Géza Perneczky

In the Rose Garden

Ilka Gedő 1921-1985-A Retrospective at the Hungarian National Gallery,
18 November 2004-31 March 2004
István Hajdu and Dávid Bíró:
The Art of Ilka Gedő (1921-1985). Budapest, Gondolat, 2003, 256 pp.

 

After an interval of ten years, I started taking trips home to Hungary in 1980.
I was immediately drawn to Székesfehérvár, where Ilka Gedő's first retrospective was on show.
I could hardly have been more surprised. It was as if a gingerbread maker who had until then been working in secret had suddenly opened wide the doors of her shop: the walls were speckled with scraps of petals embedded in honey-cake, gardens flattened with a rolling-pin, woman friends, roses and convolvulus pressed into mementoes, clowns covered with curling leaves. All these were not large, seeking to impress, but the whole exhibition was like the foliage of trees just before they start to shed their leaves. This is the season when Nature reveals more of her anatomy: as if nipped by frost, pigments stand out on surfaces, trees break up into mosaics, the boundaries of colours take on an inimitable complexity. Deep wrinkles, folds seeking a more comfortable position; elsewhere a splash of sandy deserts glimmers-the light of pilfered mirrors perhaps? And, fittingly for the work of a woman entering her riper years, the colour harmony suggests that it had been a dry summer.
The planes of the pictures here resembled sands born of purple glory, there a worn leather binding holding sheets made from the scales of butterflies. Vaguely discernible behind them seemed to be a dazzling phantasm. Here there was an elegy set in a narrow frame, possibly a few evanescent lines of Rilke's.
Elsewhere, acrobatics set in a grid of lines, and a frolicking horde of Klee's hobgoblins with their indecipherable tangle of matted hair, or dishevelled Art Nouveau witches. And then a crack in the wall. If one looked at it for long enough, one could see in it an Ariel trying to conjour out what bravado is.
He casts a spell, plays with rhymes and taps with his wand; yes, in an ecstasy of joy he lashes the bushes into veritable fairy-chaff.
So who was Ilka Gedő?
Behind her fairytale colourfulness and lyricism is a childhood that had been rich in intellectual stimuli. She was born in 1921, her father taught at the Jewish gimnázium in Budapest, and some of the leading writers and artists of the time were among the family's circle of friends. This childhood ended in the growing shadow of the Second World War. The young woman was herded into the city's Ghetto, and that was where she matured as an artist. Her drawings (until then no more than studies) captured with unexpected vigour the faces and figures in the Ghetto-captured the apathy, fear and helplessness that lurked behind them. These drawings, mainly in pencil, may also be interpreted as portraits and figurative sketches, they have no narrative content, only an intellectual dimension, only a feel that communicates the horror.
In 1946 Ilka Gedő married Endre Bíró, a biochemist of literary bent, and they spent longish periods in Paris and the Soviet Union. The horizon of postwar Budapest soon again darkened with the onset of Hungary's Stalinist era. In the visual arts, the key figures were the members of the European School, which had revived after the war only to be soon driven back underground, whilst in broader intellectual life, in close personal contact with the artists of the European School, a friendly circle of philosophers and aesthetes gathered around Lajos Szabó, Béla Tábor and Árpád Mezei, among them Attila Kotányi, who was to move to Paris after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and there became a member of the Situationists' Internationale. The predominant taste in this small circle was delineated by surrealist doctrines, with an admixture of calligraphic exploration, and an espousal of extreme abstraction. Among their Hungarian-born predecessors was Lajos Vajda, the shining star of the 1930s, who died prematurely on forced-labour service. Vajda too had ended up painting non-figurative compositions and he had near-iconic status for these artists.
It was in this artistic environment that Ilka Gedő was showing her drawings, indeed: not abstract enough, too naturalistic. Actually, as the late Júlia Szabó pointed out in the catalogue for the Székesfehérvár exhibition, the Giacometti-esque expressive drawings date to before the time Giacometti had embarked on his existentialist period. In his essay in this volume, István Hajdu sees an affinity with Munch, or the no less ecstatic Antonin Artaud, as being important too.
