Éva Forgács

Hands and Constructs

Commemorative Exhibition at the KOGART Gallery on the 75th Anniversary of Béla Kondor's Birth (19 May–20 August 2006). Catalogue in Hungarian and in English edited by Péter Fertôszögi and Mária Kondor. Budapest, Kogart House, 2006, 203 pp.

 

It might not be a stretch to say that Béla Kondor (1929–1972) was the most idiosyncratic artist of his generation and even of post-war Hungarian art. Rejected by the Painting Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, he switched to printmaking and created one of the most compelling etching oeuvres in Hungary to date. His art aroused controversy, partly because of his inquiry into the meaning of religion and partly because of his style, which was seen as blasphemous by some critics. Kondor was also active as a poet and published several volumes of poetry.
One most unexpected impression I had at this commemorative exhibition was an apparent connection between Kondor's works and those of Lajos Vajda (1909–1941). Vajda was a lonely, boldly innovative artist who combined surrealist vision with figurative style; he was retroactively acknowledged as the most important forerunner of the surrealism-heavy European School, an association of artists and art theorists between 1945 and 1948.
The similarity between the two oeuvres struck me mostly as one of gesture and style; that is, in the particular characteristics or 'personality' of the lines Kondor drew. However, I am not suggesting at all that there is a continuity of artistic tradition, or that there had been any influence of Vajda on Kondor that the latter was aware of.
There is, however, more to this connection than mere similarities. The significance of certain motifs—for example icons, the hand, or the raised hand in particular—and the palpable desire to rise above material reality mark a deeper relation between the two painters. When the late Lajos Németh referred to the presence of "both structured order and surrealist vision" in Kondor's art, he may not have realized that this was in sync with Vajda's "constructive surrealist thematic".1 According to their early drawings, both painters had mastered the skills of adequate representation in their childhood, when they used precise, flexible lines and achieved verisimilitude. Vajda drew figures, horses, carriages; Kondor portraits, landscapes, still lifes. Starting, serendipitously, at the age of twentyseven, each of the two painters found his own voice, which soon solidified into a personal style. They both invested their drawings with a particular character. They drew somewhat rigid lines which did not readily follow the contours of the objects; their characteristically brittle lines, rather, kept at a certain distance from precision and descriptive perfection. They both refrained from copying. Instead, they reinterpreted and recreated the seen in their drawings, which became increasingly self-styled and controlled. Shifting emphasis from the manifest features of the objects to the inherent ones, they both developed a slightly detached style which was both figurative and evocative.
Both Vajda and Kondor used motifs written over or written into other motifs, although they did so in quite different ways. The various layers are very clean and clear in Vajda's paintings, where each and every object is articulate and appears on its own plane; in Kondor's pictures, by contrast, there are a great many layers which flow into one another. In his 1972 painting Attila József: Mother, the title of which refers to a poem by Attila József, three figures are so combined that they are hard to disentangle. Kondor gave particular attention to the poems of József (1905–1937), another great loner of Hungarian culture, who radically broke from tradition while not giving up poetic forms, and who gave powerful expression to pain and solitude. In him Kondor apparently recognized another kindred spirit.

...

One of Kondor's most frequently occurring motifs is the hand, which appears stylized and often enlarged. It frequently features a long bent thumb and extremely long and fragile fingers, spread out wide. The hand, consistently with its actual function, appears as a finely constructed instrument, a tool, where the fingers seem to be part of the mechanics of a machine. This is particularly clear in Kondor's most famous painting, the 1963 Wasp King, where the structure of the wasp's airplane-like wings and the construction of the hand holding the wasp seem to be parts of one and the same mechanical entity.

There is hardly any Kondor painting where the hand is not particularly emphasized or even enlarged to become a particularly important vehicle of the painter's message. For example, in his 1968 Construction Workers, the hand is close to being a hieroglyph, with its contours already set and finalized.
Interpretation of the hand may span a wide scale. The hand most likely stands for that which is human: the humanly possible actions and limits, the latter powerfully evoked in his 1966 paintings The Fall: The Temptation of Saint Anthony. The hand, often directed upward, frequently occurs in Vajda's paintings as well, pointing to higher levels of reality. The always excited, gesticulating and detailed hands in Kondor's paintings mediate between the painter's classicist attempts and cosmic aspirations. For example, in his 1971 watercolour Attila József: The Song of the Cosmos, a whole choreography of raised hands appears. Many of Kondor's paintings, such as The Passing of Time, Dante and Virgil (1963), feature winged figures, airplanes, angels and astronauts, including some of his biblical images. This is indicative that Kondor had a universal, indeed cosmic perspective, like Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. Unlike them, Kondor did not paint abstract pictures, but his vision was no more limited than theirs.

Kondor's 1966 painting Man with Construction confirms that the above connection between them, although far-fetched both in time and space, is well grounded. On the right of this painting there is a man's head, while on the left there is a pair of hands carefully holding a fine, complicated, opaque, geometric construction, as if it were made of glass. The transparent object is a metaphor of spiritual power paired with manual skills, and it brings to mind El Lissitzky's 1924 photo-montage Self-Portrait, where Lissitzky's face occupies the right, merging with the photograph of a compass next to the letters XYZ, all on the type of graph paper usually associated with engineering. This analogy, the most important element of which is its being coincidental—Kondor may not have heard of Lissitzky, since the rediscovery of the Russian avant-garde did not start in Hungary until the late 1960s–clearly shows that the dimensions of Kondor's art were no whit inferior to those of the classic avant-garde, which had believed in a grand future that mankind has the ability to design and turn into reality. A more monstrous vision appears in Kondor's 1967 surrealistic painting Phenomenon, complete with fragments of stairs, trails, watermill-wheels, unfinished wooden structures and gigantic hands and faces. In the light of this and a few similar paintings, Kondor's icons, series of icon constructions, and his frequent use of gold evoke a general desire to transcend material reality and the concrete reality of the present rather than have them carry a directly religious message, as many of his critics contend. In direct contrast to most of his contemporaries who encoded religious messages in metaphors in Communist Hungary, Kondor appears to have exploited manifest religious motifs in order to evoke an even more forbidden and radical message: his own rebellious desire for political freedom. It is this inherent political charge that made his representation of saints so relevant.
Kondor was bold and radical in expressing political dissent. He got away with it, his friends and critics seem to agree, because he remained a figurative artist, never crossing the line to abstraction. He was among the very few, however, who openly thematized the 1956 Revolution, for example in his 1959 painting Revolution. Although he was generally regarded as the last icon painter, he was, in a way unprecedented in Hungarian art, so intensely taken by the present that, in 1972, he responded to a current event, the massacre of the Israeli athletes in Munich in his painting Murder at the Olympic Games.

 

Éva Forgács
former Associate Professor of Art History at the Hungarian Academy of Crafts and Design, is Adjunct Professor of Art History at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. She is author of The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (CEU Press, 1995) and co-editor of Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910–1930 (The MIT Press, 2002).