Text and Image in the 19-20th Century Art of Central Europe by Lorant Nemeth

Proceedings of the International Conference Organized at the Eรถtvรถs Lorรกnd University of Budapest, September 21-22, 2009

Text and Image in the 19-20th Century Art of Central Europe

The conference was organized by Katalin Keserü, with the assistance of Zsuzsanna Benkő and Gábor Marosvölgyi, on behalf of the Institute of Art History of Eötvös Loránd University. Section chairs: Katarína Beňová, András Rényi, Mihály SzegedyMaszák, György Széphelyi Frankl, Tomáš Winter Editors: Katalin Keserü, Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Textbook

Foreword

Sponsors of the conference and its proceedings: International Visegrad Fund, Museum of Literature Petôfi, Balogh Bertalan Art Foundation, Student Self-Government Body of the Faculty of Arts of Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Arts of Eötvös Loránd University, Erasmus Program, Czech Academy of Sciences, Slovak Institute in Budapest, Jagellonian University and the Comenius University.

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák Opening Address to the Conference Text and Image in the 19-20th Century Art of Central Europe

András Rényi Locks of Hair, Stripes, Strings and other Threads: Notes on the Metaphoricity of the Incised Line and Texture in Béla Kondor’s Samson-Etching

I. Illustration studies © the editor, 2010 © the authors, 2010 ISBN 978-963-284-130-4

www.eotvoskiado.hu Accountable publisher: András Hunyady, managing director Accountable editor: Veronika Szelid

Typography: Multiszolg Bt.

Emôke Varga Typologie de l’illustration

TaŤána PetrasovÁ The First Czech Translation (1783) of the Five Orders: Image Rewrites Text

Katarína Beňová László Mednyánszky Illustrations. Exploration of a New Cave Around 1882-1883 in the Tatra Mountains

Zsuzsanna Benkô Illustrations of the Poetry of Endre Ady at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. György Leszkovszky’s Illustrations of Endre Ady’s Poem To Cry, To Cry, To Cry

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Tomáš Winter Robinson Crusoe, František Tichý and the Cannibals

II. Cultural Studies Imre Kovács Saint Francis as Christian Orpheus. Liszt’s Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi in a Cultural Context

III. Interart studies 1. Image and Text Károly Kókai Kassák and Constructivism 1920-1922

109

Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák Autobiography as Image, as Text. Miklós Barabás

125

Gábor Marosvölgyi Words and Images from Na’Conxypan

139

2. Image in literary texts Miklós Takács No Sound, No Picture? – The Visual Narrativity of Trauma in W. G. Sebald’s Novel Austerlitz

149

Tamás Lénárt Master Frenhofer and the “deep green dimness”. The figure of ekhprasis in texts by Honoré de Balzac and Péter Nádas

159

3. Texts in images Edit Tóth Adventures of the Signature: Lajos Kassák’s Vienna Collages, 1920-1921

169

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Lenka Bydžovská The Gift

179

Anna Baranowa Intertwining. Zbigniew Makowski’s Search for the Whole

187

Katalin T. Nagy Text and Image in the Art of Péter Ujházi

195

Tamás Szentjóby Centaur (film, 1973-75)

203

Magyar nyelvû rezümék

215

Contributors

225

Colour plates

227

Foreword

In September 2009, at the invitation of and in collaboration with other universities in Central Europe, the Art History Institute of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary organized a conference entitled Text and Image in the 19-20th Century Art of Central Europe. The conference had several aims. First and foremost, the intention was to enrich our knowledge of the history of the modern arts in Central Europe, in part in order to further greater regional knowledge of the less broadly familiar contributions of the countries and cultures of Central Europe. Our understanding of the interactions and reciprocal influences of the national and cultural centres of the ethnically mixed region and the international artistic centres which came into being through the various art academies, colonies, and groups of artists have been largely based on somewhat two-sided relationships that emerged in the wake of the fall of the political division of Europe (e.g. Zeit des Aufbruchs. Budapest und Wien zwischen Historismus und Avantgarde, 2003; Fauves Hongrois 1904-1914, 2008; München - magyarul. Magyar művészek Münchenben 1850-1914 / Munich – in Hungarian. Hungarian Artists in Munich 18501914, 2009). There have been few attempts to consider these centres as international points of convergence, offering some grasp of the place of the artists arriving to them in the larger context of European art history (an early example of one such work was Agnes Humbert’s Les Nabis et leur époque, published in 1954, and a more recent example was the 2008 catalogue entitled 200 Jahre Akademie der bildenden Künste München). There are even fewer works (Tomasz Gryglewicz, 1992) or catalogues (Dieter Bogner, 1993) dealing specifically with the modern art of Central Europe, apart from the avant-garde (Europa, Europa, Bonn, 1994), neoavant-garde and postmodern (Aspekte/Positionen. 50 Jahre Kunst aus Mitteleuropa 1949-1999, Wien, 1999), periods and schools of thought

foreword

in which Central European relationships also emerged (one thinks of the works of Krisztina Passuth or Piotr Piotrowski). The Art History Institute of the university in Budapest contributed to this endeavour by collaborating in the 1990s, with the assistance of the CEEPUS program, with the institutes in Cracow, Bratislava, and Prague in the study of the art of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a result of which the volume entitled The Beginnings of Modernism in Central European Architecture was published in 2005. (The collection dealing with the visual arts for the moment is only available in Hungarian as a supplementary educational resource; the volume addressing the applied arts has not yet been published.) Our intention was also to provide an introduction to the art history of Central Europe that was organized around neither style, nor period, nor centre. The evolution of national languages and literatures and the spread of literacy and reading played a decisive role in the development of the modern culture of the region. We therefore worked from the premise that the practice of “reading” the various drawings, figures, illustrations, and images accompanying (and sometimes explicitly intended for) texts drawn from various fields contributed considerably to the spread of the new visual culture, which no longer derived primarily from the court or the church, but had not yet achieved representation in exhibitions. We also presumed that these pictorial elements further broadened the general cultural knowledge of their audiences and the growing interest in the various genres and branches of the arts (Session 1. Illustration studies). (No other media archeological research has been carried out on this occasion; extensive research in this field was guided by Miklós Peternák, results of which were published in a 2006 volume of essays entitled Kép - írás – művészet [Image – writing – art], which contained the proceedings of the conference organized jointly by the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts and the Department of Comparative Literature of Eötvös Loránd University.) Though research on illustrations has become independent at the intersection between scholarship on visual culture and art history, it is nonetheless intertwined in several respects with the sister arts conception of Romanticism, according to which one must reckon with the mutual influence of the various branches of the arts, including the attraction they exert on one another, even within the context of the oeuvre of a single

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artist, leading in some instances to more nuanced interpretation of individual works (Session 2. Cultural studies), as well as revelations concerning the process of composition and meaning (Session 3. Interart studies). (One thinks in this regard of György Endre Szônyi’s Pictura & Scriptura, 2004 or Mihály Szegedy-Maszák’s Szó, kép, zene. A művészetek összehasonlító vizsgálatáról [Word, picture, music. On the comparative study of the arts], 2007, which draw in part on semiotics and cultural anthropological studies of the previous decades.) In the modern era the notion of the visual arts and their various genres as distinctive “languages” not only emphasizes the importance of language, but has also contributed to promote the development of similar linguistic elements in the autonomous arts deriving from the continuous interaction of musical, written, and spoken languages. These elements in turn have exerted a reciprocal influence on the practice of illustration itself. Contemporary interart studies influence the arts themselves, and thus we must always consider, alongside the artistic autonomies postulated in the modern age, not only the interdependencies of the arts, but also the affinities in the methods of the arts on the one hand and the scholarship on the arts on the other. The conference explored interrelationships and moments of juncture and disjuncture between visual and textual representations. This volume offers examples of various forms of encounter between picture and text (explanatory, evocative, complementary, function-exchanging), as well as diverse research methodologies. The proceedings were opened by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, a scholar in whose work the comparative study of music, literature and the fine arts has been a recurring theme. In his essay in this volume he cites examples of literary works which refer to real or imaginary paintings (by Hungarian authors such as poet Sándor Petôfi and novelist and essayist Zsigmond Kemény) and authors who described works of the visual arts in their prose and poetry (Dezsô Kosztolányi, Sándor Weöres), noting, however, the reservations held by other authors concerning illustrations accompanying their texts. He observes, however, that opponents of visual translation, such as Mallarmé and Henry James, also fell under the spell of the image as accompaniment to text. Szegedy-Maszák mentions Hungarian poet and painter Lajos Kassák (1887–1967), who not only incorporated words into works of visual art and used the genre of picture poems, but also designed the typography of his publications. It is therefore no surprise that two other

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essays in the volume focus on his work. Edit Tóth surveys the incorporation of the authorial mark into Lajos Kassák’s constructivist collages, which, as she argues, paralleled the dissolution of the heroic artistic self in his art in the early 1920s. Károly Kókai offers an attempt to trace the evolution of Kassák’s Constructivist art. Interestingly, few of the contributors actually offer “readings” of works of visual art. Possibly the most thorough of these is András Rényi’s analysis of Béla Kondor’s (1931-1972) etching entitled Samson, but he too gives greater emphasis to the relationship between the theme of the picture and its execution. Indeed, Rényi argues against precisely this notion of “reading” a picture, which rests on the premise that the individual elements are fixed signs and references. In his view, it is far more fruitful to look at the work as an open text, leaving the viewer to play an active role. The conference would not have been complete if at least some of the papers had not addressed the question of illustration. Naturally discussion of this aspect of the comparison of text and image drew examples from the era when decorative book publishing thrived. Although György Leszkovszky’s (1891–1968) twelve watercolour paintings, the subject of analysis by Zsuzsanna Benkô, are not illustrations in the strict sense of the word (in that they do not accompany the text in the form of a publication), they nonetheless represent an intriguing case of a visual response to a poem, in this case, Endre Ady’s (1877–1919) verse entitled To Cry, To Cry, To Cry. Benkô’s interpretation, which incorporates a thorough examination of Ady’s poem and Leszkovszky’s paintings, concludes that while there may be similarities extending beyond the mere subject of the works in question, such as stylistic tools (repetition), these devices are utilized by the visual artist in a qualitatively weaker manner than the original work on which he based his watercolours. Tomáš Winter’s examination of paintings by František Tichý (1896–1961) on the theme of “White Blacks” is an interesting case of someone who later illustrated the Czech editions of Robinson Crusoe, but who previously had already explored the theme of cannibals in his own art, thereby implying that the inspiration Tichý drew from Defoe’s novel predated the actual illustrations. Borrowing terms from the field of rhetoric (illustration as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony), the paper given by Emôke Varga presents a theoretical categorization of types of illustration on the basis of the relationship between the image and the text.

foreword

Two papers focus on artistic illustrations of scholarly or scientific texts. Katarína Beňová examines illustrations made by László Mednyánszky (1852-1919) for the guidebook-like publication on a cave in the Tatra Mountains discovered by his friend Samuel Weber. Taťána Petrasová discusses the images found in a Czech edition on the five orders, comparing the edition with Lucas Voch’s Unterricht zu Aufreissung der fuenf Saulenordnungen, on which it was based. Petrasová argues that by changing the images in the translated version, the publisher raised the significance of the image above that of the text. Indeed when examining the first Czech translation of the five orders (published in Prague by Simon Truska and only recently discovered), Petrasová uses the expression, “text rewritten by an image”. Petrasová convincingly shows that Truska’s undertaking, which was exceptional simply in light of the fact that there are no other examples of architectural-theoretical publications in Czech dating from this time, is significant, moreover, not merely as a translation, but as a rewriting through illustrations (namely the image on the frontispiece and the illustration of the primitive hut) of Voch’s Unterricht, demonstrating that Truska had his own views on the theoretical questions discussed in the text. The essay by Imre Kovács focuses on a work by Ferenc Liszt, father-in-law of Richard Wagner (whose notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk exerted a strong influence on the comparative study of the sister arts). Proceeding from the idea that Liszt was at once profoundly influenced by the spirituality of the Franciscan order and also strongly believed in the unity of the sister arts, Kovács offers a discussion of the textual and pictorial sources of his Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi. Kovács concludes that Liszt went so far as to identify with Saint Francis, the holy inspired artist, a conclusion which suggests that this cantata has a place of key significance in the composer’s oeuvre. Of course in a conference with the title Text and Image, it is hard to resist the temptation to examine works by artists who cultivated both forms of expression, in particular those who ventured to express themselves in the formal genres of narrative and the fine arts, strictly understood, even if the artistic value of their work is still open to question. Gábor Marosvölgyi examines Na’Conxypan, the fantasy world of Hungarian painter Lajos Gulácsy (1882-1932). He draws the conclusion that one should not simply explore the various sources or roots of the

foreword

visual and verbal components of Na’Conxypan, but rather search for the common attitude to the world suggested by these two forms of expression. This attitude dismantles and deconstructs, only to reconstruct from these elements an entirely new world in accordance with a new system. On another note, Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák’s essay examines the autobiography and the self-portraits by the nineteenth century Hungarian painter, Miklós Barabás (1810–1898), arguing that in the case of Barabás self-portraits should be understood as retrospective gestures of identity construction. Tamás Lénárt and Miklós Takács take literary works as their starting points. With respect to the relationship between image and text Lénárt compares two works: Balzac’s short story entitled The Unknown Masterpiece and a chapter from A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas (b. 1942). In both cases the subject is an inaccessible (indescribable) picture, and therefore, Lénárt argues, the similarities between the two literary works are due to the tension which arises in the attempt to describe works of the visual arts verbally. In connection with W. G. Sebald’s (1944-2001) novel Austerlitz, Takács addresses the impossibility of narrating trauma, due in part to the difficulty of depicting memory and in part to trauma’s abolishment of the linear experience of time. The black and white photographs interspersed throughout the novel appear to offer fixed moments of timelessness. Indeed Takács claims that a developed picture is akin to a flashback, which although repressed, nevertheless rises to the fore. Lenka Bydžovská analyses the Surrealist painting by Jindřich Štyrský (1899-1942) entitled The Gift, which shows a mutilated book from the cover of which an ear has grown. Bydžovská provides a thorough examination of the possible sources and functions of this work of art, including a literary account of one of Štyrský’s dreams, but ultimately argues that the painting should not be understood as a mere illustration of this. Two papers focus on the oeuvres of individual artists. Katalin T. Nagy writes on the use of (principally Hungarian) words in the art of Hungarian painter Péter Ujházi (b. 1940), who in addition to found objects of a visual nature often makes use of textual found materials drawn from both high art and popular entertainment. Anna Baranowa describes the Surrealist method of “l’écriture automatique” in the works of Polish artist Zbigniew Makowski (b. 1930). Ujházi and Makowski both belong to the older generation of artists, and their styles differ radically from that of their contemporaries.

foreword

The art of Ujházi and Makowski is equally multi-genre and multi-media, and both artists appear to be interested in the temporal aspect of the interpretation of visual representations (one thinks of the highly narrative nature of Ujházi’s paintings and painted boxes or the books of Makowski, which undoubtedly are meant to be leafed through). A few frames of Centaur, an experimental film shot in 1973, are presented, along with the accompanying text. As a film, it is a paradigmatic example of a work of art that constitutes an ensemble of text and image. However, in this case the text bears no immediately apparent relationship to the images it accompanies. This Gesamtkunstwerk offers an example of a work in which the apparent contradiction or divergence of the two parts, rather than confuting meaning, is part of the meaning itself, much as in the language philosophy of generative grammar linguistic elements of a sentence can be exchanged without subverting the grammaticality of the sentence itself. Thus the juxtaposition in a single work of art of an image and an unrelated text is as valid as an embodiment of meaning as a combination of image and text bearing apparent affinity. The Gesamt kunstwerk comes into being not as an intermingling of the sister-arts in a single, harmonious work, but rather as a combination of incongruous image and text. On the one hand this can be seen as the exploitation of the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, but one might also see in it a deconstructive critique of the genre of film itself, which represented power in the region at the time, as an art form and method through which to influence society. Via the (documentary and pseudo-documentary) duality of the mutually complementary (and yet contradictory) media, it reveals the possibility of deliberate falsification, or, in other words, it undertakes to deconstruct the film and the power that forced the media/arts into its service, using the same tools. The conference, organized in cooperation with the universities of Cracow, Prague, Bratislava, Szeged, Debrecen, Piliscsaba, the Eötvös Loránd University and the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, demonstrated that scholars of these countries are representatives of a common intellectual tradition. As broad as the theme of the conference was, it initiated a conversation between the various speakers, suggesting that the organization of similar events in the future would prove equally fruitful. Katalin Keserü – Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák Opening Address to the Conference Text and Image in the 19-20th Century Art of Central Europe

It was a distinct honour and high privilege for me, as a literary scholar, to have the opportunity to introduce an international conference of art historians. The task was to focus on objects that combine visual and verbal materials. In other words, the presentations were interdisciplinary in orientation, presupposing a transgression or even disruption of traditional disciplinary separations. In our age the distinctiveness and identity of literature and art cannot be taken for granted. All media are mixed media. All arts are composite and intermedial. Nonetheless, the difference between a culture of reading and a culture of spectatorship is considerable. Time of course is always limited, and literary scholars do not necessarily have the same discerning perception of the visual arts as art historians, just as art historians may not necessarily have innumerable opportunities to read voluminous literary texts. It would be naïve to assume that a single scholar can be equally well-versed in literary scholarship and in art history. Interartistic research, the comparative study of verbal and visual representations, covers fields as different as the interpretation of ekphrasis, the analysis of illustration, the research into the transition between writing and picture making, or the modes of the composite text-image, a fundamental potentiality inherent in all written and pictorial representation, an investigation of textual pictures, and the examination of the role of text in the visual arts (the said in the seen), the study of such phenomena as inscription, titles, collage, montage, etc. Image-text relations are immensely complex. Silent reading is primarily a visual response. As W. J. T. Mitchell says, “Writing is caught between two othernesses, voice and vision” (Mitchell, 1994, p. 115).