Ilka Gedő faced a crisis. All her instincts and her way of seeing things demanded that she remain true to the manner of depicting feelings and passions which she had embodied in her figurative drawings, which she personally felt to be a totality and the legacy of Van Gogh. However, the attitudes of the friends around her were far more radical (indeed esoteric). They thought she was old-fashioned. Ilka Gedő resigned herself, and in 1949 she gave up working in the visual arts, only resuming painting and drawing after a silence of sixteen years.
The intervening years were taken up with studying colour theory and translating various theoretical works. She translated, and indeed supplied tiny illustrations for, the papers that Newton, Goethe and Ostwald had written on the theory of colour, and later did likewise for Eber's Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. She was not content to leave it at the purely theoretical level: she devised and executed hundreds and thousands of colour tables of differing character or mood-a journey into the realm of the rainbow-hued refractions of light that extended over many years (though one should not dismiss the thought that these "scientific" colour essays are, in many cases, poised on the brink of becoming paintings in their own right). That is how we see those years today: she was again acting instinctively, gaining the knowledge through which she could turn herself into a superb colourist.
By the time the external pressures had diminished, and the cult of the extreme abstractionist authorities was over, it was possible for the cycle of Ilka Gedő's oil paintings to begin.
After the first important show in 1980 in Székesfehérvár Ilka Gedő had one more exhibition, at the Dorottya Street Gallery in Budapest. In the year of her death in 1985, she was commemorated with a one-woman show at the gallery of the Szentendre artists' colony; her painings also featured that year in the Hungarian Cultural Weeks held in Glasgow. Two years later, in 1987, the Muýcsarnok (Palace of Exhibitions) in Budapest gave her a retrospective. Another interlude and the Janos Gat Gallery in New York mounted Ilka Gedő exhibitions in 1994 and 1997, and her work was included in a collective show three years later in 2000.
There is no space here to list all her shows. Many of her works passed into public hands; in addition to the Székesfehérvár Museum and the Budapest National Gallery, various foreign collections acquired them, among them the New York Jewish Museum, the Yad Vashem Art Museum and Israel Museum in Jerusalem, as well as the British Museum and the Düsseldorf Kunstmuseum. The 1944-45 Ghetto drawings and the slightly later self-portraits have proved most in demand, with some entire series finding new owners. Foremost among the reviews and catalogue publications that accompanied the various exhibitions was a volume of essays by Péter György, Gábor Pataki, Júlia Szabó and Ferenc Mészáros that the Új Muývészet imprint put together for publication in 1997. All in all, these shows and purchases, along with the associated recollections and analyses, have meant that Ilka Gedő's name has now started to gain a wider currency.

The new large-format album on Ilka Gedő was published in lieu of a catalogue, as it were, to prepare and accompany the long-awaited exhibition mounted by the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest. Also, it was meant to replace what, to date, have been merely fragmentary impressions with a more clear-cut synopsis; besides reprinting key documents, it includes lists of the sketchbooks and notebooks that the artist left behind. In addition, the book contains what is, for all practical purposes, a complete survey of her oil paintings-the most approachable of the genres from the viewpoint of the general public. This itself is a major step forward, given that before now not one institution or publisher had ventured to survey the entire oeuvre. Indeed the book is the fruit of a private initiative, only made possible through the work done by the artist's son, Dávid Bíró, in assembling the lists of works and references as well as drumming up the funding for the high-quality reproductions the book is packed with, courtesy of the Eper Grafikai Stúdió. Hajdu's essay is accompanied by the archive material that is in the family's possession (various writings, diaries, notes and lists of works). All in all, this makes a multi-layered guide that will be indispensable for all future studies, as well as providing a background for the one hundred and fifty colour reproductions that have been made of Ilka Gedő's oil paintings. It is particularly laudable that Hungarian and English-language versions of the book have been printed separately, rather than producing a bilingual edition, and that the scholarly apparatus of the Hungarian version also includes English glosses on the most essential information.
