resource and thanks to the keen judgement of some specialists in key positions – that this grand project could be launched with great zeal and survived – at a decelerating pace but at unchanged professional level – for three decades to come. The professional contents of the program is illumined by three documents and a conference paper read in November 1950 on the conception of the inventory of Hungarian historical monuments, which are enclosed in the supplement. The scholar to present the project was the art historian Dezső Dercsényi, who became the supreme professional guide of Hungarian monument protection until his retirement by virtue of his professional competence and exceptional diplomatic skills. The inventory was being elaborated under the aegis of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences reorganized upon the Soviet model in late 1949. Against this background did that unique intellectual constellation evolve in which the cooperation of the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, who had returned from emigration in Moscow in 1945 and played an active role in the Sovietization of culture including scholarship; of the Christian philosopher Lajos Fülep, a youthful intellectual comrade of Lukács in internal exile in this period whom Lukács asked to head the art historical community; of Dercsényi and the excellent specialists promoted the cause of the registration of Hungarian historical monuments to success. In this way the major break in history did not entail the interruption of so-far achieved results and up-to-date strategic endeavours in the studied area of culture and science but resulted in an unprecedented consolidation of the positions of Hungarian monument protection and art history at an elevated level.

A magyar politikai-kulturális karikatúra ismeretlen kezdete: Petrichevich Horváth János rajzmappái

In the library of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in Kolozsvár there are four albums containing hundreds of caricatures, genre and milieu drawings, political portraits by János Petrichevich Horváth from the period between 1824 and 1864. The albums comprise several so-far little known and unpublished depictions of actors of the age such as István Széchenyi, Miklós Wesselényi, László Teleki, Sándor Teleki, Ferdinand V, Metternich or Emperor Francis Joseph, as well as the less widely known figures of the Transylvanian public scene and nobility, and officers of the imperial army. The set of over five hundred drawings, some only rough sketches, are not only intriguing in terms of iconography but at the same time have intrinsic artistic value as well. The main asset of the albums is the representation of the 19th century small world of ordinary people besides the pictures of representative personages. In addition to unusual themes the artist also challenges some taboos and depicts the abuses of power showing some infamous aspects of the life of the imperial forces, the aristocracy or the clergy. By occupation, Transylvanian-born János Petrichevich Horváth was a high-ranking officer in the imperial army, and as such he was a committed defender of the feudal social structure and the monarchy, but as an amateur graphic artist he revealed quite a different side of his activities. Although there is no information on his regular artistic training, his works suggest a trained draughtsman mastering refined drawing techniques, with a sense of colour, careful spatial composition and exact anatomical rendering, correct perspective view and sensitive characterization. The most remarkable works in the albums are the caricatures, which makes scholarship revise the beginnings and history of the genre in Hungary. Though the first half of the 19th century is regarded as a period of rudimentary attempts in Hungarian caricature history, the unfolding of the genre being dated to after the Compromise (1867), the albums of János Petrichevich Horváth render the Hungarian manifestations of the genre commensurable with the European crop of the genre at an earlier date. Of course, Hungarian art struggling with several problems of (self) definition, institutionalization, lack of infrastructure, etc. did not have a James Gillray (1756-1815) regarded as the “father of political caricature” or an Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) yet, but Petrichevich’s works do add several hues to the general tone of backwardness. As a conspicuous analogy, most caricatures of Gillray mock George III whose mental illness was caused by porphyria, Daumier’s most famous caricatures are of the pear-headed Louis Philippe I, and Petrichevich’s several caricature sketches depict the hydrocephalic Ferdinand V. Thus his works can be taken as the start of Hungarian political and cultural caricature whose artistic rendering and embarrassing sincerity project to us a different picture of the Reform Age clad so far in the veil of the golden age or of the customary image of the imperial forces as devilish impostors.