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák

All titles can be regarded as questionable, since they are based on presuppositions, and the title of this conference was no exception. As the topic was of a general character and our age is marked by globalization, the reference to Central Europe seems somewhat arbitrary. Joseph Kosuth, an artist who combines the visual and verbal, was born in Toledo, Ohio. He lives in Belgium. Among the main sources of his inspiration the prose fiction of Franz Kafka and Robert Musil, as well as the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein are of fundamental significance. In 1993 he represented Hungary at the Venice Biennale. Would he qualify as a Central European artist? The other half of the title is no less worthy of scrutiny. The associations of the word “Bild” (in German, picture) with “Bildung” (education) are altogether lost in the English title “Text and Image”. Other languages would suggest still other aspects of the complexity of our subject. If I read about the image of a goddess in Tacitus and I look at the original text, the expression I find is “Simulacrum Deae”. My poor command of Latin suggests that “simulacrum” means not only image but also copy, icon, artificial or phantasmal likeness, even statue. How can an image “appear” in a work of literature? At the outset, a distinction can be introduced between the ideal types of “use” and “mention”. Gérard Genette gives the following examples: “In the sentence ‘Paris is a great city’, the word Paris is used transitively […]; in ‘Paris consists of two syllables’, the name of the city is mentioned (cited)” (Genette, 1999, pp. 235-236). One could introduce a further possible distinction on the basis of the presence of the visual on the levels of the signified and the signifier. The former implies either a description of or a reference to a visual work of art. The actual presence of such an image in a text can never be a clear-cut case of use or mention. An image can be imaginary or “real”. Petôfi’s poem Vándorélet (The Life of Wanderers), composed in 1844, has the subtitle: “Barabás rajzához” (“On a Drawing by Barabás”). The text was published together with a wood-engraving based on a painting entitled Czigány család (A Gypsy Family). In Pál Gyulai (1847), a historical novel by Zsigmond Kemény, an imaginary portrait is used as a starting point for the plot. Chapter one starts with the death in 1581 of Kristóf Báthory, Prince of Transylvania. The brother of the deceased ruler, István Báthory, King of Poland, has commissioned a Florentine artist to make

Opening Address to the Conference

a portrait of his nephew, the heir apparent to the throne in Transylvania. The painting is taken to the Polish court by the title hero, a young poet. The old king and the young Transylvanian nobleman differ in their readings of the portrait. István Báthory’s conclusion is that the character of the model of the portrait, Zsigmond Báthory, is full of flaws. Pál Gyulai’s radically different interpretation is based on the idea that painters create rather than imitate. Both attempt to verbalize the nonverbal. Their efforts to formulate the semantic vacuum point in opposite directions: the old monarch seeks a definitive, authoritative explanation, the young page views interpretation as open-ended. Two modes of “explication d’image” are contrasted, and the narrator’s remarks on the fundamental difference between Southern and Northern art, Italian and Dutch painting further emphasize the dependence of the understanding of art on different conventions. The disagreement between the two characters is also due to the fact that the old monarch represents political pragmatism, whereas the title hero lives in the world of creative imagination. The ambiguity of this opening scene is fully developed in the novel. What is static is transformed into action. The language is self-reflexive and the mimetic view of art is undermined. The character of Zsigmond Báthory develops in the direction foreseen by his uncle, the old king, who dies shortly after the opening scene. While the tension between imitation and creation remains unresolved, image is used as a means of characterization. The doctrine of “ut pictura poesis” dominated long periods in the history of Western literature. The German Romantics introduced a radically different notion. In his Brief über den Roman, published in 1800, Friedrich Schlegel insisted that poetry should have “der heilige Hauch, der uns in den Tönen der Musik berührt”. French and British authors followed suit. “De la musique avant toute chose”, wrote Verlaine in his 1874 Art poétique. “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”, asserted Walter Pater in his essay entitled “The School of Giorgione”, first published in 1877, and Whistler and Wilde, both highly influential in Central Europe, made similar statements. So-called non-figurative art can be viewed as a repression of verbal discourse in favour of pure visuality. Klee was a practising musician, and Kassák often complained about his lack of training in music making. A similar tendency can be detected in literature that tries to eliminate description. “Fuga per canonem” is the technique of the eleventh episode of Ulysses, to a table suggested by Joyce.

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák

The rhetoric of the emancipation of painting from language parallels the rhetoric of the emancipation of poetry from description preached by the spokesmen of “poésie pure”. As some specialists suggest, the Hungarian poet Attila József was inspired by Paul Valéry’s ideal when composing some of his poems. The first piece of the sequence Medallions (1928), translated by the American poet Peter Hargitai, reads as follows: I was an elephant, pious and poor, drank of waters wise and cool, stood on a hill and with my trunk caressed the moon and the sun, and I lifted to their faces flint, trees, snakes, dung beetles, and now my soul: heaven disappears. I fan myself with monstrous ears Of course, twentieth-century writers who regarded not only descriptive prose but also narrative paintings and verse as outmoded may have relied on ekphrasis in essays. In 1935 the Hungarian poet, novelist, short-story writer, and essayist Dezsô Kosztolányi published an article in a daily newspaper in which he attempted to remember his five favourite paintings, while emphasizing the impossibility of speaking about works of visual art. He was familiar with the public collections in Italy, as indicated by a fine essay from 1911 on the Mona Lisa (Kosztolányi, 1997, pp. 76-79) and his use in 1932 of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, a work completed by Titian, in one of his theoretical essays (Kosztolányi 1999, 300). Nonetheless, he included no Italian work of art among his favourite paintings. The five masterworks he selected were Holbein’s Henry VIII, El Greco’s Mater Dolorosa, Vermeer’s The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Degas’s Musicians in the Orchestra, and Cézanne’s Le vase bleu (Kosztolányi, 1974, pp. 367-369), from museums the Hungarian author had been fond of visiting in Rome, Munich, The Hague, Frankfurt am Main, and Paris. Sándor Weöres, who started writing verse under Kosztolányi’s influence in the 1930s, composed a sequence of twenty four-line poems in 1939-40 entitled Dalok Nanconxypanból (Songs from Nanconxypan). The topic of one of the presentations of the conference is

Opening Address to the Conference

Nanconxypan, an imaginary land dreamt up by Lajos Gulácsy. Weöres admired Gulácsy’s paintings, but he had strong reservations about the texts in which this painter tried to describe his imaginary world. His attempt to translate Gulácsy’s pictures into verbal art turned out to be successful: Songs from Nanonxypan is widely regarded as a highly original example of Central European Surrealism. Gulácsy was one of the numerous artists whose work generated much more interest in one of the two arts he cultivated than in the other. A similar case is that of Béla Kondor, whose poetry is certainly inferior to his graphic art. As is well-known, conceptualism returned to the incorporation of textual elements in the visual arts, just as so-called postmodern writing revived the cult of ekphrasis. Untitled paintings were at least partly replaced by works with titles that name a subject or object which the painting, sculpture, or installation does not represent. If a visual artist relies on a pun, his title may be untranslatable. Imre Bukta’s installation Mi tengerin hajózunk (Sailing on Maize, 1992) is a good example (colour image 1, see colour plates). Those not familiar with the Hungarian language will not know that “tenger” means “sea”, whereas “tengeri” is an equivalent of “corn” or “maize”. If you change one letter in the sentence “We are sailing on maize”, which is the literal translation, you will get “We are sailing on the sea”. Present-day Hungary has no access to the sea. The origin of the widely-known proverbial phrase “To the sea, Hungarian” can be traced back to an article by the nineteenth-century statesman Lajos Kossuth, published in a weekly in 1846. In short, the historical implications and the irony of Bukta’s title will be lost on those not familiar with the Hungarian language. Once the visual artist takes text seriously, s/he may incorporate a verbal utterance that is as untranslatable as poetry. My example suggests that language has to be taken in a broad sense. It stands for cultural memory. In the case of illustrations, the visual is not transformed into but attached to the verbal. The renewed interest in illustrations is a concomitant of radical changes that have brought about a shift away from dependence on the printed book and towards greater exposure to and reliance on a multimedia culture in which adeptness in reading pictures may be as much needed as the ability to read the printed word. Illustrations, representations in a non-verbal medium tipped into a text, usually emanate from another hand. Do such pictures bring to light something

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák

already latent in the text, or do they add another dimension to the meaning of the verbal utterance? The answer is a matter of interpretation. In certain films images might even contradict the text. It goes without saying that sometimes illustrations are inferior to the text. Literary works can be misinterpreted and almost ruined by images. That explains why some writers prefer to see their works without any visual representation. In January 1898 le Mercure de France published the following statement by Mallarmé: “Je suis pour – aucune illustration, tout ce qu’évoque un livre devant se passer dans l’esprit du lecteur: mais, si vous remplacez la photographie, que n’allez-vous droit au cinématographe, dont le déroulement remplacera, images et texte, maint volume, avantageusement” (Mallarmé, 1956, p. 878). A decade later Henry James, an author who published extensively on painting and architecture, expressed similar reservations about the illustrations of literary works: “The essence of any representational work is of course to bristle with immediate images; and I, for one, should have looked much askance at the proposal, on the part of my associates in the whole business, to graft or ‘grow,’ at whatever point, a picture by another hand on my own picture – this being always, to my sense, a lawless incident” (James, 1962, pp. 331-332). Henry James, like Mallarmé, might well be regarded simply as a selfreflexive artist much aware of the impossibility of translating verbal into visual signs, had it not been for an episode in his life which makes his position almost unique. In 1906 his collaboration started with Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966). He proposed to this American-born photographer that together they hunt through the camera for “mere optical symbols or echoes, expressions of no particular thing in the text, […] pictures of our ‘set’ stage with the actors left out”. Each would serve as a frontispiece to one of the twenty-four volumes of a selected edition of the narrative works of Henry James. The images were to represent “a contribution in as different a ‘medium’ as possible” (James, 1962, p. 333). As it turned out, the success of this collaboration was based on the idea that a tension developed between text and image. In the case of more traditional illustrations a distinction can be made depending on the temporal relations between text and image. In the 1920s Kosztolányi did a series of interviews with the representatives of certain professions and social classes (“A soldier”, “A waiter”, “A priest”,

Opening Address to the Conference

“A cook”, “A countess”, etc.). Most of these pieces were published in a daily newspaper. In 1929 he published some of them in a volume entitled Alakok (Characters) with illustrations by the painter Pál Molnár C. Although the selection may have been affected by the painter’s preference for some of the texts, what we have is not so much a text accompanied by elucidating visual commentary as two sequences that represent not only two media but also incompatible modes of expression with very different traditions behind them. What Molnár C. represented is usually called Neoclassicism, a wide-spread trend in Western art after World War II. As a writer, Kosztolányi was strongly critical of this fashion, so in this case there seems to be an apparent contradiction between text and image. The writer is widely regarded as one of the best Hungarian authors of the early twentieth century. Since the first edition the book has been reprinted without the illustrations. A special case seems to be the book written, designed, and illustrated by the same person. Költemények – rajzok (Poems and Drawings) is the title of a volume by Lajos Kassák, published in 1958. As is wellknown, he introduced a special format and paid fastidious attention to typographical details. Unfortunately, this book seems to be one of his weakest achievements. Both the poetry and the drawings are inferior to his best literary and pictorial works. Illustrations are often added to the text, but it may also happen that a text is based on images. The text of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La belle captive is a kind of commentary on paintings by Magritte. (The volume includes reproductions of these works.) When the Romantic poet Mihály Vörösmarty published his fragment An Island in the South (1831), he relied on the cult of ruins influential in the visual culture of the period. In the 1840s Petôfi’s descriptive poems were inspired by visual representations of the plain land. Since these poems were published together with lithographs, the contemporary public became familiar with composite text-images. Ironically, Pusztai táj (1838), the watercolour by Miklós Barabás that inspired Petôfi’s descriptive poems, had in turn been painted under the influence of poems by Nikolaus Lenau. Whether a text was composed prior to or after the creation of an image, interactions emerge. The same is true when one cannot be sure if the image or the text came first. The almanacs popular in Biedermeier culture are a case in point, reminding us of the fact that the breakdown

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of the distinction between text and image is not a twentieth-century phenomenon. Illustrations do not represent the only form of the visual on the level of the signifier. As is well-known, writing has always had its iconic aspect. In ancient Assyria, Egypt, India, and China it was not possible to separate text from picture. Ezra Pound’s interest in ideogrammatic writing is just one of the numerous examples indicating continuity between visual poetry ancient and modern. Although Mallarmé persisted in his negative attitude towards illustration, he produced a highly important work of visual poetry, Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (1897). This work exerted a profound influence on Pál Nagy and Tibor Papp, who started a periodical entitled Magyar Mûhely in Paris in 1962. Joined by Alpár Bujdosó in 1978, they spared no pains in writing and publishing visual poetry. In March 1990 Magyar Mûhely moved to Budapest, and in 1998 it published a two-volume collection of Hungarian visual poetry. In the Introduction to volume 1, Pál Nagy gave a tentative definition. Of his six criteria three are especially important. Visual poetry is characterized by double encoding, it requires dual perception, and since it highlights the special arrangement of the text, it questions the relevance of linear reading (Kilián, 1998, p. 10). In the same volume there is an outline of the history of Hungarian pattern poetry by István Kilián. Although the arrangement of words in the form of a particular shape never faded into oblivion, it was mainly in the age of Mannerism and the Baroque that many authors in Central Europe produced poems with acrostics or shaped texts like flowers, crosses, chalices, parts of the human body, stars, or such geometric forms as pyramids, cubes, circles, spirals, triangles, etc. Messages were often conveyed by the use of enlarged or enhanced letters within a text. In 1693 the benefactress Erzsébet Révay was presented with two pieces written in Slovak in the form of a rose and a lily (Kilián, 1998, pp. 262265). Poems resembling picture puzzles were also widespread. László Simándi (c. 1655-1717), a Pauline monk of Croatian origin, composed a sacrizan with a text in Latin when one reads from left to right and Croatian when read backwards. In the nineteenth-century what can be regarded as realism in prose fiction was bound up with the idea that language was transparent, and in verse writing was often presented as the allegory of creation. Numerous

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poets made attempts to neutralize the resistance of language. In Central Europe Kosztolányi was one of the first authors to insist that he never used language, it was language that used him as a medium. In his view media did not mediate; they were intransitive. Volume two of the anthology of Hungarian visual poetry contains material from the twentieth century. Much of it belongs to the history of the visual arts rather than to that of literature. It would be no exaggeration to say that most of the visual artists seemed to be aware of the previous history of Hungarian visual poetry. When Kassák started producing untitled free verse poems that incorporated graphic elements in 1920, he was inspired by Apollinaire’s calligrams, and not by earlier Hungarian experiments. Later visual poetry changed as a result of the spread of such techniques as Letraset, filmsetting and offset printing, but artists such as Gábor Attalai, György Galántai, Dóra Maurer, or Géza Perneczky were influenced by international trends like Fluxus and Conceptualism, rather than by seventeenth-century or eighteenth-century attempts to bridge the gap between the verbal and the visual. Poet Sándor Weöres deliberately tried to revive the practice of earlier Hungarian representatives of visual poetry, and the group around the journal Magyar Mûhely tried to combine native traditions with the legacy of the international avant-garde. Having left Hungary in 1956 and followed in the footsteps of Kassák, Pál Nagy and Tibor Papp realized their full potential as typographers, printers, and publishers in Paris. Alpár Bujdosó, who joined them as the third editor of the periodical in 1978, experimented with three-dimensional compositions and later with computer-generated poetry. In Hungary visual poetry was not tolerated until the decline of the one-party system. Few of the well-known poets tried their hand at visual compositions. In the 1970s, as non-representational art gathered momentum, the populist poet László Nagy published verse that imitated geometrical forms. In Yugoslavia ideological restrictions were far less strict than in the Warsaw-Pact countries. The poet and actress Katalin Ladik (b. 1942) has been known since the 1960s for her gestual poetry and mail-art. Similar trends were not tolerated in Hungary until the 1980s. In 1988 Dezsô Tandori (b. 1938), one of the most prolific authors of recent decades, composed a work entitled Fekete alapon fehér négyzet (White Square on Black). Since the early 1990s more and more writers crossed the boundary between the visual arts and literature. András Petôcz (b. 1959), founder of a medium-

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art studio, has been engaged in performances and cinematographic experiments, and Sándor Tatár (b. 1962) engages in experiments with the spatial arrangement of textual elements that resemble picture puzzles. I have used the term visual poetry because Hungarian prose writing paid far less attention to the visual on the level of the signifier until recent decades. Printing has made novelists and the readers of narrative fiction so accustomed to certain visual elements that neither seemed to notice them until the 1970s. It is telling that Péter Esterházy continues to rely on his handwriting, although his longest works, Termelési regény (A Novel of Production, 1979), Bevezetés a szépirodalomba (An Introduction to Literature, 1986), and Harmonia Caelestis (2000) can be interpreted as hypertextual. Far be it from me to deny that they could be compared to illuminated medieval manuscripts in this respect. Esterházy’s cult of handwriting may remind some of Heidegger’s idea that typewriters conceal or even obliterate the character of writing. It may also remind us that what seems to be new often refers to the distant past: this Hungarian writer’s work is in harmony with a culture in which “the distinction between the production of texts and of pictorial representations was much less pronounced” (Luhmann, 2000, p. 17). In what sense have computers changed the relations between text and image in Hungary? Opinion is somewhat divided on the consequences of the radical changes in the media environment. The American translators of one of the works by Friedrich A. Kittler warned of “a type of technomaterialism that, albeit only on a formal level, bears some resemblance to Marxism’s historical and dialectical materialism.” (Kittler, 1999, XXXV). My impression is that the main initiatives are due to visual artists rather than to writers. Intermedial works certainly incorporate textual elements, in sharp contrast to traditional verse or novel writing. Visual artists seem to question the legitimacy of the distinction between verbal and visual art, a distinction that has been blurred by so many creative talents in the past. The essays in this volume investigate the modes of that breakdown on the basis of examples taken from the art of the last two centuries.

