Körmendi Anna: A Körmendi Galéria művészeti kiadványai 1992-2022 (Budapest, 2022)
icance. For this, we had to reach agreement with the artists selected by us. When a book of ours is being compiled - a difficult, lengthy, bumpy, meticulous, and costly process - the artist needs to play an active part. Namely, the processing of an oeuvre on a scientific level is inconceivable without the recording, documenting, and photographing of works; without the mapping of the life and career of the artist in question; and without the collecting together of specialised literature and the assembling of a bibliography. In these endeavours the artist and art historians dealing with that artist’s work need to co-operate in a committed way. Such co-operation forms the basis for the making of a monograph or of a catalogue summing up a shorter period in an artist’s life. Such processing creates the possibilities for the staging of retrospective exhibitions. When organising an exhibition, we kept in close contact with the artist in question, giving us opportunities to decide whether to offer that artist longer-term co-operation instead of ties relating to individual exhibitions. A condition for this co-operation was that we should make an appraisal of the entirety of the artist’s work. A thorough survey of this work would then begin. Generally speaking, artists investigated have been those with a rich accumulation of works in their ateliers, the result of many decades of activity on their part. Needless to say, such evaluations have proved to be far from easy. Some artists have had 2000-3000 works to show us, as with Tihamér Gyarmathy, Oszkár Papp, Sándor Nagy, Magda Gádor, and József Baska for example. Others, Mihály Schéner for instance, had produced 8000-10,000 creations over the years. In the case of others still, the number of works surveyed exceeded 1000- 2000. There were art historians who had dealt with particular artists all along, those who investigated, very largely on the basis of photographs, works unknown to them solely in the course of writing analyses of these art-ists’ oeuvres. We would sometimes witness that after the completion of such a great undertaking, an artist would not once again allow his or her studio to be disturbed and his or her things there taken away. And it would turn out also that in artists’ studios our people often had a better idea of where works were than did the artists themselves. After a time we came to realise that we had a bigger knowledge of individual oeuvres than did specialists who had been dealing with them for decades but who lacked resources that we were able to supply: personal assistance in making order; technical equipment, for example a good camera; administrative help in recording large numbers of artworks; and so on. This has been our experience with every artist whose oeuvre we have chosen to survey. And sometimes there have been photographs that lacked data on the artworks they depicted, or artists with records of their own that lacked identifiable photographs, and so forth. As a matter of fact, in the case of every artist on whom we have published a book, and in the case of every artist for whom a monograph prepared by us has for certain reasons been brought out by a different publisher later on (Jenó' Kerényi, Ildikó Várnagy, Simon Csorba, Attila Adorján, Csaba Fürjesi, Katalin Rényi, László Kéri), it was we who prepared the volume, conducted the artwork survey, supplied most of the high-resolution photographs, provided the translations into world languages, and performed the editing work. One result of the process of preparing our books has been that a varying but large number of artworks feature in our records on account of serious appraisal and analytical endeavour on our part. Our records, and the artworks documented in our books, can claim complete authenticity, since in the course of the assessments and during the preparation of the books themselves individual pieces are declared by the artists in question to be their own work. When recording artworks of an artist, we have tried when possible to include in photographs a glimpse of that artist’s studio. We have many photographs showing interiors of studios. Our Gallery can therefore be a source, decades from now even, of authentic information, attestations also, regarding artworks, as there are records of artworks and good-quality photographs in sufficient number from every period of that artist’s oeuvre to facilitate comparisons. The task confronting the editor-in-chief of our monograph series, my son Ferenc Csák, has not been an easy one. The artists with whom he has been dealing are living persons; and, while making the volumes published with their assistance and active co-operation, he has needed to take into account requests and demands at variance with our own conceptions. But in spite of these things, I feel that through our publishing activities over the last decades we have contributed to a better understanding of contemporary and post-1945 art in Flungary. Our current book is for providing a full spectrum view on a retrospective work of the Gallery of Körmend publications between 1992 and present time assorted about 500 books, catalogues of exhibitions, one and small-volume art books. Besides our own works, it includes some others printed and published by different publishers. From the early 1990’s around 1000 videos the Gallery or other professionals have created for us. These include interviews, retrospective movies of artists and, amateur captioning of visits and opening events of exhibitions. About 300 of these videos are accessible on YouTube where by now, they have got more than 58000 viewers. Our goal is to make our videos more accessible to the public, continually extending it with new and archive contents. Furthermore, we wish to provide more on-line opportunities as well. Partnered with OSZK - Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár, mek.oszk.hu - we also offer free, downloadable materials. According to their statistics, in the past 2 years, the number of downloads have reached more than 78000. The on-line version of this book includes the active links to the MEK website which has the covers, the titles and the PDF format of the contents. 2007 - Turcsán Miklós dedikálja könyvét az Ernst Múzeumban We have started out a 128 page publication series - 11 of them already available - which eventually would introduce all materials presently found in the Kormendy-Csak Collection (NagySandor, sculptor; Gádor Magda: Graphics of Tension; Gádor Magda: Sculptures from the 40’s, 50's and 60s; Gádor Magda: Animated Screams; Várnagy Ildikó: Graphics; Várnagy Ildikó, sculptor; Nikmond Beata: Pastells; The sculptures of Nikmond Beata; Associations of Thoughts and Pictures; Photo collages; Sculptures of Ezsias István; Koppány Attila: New Geometry], We still have some more serious work to do until we can finish all our sponsored artists’ materials. Looking back to the 1990’s up to date, I have learned that we have been very fortunate being able to work together for one mutual goal with so many gifted artists, professionals, printing and publishing houses for giving an insight to an amazing, mysterious world, called art. Budapest, 2022 Anna Körmendi Kiadványok - 15 1 4 - Kiadványok