Dezső Mokry Mészáros (1881–1970) was a self-taught visual artist, but he also engaged in music and writing. In the first phase of his career, after 1905, he began to paint small pictures, usually on paper, using ink and tempera. In his numerous paintings of the same name he depicted alien planets, the underwater world of Oceania, symbols, and mysteries. From the 1910s he also produced more realistic oil paintings depicting Hungarian and exotic landscapes. From the second half of the 1920s, he depicted prehistoric themes in his oil paintings using unmixed colours. He also fashioned unique clay sculptures and ceramics with prehistoric or ancient oriental themes using his own unique technique. He carried out research on runic writing from the 1930s, and designed carpets and tombstones. After 1945, he made wall plates out of clay, on which he used almost all the motifs of his earlier art. In one of his earliest writings, he wrote about the issues that preoccupied him at the time: “My thoughts revolve around the mystical mythology of the future, weaving a wonderful world with its bizarre creatures, similar to the tales and probable assumptions of Wels and Flammarion, continuing Darwin’s theories going back to the time of creation, continuing his views into the distant future, his theories based on degeneration into plants and cells, that nature will slowly reach the point in its development from which it started, that due to the already high level of brain activity today, in the last generation of people, with the regression of all other organs, the brain does all the work, the others being hardly needed.”
“From the foot
At that time I had no reliable impersonal point of reference other than a commercially available size-42 shoe, representing the minority of people who had size-42 feet.
In the early 1960s, four boys who had completed their secondary school exams – Tamás Cseh and his friends – knowing nothing about the existence of Indians in the country, chose a place on the map in the Bakony Mountains and, by moving out, began their lifelong Indian existence.
The game that grew out of childhood, from reading Cooper and Karl May, was at first just a game, for children, and it never lost that playful quality, but it was soon imbued with a degree of existential freedom, which according to their accounts, could never have been theirs within the real social environment, not only in the Hungary of the time, but in the dehumanization of modernity in general. “The four of us went there in the forest, we were free, what we wanted happened. We were cold at night, we got soaked when it rained, we made fires… what we said was true, what we did was done, what we missed, we missed. … You replaced the man who wandered in the lying world outside, and a warrior stepped forward.”
What they left behind in their Indian existence, invaded their lives in brutal force in the summer of 1968. At dawn on 21 August, the tribal peoples were awakened by tanks driving through their camps, on the way to invade Czechoslovakia.
The experiences of World War I reinforced in many people the conviction that had been maturing since the end of the 19th century that the world – the modern world – was in crisis. The forces that held life together until then were disintegrating, every framework was being questioned, a feeling reinforced by numerous new scientific ideas, such as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and various psychological research on the human mind and personality. The first works dealing with the crisis were published during the war – the first part of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was published in the summer of 1918 – and traditionalism emerged from these in the second half of the 1920s. The essay written in 1927 by the Frenchman, René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, and the book of 1935 by the Italian, Julius Evola, Revolt against the Modern World, were foundational works for this movement. According to the traditionalist view, there was an ancient, universal, metaphysical tradition from which all great cultures and religions eventually grew. And modernity is a declining era, from which the only way out may be a return to this ancient, spiritual tradition. The most famous follower of traditionalism in Hungary was Béla Hamvas, one of whose main works is Magyar Hyperion [Hungarian Hyperion]. In his essay, Hamvas examines the spiritual state of the Hungarian people, identifying superficiality and the lack of national self-awareness as the biggest problems: Hungarians imitate the thinking of other peoples, while lacking original, Hungarian-rooted metaphysical thinking that feeds on the Hungarian national soul. He saw the solution in a return to eternal spiritual traditions and finding metaphysical thinking stemming from the Hungarian folk soul.
Tamás Lossonczy (1904–2009) graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1926 where he had been a student of János Vaszary. In 1928 he became a member of the Association of New Artists. Following study trips to Paris and the Netherlands, he produced organic spatial constructions, and worked with photograms, montages, as well as collages. Influenced by the art of Piet Mondrian, he began new non-figurative experiments. Between 1929 and 1931 he studied interior design at the College of Applied Arts. He worked in the office of architect Farkas Molnár from 1934. He became a member of CIRPAC, the international association of modern architects, and from 1938, upon the behest of his future wife, sculptor Ibolya Lossonczy, he returned to painting. He participated in a solo exhibition in 1943 and in a group exhibition titled New Romanticism in 1944. From 1945 he was a member of the European School, and from 1946 of the Group of Abstract Artists. From 1960 he produced series and families of pictures. In 1962, he completed his large-scale work Tisztító nagy vihar [The Great Purifying Storm], which commemorates the Revolution of ‘56 while also summarizing and expressing his inner anguish. Expressive and surrealist features became more prominent in his art from 1970. This period was characterized by new series, experiments with colour and form, and “space paintings”. He held a retrospective exhibition at the Műcsarnok in 1978. Starting in 1980, his use of tools became simpler, and alongside his new series, his graphic activities became increasingly important. In 1992, he became a founding member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts. In 1995, his oeuvre exhibition was held at the Ernst Museum, and in 2005, his retrospective exhibition opened at the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle). In 2009, on the occasion of his 105th birthday, the Hungarian National Gallery’s exhibition featured works from the last five years of his life.
He produced his five-page etching series, Metamorphosis, in 1943. The pages are not numbered, and the order of the images in the series is arbitrary. During the process of inclusion, the forms can thus be transformed back and forth, any section can be connected to another. The etchings are variations on two main motifs, a more biomorphic shape and a more geometric element. The latter is called the “twin triangle” by Ernő Kállai. According to Béla Hamvas, “the interpretation of the two triangles touching at their apex is that this is the moment of fusion between Shiva and Shakti, man and woman, spirituality and sensual matter. It is the moment of conception and creation at the same time.”