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References Genette, G., 1999. Figures IV. Paris: Seuil. James, H., 1962. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. With an Introduction by R. P. Blackmur. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Kilián, I., 1998. A régi magyar képvers. Miskolc – Budapest: Felsômagyarországi Kiadó – Magyar Mûhely Kiadó. Kittler, F. A., 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated, with an Introduction, by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. California, CA: Stanford University Press. Kosztolányi, D., 1974. Sötét bújócska. A kötet anyagát összegyûjtötte, a szöveget gondozta, és a jegyzeteket írta Réz Pál. Budapest: Szépirodalmi. Kosztolányi, D., 1997. Az élet primadonnái. Gyűjtötte, sajtó alá rendezte és az utószót írta Urbán László. Budapest: Palatinus – Intera. Kosztolányi, D., 1999. Nyelv és lélek. Válogatta és sajtó alá rendezte Réz Pál. 3., bôvített kiad. Budapest: Osiris. Luhmann, N., 2000. Art as a Social System. Translated by Eva M. Knodt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mallarmé, S., 1956. OEuvres complètes. Texte établi et annoté par Henri Mondor et H. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard. Mitchell, W. J. T., 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

András Rényi Locks of Hair, Stripes, Strings and other Threads: Notes on the Metaphoricity of the Incised Line and Texture in Béla Kondor’s Samson-Etching

Fig. 1. Béla Kondor, Samson’s Hair is Being Cut, or a Tribute to the Memory to Dr. Freud, 1967, etching, 295 × 210 mm (photo: András Rényi)

In 1967, the Hungarian painter and graphic artist Béla Kondor, age 36 at the time, made an etching entitled “Samson’s Hair is Being Cut, or a Tribute to the Memory to Dr. Freud” as part of an influential series of highly complex, large scale graphic works made during the 1960s (fig.1). The long title of the print figures in the picture itself – as a half-reversed inscription in the lower left corner – alongside another written text, actually another title, that seemingly belongs to the huge, open book, that says in English “The Bible of Delusions”. The use of letters, words, sentences and citations woven more or less directly into the graphic texture of the work is far from exceptional in Kondor’s voluminous oeuvre (after all, he was a poet as well). But this is not the only reason I have chosen this work as a topic of relevance in a conference entitled “Text and Image in the 19-20th Century Art of Central Europe”. My aim here is not to contribute something new to what Michel Butor presented in his famous essay on “Words in Painting”. Rather, I wish simply to meditate on the very nature of looking at a picture, or seeing it: or, to put it another way, on the question as to whether there is a methodological way of how the art historian, the representative of the profession of seeing, should proceed while investigating a picture as such, that is, as a visual work of art. There are many varieties of scholarly interest that lead our gaze towards a particular picture: for instance, if one intends to re-attribute or to re-date a work of art, one might look for some specific stylistic traits which, when compared with others, could be helpful in solving problems of authorship and date. In such cases the art historian is more interested in the reliable identification of a historical object than its function as

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a “work of art”, that is, in its aesthetic mode of existence. This is precisely my point here: I would deal with Kondor’s Samson-print not as a work of its own, not as a complex, but fixed structure of forms, signs, references and meanings put together by the artist, but rather as an open text that invites him or her to be part of the process of the formation of the image as a whole, to develop his or her personal experience of its unity. The picture is then not to be seen as an object, in other words not simply to be looked at from the outside in order to find out what it objectively “represents” or “expresses”, as if this meaning could be established and verified from a scientific point of view. A picture is rather an event, in terms of Heidegger’s philosophy of art, an Ereignis, that is, in the presence of the work, so to say, happening with us. I am interested in the process of formation that takes place between the picture and the beholder on the basis of their common presence. The method I would like to follow in explicating this etching might be called a “close reading” of the picture as a text, or rather, a “close looking” - that is, a dialectical process of a certain “relational” seeing aimed both at differentiation of elements within the picture and their unification through discernment of their interrelationships. The unity of a picture can be experienced only as a performative process of seeing in which the relations between differing parts and the whole is revealed. In order to fulfil this task, we naturally need to take into account as many factual elements as we can identify: different kinds of motifs, iconographic units, text references, coded signs and abstract elements, etc. But this cannot be a mere stating of what was used and combined by the artist, as if they were isolated things with fixed meanings. I am less interested in collecting semantic items such as those of an iconographical dictionary or a handbook on stylistic features than I am in surveying the multiplicity of specific pictorial relationships of those pictorial units and their possible consonances, which may convey both highly personal and traceable “meanings” for the beholder. Since meaning for the iconographer occurs at the level of motifs and some stereotypic relations of motifs, it functions as a certain code. However, pictures are not articulated by only one code: according to Umberto Eco, the iconic text is an act of code-making. The structural units of a picture can be determined only with reference to their pictorial context, that is, they must be followed in their dynamic interrelations. Visual signs are not discrete and

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intrinsically static units, but rather events. They occur or happen while one realizes them precisely as emerging from those relations. My aim is to show the dynamic way in which a picture can develop a complexity of meanings by its high level of iconic density – as the German art philosopher Gottfried Boehm called the level of complexity of such relations.

The personal code Let me choose as a starting point not the title’s explicit reference to the story of Samson, the biblical hero from the Old Testament. It is clear that the scene in the upper left part of the picture actually depicts the scene of him having his hair cut. I will return to this point later, but to begin, I would start by explicating the other reference of the title – the somewhat ironic allusion to Dr. Freud in the subtitle. In order to decipher this allusion, one should consider the group in the lower right field of the picture. I’ve chosen this to start with because it contains the most explicit and clear references to the artist’ personal life. First of all, one should note the two human figures in front of each other: one of them is a woman, sitting, vulgarly enough, in net stockings, as if she were a prostitute, and seemingly about to climb up on a ladder. The other one is an almost unremarkable, lean man lying prone, whose head seems to have been seized by the woman’s two legs. In contrast to her, he is apparently bound and unable to emerge – the scene seems to be a plain sketch of a grotesque experience of sexual intercourse between them, clearly dominated by the woman. She bears the features of the artists’ first wife, Ágota Kauffmann, whom he had divorced just a few years before the etching was made. Thus one can identify the humiliated man as the figure of the artist himself, even if the depiction bears no resemblance to his actual appearance. This would also explain another motif: the extremely large glass on the bottom, in or behind which figures the man, is a clear hint to Kondor’s heavy alcoholism, with which he struggled for most of his life. In his famous work Traumdeutung, which deals with the interpretation of dreams, Freud explicitly speaks about what the woman in the picture is actually trying to do and what the man, to the contrary, is unable to do: go up and down on ladders and stairs. Freud interprets these

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activities as symbolic representations of the sexual act. Climbing up a ladder or running up a staircase in a dream, he says, means the way up to the heights of sexual pleasure and satisfaction. The combination of the ladder-motif with the position of the man lying face down, in stark contrast to the stance of the woman, backed by the explicit hint to psychoanalysis in the subtitle, suggest that Kondor must have had quite an unhappy marriage, at least from a sexual point of view. One should also note the large object next to the cup, with which the figure is also interlaced, so to say: the mandolin or guitar-like musical instrument with its masterly imitated wooden surface, the strings of which seem to seize his legs. This can also be read as a personal attribute of the artist himself: it refers to Kondor’s inclination toward building and playing musical instruments for his own sake. How might one interpret the emphatic pictorial presence of these personalized objects in the picture (consider their extreme size and closeness!) in the context of his merciless affirmation of sexual dissatisfaction with his wife? I would interpret them as allegories of compensation for the artist’s lack of personal enjoyment in love: alcoholism as compensation on one side, and art on the other. But while the first leads nowhere, the second one offers him a way “upstairs” – even if it is a more complex and problematic one. My argument is clearly pictorial, and the two motifs pointing up should be collated: the ladder and the musical instrument. Symmetrically positioned, as if they were interchangeable, they form a pyramid-like complex: they end up at the same place in the middle of the pictorial field. However, if one takes a closer look, one notices that the guitar or mandolin has strings (one can even see the pegs), but no neck or frets, the horizontal lines on a guitar that look very much like stairs or the rungs of a ladder. Instead, a black, shadowy figure is “climbing up” on the left side of the pyramid strings – as if he intends to pursue the same level of fulfilment as the woman on the other side. We see that in Kondor’s fantasy, “climbing up” is actually plucking and stretching the strings with hands and feet, that is: playing the instrument, making music. According to Freud, all kinds of musical instruments (and the playing of musical instruments) function in dreams as symbols of masturbation. So one hardly needs to ask who the bodiless and faceless “artist” might be: according to the “close reading” of the pictorial process, it is the artist, himself an enthusiast of musical instruments, both a builder and player in one, as

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previously noted. The neck of a guitar looks very much like a ladder, and Kondor makes use of this in his exploration of the difference between his way and her wife’s way of “reaching the top”, whatever satisfaction this might mean. Now, if we identify the black figure as the artist making art, we may realize a certain converse analogy with the artist’s other figure making love. Back to back, they seem to be two sides of the same coin. Their paradoxical symmetry, their strange accordance suggests the interchangeability of their practices – posing the question of what their differences can signify. The one making love is, even if oppressed by the woman, not alone, while the other is alone, playing only for himself. Making art is a kind of self-fulfilment, Kondor seems to suggest: a lonely practice, masturbation, if you will. However, there is something stranger directly connected to this “play” of the shadowy artist: a pair of naked lovers, man and woman, depicted as if making love. They are symmetrically turned to face each other: but only their arms and heads touch directly, their bodies lie nicely parallel to each other. In their delicate execution some modernist features, especially those of cubism, can also be traced (see for instance the solution to the problem of portraying the breast of the woman, an extremely fine combination of naturalistic shading, complexity of viewpoints, and lapidary forms). This constitutes an ingenious solution to the problem of representation of complete reciprocity in the sexual interaction of the two, avoiding any aggressive carnality. Kondor’s aim was to invent a dreamy, utopian picture of lovers who are equal and happy in their relationship – almost a hymn to love, in a clear pictorial contrast to the uneven and prosaic pair below. And in fact, the subtle, plain figures of the lovers appear as if they were somehow in the pages of the huge book, that is opening up – like a part of, or an illustration of the Bible of Delusions. Is the imaginary presence of this artistic phantasm not an ironic allusion to King Solomon’s biblical poem, the Song of Songs, one of the most beautiful and solemn texts ever written on love? However, the fine depiction of ideal love is not untroubled. A closer look reveals that the bodies are stretched across the strings of the guitar, very much like the naked man in the right panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights from around 1500 (now in the Prado Museum, Madrid), where huge musical instruments appear both as sources

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of sensual enjoyment and instruments of torture. (That the precisely described objects (the cup, the book or the guitar) are larger than human beings, suggesting their dependence on the objects of their desires, may originally also stem from Bosch’s imagery, which exerted a considerable influence on Kondor.) The ambivalence of Bosch’ enormous harp is also echoed in Kondor’s paraphrase, suggesting that happiness is always illusory and defenceless: the lovers are inevitably exposed to the dark power of their creator, the artist’s mastery of manipulation, which suggests yet another reason why the huge volume of the Holy Script, including the Song of Songs, is referred to as the Bible of Delusions. According to the pictorial process followed here, the graphic richness of these lovers emerges as a result of the artist’s masterful playing “on the strings”, that is: of the lines, the only material at the etcher’s disposal. So, playing the musical instrument in the picture, with all its sexual symbolism, is metonymically equivalent to drawing and hatching the lines of the etching. The artist himself appears in the centre of his own work as a faceless ghost, wholly absorbed in mastering his art and, at the same time, directly contrasted with his own creatures. This extremely dense combination of motifs (the artist as a loser in personal life vs. his work of art as compensation on one side, and the figure of the artist as stylistic negativity vs. the work of art as an embodiment of stylistic richness on the other) works here as a sort of semiotic shifter between two different systems of codes: the personal and the stylistic. We have to follow both in order to generate more complex meanings and to get a better impression of the dimensions of the iconic density of Kondors’ etching. We should not however forget that neither can be superimposed on the other as the more intrinsic level of meaning.

The stylistic code This shift leads us from the dimension of personal psychology to the problem of the specific “materiality” of etching (to use Adorno’s phrase, who insisted on the idea that every modernist work of art has the task of unfolding and exploiting the ‘inner logic’ of its specific artistic material). We know from Kondor’s writings that he was highly conscious of the “inner logic” of etching and keen on exploring it both in theory and

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artistic practice. The syntax of etching is basically built on the binary opposition of black and white: everything in an etching must be somehow a combination or sequence of ink marks and untouched parts of (usually) white paper. Another basic code is the figure/ground relationship, without which there is no picture whatsoever, even if the figure is sometimes nothing more than a simple line, a dot or a shape of colour. Opaqueness vs. transparency is a third kind of opposition that a painter or graphic artist cannot fail to address. From this basic point of view, it is worth considering the harsh stylistic contrast between the ways in which the artist and his work (or the creator and his creature, if you will) are represented. As far as the figuration of the “artist” is concerned, the first thing that occurs is its opaqueness, the extreme density of the chaotic cross-hatching, which does not allow the viewer to see through or follow the dialectical play of the black lines with the white ground of the paper “behind” them. Inherently, the brutally clear-cut contours of its shape and its inarticulate compactness somehow exaggerate the figure’s mechanic contrast to the untouched ground. By using this kind of un-dialectic featuring, Kondor seems to introduce an extreme pole into the system of formal differences: its rigidity simplifies the variableness of the artistic material to a zero degree. But for the beholder this “black hole” gives rise to the realization of the dramatic contrast as a rift between “artistic” and “non-artistic” modalities of presence. By relating the graphic nonsense of the playing figure to the features of its alter ego at the bottom, the viewer realizes that Kondor is using the same type of plain line to represent the body contours of the reclining man and the cords that bind him. This very simplistic way of drawing contrasts with the intense naturalism with which he handles the bodies in the Samson-group in the upper left part. In this particular field Kondor subtly differentiates between outer and inner contours of the bodies. He uses short line sequences to model muscles, accentuate corporeality, suggest the plasticity of bodies, etc. Through his brilliant use of sophisticated, fine cross-hatching, he is able to evoke even the opulent hairiness of bodies (which is of iconographical importance, as well). He can distinguish between more or less lighted and shadowed parts as well, painterly features for which one searches in vain in other parts of the picture. This classical kind of graphic sophistication can be compared only to that of

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the utopian lovers, although they are far from painterly or naturalistic. They represent rather a “modernist” type of pictorial complexity, showing Kondor’s sense for art historical differentiations. A fourth use of line is the clear, nicely flexible, almost classicist drawing of the melancholic pair in the lower left-hand corner, and the stylistic matrix of the print emerges as a complete system. But what do these differences mean? According to Saussure, a language consists of a synchronic set of formal possibilities. Kondor, in order to be able to articulate his own world, uses – and requires us to recognize – the different stylistic features that are possible within the syntactical system of etching. In other words, he systematically relates them to each other. However, this does not necessarily mean that these differences as such must automatically generate any meaning. In order to be productive, they need other sets of codes with which to interact, such as size, resemblance, position, and iconography. Elements of a picture may allude to exterior references, including literary texts or personal symbols. They can resemble or be in formal contrast to each other, they can vary in scale, etc. These are possible types of relations that, in case of a certain level of iconic density and by way of relational seeing, can be very productive. The intention here is to search for multiple and procedural conjunctions of these elements in order to develop new meanings, suggestions, and so on. That is what one can refer to as the performative capacity of pictures.

The representational code One should consider the organization of the pictorial field as a whole. At first sight, we readily realize that the picture plane is divided into four fields by a structure similar to a roughly constructed wooden hovel. Each of the four fields can be interpreted as a picture within the picture – the art historian easily realizes that each represents one well-known genre of traditional western painting or graphics. The one in the upper left side is like a history piece, a biblical narrative: as I said before, in the tumultuous scene and its many figures we recognize the story of Samson from the Book of the Judges, with the figure of the reclining hero in the centre, whose hair is being cut by the horde of women.

