ENDRE ROZSDA

par Nathalie Georges-Lambrichs

March 29, 2020

Chance willed that André Breton's eye should rest on Endre Rozsda's paintings, who had definitively returned to France in 1957 after twenty years spent in Hungary where he was born and where fame attached itself to him as a very young man, barely finished with his years of training. It is on this contingency that today, the new digital journal, Mélusine, bets: intending to devote itself to deepening research on surrealism in all its forms[1], it dedicates its first issue to Rozsda by publishing nine texts, taken from the work of the study day of March 10, 2018.

This issue 1 of Mélusine in its digital version[2] is a kind of virtual mobile, in the image of Rozsda-and-his-painting. Diverse and diffracted, the texts respond to each other, enclosing a space that always exceeds them, but pushes each one in its logic, to the full: testimonies, analyses, rapprochements and neighborhoods, the breath of surrealism animates a portrait of the artist in nine fragments, by Françoise Py, José Mangani, David Rosenberg, Adam Biro, Patrice Conti, François Lescun, Alba Romano Pace, Borbála Kálman and Claude-Luca Georges[3]; a portrait of the "machinist", such as in himself he recapitulates, for his part, the complex world of art of which he was the contemporary and in which he imposes, after the fact, a mark that is not without infusing today through his singular art a whole current of painting, against the tonitruant speculative installations, which does not fear to make heard that surrealism has not said its last word and puts to work critics, enlightened amateurs and also contemporary artists who feel the necessity to situate themselves in relation to it. Something resists, in the eye of the typhoon, in the image of its object which precisely has no other image. The challenge is met. The events of European painting of the 20th century come back to life, the second half illuminated by the avant-gardes of the first, vis-à-vis which Rozsda persevered on his course without ignoring anything. Thus one glimpses him from a different angle each time, through a filigree detail that acts like in a magic lantern and suddenly, the focus allows us to see, in a great economy of gestures, Endre Rozsda "mad about painting".

He paints in oil on canvas, every day he paints the days, their lace, as he thinks and remembers. His idyllic and monstrous Judeo-Hungarian childhood encysted at the bottom of his eye, he never ceases to paint. The thing was decided very early, he got used to it, throughout his life, traversing intimate dramas and accidents of history. Insensitive to outrages? Certainly not, but decidedly elsewhere, he resolved to live as he paints, in the present: he transposes, metamorphoses, interprets, encodes, veils, unveils and reveals, wherever he finds himself. If there is a looker, he will decide. Endre Rozsda is his paintings, he separates from them with difficulty. He admits into his solitude friends, lovers, accomplices. Thus he knows where he is. He went so far as to separate from certain paintings only on the condition that their acquirers would wait for his death to take possession of their property. This is my body.

He paints indifferent to the noises of the world. But the silence of the studio is intense when he presents his work to potential buyers. It's cutting with a knife (no or very few knives by the way in Rozsda's panoply). He resists, he welcomes his fellows one by one, without makeup, each at their own risk, model, critic, gallerist, young man, socialite or neighbor. He effaces himself, he appears, he expects nothing. In the silence of the night, it is to Mozart or Bartók that is devolved the power to silence the noises of the world[4] and to his laughter to give it its thickness of joy, its color, its colors, and its melancholy.

The contributors to this issue of Mélusine have all approached him, frequented him, directly or through the intermediary of his close ones, José Mangani first of all who was his companion and who composes with the "plural fidelities" of which Breton made his attribute. Each thus has "his" Rozsda, while he paints at his own estimation, alone in making known what he refuses: venal compromise. A painter doubled by a man having that ethics: rare thing.

There are the chosen companions, the readings – Freud, Proust[5] –, there is also chance. Rozsda precocious, gifted, knew eclipses, but he will have had this long chance: André Breton whose eye not only – thanks to Simone Collinet, his first wife, thanks also to Raymond Queneau who had married her sister – rested on his canvases and on him, but also the pen, as Françoise Py recalls in her presentation. Did he know from then on (we are in 1957, he has just crossed the border to take refuge in Paris) that his work would survive him? In any case he never refused the label of "surrealism": it left him free to live as he understood. He was surrealist and intractable. Unbearable. In love with an abyssal humor, doubled by a tender irony. His inertia? It's painting, always painting, seven days a week, and if not it's the drawings, it's photography, and it's visits to the Louvre. Such, his mediations, very unmediated. He has no time to slander, he meditates. And distills half-words, "in search of time". It's thus that he resists, and makes the air of the times stop at his door and condense into this term which today installs him in the company of his peers.

Little by little – Endre Rozsda died at the end of 1999, as he had lived, in his century – an existence imposes itself. His paintings, one by one, let themselves be looked at, commented on, ordered. Thousands of photographs have not sunk, forming the counterpart, largely black and white, of his canvases painted in often vivid colors; and there is, last but not least, the accumulation of very numerous drawings, material for exhibitions yet to come.

It is thus, in the spirit of surrealism in statu nascendi, the logic of a life that quivers in each of these pieces; a life concentrated in an eye, a hand and, in a quite sensible manner, an ear, on the alert, transmuting into matte and mute matter the silence to which it tended and returns. Endre Rozsda painted the passions, the furies of the world without loving or fearing them. He made them his material and imported them into a zone where diffuses the light that he learned to capture not to tame them, for it is impossible, but to enchant them. If death prevented Patrick Waldberg from writing on Rozsda the text he planned, I believe I do not betray him – it's the case to say – by borrowing from him "the simplest definition that one can give of the poet", as he formulated it in Les Demeures d'Hypnos[6]: "a child who has not betrayed", to make it enter into the Rozsda-studio.

Nathalie GEORGES-LAMBRICHS

[1]. The Mélusine journal is published by the Association for Research and Study of Surrealism (APRES), chaired by Henri Béhar.

[2] To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the painter's death, the Friends of Endre Rozsda association printed this issue. Information on this subject is available on the artist's website https://www.rozsda.com

[3] May the reader kindly, with one click, consult the table of contents to engage in reading as soon as he has the leisure... https://melusine-surrealisme.fr/wp/?attachment_id=3225

[4] Cf. "Endre Rozsda and Music", François Lescun, notably p. 47.

[5] Cf. Patrice Conti's study p. 29-44, and I allow myself – Freud's Vinci and Proust's Elstir oblige –, to link it in turn to the texts of Ginette Michaux devoted to the Proustian gaze, and gathered in her Essais de psychanalyse lacanienne at Erès in 2008.

[6] Éditions de la Différence, Paris, 1976, p. 483, cf. "Vasilije Jordan – The Dagger in Memory". Reading note