Éva Forgács

In a Dark Age

Lajos Vajda. A Retrospective at the Hungarian National Gallery.
Budapest, 12 December 2008–22 February 2009.
Curated by Gábor Pataki and Mariann Gergely.

 

Two things will be immediately obvious to the visitor: Vajda's powerfully expressive drawing skills that he commanded already as a boy, evidenced by the chalk drawing he made of his father at the age of sixteen; and his clearly articulated, astounded curiosity about the forces of history and their impact on man that comes across in his collages. The central themes of the collages made in Paris between 1930 and 1933 are torture and execution: the most unacceptable acts of what Vajda saw as the legalised barbarity of war. The most shocking pictures, like Chinese Execution, War and The Whipped One, are welldefined visual structures where skull, flower, male face and female body, refugees, executors and those about to be executed appear superimposed within strictly controlled and clearly designed compositions. Some collages follow the diagonal or circular arrangements of the Constructivists, while in other photomontages the fragments of photo-journalism are arranged according to a different logic, but still within clean contours.
The drawings he made after his return to Hungary in 1934 seem, precisely by virtue of their clear contours, to be a continuation of his collages. Gone is the busyness of documentary photos from the central space; only the lucid contours remain to define the limits of the composition. Vajda uses clean, steady lines to represent figures and faces, at times experimenting with filling parts of the surfaces with dots or tiny broken lines. Reduction to contours makes the drawings crisp and lucid. The power of the steadily drawn, vigorous line seems a great discovery. Clearly-drawn outlines are a hallmark of Vajda's paintings and so is the superimposition of various motifs to overlay the conceptual and the graphic, Vajda's next breakthrough.
Layering motifs and inscribing them into each other made it possible for him to render not only simultaneity and the dynamics of optical perception, but also the inseparability of the visual and psychological sides of reality. Drawings such as his Szentendre Yards (1936) and Houses with Ship (1936), or paintings like his Floating Houses (1937) and Tower with Plate Still Life (1936) bring the visual sight and the associations it generates into one picture space; that is, images of objects that evoke memories depict both the objects and their mental reflections. In this way Vajda could synthesise the internal and the external image, the present time of the perception and the past time of the memories it evokes. The pair of 1937 drawings, both titled Double Portrait, and Two Heads with Nude (also from 1937) establish this kind of interconnection between visual and psychological reality. This complexity is at its most concentrated and enriched with transcendental overtones in the 1936 Icon Self-portrait Pointing Upward. Through a rust-coloured icon silhouette evocative of the Serbian church in Szentendre, the clear contours of Vajda's self-portrait come to sight. It is written into a stylised, bluish-gray, shadowy self-portrait-figure; the two superimposed images result in a doubly-strong colour field. The focal point of the self-portrait is the pair of blue eyes without pupils. The raised hand on the left looks more like the shadow-play of a hand on a wall than a realistic representation. The familiar, if not naturalistic, form and the ambiguity of whether it belongs to the Christ of the icon or to the painter keeps the painting suspended between physical and spiritual reality. The downward-flowing stream on the right—perhaps water pouring out of some spout, or, as some critics claim, a Jewish prayer shawl—serves as a counterpoint to the upward-pointing fingers on the left.