“(…) for some 20th century musicians – especially Bartók – ‘folk music’ and ‘children’s music’ coincide. In both cases, it is the same ‘musical foundation’, the ‘golden age music’, the purest sounds of which are heard in Mikrokozmosz [Microcosm] and Bartók’s last works. (…) Bartók was the only music poet who knew what no one else knew: folk music is not the creation of the ‘folk’ (or peasants), but the memory of an ancient musical world accumulated over countless centuries, preserved by the people.” (Béla Hamvas: Bartók)
In Hungary, from the second half of the 1960s, cultural spaces and formations that operated under the broader public sphere developed and, by the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, had organized themselves into a kind of “second public sphere,” a counterculture. This counterculture was organically linked to neo-avant-garde artistic endeavours, typically in the form of concerts, performances, and happenings. For example, György Galántai’s chapel studio in Balatonboglár was an iconic venue, which between 1970 and 1973 hosted numerous exhibitions, alternative theatre performances, and performances, including for such notable artists as Tibor Hajas (artist, poet, performer, member of the Balázs Béla Studio), Gábor Bódy (film director), Miklós Erdély (architect, artist, filmmaker), but the Kaláka ensemble, later absorbed into the official mainstream, also performed in the chapel several times. In 1974, the village council evicted Galántai and subsequently established its own exhibition in the chapel featuring the works of state-supported artists. In the 1970s, emblematic figures of the cultural and political underground, which was constantly pushing its boundaries, emigrated after constant harassment by the authorities. Such figures included János Baksa Soós, the singer of Kex, and Tamás Szentjóby, whose iconic slogan was “Be forbidden!”
Samizdat publications were documents distributed without permission during the communist dictatorship, circumventing censorship. Samizdat publishing activities intensified in Hungary in the 1970s. Initially, copies were produced using typewriters and carbon paper, then in the 1980s with screen printing or photocopying, enabling much larger print runs. By this time, longer- and shorter-lived publishing houses had already been established, such as AB or “Magyar Október”, and periodicals were also launched. The publications were typically political in content, discussing topics deemed taboo by the authorities, and less frequently, works of fiction were published in this form. This made it possible for George Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm to be published in Hungarian, in 1984.
The Inconnu artist group was founded in 1978 in Szolnok by Péter Bokros, Mihály Csécsei and Tamás Molnár. Their name comes from the French postal marking meaning “address unknown”, as the group originally worked in the field of mail art. Initially, they were an avant-garde group of artists, but in response to constant police harassment, they increasingly turned towards depicting political themes. An international fine art competition was announced for the 30th anniversary of the Revolution of ‘56, titled The Fighting City, 1986, which was to auctioned to help the needy. Some of the works sent for the exhibition were confiscated during postal inspections, and then the exhibition materials were seized and subsequently destroyed after the exhibition opened. Inconnu’s publications, published as samizdat, primarily served as documentation of their artistic activities.
“It is true that we have been through many fates, all that remained was to survive the Day of Judgment, and behold, we have survived. For a week now, the lamentation of the end of the world has haunted us in every direction; the people, who only nine years ago had witnessed the most magnificent eclipse of the sun, and who have since experienced many eclipses, have once again found ears to hear the trumpet of the foretold Day of Judgment. Simple-mindedness does not disappear from the world.
György Galántai: Szabadság-börtön [Freedom Prison], 1979, BTM Kiscelli Museum – Capital Gallery
Dezső Mokry-Mészáros: Idegen Planéta [Foreign Planet], n.d., Kecskemét Katona József Museum
Dezső Mokry-Mészáros: Élet idegen planétán [Life on a Foreign Planet], n.d., Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery
Dezső Mokry-Mészáros: Élet idegen planétán III. [Life on a Foreign Planet III], 1910, Herman Ottó Museum
Dezső Mokry-Mészáros: Élet idegen planétán XII [Life on a Foreign Planet XII], 1910, Herman Ottó Museum
Dezső Mokry-Mészáros’s diary, n.d., ELTE HTK Institute of Art History Database
Béla Hamvas: Hungarian Hyperion, typescript, n.d., National Széchényi Library Manuscript Archive
Béla Hamvas: Hungarian Hyperion, manuscript, n.d., Hamvas Béla Foundation
Tamás Lossonczy: Metamorphosis, 1943, National Széchényi Library Map, Poster and Small Print Collection
Margit Ágotha: Különös és utánozhatatlan bohócok [Strange and Inimitable Clowns], 1975, OSZK Map, Poster and Small Print Collection
Dóra Maurer: Napfogyatkozás [Solar Eclipse], 1964, OSZK Map, Poster and Small Print Collection
Gyula Hincz: Felhők [Clouds], 1980, National Széchényi Library Map, Poster and Small Print Collection
László Kistamás: Kontroll csoport [Control Group], 1983, OSZK Map, Poster and Small Print Collection
George Orwell: Animal Farm, 1984, National Széchényi Library Core Collection
George Orwell: 1984, 1984, National Széchényi Library Core Collection
Group Inconnu: Retrospekt 2, 1985, National Széchényi Library Map, Poster and Small Print Collection
Excerpt from an interview with Péter Gilyén, interviewer: Gábor Hanák, cinematographer: Gergely Ballagó, 2013, PIM Tamás Cseh Archive
Excerpt from an interview with Georg Pintér, interviewer: Gábor Hanák, cinematographer: Gergely Ballagó, 2011, PIM Tamás Cseh Archive