At the first opening of the book, it is clear that its primary (and legitimate) purpose is to present the paintings. Given that the principal message is the colour values of the paintings, my only remark is that in some cases these are a little too vivid, even strident: anyone who has seen the originals knows that Ilka Gedő was a master of restrained surfaces and tones on the darker side of the palette. Having said that, I would like to add the minor comment that it is a matter of personal regret that space could not be found, alongside this imposing gallery of oil paintings, for the reader to be treated to the no less valuable drawings in similar plenitude and quality (possibly in full colour).
Indeed, the further you turn the pages of the volume, the greater your curiosity to know the diverse "other" genres that are referred to merely in the form of lists. Over the decades, Ilka Gedő's studio became a repository for "secondary materials" of the most fantastic forms and contents, and I am quite sure that all this material, attesting as it does to a rare absorption and, at times, inventiveness or playfulness, still holds many surprises.

Two names appear on the book's title page, those of István Hajdu and Dávid Bíró; a third should rightly share the credits: the artist's husband, Endre Bíró. I am not aware to what extent earlier publications produced for particular occasions utilised the notes and recollections on his wife's work; here, at all events, two such writings ("Ilka Gedő's Studio as It Was at the Time of Her Death", and "Note on Ilka Gedő's Working Life") are highly significant in both their content and length, and in no way inferior to the essay by Hajdu, the highlighted feature of the text.
For their extraordinary modesty and fidelity to their subject, these two documents by Endre Bíró are unique indeed. Writings by the spouses of "dead artists", rarely stop the readers in their tracks, supplying a warning like: "The facts about Lajos Szabó and 'his circle' as recorded here contain things that were experienced and interpreted, and misinterpreted, by the writer of these lines. They may not be applied to any other context without checking and independent confirmation." What follows is informative, accurate, and yet still enjoyably rounded. One would need to be quick on one's feet indeed to be able to locate any misinterpretation worth mentioning.
With the mention of Lajos Szabó's name we have plunged into the-I almost said metaphysical-tumult, but instead will make do with the clamorous thick of the world in which Ilka Gedő moved. After his wife's death, Endre Bíró took stock of the seemingly endless slips and scraps of paper, newspaper cuttings and postcards, prints and paper toys, miniature bottles, broken-off twigs, remnant tubes of paint or pages ripped from books, and supplied each and every item with a few lines of commentary on its intrinsic or biographical significance. Quite spontaneously, I started reading this text as if it had some literary kinship to one of Georges Perec's writings or, say, Hrabal's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. The further one delves into the inventory, the more significant and perplexing each single addition seems. This is a virtuoso scholarly feat, worthy of a great natural scientist.

Just as modestly groomed but steeply raked in its perspective is the second essay, dealing with Ilka Gedő's artistic career (with footnotes disproportionately longer than the text). Into this Biró crams all those thoughts that he felt were either personal or whose contents, by extending beyond the person of Ilka Gedő, strictly speaking stepped outside the framework adumbrated by the title. That is why they are being passed on, as if in an undertone, in columns of small print.
Reading this or that interminable footnote one feels it is closer in spirit to the essay than the main text itself. On the way, Bíró has many fascinating things to relate about his wife.