A hazai műkereskedelem tipológiája és térbeli jellegzetességei Budapest példáján

A műkereskedelem hazánkban mindmáig a kiskereskedelem kevésbé feltárt szegmensei közé tartozik. Ugyanakkor a téma aktualitását igazolja, hogy bizonyos társadalmi rétegek jelentős összegeket fordítanak műtárgyak vásárlására és fektetik be felhalmozott jövedelmük egy részét antik és kortárs vagyontárgyakba. A műtárgypiacon számos galéria, aukciósház és régiségbolt jelenik meg, és az antikváriumok is fontos résztvevőknek tekinthetők.Jelen tanulmány célja a budapesti műkereskedelem klasszifikációja és térbeli sajátosságainak bemutatása. A primer adatgyűjtésre épülő kutatás a fővárosi műkereskedéseket vizsgálja, saját terepi megfigyelésekkel és félig strukturált interjúk elkészítésével. Az üzletek és kereskedőházak elhelyezkedésének megjelenítése és elemzése térinformatikai szoftver alkalmazásával történt.A műtárgypiac szereplői különböző típusokba sorolhatóak a profil, az értékesítés helye, az árpolitika és a kínálat alapján. Megfigyelhető, hogy a galériák és aukciósházak Budapest legelegánsabb hagyományos bevásárlónegyedében helyezkednek el, a másodlagos bevásárlózóna jellemzően az antikváriumoknak és a régiségboltoknak ad otthont. Az egyes típusok térbeli elkülönülése számos tényezővel magyarázható: a bérleti díjak nagyságával, történeti előzményekkel, agglomerációs előnyökkel.

Does Utopia Attract Utopia? Freemasons in Hungarian Artists’ Colonies

Does Utopia Attract Utopia? Freemasons in Hungarian Artists’ Colonies

A Mission Impossible? Learning the Logic of Space with Impossible Figures in Experience-Based Mathematics Education

Most visual effects based on mathematically and physically describable phenomena and formalizable processes. Creating visual illusions, paradox structures and ‘impossible’ figures through playful and artistic procedures, holds an exciting pedagogical opportunity for raising students’ interest towards mathematics and natural sciences and technical aspects of visual arts. The Experience Workshop Math-Art Movement has a number of pedagogical methods, which are connected to visual paradoxes and perspective illusions. In the first part of our article, we introduce classroom exercises connected to the Hungarian artist Tamás F. Farkas’s paradox structures and impossible figures. There are certain digital games as well, which employ visual illusions as a part of their game mechanic. Most of these games were not designed as an educational game, but they may be used for educational purposes, to clarify mathematical concepts behind and related to visual illusions (symmetry, perspective, isometric projection etc.). In the second part of the article we analyze which characteristics of these games can contribute to the pedagogic impact, and how to best take advantage of them in an educational context.

A Perlmutter-gyűjtemény

A colourful, dazzling world was created by one of the strangest Hungarian art collectors, lawyer and patent judge Alfréd Perlmutter (1867-1929), around himself. His art works radiated that iridescent and serene atmosphere which his brother the painter Izsák created in his pictures. Alfréd fitted out his home with Louis XV, Maria Theresa and Joseph II period furniture as well as empire pieces. Gilded bronze bracket lamps and a cartel clock were on the walls. Colours were first of all provided by the textiles (Flemish tapestries on the walls, rugs from Asia Minor and mainly China on the floor together with a Spanish carpet) and ceramics. First of all he collected oriental, Chinese objects, but his attention was also captured by Italian maiolica, Hispano-Moorish bowls of a metallic lustre, diverse forms of Holics faiance. He had some exquisite enameled pieces of goldsmith’s art, outstanding objects from Limoges. They included a crosier whose analogy can be found in the Louvre collection. Perlmutter was the admirer and captive of colours and the East (China). Art provided real pleasure for him, and an art work was for him the noblest form of perception. That is why he could rise above the limitations of periods, space and time, grasping the genuine inherent value of art, its esthetic quality, by his sensitivity and intellect. His refined taste was manifest in the selection of objects and the decoration of his home. The inspiration for collecting came from a relative of his wife Lili Hirsch, Horace Ritter von Landau, who owned one of the most beautiful book collections in the world together with other works of art. Lili Hirsch’ brother Albert married Irén Hatvany, thus coming into close contact with the Hatvany family who created one of Hungary’s most exquisite art collections. Apart from contemporary Hungarian examples, the fine art collections of the haute bourgeoisie, Alfréd Perlmutter must have known foreign collections and museums as he was widely travelled. Some of his collection pieces were purchased during his foreign journeys, others from contemporaneous Hungarian private collections. By way of an example, he came into possession of fine pieces from the one-time estate of Kálmán Giergl through Hugó Kilényi’s collection. He had few paintings, some of his brother Izsák’s works and some István Csók pictures who also depicted his Flemish tapestry and was himself attracted to Chinese art. Alfréd Perlmutter died in 1929, his collection passed on to his wife. From 1930 several works of art were borrowed from her for exhibitions of the Museum of Fine Arts. During World War II, in the period of German occupation and Soviet liberation Mrs Perlmutter moved frequently and a part of the collection got lost without a trace. During the war she had to sell many pieces, and only two of the listed art works came eventually into the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts (a 16th century tapestry and an empire style swan-bed), as well as a renaissance Italian dish from some other source. A Holics vessel was donated to the museum by the heirs. Painter Izsák Perlmutter also had art works that were inherited by his daughter, the widow of a Persian prince. She was the heir of the tenement building at No. 60, Andrássy avenue and the villa in Rákospalota. The Andrássy road palace was rented by the nazi Arrow-cross party, then by the secret police of the Inner Ministry. In 1951 it was nationalized, the prince’s widow was displaced, the art works were transported to an unknown location. She managed to identify and get a few back in 1962. Both Perlmutter collections fell victim to history, from German occupiers to Soviet liberators and post-World War owner changes, expropriations. Everyone pilfered them who could have a hold on them, including the wildings of that-time art trade. As a result, apart from a few museum objects the great part of the two collections perished or is latent.

Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde ed. by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

Reviewed by: Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde ed. by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer Carl F. Miller (bio) Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde. Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015. Stemming from a 2012 international conference, this book offers a diverse study of the avant-garde in children’s literature, tackling a consideration that has often been suggested but rarely addressed with such intellectual rigor. Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer have assembled a collection that is interested not only in validating the study of the avant-garde within children’s literature, but also in using this relationship as validation for the study of children’s literature in general. Consequently, this text has applications that reach far beyond the field of children’s literature, and should be of interest to scholars and students of comparative literature, modern art, and literary periodization, among many other practical possibilities. The editors’ introduction first attempts to formulate a working concept of the avant-garde via historical overview, from its late nineteenthcentury origins to its association with a number of art movements of the early to mid-twentieth century, including expressionism, surrealism, and—both most especially and problematically—modernism. Much as the avant-garde is both culturally contingent and historically disparate, “avantgarde ideas about children’s literature often reflect a general desire to break free from aesthetic boundaries and labels” (5). The scholars contributing to this volume have uncovered a great many previously unseen materials that serve as fascinating precursors to some of the more recognizable contemporary children’s texts, in the process highlighting the mutual impact between the avant-garde and children’s literature in Europe and North America. Part 1, “Vanguard tendencies since the beginning of the twentieth century,” considers the early interplay of children’s culture and avant-garde development with chapters on John Ruskin (Marilynn S. Olson), Einar Nerman (Druker), Sándor Bortnyik (Samuel D. Albert), and the lost legacy of the early avant-garde British children’s book (Kimberley Reynolds). Olson’s assessment of Ruskin as an early champion of the avant-garde for children presents a logical lead-off to the book, as its effective background of children’s literature and art experiments prior to the twentieth century proposes an origin for the more widespread movements to follow. Druker’s subsequent chapter analyzes the crossover between Swedish artist Nerman’s children’s books and his avant-garde work in caricature art and performance, suggesting that this points to a modernism in Swedish children’s literature that precedes Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson. Albert, meanwhile, examines Hungarian artist Bortnyik’s only children’s book, Potty és Pötty, theorizing how this originally wordless text is illustrative of the relationship between modernism and graphic design in interwar Europe. In comparison with the single-artist focus of the earlier chapters, Reynolds offers a more expansive analysis of early [End Page 231] avant-garde publishing in Britain, suggesting that the forgotten works of Jean de Bosschére, Enid Bagnold, and Edith Saunders represent a “romantic Modernism” that contrasts to the historically perceived conservatism of British children’s literature of the time. Part 2, “The impact of the Russian avant-garde,” highlights this movement’s influence, both at home and abroad, on children’s literature from the 1920s through the 1940s. Sara Pankenier Weld’s excellent study of the avant-garde infantile begins this section, demonstrating how the minimalist suprematism of Kazimir Malevich can be usefully aligned with works for children by El Lissitzky, Vladimir Lebedev, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Serge-Aljosja Stommels and Albert Lemmens follow with the most catalog-oriented chapter in the book, an overview of early Soviet Union children’s publishing followed by a reconstruction and assessment of the landmark 1929 Amsterdam exhibition of Soviet picture books. Nina Christensen’s chapter similarly explores the outside influence of the Russian avant-garde on four progressive Danish picture books of the 1930s and ‘40s, all the while stressing that this new model of Scandinavian children’s book was inspired by multiple cultural sources—and thereby marking its development as more than a direct offshoot of the Soviet model...