Icons preoccupied Vajda not so much for their representation of Christ, but as an almost-two-thousand-year-old, validated, traditional form—circular head in circular halo. His “icon" portraits and self-portraits stylising the human face and shape betray full awareness of the power of form. The pictures Vajda made in 1936 and 1937 testify to his faith in the overarching form as framework—a feature we could see already in his collages. Form is the repository of tradition and culture. It erases the differences between the male and the female face as well as individual features and the irregularities; the hair will take on the shape of the halo. In Icon Self-portrait, Lily Self-portrait, Silver Icon, Girl Icon (all from 1936) and Plastic Head (1937) strong contours carve out the form from the background. The circle of the head rests on the rectangle of the neck and the torso, thus closing the upward-tending angular form. The correlation of circle and rectangle also appears in his still lifes with plate and his constructivist sketches drawn on squared paper. Attempting to reconcile the drive of upward-tending with the balanced inactivity of the circle, these compositions contain the finite and the infinite on the same picture plane, with the reduction of the motif serving to empower the form. In his icon pictures reduced to the formula of basic forms Vajda aspired at permanence, an indisputable validity. It might not be the religious symbolism of the icon but its form that Vajda considered important. Form, writ large, as painterly work, the synthesis of the cognitive and the experiential, the fruit of culture. Gábor Pataki rightly notes in the booklet accompanying the show (no catalogue was published) that Vajda, in his icon pictures, offers a synthesis of the sacred and the profane—and other authors could be quoted on a similar note. However, it remains clear that in his icon pictures, Vajda empowers form, which absorbs all content so that content becomes inextricable from it. It is particularly Lily Self-portrait and Icon Self-portrait (which, presumably, was meant to have a golden background) that stand solidly on the picture plane, secured, with strong contours, in their Byzantine permanence, though with figures more fragile than in real icons.
Icon Self-portrait Pointing Upward is more layered and complicated than these pictures. Its shadowiness is Platonic rather than Byzantine: it is intuition rather than a statement. Gone are the closed contours of the earlier pictures: instead of Form, we are faced with the possibility of several forms. The irregular picture of the natural face is seen through the shadow of an icon that has been distilled to a basic form. The sensual materiality of the multicoloured texture keeps the viewer's gaze wandering back and forth in the space generated between the icon's shadow, the immaterial self-portrait and the hand. In this work, forms and background intermesh, the contours are sometimes stronger, sometimes barely visible.
Two early photographs from Vajda's estate in the show shed light on his approach to form. Both show details of Szentendre houses: a vertical pillar between two bow windows. The house itself is seen as a face, the pillar being the nose between the two window-eyes. A sketchy self-portrait placed next to the photos suggests that Vajda was really interested in the dynamics of the vertical line between two cavities on a horizontal plane, regardless of what the line and the cavities actually depicted.

By 1938–39 mask-like formations replace the human face, and the contours of the forms grow ever fainter. Where the contours are still definite enough to provide a framework, it is the space within the masks that disintegrates: we find third eyes, semi-abstract scenery and a world of cosmic dimensions, as in the 1938 pastel Mask with Moon. The decisive turn, however, is the disintegration of form, something foreshadowed already in the 1937 Abstract Self-portrait. The 1938 Brown Crossbar Mask and Mask with White Contour anticipate Jean Dubuffet's rebelliously neo-primitive paintings from the 1940s. Vajda's works of 1938–39 exude his horror at the realisation that Form, that hallmark of European culture, and all Europe's great cultural achievements which had not been able to prevent the First World War, would again be swept away by the dark forces of the irrational back in power in Europe.
The forms of expression that Vajda had developed in the course of his career allowed him, at the end of his life, to visualise the tragic dissolution of that culture, and portray the monsters that surface once its fragile veneer is rent by forces hostile to order. The victory of the vulgar, the break with the Ten Commandments (the basis of Judeo-Christian culture), was tantamount to the dissolution of form to Vajda. He, too, experienced Goya's insight: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
The charcoal drawings of 1940, his last creative year, show how far his earlier sensitivity, creativity and penchant for learning had been a matter of rational choice. In a world bereft of reason, his raving, unbridled, rhizomatic charcoals mirrored the unfettered darkness of the irrational around him. These horrific visions call for the self-examination of European culture, a harrowing self-critique threatening indigestible answers. To dismiss Vajda's works as "alarmingly foreign" is to refuse to look within. Vajda's work is, much rather, alarmingly familiar, it seems to me. Familiar to everyone harbouring the forces of destruction and darkness as much as the sustaining powers of creativity. And who can claim to lack any of these?

 

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).