The precise descriptions that he gives of her method of building up layers of paint, for instance, are most instructive, since with this knowledge it is easier to reconstruct how the iridescent, deceptive surfaces of her canvases, which bring to mind translucent lamellae or the concretions of sea shells, were contrived. Even more important, of course, is the testimony borne to the stations and trials through which the artist passed, as observed and recorded by Endre Bíró. One instance concerns the question of why Ilka Gedő gave up art around 1948-49. Was it due to some personal crisis, or because that was when her children were born, or was she paralysed by the failure of the circle of friends around her to understand her? Or might it have been because external pressures-and remember, we are speaking about the period just before 1950-had intensified to the point that they became unbearable? In Endre Bíró's view, Ilka was unnerved on being confronted with the norms set up by the circle around Lajos Szabó and Béla Tábor and on perceiving the significance of Lajos Vajda's late abstract period, which debates within the circle had raised to the status of a guiding principle. As a result, she lost her faith in "drawing after nature": she laid down her pencil because she believed that was the only way in which she could be creative. Elsewhere Bíró informs us that Ilka's appetite for art was perhaps taken away by the opinions that Lajos Szabó had formed (partly under the influence of the Vienna psychiatrist Otto Weininger) and which he did not bother hiding, about "women's place in the intellectual world".
By then, Ilka Gedő had already produced the series of drawings that major international collections are now so keen to lay their hands on, and over which there has for some time been an ongoing discussion. Does the concentration that is the essence of the figures really presage a transformation towards the spiritual comparable to Giacometti's, or did the artist use some other refined stylisation and transmutation to capture these singularly tension-fraught transcendences? And now we have it: she herself believed that the drawings were merely "copied" from nature. Her sole consideration was to be true to life. As to the stilling of her activity, I shall later venture an explanation that perhaps assigns less weight to the incomprehension of the friends around her; for now let it suffice to say in regard to the core question that she may well have felt that the revered figure of Van Gogh was standing behind her whilst she was drawing-and he was the source of her inspiration. Her appetite for work was subsequently taken away by the proliferation of a thicket of directional posts and prohibitory signs.
What is clear from Bíró's lines is that the husband strove to remain discreet, how else was an esteemed scientist at the Szent-Györgyi Albert Institute supposed to "relate" to an issue so fraught with subjective problems? He has more to say, on the other hand, about the role of automatism, and Ilka Gedő's ambivalent attitude towards the technique, as Lajos Szabó, for example, accepted its importance but denied it had any role in his own work. Bíró describes the path by which Ilka Gedő, when she resumed work around 1968 by drawing "portraits" of family members or acquaintances (the quotations marks are warranted because these were completely free studies that, even allowing for their being sketches, are not modelled on human body forms), found herself close to total abstraction. According to him, what happened is that whilst doodling she would be thinking intently about the subject in question but simultaneously trying not to draw from memory.
In essence, this semi-automatic or, as Bíró aptly denotes it, pantomimic mode of representation subsequently became the near-exclusive method of her entire second artistic period, of the oil paintings that she produced from 1966-68 until her death.

On the occasion of the 1985 commemorative exhibition at Szentendre, the playwright and novelist György Spiró wrote for the catalogue on "The ever-alert manualism of the non-observer", which is both more and less than automatism. István Hajdu, in his essay, perceptively introduces and analyses the pre-1950 drawings, which he personally (and perhaps Ilka Gedő herself) regards as ".individually fashioned yet universally valid theological messages." In dealing with the oil paintings that were painted twenty years later he discerns a completely different Ilka Gedő. He concludes that in this second period, largely given over to oils, she now saw painting as "the most important end, and also the most important means, of what was rather a playful, auto-mythological and also verbally marked internally conducted dialogue." This can no longer be the intuitive alertness of a non-observer, nor the creative scrawls of a pantomime's semi-wakefulness; these are now supplanted by the mechanism of self-reflexiveness, the fairytale world of an artist with her own phantasms, drawn from within herself and for her own amusement. A form of l'art pour l'art fantasising.
It can be sensed what an essential difference this is. Hajdu divides Ilka Gedő's career in two stylistically, he also sets the two periods on the scales morally as well, and one may be left with a distinct impression that this assessment ends up with Hajdu denying the second, oil-painting period any possible form of relationship with universal functions. How could paintings be truly significant if they are "verbally marked" or "auto-mythological" and serve simultaneously as both end and means in a "dialogue process", or self-serving games, as defined by such terms.