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In contrast, the scene directly below it can be interpreted as a landscape: the two small figures on the left, seemingly a pair of lovers, are looking towards the horizon. (There are mountains and even a monastery-like building in the upper part as well, though they are only part of the background accompanying istoria, without any significance of their own.) It is the distance that constitutes landscape, and that is portrayed only in the lower picture, signified by the two lovers sitting with their backs to the viewer, as if in a romantic work by (for instance) Caspar David Friedrich. Their melancholic gaze into the far distance of the undulating landscape embodies and personifies our gaze: it evokes a more sentimental attitude, while the scene above with Samson and Delilah demands a kind of dramatic empathy and moral involvement. As far as the position of the viewer and the relationship between figure and ground are concerned, the lower right part is more complex than the previous two. This part of the picture has, unlike the first two on the left side, a quite neutral background, which Kondor left untouched, as if his aim here were rather to stress the paper as the plain surface of the picture. One notes the spatial paradox this causes, as Kondor tries to match the masterfully imitated wooden surface of the guitar with the object’s lateral view and relate them to the ground: a typical problem of cubist painting. And in fact, the main motives are that of still lifes, based on the close look. Surrealistically enough, the human beings are of a smaller scale. In sharp contrast to the other three “pictures within the picture” (history, landscape and still life), the fourth and last one in the upper right corner seemingly does not represent any subject or genre: this wildly and roughly scratched part of the picture plane – at least in the context of the others – seems to point to the empty space of non-figurative modern painting. The almost immaterial ladder or suspension bridge seems as if it were directly leading into the abyss of this hollow, meaningless void. To summarize, in the process of relational seeing we realize that the four parts of the picture constitute a certain order, an art historical matrix, in which, in the two fields on the left (“history” and “landscape”), the relationship between figure and ground is handled according to the perspectival system of traditional western representation, while on the other side we face the same problem, but it is solved in terms of modernism: paradox, as in cubism, and non-representational, as in abstractionism.

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However, we can conclude that everything in this framework, both iconographic, personal or formal, is related to a set of historically given codes of representation that are different from but not independent of style. No interpretation of the work can avoid rendering an account of them.

The iconographical code Iconography is a key issue of the interpretation of pictorial works of art. This is more evident in the present case, as the title of the picture identifies the subject matter, one of the most popular in biblical iconography. According to the story told in the Book of Judges, after numerous vain attempts to discover the hidden source of Samson’s extreme physical strength, Delilah eventually manages to persuade him to reveal his secret to her. He tells her that the source of his strength is his hair, which he was never allowed to cut, since he was born a nazir, a man dedicated to serve God and the community of the Chosen People. Called by the angel of God for this task, he had to restrain himself from engaging in any kind of frivolous activity and sensual pleasure, alcohol and the like, all his life. However, for the protagonist the task of living an ascetic life is basically in stark opposition to his inner nature, his dependence on sensuality, women and alcohol. It is Samson’s nature always to be in love, and in fact, he shows his distinguished physicality in fighting his enemies almost only because of his repeated affairs with Philistine women. Thus his hair is a symbol of both his extraordinary abilities and his fateful weakness. That is why he is defenceless against Delilah, even had he been aware of the Philistine’s hostile intentions. The turbulent scene in the upper left of the etching obviously represents the act of cutting the biblical hero’s hair, as indicated in the title. It is Kondor’s own invention to merge two iconographical types depicting the scene, which is told in part 16 of the Book of Judges: one of them is that of Rubens, who presents Samson as a half-naked figure of the athletic type of an antique hero, with highly elaborated muscles, but powerlessly lying in the arms of his beloved wife. Delilah is shown as a seductress, seemingly accepting her man’s desires. That love is at stake here is symbolically indicated in the background niche, in which Venus and Cupid appear. Kondor’s naked Samson is also helpless, but he is

Locks of Hair, Stripes, Strings and other Threads

lying on his back, totally exposed to the women’s sexual harassments. Kondor is making use of the artistically arranged draperies, overlapping the frame of the picture as well – a typical feature of classicism, signifying the humanist tradition of grand art, which was traditionally seen as the only proper way to represents heroic subjects. The other iconographical type of Samson referred to by Kondor is Rembrandt’s similarly well-known large painting from the mid-1630s (now in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt): this is a vivid scene of cruelty and horror. Rembrandt is interested here in the shocking effect of the physical violence of blinding. His treatment of the story of Samson has seemingly nothing to say about love. For Kondor there are two points of relevance in Rembrandt: the scene as the chaotic turmoil of many tumbling figures (in ironic contrast to the rather quiet and peaceful event in the composition by Rubens), and the poly-semic play with symbols. In the Städel picture, the lunatic Delilah, while running away from and looking back at the violent action, is holding in her hands the pair of scissors and the locks of Samson’s hair, which almost resemble iconographical attributes. They are also present in Kondor’s etching, although this time connected not to the dominant woman, but to a comic figure of a barber-like man. Thus Kondor mixes contradictory elements of the two interpretations in his composition: his hero, although resembling an athlete, is as helpless as Rubens’ hero, but will be as cruelly dismembered as Rembrandt’s. However, he is not defeated by a horde of martial men, but rather by a naked women, with comic male figures in the background, representing “the world” as dominated by females. Moreover, Kondor characterizes the loving man’s naiveté as childish by means of an infernal travesty: by tendentiously arranging the figures of Samson and the woman in the middle (we may call her Delilah), he is unmistakably alluding to Michelangelo’s early Pietà – an ambiguous work in which, as is well-known, Mary resembles more a young woman mourning the death of her lover than a mother. (The motif of the drapery may come from – and can point to – Michelangelo’s renaissance sculpture as well.) Thus Samson’s dependence on being loved appears as his regression to the pre-Oedipal phase – and thus we arrive back at Dr. Freud and his psychoanalytical comprehension of sexual desire. But something else is also clear: if, as I suggest, Kondor interprets the biblical story as a myth of man’s dependence on women and com-

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bines the Rubens-prototype with that of Rembrandt, the violent scene of haircutting is undoubtedly presented as an act of Samson’s castration. Castration anxiety is another basic idea developed by Sigmund Freud: originally, it means a false fantasy emerging in the young boy. When he sees a girl’s genitalia, he makes the unconscious assumption that she is missing her penis as the consequence of a punishment, and unconsciously he fears his might also be removed if he misbehaves. Looking more closely at the group in the middle, one should consider first the figure of the woman sitting, whom I earlier referred to as Delilah. Her fleshy, mundane figure is turned directly towards us, aggressively unveiling her genitalia. It seems almost as if Kondor were deliberately alluding to Courbet’s shocking and scandalous L’Origine du Monde, a well-known painting from 1861 hanging today in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and owned for a long time by Jacques Lacan, one of the most influential theorists of psychoanalysis after Freud. But here this motif plays a different role: it functions rather as a corollary of the representation of castration anxiety by pointing to its origin. In Kondor’s highly original vision, the hair as a source of Samson’s manly power is metonymically identified with his phallus. Let me refer to the overt motif of the enormous but unseen erect penis that is suggested by the figure of the sitting woman, resolutely grasping it with all her fingers. Here, the man’s sexual organ, although brutally explicit, is represented through its absence: a genuine pictorial solution for representing castration both as fear and threat. The only thing we can actually “see” is its direct placement and positioning along the exact axes of the woman’s genitalia, almost as if it were an expression of her penis envy. Thus, the depiction of Samson and Delilah functions as a shift between different codes: we change now from the iconographical code to the sexual. Unlike the lower right part, which is replete with symbolic references to the author’s carnal life, in the upper left part sexuality is overtly present. At first one feels even embarrassed by this kind of direct pornographic rendering of a biblical narrative. The hero is lying on the knees, backs and asses of naked women in different poses, all of them shamelessly exhibiting their bodies to the viewer’s gaze. There are more phallic motifs accompanying this, for instance, the somehow parallel gesture of the gaunt woman on the left, pointing up with her right arm (ironically, the same is true of the praying gesture of the man behind with

Locks of Hair, Stripes, Strings and other Threads

a large mitre on his top). But even the way in which the fleshy, plump, dark woman on the right, who looks like a Madame in a whore-house, is arranging and disposing the body seems to be another attempt to dismember him. This kind of turbulent nakedness is as far from the nakedness of the beautiful pair alluding to the Song of Songs as an unrestrained sexual orgy of animal excesses is from the personal intimacy of human love. (One notes the poetic mode of phallic symbolism Kondor is using here: his arm, penetrating into her body, is a clear sign of the sexual act, but it penetrates her at her heart.) From a pictorial point of view, Delilah’s movement and position is obviously related to that of the shadow-artist: both open their legs and have the same axial position. However, they differ not only according to the stylistic code, but to the sexual one as well: the brutal presence of aggressive femininity on one side is strongly opposed to the sexless ghost, the bodily absence of the artist on the other. But this relation evokes another: in the end the ghostly black figure is just an alter ego of the artist, and one realizes the reciprocal placement of him, lying prone, and Samson, lying on his back. This procedural correlation of the two figures, both – one in prosaic mode, the other heroic – struggling in vain for love against women, and the third – negating both roles, but mediating between them – suggest that they represent only different aspects of the same actor. Thus we may identify Samson as Kondor’s biblical equivalent, his super-ego: the hero, who was called upon to serve higher purposes, but who has been in endless war not only against women, but against the whole world and himself as well. So Béla Kondor’s Samsonetching turns out to be a narrative self-portrait of extreme coherence, containing hints both of private confessions and public demands, explicating artistic notions and questioning the work as a fixed construction.

I. Illustration studies Emôke Varga Typologie de l’illustration Pour commencer, je voudrais esquisser la question qui se cache derrière notre sujet étroit. Si nous nous sommes préoccupés des principes de systématisation qui peuvent constituer la typologie des oeuvres littéraires, nous ne pouvons pas négliger le problème latent, qui était toujours présent dans l’histoire, notamment: est-il nécessaire d’illustrer une oeuvre littéraire ou non? Du premier coup il semble peut-être non-sens de commencer par ce dilemme-là, puisque si nous décidions „non”, comme, bien connu, ont fait Flaubert ou Pouchkine, nous serions a priori privés de la possibilité de la typologisation et de son examen, car, comment pourrait-on classifier ce qui n’existe pas? Mais, comme il est prévisible, de notre part, évidemment, nous ne votons non seulement oui, mais encore, par la suite, cette latence en discussion sera le point de départ de notre raisonnement. Regardons à travers les exemples contraires de Pouchkine et de Balzac, de quelle manière les antinomies de la pratique ont-elles influencé la pensée théorique. Les gravures de l’Onéguine parues dans le Nevski Almanach ont incité Pouchkine à écrire des épigrammes sarcastiques. Il a trouvé comique ’l’incarnation de l’image qui paraît être légère’ dans le médium de la littérature, pour ainsi dire, l’oeuvre graphique, avec sa „concrétisation” 1, est devenue un organe génant, révélateur devant le ’regard’ de Pouchkine. Le cas de Balzac, c’est le contraire – lui, tout simplement, a appelé ainsi le frontispice, mentionné aussi comme affiche: „poème aux yeux”2. Il semble être trop évident de dire, que probablement, Pouchkine a vu de mauvaises, Balzac a vu de bonnes illustrations. Sans doute, la

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situation est plus compliquée. Mais, étant donné qu’en dehors d’autres facteurs, il pourrait être vrai aussi que Pouchkine a vu les illustrations insuffisantes, faibles, en bref, mauvaises tout simplement dans leur qualité graphique, pourtant, c’est justement de cette même raison-là que Balzac a apprécié positivement les frontispices, donc, à cause de leur performance iconographique. C’est pour cela que, pour le moment, nous soutenons la division binaire de notre schème esquissé. Surtout, car ainsi nous pouvons évoquer la contradiction autour du genre de l’illustration aussi qui se reconstruit tout le temps dans l’histoire (notamment, l’illustration est-elle nécessaire ou non), qui, en effet, a toujours porté de l’ombre sur la réception critique du genre, sur les questions de l’histoire de sa publication, sur l’estimation des qualités artistiques des illustrateurs, et, entre autres, sur la taxonomie du genre.

Le principe des catégories exclusives Ainsi nous sommes arrivés au principe de classification probablement le plus ancien dans l’histoire de la typologie de l’illustration, qui pourrait être appelé le principe des catégories exclusives. Ici, nous pourrions mentionner de telles oppositions conceptuelles, rapportables aux tracts iconophiles ou bien iconophobes des pères de l’Église, qui concernent aussi les illuminations, comme les antagonismes ’bon-mauvais’, ou ’nécessairesuperflu’ déjà invoqués, ensuite, comme la taxonomie qui met en question l’illustration dans sa fonction, soit, qui renie même sa dénomination initiale. Voir par exemple le terme „oeuvre graphique possédant la raison d’exister” envers „illustration” chez Tinyanov.3 Dans cette quasi-classification, en général, ce n’est pas la considération théorique, semblable à celle de Tinyanov, qui produit la division binaire, elle est formée plutôt par de tels facteurs pragmatiques, comme les points de vues économiques de la publication (nécessaire-superflu) ou bien par des questions de la politique culturelle et idéologiques (bon-mauvais), peut-être par des principes de systématisation d’autres disciplines (par exemple l’illustration „pédante” et „individualiste”)4, d’autre part, tout simplement par l’(auto)réflexion artistique et par l’ordre de valeurs esthétique. „Il n’existe que deux types d’illustrations: bonne et mauvaise” – dit János Kass.5

Typologie de l’illustration

Systèmes à la division multiple Mais la plupart des typologies de l’illustration – métaphoriquement, pour ainsi dire – focalisent à proximité (donc elles acceptent l’illustration a priori, en même temps, laissent le texte en arrière-plan), et présentent le genre dans un système à la division multiple. Concernant ces classifications, il vaut la peine de faire attention à deux aspects. D’une part les expériences, dont le système est souple, c’est pour cela que nuancé, sont plus appréciables, d’autre part, les systématisations, qui examinent l’illustration en tant que médium visuel, ensemble avec le médium verbal qui est avec elle dans une relation interréférentielle, donc, en tenant toujours compte de cette interaction, sont plus adéquates au canon de la recherche intermédiale du tournant du millénaire. En même temps il est étonnant: bien que les recherches dans le domaine sémiotique et (post) structuraliste, et les théories aussi qui emploient le système d’aspects moderne des ’cultural studies’, semblent être dynamiques du point de vue des aspects mentionnés, en tout cas, la plupart d’elles accorde si peu d’attention à la compréhension du ’fontionnement’ soi-même. Plus exactement, „l’espace dilatorique” (Barthes), pour l’interprétation de la formation d’une signification relative qui se produit entre l’oeuvre et le récepteur.6 Voici par exemple la taxonomie de Nikolajeva et de Scott, nuancée et appréciable par ailleurs. Bien que même la dénomination des quatre catégories importantes soit évidente, le couple d’auteurs typifie le genre sur la base de l’interaction de l’image et de la parole: symétrique (simmetrical), agrandissant (enhancing), complémentaire (complementary), contrapontique (counterpointing), quand même, le développement de chaque catégorie est essentiellement descritpif. Donc, ce qui peut manquer de ce système, c’est le développement du jeu dialogique entre l’oeuvre illustrée et le récepteur, ou bien l’indication des stades de ce dénouement.7

Les taxonomies du point de vue externe Avant l’esquissement de notre propre classification, regardons déjà plus concrètement la définition des principes de systématisation caractéristiques des typologies qui „focalisent à proximité”! Le but de notre révi-

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sion ne peut pas être la totalité, par la suite non plus, notre examen se porte plutôt sur l’esquissement d’un système d’aspects métathéorique, notamment, sur l’esquissement de la typologie des systèmes typologiques.8 Appelons du point de vue externe les taxonomies qui, soit, s’occupent des questions locales-typographiques de l’illustration, soit celles, dont le point de départ, en général, n’est pas l’immanence du genre. Ici appartiennent les ouvrages classifiant selon les solutions techniques, qui dessinent l’arc de la tradition depuis les illustrations ou les imprimés à la gravure sur bois, jusqu’aux procédés de la photo-technique et de l’informatique de nos jours, et ici appartiennent les écrits classifiant selon le placement dans le miroir du texte. Parmi les précédents nous pouvons souligner par exemple l’ouvrage chronologique de Smith et Lewis, en Hongrie, les parties du volume d’Andor Tevan concernant notre sujet: Le chemin millénaire du livre, et parmi les derniers, l’étude intitulée Illustration et illustré, qui donne un résumé depuis la vignette ornementale jusqu’au problème graphique compliqué du soi-disant hors-texte et du frontispice. De la bibliographie hongroise il est important, concernant la graphique populaire des XVII-XVIIIe siècles et concernant les illustrations de la sécession, le livre de Éva Knapp, Gábor Tüskés, et Katalin Gellér.9 En dehors des mentionnés, plusieurs ouvrages historiques ont aussi un point de vue externe, qui soumettent la présentation des catégories et des époques plutôt à l’un des aspects généraux de l’histoire de l’art (par exemple à celui de l’histore de la graphique), et non pas aux aspects intermédiaux. Or, comme les théoriciens principaux des recherches texte-image (Hans Belting, W. J. Thomas Mittchell, Mieke Bal) y ont déjà plusieurs fois attiré l’attention, on ne peut pas concevoir l’image en tant qu’artefactum – ainsi l’illustration, nommée mineur art non plus – ni d’une manière neutrale, ni objective, seulement d’une manière culture-spécifique. Il en résulte nécessairement, que le point de vue de l’historicité doit se croiser avec d’autres systèmes d’aspects – actuellement, exactement avec les questions de l’intermédialité – dans les typologies de l’histoire de l’illustration. Voir par exemple la méthode du livre de Michel Melot, Philip Stewart, Philippe Kaenel.10 La question de la spécificité culturelle touche la relation de la place typologique de l’illustration „artistique” et „non artistique”, ou bien scientifique, et touche aussi la modification de cette relation. György Rózsa représente les modifications dans la fonction du genre à travers un type

