SKETCHES ON SURREALIST PAINTING
par László Beke
March 1, 2015
It was the art of the 1940s that played the most decisive role in the reception of surrealism in Hungary. Árpád Mezei, one of the founders, in 1946, of the European School, collaborated for a long time with Marcel Jean. The members of the European School practiced surrealism in painting, not without tinging it with abstraction (József Jakovits, Endre Rozsda, or Ferenc Martin), while from a theoretical point of view, conceptions such as the use of ancestral traditions of the busójárás of Mohács ^1^ in the search for a collective unconscious and the quest for surrealism emerged. This generation (Dezső Kornis, Endre Bálint, József Jakovits, Júlia Vajda, not to mention the young Lili Ország), also renewed the genres of montage and photomontage from the late 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, surrealism was to remain relevant, along with abstraction: these two trends were the favorite targets of the political-cultural establishment.
The appearance of the "supernaturalists" ^2^ in the first half of the 1960s is one of the first signs of this change, which we will call the new avant-garde. The roots of this trend are usually traced back to the painting of Aurél Bernáth, less imbued with the avant-garde, however, than with a decaying lyrical realism: indeed, it was a disciple of this painter, Tibor Csernus, who, by using various techniques such as frottage, gave realism a magical dimension. As early as 1964, Csernus emigrated to Paris, where, a few years later, he became a forerunner of hyperrealism. Another emigration to Paris, a year later, was that of Ákos Szabó, more acerbic and less pictorial than his elder Csernus, but all the more "surrealist."
The development of a "magical surrealism" from elements of nature took center stage in the art scene for at least two reasons: on the one hand because the sterile debates around abstraction had generated a new need for materiality, materialized, among other things, by the adaptation of the principle of montage ^3^; on the other hand because such a trend, working from ultimately realistic elements, could not irritate the political-cultural authorities as much as non-figurative art, labeled as formalist and totally foreign to the working class.
Among the other prominent representatives of supernaturalism, let us mention Làszló Lakner, with meticulous and cluttered paintings such as Polytechnic Tool Cupboard (1962-64) or Spherical Locomotive (1963). Lakner, however, soon turned to pop art and hyperrealism. Làszló Gyémánt tried to recreate the atmosphere of jazz and American lifestyle through works based on the principle of montage.
In the semi-abstract and "vegetative" painting of Ignác Kokas, one notes the sporadic influence of the traditional landscape painting of the Alföld (the Hungarian Great Plain). As for success and popularity, the prize goes to György Korga and Endre Szász, who best managed to commercialize the supernaturalist vision.
Faced with all these artists, the strangest variant of supernaturalism is the painting of Sándor Altorjai, even if among the works saved from disappearance, only one seems to belong to this category, It Moves Me So Much (1966). Altorjai, like the other representatives of this trend, experimented with a technique characteristic of him, paint pouring. To his alternately figurative and non-figurative compositions, he associated the ideology of "diadism," whose spokesman, Father Diadia, a character created by Altorjai, is both the embodiment of stupidity, a sort of Hungarian King Ubu, and the painter's fictional alter ego.
Insofar as the informal painting of the 1950s and 1960s practiced the technique of surrealist automatic writing, we could cite a significant number of young artists devoted to lyrical abstraction, calligraphy, and action painting, such as Krisztián Frey or Endre Tót.
Seen from a historical distance, supernaturalism thus turns out to have been a significant but only temporary phenomenon: none of its representatives remained faithful to this artistic vision for long. It was to pop art, hyperrealism, and conceptual art that the paths then led.
National Gallery, Budapest
^1^ On Carnival Sunday (mid-February), in Mohács, not far from Pécs, the inhabitants wear the strangest costumes and the most cruelly expressive masks. They then go down into the streets and form the busó procession, which must be as noisy and frightening as possible. This very ancient custom inherited from shamanism is meant to drive away the evil spirits of winter and announce the coming of spring. (N.de G.B.) ^2^ This term is that of Géza Perneczky, "A magyar 'szürnaturalizmus' problémája" [The problem of Hungarian 'supernaturalism'], in (Új Iràs, Budapest, 1966/1, pp. 100-109). ^3^ On this subject, see Miklós Erdély, in Valóság, 1964/4, pp. 100-106.