Perhaps what Hajdu is trying to say is that in this second period Ilka Gedő no longer believed there could be any transcendental values, that she (and only she) in that specific time and place would be able to formulate successfully through her particular means. Instead, she constructed a puppet theatre in which she set those repeatedly overpainted, fraying flowers or coloured dolls dancing for her own entertainment. (Hajdu is possibly referring to this when he reminds us that Ilka Gedő often (indeed too often) called her pictorial motifs "artificial flowers". To call something "artificial" is tantamount to saying it is "mock"; so mock art would be something one creates with mock flowers. If that supposition is correct, then it may also be true that Ilka Gedő saw herself in the same way as Hajdu now sees her.) The fact that she painted them beautifully is quite another matter. For what does the beauty of the fairytale world that revolves around her count for, if it is such that ends and means merge so closely within it? If it is true that this type of painting neither accuses nor glorifies, neither crumbles to dust nor truly soars on high, then it is at best decorative rather than transcendental. And it can only attain "ethereal" heights: in other words, it can be aesthetic, but not redemptive.
But let me go to the heart of what I want to say. On reading the book, I had the impression that Hajdu's essay is based on a story of catharsis; it seeks to register a complaint about the failure of this catharsis to gain wider currency in Hungarian art. The tragedy that makes the catharsis necessary was the persecution of the Jews that came to a culmination in the final years of the Second World War; its possible epic material comprises the efforts (and any successes) of those thinkers and artists who are sensible to and relive the problem, and eventually attempt to portray it-or if the attempts largely failed, then a description of those failures.
The two artistic climaxes in Ilka Gedő's career more or less coincide with the two periods of accepting that troubled heritage and of being resigned to finding no genuine solution (perceptible at the time right across Europe). The large distance in time between these two periods, which she experienced as a crisis (roughly the years from 1948 to 1968) correspond with what might be characterised as the years of experimentation in which artists were still clinging to the classical avant-garde and seeking a path forward even as they were increasingly obliged to recognise that the path was overtrodden and was not going to help a new Picasso, and thus a new Guernica, come into the world. It seems highly indicative that this same weakness, hesitancy or failure, was manifest throughout postwar Europe as it was in Hungary-at best in more familiar settings and on a much larger scale.
(One may add parenthetically that Paris was still a beacon for the continent, though that beacon had long ceased to be the Belle Époque. Life no longer moved within the domains of the Bois de Boulogne, Montparnasse and Montmartre; the city recovered only gradually from the postwar ordure and troubles. Figuratively, if not literally, its streets stank of urine, and the stucco of its houses had grown black with age: one only has to think of the sensation that was caused when a start was made on cleaning up the façades of public buildings. Western Europe spent little time lingering in Proust's gardens; in his place the busy, ant-like figure of Sartre bestrode the pavements, whilst Yves Montand and Juliette Greco became the idols of intellectuals. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the privileged well-off collected the records of Yma Sumac-a startling hand-in-hand consonance! Brisk gusts now swept in, not down the pitted roads, but from the North African coast, courtesy of Camus, or whistled under the door as a frigid Viking legacy, thanks to Beckett. That relatively protracted spell, during which all of Europe waited for Godot, lasted up till the events of 1968 in Prague and Paris, after which the scenery was finally rearranged. True, there had already been harbingers of this change: in the early 1960s Rauschenberg carried off the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale, the first slap in the face by the New York School; Alberto Giacometti shifted his abode from Alpine valleys to a tiny bedsit in Paris; and Yves Klein discovered how blue the sky was and learned how to launch into flight from the rooftops.)