The artist’s hand — When dematerialization becomes form

László Beke once said: ‘we can consider conceptual art as anti-painterly, or, anti-traditionalist art. For this reason, everyone, especially painters with a good perspective, had to decide for their own how to handle this. [...] The same problem occurred again at the beginning of the 80s when the same artists, who had become conceptual, had to decide whether to begin to paint again. [...] This can be described as the great conflict between traditional and conceptual art in general.’ This conflict that I would call La querelle des conceptuels et des traditionnels is presented in this paper through the work of the Hungarian artist Gyula Konkoly and his twofold, controversial relation to the tradition of painting and to conceptual thinking. Konkoly, a classically-trained painter, who is mainly known as a pop art artist and as one of the earliest protagonists of object art in Hungary, with his Manifesto from 1971/72, ceased every kind of ‘grand art’ activity for almost two decades, until the end of the Eighties, when he returned to painting. In most of his works from the Sixties, it was the episteme of painting that he was dealing with. On the one hand, he quoted the great masters of art history in many of his paintings, using their works in a pop art context, pairing them with abstract, hardedge surfaces. On the other hand, as a skilled painter he inserted resin imprints of his own hand on the canvases that represented the notion of craftsmanship and also the idea of the ready-made. It was the motif of the skilled hand of the artist that had to be destroyed when he got involved in conceptual art and in anti-art activities. At the first Iparterv exhibition he presented his seminal work Cage: An Academic Study (1968). In an unrealized project for a solo exhibition it was also the artist’s hand that he planned to bury. By the deconstruction of the artist’s personality and by the symbolic destruction of the artist’s hand, the symbol of the mastery of his métier, Konkoly came to the conclusion that this process, the total dematerialization of art and art object has reached its end making every kind of artistic activity pointless. The great paradigm shift of conceptual art thus led in Konkoly’s career also to a major turning point, to an almost two-decade long pause in his work. When returning to painting at the end of the Eighties, it was again, through his skilled artist’s hand with which he resumed his meditation on medium and métier, on colours and forms, and on the episteme of painting in general. Thus the thesis of this paper is that Konkoly’s work may be seen as a continuous and – almost – lifelong meditation on painting, on its basic structures, its relationship to its tradition and to the reality it expresses, and its epistemological value when compared with other, more abstract and philosophical, conceptual modes of art making.

Decadence and progress: The boundaries of official Hungarian art in 1968

While the new art of a new generation was emphatically present from the mid-Sixties, today thanks to the canonisation of the Iparterv exhibitions, the year of 1968 appears as the primary turning point in Hungarian art. The change was signified by the concentrated and programmatic appearance of the ‘new strivings’ of the avant-garde that publically went against the officially accepted guiding principles and artistic thinking in relatively greater numbers. The border between the official art of the time, and the overstepping of that border by unofficial art, appeared as an important problem. The state (party) principles and preferences of power that were applied in the area of art were most systematically communicated to the professional audience and a broader public through the art journal Művészet. Based on the examination of the published articles and images in the issues of Művészet from 1968, the study highlights the frame provided by official art theory. It makes the ideological boundary lines visible, so that the criteria of preferences appear more systematically, and from this it is possible to convey the way in which the official system related to artists who partly defined themselves outside of these frames. From the beginning of the Sixties through the changing viewpoint of the journal it was possible to observe both the gradual deflation of a socialist realist tendency that asserted its dominance and was strongly anti-abstraction, as well as fluctuations: short episodes of ideological loosening were often followed by stricter, more hard-line periods. In the contemporary criticism and exhibition accounts of Művészet the officially specified values, above all the intelligibility of art had to be defended. Művészet saw a guarantee of this, amongst other factors, in the maintenance of the characteristics of Hungarian painting as intelligible to everyone and the continued focus on socialist themes. In the second place, the audience had to be protected since ‘without an audience there is no viable cultural revolution.’ In the third place, ethical commitment had to be defended: ‘humanity’ believes in socialism, and therefore socialist artists have to be prepared to cater to the spiritual nourishment of the masses. Characteristic of 1968 was the adoptive strategy, which attempted to bring the young artists closer to the categories of the system. In this category sensitivity towards social problems, the illumination of the problems of the present, or an affinity for humanism was enough for a young artist to go from being a representative of progressive art to being tolerated or even temporarily supported. Over the course of 1968 numerous young artists appeared in Művészet who at the December Iparterv exhibition turned directly against the ideals of official art. In 1968 from the official side, the broadening of the picture seemed possible by situating the young in the field between decadence and progress.