Typologie de l’illustration

caractéristique de l’histoire de l’illustration, le Maiestas: la série des portraits, désignée comme illustration scientifique à l’époque de sa création, de quelle manière devient-elle illustration littéraire, parallèlement au développement de la critique historique.11 De ce point de vue, puis, d’après la „force d’expression” des illustrations, l’écrit de David Kirsch classifie sur une échelle à neuf degrés, du côté hongrois, l’étude de János Géczi est digne de l’attention.12 Les typologies, qui soumettent le problème de la conceptualisation des médiums à la question de l’origine, de la primauté, de la philologie, conçoivent le temps comme quasi le temps interne des relations médiales. Dans les rapports internationaux aussi sont connus les écrits de János Petôfi S. et des chercheurs de la textologie sémiotique, et encore l’ouvrage d’Áron Kibédi Varga, qui peut être aussi compté parmi eux.13

Typologies fonctionnelles-relatives Selon notre opinion, ce sont surtout les typologies, qui pourraient être étiquetées ainsi: systématisations ’fontionnelles-relatives’, qui ouvrent une nouvelle perspective pour la recherche. Car, en examinant les fonctions de l’illustration – en conséquence de la position de la question soi-même – la recherche doit a priori accorder de l’attention aux relations analogues et divergentes du texte et de l’image, en général, aux déterminations intermédiales de la formation du sens. Voir par exemple les types d’illustration complémentaire et sélective chez le couple d’auteurs Knapp-Tüskés, ou les cinq catégories d’Ivan Illich, qui éclaircissent, un type de figure ayant un contenu sémantique général, quel sens spécial peut-il prendre, par le contexte iconographique ou linguistique, à l’époque des illuminations ou des incunables.14 Derrière les expériences typologiques du volume de Philip Stewart, cité au-dessus, se cache par exemple la question sui vante (aussi): L’illustration comment „simule”-t-elle être subordonnée au texte, bien que, d’une manière divergente, elle modifie, déforme, parfois corrompe, falsifie.15 Et la question fondamentale de la typologie de Wendy Steiner est la suivante: les principes théoriques, élaborés spécialement pour le médium linguistique, comment peut-on adapter au médium iconographique de l’illustration et vice versa. Steiner, en formant ses types, prend comme point de départ les notions du moment central, de la

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concentration symbolique et de l’image-séquence.16 En profitant du vide entre les narrations linguistique et iconographique (notamment, que les arts visuels n’ont pas d’équivalent direct à la première personne dusingulier au sens linguistique), Stewart distingue les illustrations en tenant compte, que le protagoniste est-il présent sur l’image ou non, ou bien, que le poète devient-il visible (catégorie extra diegetic).17 A la fin de notre énumération méta-théorique, nous devons encore mentionner le système des catégories, créé d’après les types de textes. Par exemple, l’article online du Grove Art n’utilise que des variations de quelques notions (par exemple complément, supplément, subordination, etc.) pour composer la typologie des relations interréférentielles du livre d’images, du livre scientifique illustré, du livre religieux, etc.18 Et l’étude d’Áron Kibédi Varga, concernant les auto-illustrations de Saint-Exupéry articule la possibilité de la classification d’après les genres classiques.19 Nous pourrions choisir pour le sujet d’une nouvelle communication, que la théorie d’illustration du tournant du millénaire, quel résultat peutelle atteindre du point de vue taxonomique, concernant la question particulièrement préférée, notamment, quels sont les traits, les types carac- téristiques spécifiques des illustrations des livres d’enfants. Du point de vue méthodologique aussi sont intéressants: l’étude de Jenny Grenfell, le matériel du colloque sur Alice intitulé Word end Image en 1999, et du côté hongrois, la typologie de Katalin G. Papp.20 Notre aspect méta-théorique ne peut être complet ni du point de vue du matériel d’exemples, mais ni du point de vue des classes métatypologiques non plus. La série s’enrichit tout le temps par exemple dans le domaine des illustrations pour les enfants, surtout – il est bien actuel d’accentuer cela ici, au Colloque des Universités de l’Europe Centrale – parce que, en dehors de la Biennale d’Illustration Nationale de Bologne, on organise déjà depuis des années la Biennale d’Illustration de Bratislava (BIB), et depuis 1994, la Biennale de Ljubljana (Slovenian Illustrations Biennal) aussi. Des travaux théoriques accompagnent les expositions, et les intègrent dans le discours linguistique et probablement, les intègreront bientôt dans les typologies aussi, qui se forment dans ”l’espace dilatorique”.

Typologie de l’illustration

Proposition d’une nouvelle typologie Dans la formation de notre propre classification nous avons trouvé important de maintenir le principe du dynamisme: entre les catégories – nous n’avons élevé leur nombre que dans la mesure nécessaire, c’-est-à-dire jusqu’à la quatrième division – nous avons essayé d’établir un souple passage et en même temps, de rendre possible l’élaboration des dimensions historiques. Puisque nous suivons la direction théorique récepteurcentrique des recherches intermédiales du tournant du millénaire, ainsi, nous avons pu accorder de l’attention au processus qui se passe dans le champ commun des médiums: au jeu configuratif et divergent du texte et de l’image, ou bien, à la formation du sens d’une nature relative. Nous avons trouvé important aussi, que le classification doit se lier avec un principe méthodologique, qui facilite la construction et la déconstruction continues, convenables à la situation d’interprétation donnée des catégories ayant un caractère essentiellement descriptif. La présentation de la méthode dépasserait bien les cadres de cette communication, donc, dans le temps qui nous a resté, nous entreprenons de décrire les quatre types, en donnant un exemple pour chacun.21 La mesure de la ressemblance entre le texte et son illustration, c’està-dire la proportion de l’identité et de la différence, du presque identique au presque tout à fait différent, peut être représentée sur une échelle intermédiaire riche. Nous pensons que cette hétérogénéité, par la définition des quatre catégories, peut être rendue essentiellement transparente. Ces catégories sont pénétrables, voisines aux frontières ouvertes, et nous les désignons par les termes employés dans la rhétorique: métaphore, métonymie, synecdoque, ironie.22

L’illustration métaphorique Dans la relation métaphorique du texte et de son illustration nous considérons quelque chose toujours du point de vue (de la perspective) de quelque chose d’autre; dans la métaphore, l’identique agit contre le différent. Il y a toujours du déplacement et du conflit, de plus, la ressemblance, qui est le fondement de la relation métaphorique, n’est pas donnée objectivement. Dans l’archéologie de Foucault, à la métaphore se

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rattache le port, la transmission, la possession inconscients de la substance divine. Ensuite, elle est caractérisée par l’équilibre de la relation du signifiant et du signifié, pour le moins dans le sens que les phénomènes intégrés dans la comparaison métaphorique, bien qu’ils soient clairement distincts l’un de l’autre, à cause de la partialité de leur identité, ils en rajoutent sur la diversité, sur „l’illusion de la diversité”. Comme l’exprime Paul Ricoeur: „dans la métaphore l’identique agit contre le différent”23. Dans la relation métaphorique du texte et de son illustration, l’un des facteurs dominants, c’est exactement cette recherche de l’équilibre et ce maintien de l’équilibre entre l’identique et le différent. La métaphoricité, en tout cas, se fond sur la conviction de l’artiste, qu’il existe un troisième caché, un Idéal encore non-représenté (idée, imaginaire, image mentale, histoire transmissible, estc.), l’Idéal à représenter, qui peut être transmis également par les médiums verbal et visuel. Bien que l’équiblibre de la relation du signifiant et du signifié ne caractérise pas totalement la série de la Tragédie d’Endre Bálint, nous avons quand même choisi notre exemple de cette oeuvre-là. Car d’une part, l’illustration de la IIIe scène ne convient pas à la ligne des autres, d’autre part, à travers les monotypies de Bálint nous pouvons bien percevoir que même une oeuvre graphique ayant un ensemble de formes d’expression réductif, loin de la représentation iconographique mimétique, peut réaliser l’équilibre de la relation du signifiant et du signifié, de l’image et du texte. Ici le rôle de l’Idéal à représenter, qui se cache derrière les médiums est rempli par le providentiel. Sur la troisième pièce de la série (image en couleurs 2), le jeu de l’ensemble des taches rouge, placé dans le tiers central de la surface plane avec la surface noire transparente induit un processus sémiotique à deux sens. Nous pouvons concevoir la surface rouge limitée par une ligne continue comme les bords de la grille/du mur du Paradis, de même que comme le contour d’un visage diabolique mystérieux. Mais si nous regardons l’image plus soigneusement, en conséquence du jeu d’ensemble des mêmes éléments iconiques nous pouvons découvrir une forme possédant un troisième sens. Mais pour cela il faut suivre la logique des intrigues de Lucifer, il faut tourner l’image à l’envers. En effet, les apparitions du visage diabolique sur les trois premières illustrations ont déjà „tordu” les images dans le sens des aiguilles d’une montre (figure dressée sur pied, pendant du dessus, clignotant de droite à gauche), nous

Typologie de l’illustration

ne devons que continuer le mouvement virtuel. Maintenant, le schème de la tête de Lucifer devient soudain une partie du visage du Dieu, et lorsque les valeurs du plan s’échangent (le bas et le haut sont reconsidérés), le visage du diable deviendra le masque du Dieu. La surface blanche, arrosée des lignes fines en couleur, prendra un sens (le rôle du pur signifiant qui appartient à la forme de l’image dressée, c’est-à-dire la valeur de la tache, trouve maintenant son signifié), nous pouvons la concevoir comme une bouche, comme une partie du visage triste du Dieu, en même temps nous pouvons la voir comme un arc-en-ciel aussi. Ainsi, la dualité de la perception, basée sur l’analogie de la forme, parle, en langue iconographique, de la même chose que son original, la Tragédie, d’une part de l’union du créateur et de sa création (visage et arc-en-ciel), d’autre part, de l’inséparabilité, de la complémentarité du bon et du mauvais, de la thèse et de l’antithèse, du divin et du diabolique, et encore d’autre chose: il faut apercevoir que maintenant, d’une manière latente, l’image est discursive. Par les reprises et les amplifications du schème formel du visage diabolique (triple représentation sur la même image) les processus transcendants de l’oeuvre littéraire (voir les expériences transcendantes du couple (Adam et Eve), grandissantes jusqu’à la fin de la IIIe scène) peuvent s’amplifier pour le récepteur en tant que lecteur-spectateur. Et par le dénouement des formes, par le relâchement des contours de forme (sur les autres pièces de la série nous ne pouvons pas observer cela dans une telle mesure) cette monotypie évoque l’obscurité des visions de rêve. Donc elle est discursive de ce point de vue aussi, car chez Madách, c’est à la fin de la IIIe scène que Lucifer lance un rêve sur Adam.

L’illustration métonymique La notion de l’illustration métonymique modélise de telles illustrations, dont la structuralisation, contrairement à la métaphorique, ne se passe pas équivalemment avec le texte. L’attribut le plus important de l’image, c’est qu’elle soit réduite envers le texte, par exemple sa simplification par rapport à l’histoire verbale, à la narration du texte etc., qui, devant le récepteur, semble être intentionnelle, volontaire. La métonymie réduit la totalité originelle à un vide postérieur, c’est-à-dire, au cours d’un acte de limitation, l’illustration en tant que

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nouvelle représentation, décompose le texte en tant que représentation antérieure, puis elle le reproduit au moins autant qu’elle l’apostrophe par son manque (sa représentation incomplète, réduite). Ce qu’elle nous expose, c’est la victoire de la partie sur la totalité, de l’effet sur la cause. Elle est une illusion, car elle tend à nous faire croire que le nouvel ordre des détails découpés pourrait reproduire l’original, mais elle est aussi une auto-dévoilement, car l’illustration métonymique, contrairement à la métaphorique, ne tend pas à cacher les capacités matérielles du médium, plutôt elle a l’intention de les présenter. Pour le Mózes (Moïse) d’Imre Madách, János Kass a fait une série d’illustrations, qui se montre, du point de vue de l’ambiance ou du symbolique, être fidèle au texte au maximum, mais qui, d’un autre point de vue diverge de lui au moins dans la même mesure. Elle ne „raconte” pas les histoires de Madách, de plus, semblablement, elle n’essaye même pas de reproduire la cohérence historique. Au premier coup d’oeil il est déjà visible, elle est elliptique pas à la manière du texte. Si elle l’était ainsi, alors, nous pourrions voir dans le livre une série de mises au point scéniques iconographiques qui créent la continuité au moins partiellement, mais au lieu de cela nous rencontrons soit des corps qui remplissent la surface totale de l’image, soit des ’portraits’ placés au premier plan. Parmi ces derniers, insistons maintenant sur l’illustration qui représente la compréhension par la vision! L’image est réductive à l’extrémité, à première vue il paraît qu’elle ne représente rien d’autre que l’expérience euphorique d’apercevoir le Canaan (image en couleurs 3). Ce qui pourrait nous amener au fait qu’ici il s’agit de beaucoup plus de choses, c’est-à dire que l’estampe est capable de visualiser la Totalité à travers la Partie, et à travers la représentation d’un événement de vision, visualiser la question fondamentale du drame aussi (voir la question de mener le rôle de prophète jusqu’à l’absurdité), c’est le changement de la fonction de ’l’objet-but’ de la vision pour ainsi dire, symbolisant Jéhovah. Car, quand sur les images précédentes, qui thématisent la vision, le récepteur peut percevoir ce qui et ce que Moïse voit (par exemple le regard de Moïse se dirige sur le buisson ardent), cependant ici les représentations objectives ne signifient pas les objets eux-mêmes, plutôt les sensations qu’ils suscitent. Sur cette image – dans une superposition intermédiale qui renforce le drame – nous voyons Moïse, l’incarnation absolue du prophète, dont sur

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le visage se reflètent en même temps le spectateur et l’objet de la vision, qui, par la vision finale en tant que compréhension, mène son rôle jusquà l’absurdité.

L’illustration synecdotique En regardant une illustration du type synecdotique, nous avons l’impression que l’image ou la série d’images essaye de récrire le texte, de le reproduire, d’une manière même pas dégagée de la tautologie. Car l’illustration synecdotique – semblablement à la métaphorique – prétend au maximum de la fidélité textuelle, mais elle en donne une solution d’une manière distincte, pas au prix de toucher et par toucher l’idéal invisible, plutôt, elle met sa performance visuelle, dans la plus grande mesure possible, à la disposition de la discursivité. L’illustration métaphorique se fond sur la croyance dans l’intégrité et la totalité de l’Idéal à représenter, derrière la synecdoque, au contraire, se trouve la conception de la fragmentation de la Totalité. La synecdoque, c’est le moyen de la ’restauration’, de la reconnaissance qu’il faut rassembler les morceaux cassés du pot pour reconstituer la totalité (tessera)24. C’est pour cela que l’illustration synecdotique, bien que, nécessairement, ne puisse pas atteindre son but, c’est-à-dire la ré-écriture absolue du texte, car elle ne peut pas équivaloir à „l’externalisation totale”, tout de même, elle y prétend perceptiblement, plus exactement à représenter, remplacer le texte „absent”. Elle reconstitue ce qui n’est pas donné pour le moment d’une telle façon que dans les cadres de ses possibilités médiales – de plus, quelquefois nous pouvons avoir l’impression qu’elle dépasse ses limites médiales – le ’représente’ ou ’annonce’. A l’illustration synecdotique, nous trouvons le plus grand nombre d’exemples parmi les livres d’enfants. Car, dans ceux-ci, la performance référentielle du médium linguistique et iconographique est presque symétrique: l’image essaye de nous faire croire qu’elle représente exac tement la même chose que déclare le texte. Et à l’envers: l’enfant, d’après les images, peut ’composer’, reconstruire par exemple l’histoire en texte de l’oeuvre intitulée Lúdas Matyi (Mathias et ses oies). L’Éditeur ’Holnap’ (Demain) a essayé d’atteindre le maximum de la discursivité, quand sur la jaquette du livre, aux oeuvres graphiques

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de Piroska Szántó, il a assigné des inscriptions dénotatives. Les taches de texte composées de la liaison d’un pronom démonstratif et d’un nom avec article défini, ensemble avec les figures assignées à eux, simulent le mimétisme complet (image en couleurs 4). Ils font semblant que Ma thias, Döbrögi ou bien les hommes de main ne pourraient être imaginés que de cette seule façon et pas autrement. A la réussite de la simulation contribuent les solutions iconiques tendant à la clarté: les illustrations en rajoutent sur le langage connu de gestes et d’affections de la tradition iconographique, représentent les objets et les êtres vivants presque toujours dans une position canonique, les images exprimant de l’action ont un caractère de genre et une structure simple. Et bien que les oeuvres graphiques de Piroska Szántó – semblablement à l’oeuvre de Mihály Fazekas – soient beaucoup plus compliquées que les illustrations, prédestinées à re-raconter tout simplement l’histoire (voir par exemple la représentation symbolique des astres, ou la force expressive dans la répétition des figures à la page 46. et 50.), à cause de leur quantité (à peu près 70 images internes) et leur position typographique aussi, nous pouvons ressentir à juste titre leur recherche de l’externalisation totale, c’est-à-dire leur caractère synecdotique.