When Endre Bíró first met Ilka Gedő he had the impression that the young woman was still completely under her mother's influence, a sentimental creature who could only react to her sufferings with romantic or affronted gestures; who whilst loathing the evils she had lived through, indeed forming what was perhaps an unduly mythical image of the atrocities, was nevertheless incapable of any analytical or polemical engagement. Within a few years, however, Ilka too had become a member of the intellectual circle in which Bíró had long been at home, learning to read books on philosophy and aesthetics, translating "banned" texts, and arguing about the problems of abstract art, though there are countless indications in her notes and sketches that she did not feel these were truly her own concerns, indeed sometimes found the denizens of the faded décor of Budapest's mini-Montparnasse to be hysterical or snobbish.
On her attaining the heights of this slowly accumulated erudition and critical acumen, and using it as a rock from which to dive and on which to cling (I could say: at the fever pitch of the crisis induced by this realisation), came an essay on Vajda that she wrote in 1954 as a lengthy and highly instructive open letter to the art historian and poet Stefánia Mándy. In this she took issue with the norms that had been set up around the European School, such as its doctrine of the alleged or genuine necessity of "catacomb art", or the orthodoxy of dogmatic abstraction. Longing to escape the artistic ghetto she had come to know in Budapest, she sought the outlines of a more total way of painting-one that, for instance, summated Van Gogh, Picasso, Vajda and Klee and also admitted and inhaled more deeply the air of the world of the Old Masters. But was art of this kind still possible at all by then-in 1954, she agonised? And if so, how? Ilka Gedő desperately addressed these questions to the authorities of the European School, and it is noteworthy how much emphasis the text gives to the expression "cramping-up". The essay, one of the outstanding documents in Hungarian art history of the years between 1948 and 1956, is included in the book.
By then, Ilka Gedő had not been drawing for a good few years, and it was to be a further decade and more before she took a brush in her hand. It was a long night-of renouncing catharsis. The era bids farewell to the illusion that there might be hope of a solution through the tools of art. The recognition that the path that until then had been regarded as negotiable (to put it another way, the further pursuit of classical modernism) could only lead towards a cramping-up, or merely add to the sterile waste-tip of epigonism. Ilka Gedő too was one of those for whom a glimpse of this cul-de-sac signalled an order to halt. To be sure, it would not have been as dramatic, or as radical, as this suggests; equally, there may well have been other reasons-personal or family considerations, for instance-for falling silent. Yet looking back from a perspective of half a century, one cannot help feeling that it was some major ethical impulse that led her to lay down her pencil. In her own way, quite unconsciously and naively, yet autonomously, she had already once before, during the 1940s come very close to the tone of the longed-for synthesis, perhaps also (it cannot be excluded) to a possible continuation of the trajectory from Van Gogh to Vajda. At one point Hajdu, very perceptively, mentions Francis Bacon as showing certain affinities to Ilka Gedő's early drawings. But Bacon is truly the protagonist of a subsequent chapter, as far beyond her generation as the distance separating the little Hungarian Montparnasse from the dam burst that occurred in Hungary in the late 1960s to produce the Iparterv group from some lower depth. Neither the artists clustered around the European School nor more independent spirits like Ilka Gedő knew what to make of the opportunities that opened up with this new era, for it marked the setting-off on open tracks of a train, still rattling on to this day, on which we ourselves are seated.

Which brings me to my conclusion. I feel that Ilka Gedő's withdrawal was an act that was made within the artistic arena. On reaching a point beyond which the sole paths open to her lay in the direction of sterile planning or the proliferation of copycats, she turned away and fell silent, because that was the only way she could remain true to herself and to the world of her earlier drawings. Plainly, she did not do so with premeditated intent, and quite certainly she can have had no inkling of the wider context. She remained as blind in doing so as she had been in producing her drawings with closed eyes, for only the fearlessness of an idiot savant can explain how she was able to balance so masterfully over yawning chasms. By their nature, of course, accomplishments like that can have no direct influence; the message that they impart only arrives at its addressees much later. Ilka Gedő's unpainted pictures, which are lined up under the alcoves of the years from 1950 to 1968, are phantom pictures, shades that would first become visible only after decades had passed.
