The Hungarian Quarterly, 2009 (50. évfolyam, 194. szám)

ART AND ARCHITECTURE - Forgács Éva: In a Dark Age: Lajos Vajda. A Retrospective at the Hungarian National Gallery (III.)

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. T he centennial retrospective show of Lajos Vajda—like recent retrospectives of István Farkas, László Mednyánszky, Béla Veszelszky, Béla Kondor, Tibor Csernus or János Mattis Teutsch—confirmed that Hungarian art has no coherent narrative. Instead, we have individual artists who don't seem to connect. The French are clear about how such different artists as Ingres, Matisse or "Le Douanier" Rousseau fit into their culture. French gallery-goers visit newer exhibitions of these artists' works with the curiosity one has to see a new production of a well-known play—to enjoy the subtleties of a new director's interpretation. By contrast, we always have an opening night with a first introduction. The Hungarian art lover is not a gourmand who will discern new insights and intriguing details in each new show: he is rather confronted, time and again, with surprising and completely new material. This is the case even when the exhibited works have often been shown before and had been covered by catalogue essays and monographs. How is it that the works of Hungarian artists fail to come together into a coherent fabric of Hungarian art? This is an issue that Vajda's earlier critics also addressed. Géza Perneczky saw the 1969 Vajda retrospective at Székesfehérvár's King Stephen Museum. He said: "Missing from the exhibition is a sense of posterity: awareness of the word 'art'... [Vajda] never became a regular artist. There was no regular society around him." 1 1 ■ Géza Perneczky, "Koponya madárral—Vajda Lajos emlékkiállításán" [Skull with Bird—At a Lajos Vajda Retrospective Exhibition], Élet és Irodalom, October 1969, quoted by Stefánia Mándy, Vajda Lajos. Budapest: Corvina, 1983, p. 216. 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). 105 Art & Architecture T U R E A R T & A R C H I T E C

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