L’illustration ironique La relation ironique du texte et de son illustration est la conséquence de la divergence et de la concurrence des deux médiums. L’image révise et discute, ou bien, évite tout simplement les déclarations du texte. Cet acte, du point de vue du processus de la réception, où „l’ordre” du texte et de l’image est indéterminable, semble plutôt être une simulation réciproque. Une telle contradiction, qui force un changement, exige une ré-orientation dans la stratégie du lecteur-spectateur: en possédant l’expérience, il faut ouvrir une nouvelle perspective sur le texte (ou sur l’image), il faut subordonner le processus de la compréhension à la dialectique du texte et de l’image. Les mouvements intellectuels contradictoires, en même temps, „dans une identité perceptive évidente, se fondent et s’impliquent réciproquement”.25 Le „glissando” ou „clinamen”26, par lequel l’image se déplace de son original et prévoit la dialectique de l’interprétation, est

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rendu accessible par de telles valeurs iconographiques „innocentes” qui, en devenant par exemple les éléments structuraux d’une unité scénique intellectuelle, dans la concentration, dépassent la référentialité textuelle. En partant de ce point „faiblement” ironique, nous pouvons arriver sur une riche échelle transitoire à un tel point fortement concurrent, où l’image simule et „s’oppose à l’original”: déforme, corrompe, falsifie.27 Les illustration de Béla Kondor pour Le Roi Ubu de Jarry donnent une bonne possibilité de montrer comme exemple le type de l’illustration ironique du point de vue de la différence aussi, qui existe entre l’ironie du texte ou de l’image et entre celle du texte-et-image. Car, quand nous devrions parler, dans le cas du texte, évidemment des sarcasmes linguistiques du drame de Jarry et de son traducteur hongrois, Zoltán Jékely (par exemple des différences dans les niveaux du style, du jeu des liaisons phonétiques, etc.), ou bien, dans le cas de l’image, d’un tel humour iconique, comme la figuration pseudo-naïve de la 6e pièce de la série qui représente la force du vent conformément à la tradition des livres de contes, dans ce dernier cas, nous devons découvrir l’ironie dans la réciprocité du texte et de l’image. Nous en pouvons voir un exemple éclatant sur la première image qui actualise (c’est-à-dire transcrit) le temps historique du drame par de tels éléments cumulatifs comme les ornements de l’uniforme de Poszomány (Passement), évoquant les insignes militaires des Soviétiques (image en couleurs 5). Dans l’axe référentiel vertical de la totalité de la structure plane de l’image (qui est produit par le plat de viande, le couteau levé, et la ligne de symétrie du corps d’Ubu), nous pouvons trouver d’exemple à la corruption aussi. Dans l’arrière-plan symbolique, du faisceau de lignes groupé d’une manière suspecte, tout d’un coup se dessine devant nos yeux une forme concave, une mitre d’évêque. Il est évident qu’ici, l’illustration fait beaucoup plus que „répondre” à la phrase du drame (Mère Ubu dit: „Alors, prenons peut-être le bonnet d’évêque!”), car elle nous contraint, par ses propres moyens, à la ré-orientation: premièrement, concrétise la métaphore en hongrois usuel (püspökfalat – bonnet d’évêque) par la représentation du poulet rôti, deuxièmement, la reproduit par le contexte iconographique, et c’est pour cela que suscite de l’humour (forme concave), et troisièmement, par la composition, élève au rang symbolique le sujet fondamental de la totalité du drame, la caricature des autoritaires de tous temps.

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Donc, du point de vue du passage donné du texte, l’illustration est concurrente, car tandis que l’image parle doublement de ’l’évêque’, il n’y a aucun évêque dans la situation dramatique, mais, du point de vue de la totalité du texte – comme toutes les illustrations „bonnes” et „nécessaires” – elle est discursive et coopérative.

L’avantage des typologies A quoi sert-il, pourquoi est-il nécessaire de classifier, de typifier les illustrations selon des principes de systématisation divers? A cette question on peut donner plusieurs réponses. Il serait le plus évident de répondre que tout ça est important pour la recherche de l’illustration du tournant du millénaire, car – soit du point de vue descriptif, soit dans les cadres plus étroits de chaque discipline ou bien sur leurs territoires intermédiaires – les théoriciens peuvent trouver des points de référence. Il est informatif pour les typologies, et en même temps pour les examens méta théoriques semblables aux nôtres, de reconnaître que les théories qui se succèdent temporellement, en tant que des couches archéologiques qui se construisent l’une sur l’autre, montrent pour la recherche de nos jours les devoirs irrésolus et les possibilités du développement. Nous pensons que tout ça justifie la réarticulation continue des principes de systématisation des illustrations, mais nous trouvons que notre troisième réponse soit la plus importante. En partie, dans les relations internationales, mais surtout du côté hongrois il est absolument vrai que la critique de l’illustration est absente. De Károly Tamkó Sirató et Tibor Tüskés jusqu’à Béla Bodor, il y en a plusieurs qui ont déjà écrit28, que les recensions des oeuvres littéraires illustrées ne parlent presque pas du tout des oeuvres graphiques – selon notre statistique personnelle, le maximum c’est trois phrases, mais, même dans ce cas-là, le point de vue du critique soit le plus rarement configuratif. Mais il est bien connu, que – nous en pouvons lire plusieurs fois dans les ouvrages de sciences littéraires de nos jours – si la théorie se répète – il est indifférent que le théoricien le veut ou non – inévitablement, elle se transforme en méthode, car sur le point de la répétition, de toute façon, les question de la méthode et du sujet sont liées. Donc, l’avantage le plus important de la typologie, basée sur les théories, pourrait être

Typologie de l’illustration

la méthode, se formant toujours à son influence dans la pratique de la critique, c’est-à-dire la pratique, élaborée pour le livre illustré comme le sujet de la critique et rendue ’courante’. Bien que, pour le moment nous soyons loins de la situation idéale, par les questions posées, par les sujets concernant la problématique du texte-image de notre colloque actuel, nous nous en approchons tout le temps.

Notes Tinyanov nous préserve de mélanger „la concrétisation spécifique de la poésie” à „la concrétisation de la peinture”. C’est en parlant de l’impossibilité de leur coïncidence qu’il fait allusion à Pouchkine. Tinyanov, J., 1981. Az illusztráció (L’illustration). In: Cs. Könczöl, ed. 1981. Az irodalmi tény. Budapest: Gondolat, pp. 74-84.

Concernant l’illustration des romans de Balzac et l’opinion de l’écrivain dans le sujet du genre de la vignette-frontispice voir: Illustration et illustres. [Online] http:// www.chez.com/bibliophile/definition.html#ilustr

„Tous les deux cas de «l’oeuvre graphique possédant la raison d’exister» sont en dehors de la notion de l’illustration. (…) Toutes le oeuvres, préparées pour illustrer une autre oeuvre, déforment et réduisent inévitablement cette oeuvre”. Tinyanov, J., 1981. Az illusztráció (L’illustration). In: Cs. Könczöl, ed. 1981. Az irodalmi tény. Budapest: Gondolat, pp. 82-83.

Albert Kapr, par exemple, détermine les deux catégories des illustrateurs et de leurs oeuvres en touchant des problèmes de la psychologie de création: „traducteur pédant” és „individualiste”. Kapr, A., 1971. Az illusztráció (L’illustration). In: Könyvtervezés, könyvművészet. Budapest: Műszaki Kvk, pp. 105-137. Il y en a d’autres qui forment des catégories polaires en utilisant les résultats scien tifiques de la théorie de réception, par exemple: 1. „l’illustration aide la compréhension”, 2. dans la compréhension „le texte et l’image ont la même importance” Nikolajeva, M., Scott, C., 2000. The Dynamics of Picturebook Communication. Children’s Litte rature in Education, 31 (4), pp. 225-239. 4

Kass, J., 1997. Gondolatok a könyvillusztrációról (Réflexions sur l’illustration du livre). In.: V. Bánki, J Lengyel,. L. Tandi, ed. 1997. Ötven év képben és írásban. Szeged, 1997. pp. 64-77.

Les théories de sens de nos jours „refusent de supposer une raison stable”. Elles présentent le sens comme quelque chose ayant une nature de relation, et pensent que celle-ci se développe du dialogue de l’oeuvre et du récepteur c’est-à-dire de leur jeu rhétorique. La question est traitée du point de vue des sciences littéraires, entre au-

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tres, par Antal Bókay. Bókay, A., 1997. A posztmodern kor és az irodalomtudomány (L’époque postmoderne et les sciences littéraires) In: A. Bókay. 1997. Irodalomtudomány a modern és a posztmodern korban. Budapest: Osiris, pp. 276-278. Sur la base de la théorie de métalepse de Gérard Genette, l’une des oeuvres de Jan Batens concernant la critique d’illustration réalise tout ça exemplairement, de la même manière que sur la base de la théorie de narration. Concernant les variations textuelles et iconographiques du sujet du fils prodigue, il existe un ouvrage en langue hongroise aussi, l’écrit de András Rényi. Mais ces deux dernières études ne peuvent être mentionnées comme exemples qu’à cause de leur aspect, car ce ne sont pas des ouvrages typologiques. Baetens, J., Un dessinateur qui pense. A propos de Martin tom Dieck. Image [&] Narrative [Online] http://millennium.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/ narra.../preview_art_1.cfm?article_ID=93&kind= (: Online Magazine of the visual narrative) Rényi, A., 1997. A tékozló tekintet (Le regard prodigue). Enigma. (14-15) pp. 95131.

La classification et la valorisation seront rendues plus difficiles, car une partie des études sont, en premier lieu, des ouvrages analytiques et/ou historiques, mais ne sont-elles des classifications qu’en second lieu.

Smith, M. M., Newel L. J, Book illustration. http://www.groveart.com/data/articles/ art/00/0099/009989.xml?sect… Tevan A., 1984. Az illusztrált könyv (La livre illustrée). http://www.mek.iif.hu/ porta/szint/tarsad/muvtort/tevan/html/fejez30.htm (Tevan A., 1984. A könyv évezredes útja (Le chemin millénaire du livre). Budapest: Gondolat Illustration et illustres. http://www.chez.com/bibliophile/definition.html#ilustr Knapp, É., Tüskés, G., 2004. Populáris grafika a 17-18. században (La graphique populaire des XVII-XVIIIe siècles). Budapest: Balassi Gellér, K., 1997. A szecessziós könyvillusztráció Magyarországon 1895-1925 (Les illustrations de livres en Hongrie à l’époque de la sécession) Miskolc: Miskolci Galéria 9

Melot, M. 1984. L’ Illustration. Histoire d’un art. Genf: Skira; Stewart, Ph., 1992. Engraven Desire : Eros, Image and Text in the French Eighteenth Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Kaenel, Ph.,1996. Le métier d’ illustrateur, 1830-1880. Rodolpe Töpffneer, J. J. Grandville, Gustav Doré. Paris: Messene

Rózsa, Gy., 1998. Grafikatörténeti tanulmányok (Études sur l’histoire des oeuvres graphiques). Budapest: Akadémiai Kirsh, D. Why Illustrations aid understanding. www.itedo.de/E/157_1650.php; Géczi, J., 2002. Az illusztráció formái (Les formes de l’illustration). Iskolakultúra. (4) pp. 40-55.

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Petôfi, S. J., 2001. A verbális és a képi összetevôbôl felépített kommunikátumok tipológiájához (A la typologie des communications constituées des composants verbaux et iconographiques). In: S. J. Petôfi, ed. 1998. Szemiotikai szövegtan: A szövegtani kutatások általános kérdései; Kép és szöveg; Kommunikáció a médiában. Szeged: JGyTF K., pp. 61-66.; Kibédi V., Á., 1998. Szöveg és illusztráció: A „Kis Herceg” ürügyén. A műfajok multimedialitása. (Texte et illustration: A propos du „Petit Prince”. La multimédialité des genres.) In: D. Csordás, ed. 2000. Szavak, világok: Esszék, tanulmányok. Pécs: Jelenkor, pp. 152-160., pp. 161-170. Knapp, É., Tüskés, T. op.cit., Illich, I., 2001. A beszéd lejegyzésétôl a gondolat le jegyzéséig. (De la description de la parole à la description de la pensée) In: A szöveg szôlôskertjében. Budapest: Gond-Cura Alapítvány – Palatinus, pp. 165-199.

Stewart, Ph.op. cit.

Steiner, W., 1982. The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Stewart Ph. op. cit.

Strachan, W. J. Livre d’artiste [Fr.: ’artist’s book’]. http://www.groveart.com/data/ articles/art/05/0514/051448.xml?sect…

Kibédi V., Á. op. cit.

Grenfell, J. Arts Education: Teaching the Visual Arts. Aesthetic Images in Children’s Book Illustrations. http://www.deakin.edu.an/education/visarts/aesthetic%20images%20in%20cb.pdf. Voir le sujet du colloque Word &Image organisé en 1999 à Claremont. Papp, G. K., 1999. Szöveg és illusztráció : Szöveg és kép viszonya gyermek- és ifjúsági irodalmi művekben szövegdominancia esetén. (Texte et illustration: Relation du texte et de l’image dans les oeuvres littéraires pour des enfants et pour la jeunesse dans le cas de la dominance textuelle). Magyartanítás, (2) pp. 8-12. 20

D’après les caractéristiques de la fonction des configurations interréférentielles nous avons élaboré un modèle méthodologique ’à trois échelles’. Voir: Varga, E., 2007. Kalitka és korona. Kass János illusztrációiról (Cage et couronne. Les illustrations de János Kass). Budapest: L’ Harmattan Dans la présentation de notre système typologique nous avons utilisé les éditions suivantes des quatre oeuvres littéraires illustrées: Madách, I., 1972. Az ember tragédiája. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Madách, I., 1966. Mózes. Budapest: Magvetô Fazekas, M., 2002. Lúdas Matyi. Budapest: Holnap Jarry, [én]. Übü király avagy a lengyelek. Budapest: Európa 21

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Kenneth Burke, Michel Foucault et Harold Bloom ont fait des tropes des notions convenables à la description des caractéristiques fondamentaux des phénomènes et des systèmes d’aspects artistiques et rélévantes de notre point de vue. Burke, K., 1997. A négy alapvetô trópus (Les quatre tropes fondamentaux). Helikon, (1-2), pp. 46-57.; Bloom, H. 1994. Költészet, revizionizmus, elfojtás (Poésie, révisionnisme, étouffement). Helikon. (1-2), pp. 58-76.; La théorie de Michel Foucault est présentée par Antal Bókay. In: Bókay, A. op. cit. pp. 254-255. 22

Ricoeur P., 1990. Az élô metafora (részlet) (La métaphore vivante – extrait). Helikon. (4), pp. 489-490.

Tessera veut dire „complément antithétique”, „le moyen de la reconnaissance qui rassemble les morceaux cassés du pot pour reconstituer la totalité”. Ensuite, nous avons emprunté de Bloom l’expression de „l’externalisation totale” aussi. Bloom, H. op. cit. 70. p.

TaŤána Petrasová The First Czech Translation (1783) of the Five Orders: Image Rewrites Text

Imdahl, Max, 2003. Giotto: Arénafreskók. Ikonográfia – ikonológia – ikonika (Giotto: Fresques d’arènes. Iconographie – iconologie – iconique). Budapest: Kijárat

C’est Bloom qui met en rapport l’ironie avec la notion du clinamen ’déviation’ (trope-comme-mauvaise interprétation), d’après Épicure, Lucretius et Coleridge. Nous pouvons lire aussi chez lui du stade ironique „du péché de la confrontation avec l’original”, de la „dérivation dialectique” venant de Burke. Bloom, H. op. cit. pp. 68-71.

Stewart, Ph. op. cit. 17. p.