I am aware of just one other gesture in Hungarian art of those years that is comparable to her "stepping aside": that was the pit Béla Veszelszky dug in the garden of his house on Budapest's Rose Hill and into which he withdrew with a humility comparable to Ilka Gedő's resignation. Veszelszky's "observatory" was a funnel-shaped hole that pointed towards the heavens like a telescope. What the artist saw from down there brought about a totally new approach in his art.
Where, then, are we to place the mutedly lit fairytale world of the late oil paintings? In answer, I turn to another story as my starting-point.
Some time ago, as luck would have it, I got into a discussion with Zsuzsa Szenes about textile art in Hungary during the 1960s. She recalled that back then I had written a fairly lengthy piece, "Subterranean Streams", about a group of women-most of them the wives of architects-who had given the genre such an unexpected push into prominence. Hungary's political leadership in those days kept applied artists on a much looser leash, and they took full advantage of the opportunities that this offered. It was potters (Lívia Gorka, for example) who were perhaps the first in Hungary to make this new fashion presentable by announcing, with disarming frankness, that they were, to be sure, in a distant sense abstract artists, and before long a whole army of tapestry-weaving women and textile artists, working with carding cotton, woollen yarn and other coloured stuffs, were emulating their example. To this day, whenever I take a 56 tram along Szilágyi Erzsébet Alley in Buda and see, resplendent in its tulip colours, the sentry-box standing by the gates of the Zrínyi Military Academy, I am reminded of the similarly shaped three-dimensional appliqué works of Zsuzsa Szenes entitled This Is How Hungarians Like It, or A Chapter from the Aristophanes Adaptation "Long Live Háry János". And I can almost hear the ringing, healthy peels of laughter with which those conceptual textile artists stole the thunder of pontificating males with their disputatious dispositions.
Zsuzsa Szenes claimed that back then, in the Sixties, I too had paid a visit on their Mecca, the artists' colony at the village of Velem, from which the textile art biennale at nearby Szombathely later emerged. When I said I was truly sorry but I had no recollection of that, Zsuzsa just shook her head: "And what about the cedar of Lebanon standing there, and the sweet chestnut?" She could not believe that such key details could have been erased from my memory. It emerged later that since the Velem colony only began to function during the 1970s, there really was no chance that I had visited it in the previous decade, but that is beside the point. What matters is that in their world women have other mental maps-not maps on which names, trends and political programmes (least of all prohibitions) are printed but sweet chestnuts, cedars and arbours of blooming (albeit possibly thorny) rose-bushes. Those are the truths by which they regulate their own lives as well. They maintain surreptitious contacts with one another and with these living, unstoppably growing organic beings. If men happen to come by with their theories, the women just smile forgivingly, for they are well aware what their business is: life must carry on, whatever may have happened, for the fate of generations to come is in their hands.
Ilka Gedő was one such woman. When the 1960s arrived and that gradual but unstoppable flow of subterranean streams commenced, with the result that the overlying rocks began to crack under the pressure and the life-sustaining moisture to seep out onto drought-plagued land, she too started to paint. Flowers-or "artificial flowers" as she called them with quiet self-irony. Part of her extant legacy comprises 128 notebooks containing sketches and notes made whilst she was painting the oils, as well as another 157 notebooks of other texts, including a diary and various notes discussing artistic matters. A plethora of fascinating messages that pass on Ilka Gedő's thoughts still await discovery in this archival material.
Until then, though, we have the pictures. As if a gingerbread maker working in secret had suddenly opened wide the doors to her shop: scraps of petals embedded in honey-cake confections, or gardens flattened with a rolling-pin, roses and convolvulus pressed as mementoes, curling leaves, flowers.

 

Géza Perneczky
is an art historian who left Hungary in the 1950s and made his home in Cologne, Germany, where he became a secondary school teacher. He frequently contributes essays and short stories to Hungarian journals.