THE NAME OF DISORDER

par Adam Biro

March 1, 2015

Four common points that allow me to speak of him: we were both political refugees from Hungary, Jews indifferent to religion, linked to surrealism (he as an actor, me as a spectator) and lovers, living for and from art. As a kid in Budapest, I knew nothing of Rozsda. In communist Hungary, art had to be socialist-realist. (When I think about it! These people, our leaders, who called themselves revolutionaries and who imposed the most seated, even lying, art, the most conformist, the most bourgeois, the most petit-bourgeois that one could imagine...) Surrealism, but any trend even slightly modern, any research was cursed-forbidden, punished. I learned of Rozsda's existence, I discovered his works in Paris, while working on a dictionary of surrealism. These canvases spoke to me. If they were not surrealist in the strict sense of the term, they were so by dream, by instinctive, by automatic, by transgression. I loved his colors, the apparent disorder of his painting ― apparent, because his paintings were very organized. The name of this disorder was in fact freedom. I called him to ask him to send me the Ektachrome of one of his works to be included in the dictionary. (For the younger generation: an ektachrome was a color film, ready to be reproduced, serving as the basis for photogravure.) We spoke Hungarian, to my great satisfaction. A few days later, I received a tiny Ektachrome of mediocre quality (I still have it), obviously made by an amateur ― by Rozsda himself, as he told me when I called him back to complain. (A similar anecdote suddenly infiltrates my memory: when, working with another surrealist painter, Max Ernst, on a book, I told the master that the photogravure I had just received, bad, "did not reproduce his work", he reprimanded me: "dear Mr. Biro, did you intend to reproduce my work?") Then, I had the opportunity to personally meet Rozsda, at the Bateau-Lavoir where I had been introduced by a Hungarian friend, art journalist Julia Cserba. I had never been to this mythical building before, and I went there all excited, what am I saying? impressed in Rozsda's studio which, most naturally in the world, occupied a beautiful space in one of the high places of modern art. As if someone had told me, come have dinner tonight, informally, there will be some friends, Picasso, Giacometti, Turner, Caravaggio... The scene is very vivid before me: Rozsda standing in a large bright room where some succulent plants flourished (was it really like that? memory deforms, transforms, and this one goes back to the early 80s), showing us an immense canvas (which one?) very colorful, full of humor with small characters. (Has enough attention been paid to the omnipresent humor in Rozsda's work?) We talked about his relationship with surrealism, about Hungary... He had a Hungarian accent. Little known at the time, appreciated by a small circle of connoisseurs of good taste, helped by Françoise Gilot, his reputation soon exceeded this circle, then the borders. Another memory, a posthumous memory: I was invited to a vernissage of Endre Rozsda in a gallery in Budapest ― vernissage that took place on November 4, 2006, at 4 (or 6 o'clock?) in the morning, exactly fifty years after

the solemn nocturnal appeal of Imre Nagy, head of the Hungarian revolutionary government. Desperate, pathetic, and how vain appeal, we know today, addressed to the whole world, to the free world (which cared nothing for a revolution lost in advance in a small country without importance), to come save Hungarian democracy which had only twelve days of existence. Indeed, the Soviet tanks were setting in motion precisely at that hour to crush this democracy. With the success and the sequel we know. And, I don't know why, this exhibition corresponded perfectly, despite the extraordinary gap between a cruel moment of History and this place and this public and this moment, to this artist and his works. (For the little story – or History? –, this exhibition took place in the building of the Central European University subsidized by another Hungarian refugee, Soros, whom the government of the far-right Prime Minister Orbán has just chased from Hungary...)

This moment fifty years earlier was inseparable from Rozsda's career, from his life: shortly after this invasion, having understood that he had no future in this subjugated homeland, he left it for a second and final time. His country, his language... but he saved his art: the illustrator – that's how he survived in Stalinist Hungary –, became the painter we know. A free painter.

I suddenly realize that we are November 4th (2018). There is no chance except objective.