Tamkó S., K., 1975. A magyar könyvillusztrációkról (Des illustration de livres hon groises). Könyv és nevelés. (6) pp. 257-260.; Bodor, B. Van-e magyar kritika? Továbbá volt-e valaha és lesz-e valamikor? (La critique hongroise existe-t-elle? A-t-elle existé autrefois et existera-t-elle un jour?) http://www.freeweb.hu/bodorbela/t_99_13. htm

In eighteenth century architectural theory, the idea was proposed that architecture had nothing in common with painting, poetry or music. These types of art, so the proposition went, only represented objects that people saw around them and were based on a system of imitation. In architecture, by contrast, the intellect predominated and its system of imitation derived from universals that were hardly visible to the human eye (Rykvert, 2005, p. 69). Most of the major theorists of the era, however, believed that man imitated nature and that architecture developed in the process of perfecting nature. Although there were theoretical texts about architecture that deliberately avoided illustrations (Vitruvius’s The Ten Books of Architecture are a classic example), most theorists expected to illustrate their accounts. At the same time, the relationship between text and image gave priority to the text as the conveyor of meaning, while the image was relegated to the status of mere illustration. The experience of the art historian, however, confirms the opposite approach: in particular, translations of books about architecture for which the new publisher changed the selection of illustrations elevated the image over the text. Although originally the image was only supposed to illustrate the text, it gave it a different meaning. Thus, the art historian’s interpretation is ‘split’ between that which is read (or presented) and that which is depicted. The recently discovered first printed Czech translation of the five orders, published in Prague by Simon Truska, a lay member of Strahov Premonstratensians, in 1783, is an example of a text rewritten by an image. The late publication of the title by Lucas Voch, Unterricht zu Aufreissung der fuenf Saulenordnungen, which was not one of the pioneering works on the architecture of orders, does not challenge the

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accepted view that architectural theory was not cultivated in Bohemia. It was a singular, almost bizarre undertaking: at that time, scholarly works in Bohemia were only published in German. It thus raises the question, why was this translation, the first one into Czech, done? At the time, the Czech language functioned more as a constitutional symbol than as a means of communication. After German was declared the administrative language of the Habsburg Monarchy, spoken Czech degenerated to the level of a colloquial language or a regional dialect. Some of the Premonstratensians showed an interest in the modern resurrection of Czech as a literary language. This is apparent from the poem commemorating the meeting between Emperor Joseph II and Pope Pius VI in Vienna in 1782, composed by the later Strahov historiographer Bohumír Dlabacz. It is considered to be the first modern Czech verse (although even contemporaries had doubts concerning its quality) (Hanzal – Otruba, 1985, pp. 550-553). In this context, the Czech-German manual for drawings of the five orders, which was published a year later, can be seen as a National Revival attempt to dignify the Czech language (Dlabacz, 1815, cols. 278-279). The translation published by Truska, which also came to the attention of Josef Dobrovský, the most important Czech scholar of European renown, strikes one at first glance as a naïve attempt to restore the classical canon in a milieu that was still strongly dominated by Baroque culture. The publisher had no qualifications with regards to this task apart from his experience as an artistic cabinet-maker and maker of musical instruments (he himself played stringed instruments). The choice of this particular title can also be interpreted as an attempt to facilitate the work of craftsmen: stonemasons and cabinet-makers are addressed as readers. The text, however, could also meet the greater demands, for example, of builders. Lucas Voch’s manuals were taught at the Estates’ engineering school in Prague (founded in 1707), which was one of the oldest schools for military engineers in the Austrian Monarchy. In the library of the engineering school of the time, however, the five orders were represented by classical authors such as Palladio and Vignola, and Voch’s manuals were used to lecture on hydraulic structures, roads and construction. Truska chose a book that went beyond the needs of ordinary building practice, but neither the title nor the author was among the greats of architectural theory at that time in Germany which included Sturm,

The First Czech Translation (1783) of the Five Orders

Goldmann, Penther and Succov (Schütte, 1979, pp. 16-17). On the contrary, according to several historians of architecture, the author, Lucas Voch, represented the crisis in theory. He was one of the practitioners of German architectural theory whose main aim was to introduce the ideas of the great theorists into the practice of building. Voch’s understanding of architectural theory was based on the conviction that, for the practice of building, it was important to know practical approaches, not the theoretical interpretations of the five orders (Oechslin, 2008, p. 94). But with the rise of Neoclassicism, there was a need to return to the form of the orders that had been canonised by Renaissance authors, and Voch quickly responded to the needs of the day. In order to make theory more accessible to builders and masons, he published two books in close succession that touched on the five orders: in 1778 a manual on drawings of the five orders (Unterrich zu Aufreissung der fuenf Saulenordnungen); and in the following year a manual on the application of the five orders (Anwendung der fünf Saulenordnungen). Voch relied on Vignola’s modular determination of the proportions of the various orders, which was most popular among builders and craftsmen because of the simplicity and universality of its application. Vignola’s approach to the five orders was revolutionary in that he abandoned his predecessors’ (Serlio, Palladio) attempts to establish a canon of proportions based on observation of classical architecture. The dimensions of columns within a single order differed from building to building, which resulted in a great deal of uncertainty in practice. This approach was also unsuitable because it meant that the proportions of buildings were based on a detail. Vignola, by contrast, introduced a rule according to which the proportions of the orders were based on the overall height of the building (Borngässer Klein, 2003, p. 88). Drawing on experience, he formulated a rule according to which the relationship between the socle, column and cornice could be expressed in terms of the fixed ratio 4:12:3, given by an absolute unit, a module. According to this module, the shaft of the column was divided into 12 (sometimes 18) sections; their application made it possible to maintain the same proportions within a single order. In addition, the module was easier to work with because it did not rely on local measurements, which, with their different systems, naturally complicated calculations. Vignola was not at all interested with the primitive hut.

TaŤána Petrasová

The First Czech Translation (1783) of the Five Orders

of the primacy of Greek temples because this best explained the basic details of the five orders, such as the socle, shaft and entablature. Dissenters argued that the temples of the Egyptians and the buildings mentioned in the Bible were stone. The French academic tradition (Perrault, François Blondel) saw the origin of architecture in stone buildings and therefore depicted the first habitation, the primitive hut, as a stone house with a simple roof, which was supported by lintels resting on four corner posts. Laugier’s Neoclassical manifesto extolled the primitive hut as the architectural ideal because it emphasised the column rather than the wall

Fig.1. Lucas Voch, Zpráva k vyreysování pěti řádů sloupů [Manual for drawings of the five orders], Czech-German edition – Czech title page, 1783, engraving, 15.5 × 17.5 cm, (photo: Národní knihovna ČR, Praha)

On the title page, Truska identified the Czech edition of Voch’s text as altered (fig. 1, 2). When one compares the original and the translation, however, the only alterations one can find, in addition to the changed system of numbering the sections of the chapters, are two new illustrations: the frontispiece and a print connected with the introductory passage on the origin of architecture, which is placed first. This passage from Vitruvius’ second book was of key importance for Neoclassical theorists. In his account of the origins of human civilisation, Vitruvius described how adverse weather conditions forced people to build the first dwellings; he also described what their buildings looked like. He mentioned three building materials that, depending on their accessibility, were used in various lands: wood, clay and stone. Eighteenth-century theorists based their proofs of the primacy of Greek or Roman architecture on these materials. According to some authors, wooden posts were clear evidence

Fig. 2. Lucas Voch, Unterricht zu Aufreissung der fünf Säulenordnungen, Czech-German edition – German title page, 1783, engraving, 15.5 × 17.5 cm, (photo: Národní knihovna ČR, Praha)

as the foundation of construction; the wall merely provided an opportunity for ornament, such as the pilaster. The defenders of Palladianism, which spread from Italy, had a special position within Classicism. They acknowledged the importance of the orders, but based the fundamental rules of architecture on stone architecture and demanded ornament. Ger-

TaŤána Petrasová

man theory of this era saw the origin of architecture in wooden buildings. This idea was reinforced with an illustration in the first German translation of Vitruvius published by Rivius in 1548. It also appeared in the Baroque edition of the five orders published by Abraham Leuthner in Prague in 1677.

Fig. 3. Simon Truska (drawing) – Jan Berka (print), Primitive hut, 1783, engraving, 15.5 × 17.5 cm, (photo: Národní knihovna ČR, Praha)

Voch did not include the primitiv hut among the illustrations of his book on the five orders, but he treated the origins of architecture briefly in the text. He clearly drew on Goldmann, who conceived of his treatise as a synthesis of Christian and pagan cultures. Voch wrote: ‘It is clear, both from holy scripture and from other histories, that immediately after the abominable sinful fall, necessity and destitution compelled the first people to protect themselves from the terrible weather and from wild beasts

The First Czech Translation (1783) of the Five Orders

[…] In holy scripture, there is mention of a city before the flood, which Cain built and named after his son Enoch, as one reads in the First Book of Moses 4:17. We can easily imagine how splendid that city was and what it looked like. There were miserable shacks made of turf and clay and similar things in that city.’ (Voch, 1783, p. 1). This is the first instance where Truska meddled with Voch’s text, adding the comment according to which the first illustration indicated what the city looked like. (fig. 3) Thus far, it is not clear where the casual theorist Truska got his model. He may have had access to the rich Strahov library. His primitive hut was based on Rivius’ edition of Vitruvius published as Vitruvius Teutsch in 1548 (in the Strahov library another edition from 1575 also existed); the two-storey dwelling with wooden walls and a roof covered in rushes resembled illustrations for Vitruvius’ text on the buildings of the Colchi in Pontus: “Among the Colchians in Pontus, where there are forests in plenty, they lay down entire trees flat on the ground to the right and the left, leaving them a space to suit the length of the trees, and then place above these another pair of trees, resting on the ends of the former and at right angles with them. These four trees enclose the space for the dwelling. Then upon these they place sticks of timber, one after the other on the four sides, crossing each other at the angles, and so, proceeding with their walls of trees laid perpendicularly above the lowest, they build up high towers. The interstices, which are left on account of the thickness of the building material, are stopped up with chips and mud. As for the roofs, by cutting away the ends of the crossbeams and making them converge gradually as they lay them across, they bring them up to the top from the four sides in the shape of a pyramid.” (Vitruvius, 1960, II, 1, 4) . At the same time, however, Truska could use a completely different source, e.g. François Blondel (Cours d’architecture, 1618–1686), to explain the origin of the socle and the capital of the column: “After this method of building, there followed another that was more convenient, consisting of four tree trunks, which served as supports, as is shown in engraving I, fig. 2. These supports, […] however, were erected on stones to protect them from the damp and provided with iron rings on top to prevent them from breaking under the weight of the roof that rested on them.” (Voch, 1783, p. 2). In the passage concerning the grounding of the beams on stones, Blondel was defending the principle that the primitive hut imitated nature, while human endeavour perfected it. Voch merely

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commented: “The present decorative and crafted method of building, the five orders, was based on this, the most ancient natural method of building.” (Voch, 1783, p. 2, § 3) Thus, the Czech publisher was not such a naïve reader of handbooks as might have seemed at first glance. At the very least, he knew about the discussion about the primitive hut and he knew where he could find illustrations of this. As he could not rely on Voch, he was compelled to turn to another authority. The second print that Truska prepared for his edition of the five orders ‘rewrites’ Voch’s original text even further. The frontispiece shows a rather clumsy depiction of St Peter’s Square in Rome, on the colonnade of which Truska set something like a Greek prostyle (fig. 4). St Peter’s Basilica and the colonnade were often criticised by Neoclassicists who reproached Bernini (and other Baroque architects) for not implementing the orders properly. The colonnade has Doric columns, but the entablature lacks triglyphs. Critics assumed that, given the curve of the wall, the Baroque masters had not known how to calculate properly the position of the triglyph above the columns. In his manual on the application of the five orders, Voch wrote: ‘In Rome one sees an entire colonnade in this Doric Order, which, however, lacks the essential feature of the order, namely triglyphs.’ (Voch, 1779, p. 12). The triumphal arch, which Truska placed as a symbol of architecture in the foreground of the frontispiece, also lacks triglyphs. One can interpret Truska’s frontispiece as demonstrating a shortage of suitable examples from contemporary architecture. The most famous treatise of the five orders showed how they were used in contemporary architecture on the frontispiece: the French edition of Perrault’s translation of Vitruvius (Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve, 1673) and the German translation that was published in Nuremberg, Würzburg and Prague in 1757. In his manual on the application of the five orders, Voch also provided examples in the text and illustrations. Thus one can conclude that Truska’s frontispiece suggests that the publisher of the Czech translation saw the future of the new architecture in Roman Baroque models. Those interested in questions of the five orders could be guided by the altered proportions in these models. Perhaps that is why the edition vanished altogether. The Neoclassicists in Europe and those in Bohemia followed completely different paths.

The First Czech Translation (1783) of the Five Orders

Fig. 4. Simon Truska (drawing) – Jan Berka (print), frontispiece from Voch’s CzechGerman edition of Unterricht zu Aufreissung der fünf Säulenordnungen, 1783, engraving, 15.5 × 17.5 cm, (photo: Národní knihovna ČR, Praha)

The illustrated manual on the five orders, which was published in Prague in 1783, offers particular insights into the relationship between text and image. The bilingual Czech-German edition closely follows the original text, but the publisher expanded the number of illustrations to include two additional prints. One is based on the text, but expands its meaning by providing more pictures of models. The frontispiece, by contrast, indicates that the publisher had his own distinct interpretation of the text in question. This research was supported by the Czech Science Foundation, grant no. 408/04/1356.

TaŤána Petrasová

References Borngässer Klein, B., 2003. Iacomo Barozzi da Vignola. In: Architektur Theorie: von der Renaissance bis zur Gegenwart, Köln: Taschen. Dlabacž, G. J., 1815. Allgemeines historisches Künstler-Lexikon für Böhmen und zum Theil auch für Mähren und Schlesien. Vol. III S–Z, Prag: Gottlieb Haase. Hanzal, J., Otruba, M., 1985. Bohumír Jan Dlabač. In: Lexikon české literatury: Osobnosti, díla, instituce 1. A–G. Praha: Academia. Oechslin, W., 2008. Palladianismus. Andrea Palladio – Kontinuität von Werk und Wirkung. Zürich: gta Verlag. Rykwert, J., 2005. Adams Haus im Paradies: Die Urhütte von der Antike bis le Corbusier. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag. Schütte, U., 1979. ‘Ordnung’ und ‘Verzierung’, Heidelberg: Universität. Vitruvius, M. P., 1960. The Ten Books On Architecture, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Voch, L., 1779. Anwendung der fünf Saulenordnungen. Worin gewiesen wird, wie [...], durch weniges Rechnen, die Dreyschlitze und Triglyphen und Sparrnköpfe, anzubringen: [...]. Als eine Fortsetzung zu dem Unterricht die fünf Saulen aufzureissen, Augsburg: Matthäus Riegers sel. Söhnen. Voch, L., 1778. Unterricht zu Aufreisung der fünf Saulenordnungen nach dem zwölftheiligen Modul. Worinnen auch auf das deutlichste gezeiget wird wie bey allen vorfallenden Säulenweiten die Tryglyphen, und Sparrenköpfen, oder Kragsteine durch weniges Rechnen anzuordnen. Zum bequemern Gebrauch der Werkleute und andern Bauliebhaber mit XXI. Kupfertafeln. Augsburg: Matthäus Riegers sel. Söhnen.

Katarína Beňová László Mednyánszky Illustrations. Exploration of a new cave around 1882-1883 in the Tatra Mountains

The connection between art and literature is one of the most interesting issues in contemporary art history and literary science (Mitchell, 2002; 2008). One of the most common tasks for both subjects is the examination of visual arts in books or journals in the form of illustrations. In this case, a recent discovery of a collection of illustrations by Baron László Mednyánszky for a book written in 1882 by Samuel Weber is of particular interest. Mednyánszky’s extraordinary personality and his artistic skills are very well known to Hungarian and Slovak audiences (Beňová, 2009; Markója, 2008; Bárdoly – Markója, 2007; Czóbel, 2000; Kállai, 1943; Malonyay, 1905). To summarize briefly, he was born to the aristocratic family Mednyánszky in 1852 in Beckov. He spent the first years of his life there, as well as at the family dwelling in Stražky (Beňová, 2004, pp. 158-171). From 1861 on this was essentially home to the whole family, and his artistic career also began here. During the first years, Mednyánszky was influenced by the style of landscape watercolours of Viennese landscapist Thomas Ender. In 1873 he spent two years at the Munich Academy (Prof. A. Seitz, Prof. A. Strähuber), and until 1875 he was at the Ècole des Beaux Arts in Paris (Prof. I. Pils). After completing his studies he spent most of his time abroad, sometimes spending the summer months and time around Christmas at home. He took an interest in modern styles with which he came into contact in France, especially Barbizon landscape painting, which he adopted in his depictions of the natural world of the Tatra Mountains. Throughout his life he maintained an interest in landscape painting and figurative motives. Many of his works

Katarína Beňová

have survived and new discoveries are still being made (Cat. Dreweatts, 2009; Markója, 2009). One of the main sources through which to glean an understanding of Mednyánszky’s art and personality is his diaries (Bárdoly – Markója, 2003, 2007). The diaries begin in 1872 with his first comments about his nomadic life. The form of the diaries is very unique, as Mednyánszky uses the Greek alphabet. There was a family predisposition to this form in the personality of Mednyánszky’s grandfather Boldizsár Szirmay, who used Greek in his diaries. His grandson’s diaries are written in the Greek alphabet, but when transcribing these texts to the Latin alphabet we are provided with a narrative which – for the most part – is in Hungarian or in German. The small notebooks and sketchbooks not only are filled with his comments, but also contain his first illustrations, which however were hidden from the eyes of the public. This “private project,” a documentation of his “secrets,” was a place for reflecting on his demons, personal tragedies, and the better moments of his life. In addition to the words, the visual aspect was also very important for Mednyánszky, which is visible on the basis of the large number of sketches and illustrations. Mednyánszky began doing illustrations in the mid 1880s for the newspaper Vasárnapi Ujság, especially in the form of vedutas and landscape drawings. In 1884 he attended the competition for the best panorama painting held by the town hall in Budapest (Gábor, 1991; Hessky, 2004, p. 179). In 1885 Vasárnapi Ujság printed his drawing of the castle in Trenčín (Trencsén vára) (1885. Vasárnapi Ujság, June 7, p. 368). The cult of picturing old chateaus or castles from Upper Hungary, most of which lay in ruins by the nineteenth century (examples include Beckov and Červený Hrádok), was very popular at the time. Also the brother of Mednyánszky’s grandfather, Alajos Mednyánszky (1784-1844), was a very popular author of the book Malerische Reise auf dem Waagflusse in Ungarn from 1826. Three years later he wrote a book about the legends and stories of the castle, which later became an inspiration for some paintings. He was particularly attracted to the world of ruins and castles, with their special genius loci, mostly in the first years of his career (Castle Beckov, 1870s). Mednyánszky was influenced by some of these stories, as well as his own private interest in these extraordinary places. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century he also made several drawings for the