Fejezetek a képzőművészeti Alap történetéből: A Tavaszi Tárlat és a három „T” a dokumentumok tükrében

Fejezetek a képzőművészeti Alap történetéből: A Tavaszi Tárlat és a három „T” a dokumentumok tükrében

Miklós Erdély: A Hunger for Montage (1966)

Miklós Erdély, one of the most important Hungarian artists after World War II, did not only produce experimental films, but within the framework of his manifold activities wrote an important theoretical essay about montage already in the mid-1960s. The paper discusses this essay’s ramifications with ideas of montage and filmic language (a semiotics of film?) and also Erdély’s theoretical stance in the face of this artistic means, as a crucial and historical strategic tool against cinematic illusionism. This implicitly raises the semiotic question of the basic meaning making unit of film and the limited instrumentality of the linguistic metaphor’s extension to the area of the moving images. In the essay, however, Erdély dismisses the political and critical potentialities of montage, formulated by the Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein and the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. It seems that this blind spot is the result of the political circumstances of the time that made impossible for Erdély to make theoretical claims either about the promotion of the proletarian revolution (Eisenstein), or the critique of the commodity fetish (Benjamin).

Aesthetics in the shadow of politics

After 1956, thanks to the political thaw a modernization of the Hungarian canon of socialist realism took place. However, the modern and nationally oriented view of socialist culture was confronted with an ideologically motivated fear of nationalism and bourgeois revisionism, which also fueled official hostility towards the forces of popular naturalism and ‘decadent’ surrealism. Consequently, in the early 1960s a significant part of Hungarian art criticism was still dominated by the dated political aesthetics of Zhdanov that fiercely offended new realist tendencies, like the work of Tibor Csernus and his followers. One of their critics labeled the new realism of Csernus ‘surnaturalism,’ others supported their painting under the umbrella terminology of ‘magical realism.’ The paper investigates the different aesthetic ideologies and interpretations concerning such artists as László Lakner, László Gyémánt, György Korga, Gyula Konkoly, and Csernus himself. Beside the analysis of their avant-garde, ‘formalist’ sources, the paper also attempts to shed light on their realism, based on the classical figurative tradition of painting from Piero della Francesca to Edouard Manet. Beyond the more or less ironic use of the cold war imagery, this ‘traditionalism’ could even legitimate their ‘decadent’ formalism. However, their secret classic and modern references and their unique illusionism or a kind of magical socialist realism have never got the official stamp of approval.

European travellers and the transformation of garden art in Hungary at the turn of the nineteenth century

The transitional or irregular phase that characterized the development of more advanced English gardens in the 1720s and 1730s, while offering ways to express a plausible naturalness in designed la...

Performative Interactions with the Past

Reinterpretation and recontextualization… play an important part in the work of the Hungarian artist group Little Warsaw. In the fall of 2005, they invited Tamás Szentjóby to repeat his action entitled Exclusion exercise. Autotherapy to prevent punishment in their studio as a public event. The original action was realized in 1972 in the context of the “chapel shows” in the lake-side resort of Balatonboglár, a series of underground art exhibitions that was monitored by the secret police and forbidden the following year. Of particular interest here are Little Warsaw’s motives for asking Szentjóby to repeat this action and his reasons for agreeing to do so. As he had done thirty-three years previously, he sat on a chair, placed a bucket over his head, hung a piece of cardboard round his neck bearing the words “Exclusion exercise. Autotherapy to prevent punishment” and subjected himself to questions from the audience for two hours. The action included a piece of paper nailed to the wall with suggestions for possible questions. They included the following: “Is it really the task of art to raise awareness, is our destiny identical with history?”’

ANTON STRAKA I LERINC SABO – ANTOLOGIJA ČEŠKIH I SLOVAČKIH PESNIKA

Studija govori o češkim motivima u životnom delu Lerinca Saboa. Lerinc Sabo i Eržebet Korzati su, naime, od 1. avgusta 1933. godine proveli više od dve nedelje putujući po Čehoslovačkoj. Ovaj put im je obezbedio Anton Straka, čehoslovački ataše za kulturu. O tom putovanju najviše podataka saznajemo iz mađarskih izvora: iz dnevnika putovanja gđe Vekaš, Eržebet Korzati, iz stihova Lerinca Saboa i iz pisma koje je on uputio svojoj supruzi, Klari Mikeš. Kod terase Berandovi u Pragu Lerinc Sabo se sastao sa najznačajnijim češkim i slovačkim pesnicima, sa kojima je i kasnije održavao plodotvornu prepisku. Anton Straka je, boraveći u Budimpešti, organizovao tzv. večeri petkom, na kojima je ugostio značajne mađarske, češke i slovačke umetnike. Kao rezultat tog čehoslovačko-mađarskog kulturnog približavanja nastala je Antologija čeških i slovačkih pesnika, koju je priredio Straka.