László Mednyánszky Illustrations

book with the aim of popularizing Austria and Hungary. From 1885 on these were published in brochures entitled Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image. Mednyánszky was mentioned in five books between 1880 and 1900. The most famous of his works are Apricot Market in Kecskemét and Oak-Forest along the Tisza, and it is worth noting that Strážky, Chateau in Brunovce, Castle Tematín and Castle in Ľubovňa were all made with great attention to detail. Before mentioning Mednyánszky’s illustrations of Samuel Weber’s book, I would like to mention something briefly about the whole project, beginning with some facts regarding the discovery of the cave in the 1880s. Born on March 26th 1835 in Poprad, Samuel Weber was a protestant priest, writer, historian and scientist (Kollárová, 2008). For most of his life he lived in the small town of Spišská Belá, close to Château Strážky and Kežmarok. His pursued studies at the evangelical lyceum in Kežmarok, and later in Prešov, where he was a student of theology. Between 1857-1859 Weber was a private tutor of the family of Earl Albin Csáky, and he later studied theology, history, and geography and the natural sciences at the university in Jena. In 1861 Weber married Mária, neé Steiner in Spišská Belá. Daughter of Professor Samuel Steiner from Kežmarok, she was also well educated in literature and music. Although Weber’s primary occupation was as a priest, he was interested in the natural world of the High and Low Tatra Mountains. He founded the Association of Belany (the geographical part of the eastern Tatras) in 1862 and an amateur theatre society in the 1870s. They donated the money they made through the theatre performances (around 10,000 crowns over the course of 10 years) to the foundation of the children’s hospital (Kollárová, 2008, p. 43). As a scientist, Weber was a member of the Hungarian Carpathian Association, which was founded in 1874 in Kežmarok (Kollárová, 2008, p. 53). In 1881 he started a monetary collection in support of the foundation of the Carpathian Museum in Poprad, where in 1883 his former patron Albin Csáky was elected president. Weber made numerous visits to the Tatras, where his primary interest was in botany. As mountaineer he made many excursions, and his discovery of the caves was part of his work for the society. In 1874 the Alabaster Cave was explored, followed by the Belianska Cave in 1881. It is situated in the eastern part of the Tatras called the Belany Tatras, a nature reserva-

Katarína Beňová

tion. The length of the cave is 1752 m. It is fully decorated with natural elements. The entrance was discovered for the first time in the first half of the eighteenth century and for the second time in 1881. It was open to the public for the first time in 1882. In 1896 electric lightening was used in the cave for the first time. Nowadays the length of the cave open to the public is 1135 m. Belianska Cave is the main topic of interest here (Kollárová, 2008, p. 58). There is a letter written to Mednyánszky by Weber about this new discovery in the Archive of the Slovak National Gallery. The painter is asked to attend the visit to the cave to record its beauty: “Dear Mr. Baron. Tomorrow morning a small company of people will make a short visit to the cave. If you are interested and have time to join us I would be very pleased if you could make some drawings. I can send my people for you at 7:00 AM. The clothes for the visit to the cave should be simple and warm. I am looking forward to your reply. Yours, Samuel Weber.” (Bratislava, Archive of the Slovak National Gallery, Fond Mednyánszky). The first visit to the cave took place in August 1881, and one year later, on April 1st, Weber gave a special lecture on it in Kežmarok. With the support of the town he prepared a small book about this discovery entitled Beschreibung Szepes-Belaer Tropfstein – Hohle [Description of the Spis Belá Cave] (Weber, 1883a) in which he used the illustrations done by Mednyánszky. It was published in 1883 (Weber, 1882; Weber, 1883a; Weber, 1883b; Weber, 1884). These sketches must have been executed sometime between 1881 and 1883. During this period, especially in 1882, Mednyánszky spent more time in Strážky. He was visited by the Viennese painter Wilhelm Bernatzik, and together they took a trip to the Zemplín region. In late autumn Mednyánszky also visited Albin Csáky in Mindszent (Bárdoly – Markója, 2007, p. 116). It is possible that he did the sketches for the illustrations at this time, during which one of his favourite activities was taking long walks in Tatras. The book is divided into several chapters with a short, very personal introduction by Weber. He notes, “Zweck der nachfolgenden Zeilen ist, die Touristen über die neuentdeckte Bélaer Tropfstein-höhle zu orientieren und ihnen auch Winke zu ertheilen, welche Partien von der Höhle aus unternommen werden können. Zur Erleichterung des Verständnisses, sind die Herren Baron Ladislaus von Mednyánszky und Josef Novalszky,

László Mednyánszky Illustrations

Archäologe, freundlichts die gelungenen Zeichnungen lieferten, wofür ihnen auch an dieser Stelle der gebührende Dank ausgedrückt wird.” (Weber, 1883a, Vorrede). Weber presents the history of the discovery, information regarding the town of Spišská Belá, the location of the cave, a very detailed botanical description, and details concerning the whole cave (including measurements of particular spaces in the cave). The last part of the book is about the region of the river Dunajec and Lublau, which was also a favourite part of the region for Mednyánszky. Attached is also a map of the cave. The inspiration of Weber’s literature is also mentioned in one section of the book. He describes the nature of the region around the cave, using the 3rd act from Schiller´s Wilhelm Tell: “Wenn man hinuntersteigt von unseren Höhen Und immer tiefer steigt den Strömen nach, Gelangt man in ein schönes, ebńes Land, Wo die Waldwasser nicht mehr brausend schäumen, Die Bäche ruhig und gemächlich zieh´n; Da sieht man frei nach blauen Himmlsräumen, Das Korn wächst dort in langen, schönen Auen, Und wie ein Garten ist das Land zu schauen.“ (Weber, 1883a, p. 33-34.) In 1882, one year after its discovery, some 632 visitors flocked to the cave. Mednyánszky was among the first. His illustrations for the book were made first as drawings and later as etchings. He wrote in his diaries about his meetings, his visits to extraordinary places, different people, etc. Unfortunately, he wrote nothing about his works in the Belá Cave. The illustrations of the cave, however, were his first works done for commission. He undertook them in part because of his good relationship with Samuel Weber (Bárdoly – Markója, 2007, see year 1904) and in part because he was extremely interested in all nature curiosities. As Weber mentioned in the foreword, Mednyánszky did eight sketches. The first one shows a group of people, some in folk costumes, standing around the entrance to the cave, preparing to go in. The grouping of the figures is similar to other works from this period of Mednyánszky’s work, such as Christmas (Štedrý večer, now in a private collec-

Katarína Beňová

tion), which has a similar mood of collective, silent meditation. This first illustration is called Entrance to the Cave (A barlang bejárata – Eingang in die Höhle). The inscription is always written in Hungarian and German. The second illustration, Árpád’s Helm (Árpád sisakja – Árpád Helm), is more horizontal and presents the inner space with some people perched on ladders (fig. 1). When we compare the depiction with the cave at present, we can note some changes wrought by time. The third illustration, Main Hall and Mount Sinai (A díszterem és a Sinai hegy – Prunksaal und Sinaiberg), represents one of the unique details of the cave in the main chamber (fig. 2). Mednyánszky’s illustration focuses on the temporality of the segments of the cave, working deftly with the light and dark patches of the setting. The next one is called Cabinet of Statues (fig. 3). We can see here two people in folk costumes with special hats from this region discovering the group of rock formations. It´s a fine example of Mednyanszky’s work, with contrasts of light and shadows reflecting off the shapes of the cave’s interior.

Fig. 1. László Mednyánszky, Árpád’s Helm, c. 1883, etching, paper. From Samuel Weber: Beschreibung der Szepes-Bélaer Tropfsteinhöle. Turisztikai röpiratok. 1883. (photo: Katarína Beňová)

The fifth image shows people discovering a part of the cave called the Treasury (Az “Ékszer-szekrény” – Schmuckkästchen). One of them holds a lamp, which often bears symbolic value. The vertical composition is dramatically divided by the light. The use of figures was important, as they indicate the dimensions of the space.

László Mednyánszky Illustrations

Fig. 2. László Mednyánszky, Main Hall and Mount Sinai, c. 1883, etching, paper. From Samuel Weber: Beschreibung der Szepes-Bélaer Tropfsteinhöle. Turisztikai röpiratok. 1883. (photo: Katarína Beňová)

Fig. 3. László Mednyánszky, Cabinet of statues, c. 1883, etching, paper. From Samuel Weber: Beschreibung der Szepes-Bélaer Tropfsteinhöle. Turisztikai röpiratok. 1883. (photo: Katarína Beňová)

The so-called Pisa Tower, which at the time of the discovery of the cave was named the Vendome Column (Vendome oszlopa – Vendome Säule) is another unusual formation (fig. 4). The illustration is the only

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one on which the signature of the painter is visible, on the right side. In the foreground there is a detailed depiction of a white tower against a dark background. The last two images are views into the wider parts of the interior of the cave. The first bears the romantic name Home of the Water Nymphs (Hableányook hazája – Nixen-Heim). In fact it depicts the inner lake of the cave, which is decorated with stalagmites and stalactites. Colonnade (Oszlopcsarnok – Säulenhalle) combines figures (as a measuring tool) with the natural scene.

László Mednyánszky Illustrations

The motifs of the cave and rocky mountain are both included in his large size landscape paintings inspired by the area around the Dunajec River and Kotor Bay. These were done before 1900, but there is a nice connection between the motifs from the illustrations from the beginning of the 1880s and those of his main creative period Sunset (Twilight) (1897-98),1 The Dunajec in Autumn (before 1900);2 Landscape Near the Dunajec (before 1900).3 Mednyánszky worked a great deal on the basis of his memories of particular countries, depicting mountains or lakes with the soil and sky in different moods. The motif of the cave was quite popular during the nineteenth century. In Hungary, Károly Markó the Elder (1791-1860) did a series of depictions of the Gombasecká Cave (Aggtelek) in 1821, painting several gouaches of the cave interior (Szvoboda, 2004; Cat. Markó, 1992; Bodnár, 1980). One of the most famous is the so-called Pest Organ. These were done under the influence of Enlightenment and also Romanticism. Nevertheless, the works of both Markó and those of Mednyánszky represent the interest of earlier society in science and new discoveries, with a strain of national pride in the presentation of the beauty of the former monarchy.

Notes László Mednyánszky: Sunset (Twilight), 1897-98, oil, canvas, 231 x 190.5 cm, signed bottom right Mednyánszky. Hungarian National Gallery, inv. no. 1754. 2 László Mednyánszky: The Dunajec in Autumn, before 1900, oil, canvas, 57 x 67 cm, signed bottom right Mednyánszky, Hanság Museum, Mosonmagyaróvár, inv. 95.147. 3 László Mednyánszky: Landscape near the Dunajec, before 1900, oil, canvas, 98.3 x 73.5 cm, signed down right Mednyánszky. Hungarian National Gallery, inv. no. 55.299. 1

Fig. 4. László Mednyánszky, Vendome Column, c. 1883, etching, paper. From Samuel Weber: Beschreibung der Szepes-Bélaer Tropfsteinhöle. Turisztikai röpiratok. 1883. (photo: Katarína Beňová)

Mednyánszky was interested in the variety of landscapes of the former monarchy. On the one hand, the Great Hungarian lowland around the river Tisza represented eternity, while the Tatra Mountains represented spontaneity and strength. As Júlia Szabó mentions in her work on Mednyánszky landscapes, “His landscape drawings and paintings are not connected with definite trends, stylistic tendencies or individual achievements within the boundaries of a particular style, but rather reflect a dialogue with nature that includes the existence of man, animals and plants.” (Szabó, 2003, p. 231).

References Bárdoly, I. – Markója, Cs., 2003. Mednyánszky (1852–1919), Hungarian National Gallery. Bárdoly, I. – Markója, Cs., 2007. Ladislav Mednyánszky Denníky 1877–1918, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava: Kalligram.

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Beňová, K., 2004. Rané roky – Ladislav Mednyánszky a Strážky. In: Cs. Markója, ed. 2004 Mednyánszky (1852-1919), Bratislava: Slovak National Gallery, pp. 158-171. Beňová, K., 2009. Ladislav Mednyánszky (1852-1919), Bratislava: Slovak National Gallery. Bodnár, É., 1980. Id. Markó Károly: (1791-1860), Budapest: Képzôművészeti Alap Kiadóvállalata. Cat. Dreweatts, 2009. Traditional and Contemporary Pictures and Prints, including a collection of Hungarian Pictures, 29. September 2009, Dreweatts, Donnigton Priory Salerooms, pp. 74-83. Cat. Markó, 1992. Id. Markó Károly: (1791 - 1860), 1992. Hungarian National Gallery, 1991, Oct-Dec., 1991. Landesgalerie im Schloss Esterházy, Eisenstadt. E. Bajkay, O. Hessky, E. Szurcsikné Molnár, ed. Czóbel, I. M., 2000. László - Brouillon (Visszaemlékezés), Enigma, 24/25, pp. 56-73. Gábor, E., 1991. Az 1884-85. évi budapesti látképpályázat. Ars Hungarica, 19, pp. 193-195, 198, 201-202. Hessky, O., 2004. Kresliť treba vedieť o štúdiách a kresbách Ladislava Mednyánszkeho v Mníchove. In: Cs. Markója, ed. 2004. Mednyánszky (1852-1919), Bratislava, pp. 172-182. Kállai, E., 1943. Mednyánszky, Budapest. Kollárová, Z., 2008. Samuel Weber, Jadro. Malonyay, D., 1905. Mednyánszky. Budapest. Markója, Cs., 2009. Lost and Found. Büszkeség és Balítélét. A Ringwald-Gyűjtemény Mednyánszkyy-Lépeimek felbukkanása Newburyben. Artmagazin, 35, pp. 16-25. Markója, Cs., 2008. Egy másik Mednyánszky, Budapest: Enigma. Mitchell, W. J. T., 2008. Bildtheorie, 1. edition, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Mitchell, W. J. T., 2002. Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture. In: M. A. Holly – K. Moxey, ed., Art history, aesthetics, visual studies, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 231-250. Szabó, J., 2003. Mednyánzsky László: tájvazlatok táj és „genre“ képek. In Cs. Markója, ed. 2003. Mednyánszky, Hungarian National Gallery. pp. 185-192. Szvoboda Dománszky, G., 2004. Markó. Budapest: Corvina. 1885. Vasárnapi Ujság, June 7, p. 368. Weber, S., 1882. Die neuentdeckte Bélaer Tropfsteinhöle in der Hohen Tatra. Aus allen Weltteilen, pp. 302-306. Weber, S., 1883a, Beschreibung der Szepes-Bélaer Tropfsteinhöle. Turisztikai röpiratok. Weber, S., 1883b. Ein Besuch in den neunetdeckten Räumen der Belaer Tropfsteinhöhle, Karpathen-Post, IV, no. 9, p. 3. Weber, S., 1884. Der Besuch der Belaer Tropfsteinhöhle im Jahre 1884. KarpathenPost, V, 45, pp. 1-2.

Zsuzsanna Benkô Illustrations of the Poetry of Endre Ady at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: György Leszkovszky’s Illustrations of Endre Ady’s Poem To Cry, To Cry, To Cry

In my paper I am going to discuss a relatively unknown illustration of a poem by famous Hungarian poet, Endre Ady. The illustrator was painter György Leszkovszky (1891–1968), a follower of the artists of the Gödöllô Artists Colony, the art nouveau centre of Hungary in the first decades of the twentieth century. Among the works of György Leszkovszky’s rich oeuvre, his illustration series of Endre Ady’s poem To Cry, To Cry, To Cry merits particular attention. The series contains twelve watercolour paintings (eleven completed illustrations and one study), and it was exhibited at the National Salon in 1922, at the second exhibition of the Cennini Society, which was founded by Leszkovszky himself in 1920. (Cennini Society, 1922. Cat. no.: 91-94, 129-140.) Endre Ady was born in 1877 and started writing early, but his cult did not really begin to flower until 1906, with the publication of New Verses. He was an archetypal poet and his persona divided public opinion. Perceptions of him as a romantic, a revolutionary, and an opponent of the Second World War were all part of a conscious image-creating machinery in operation. There are also several myths in literature related to Endre Ady, as well as rumours concerning his drinking and epic womanizing. In the early twentieth century Nyugat (West) was the mainstream periodical, and from the moment of the publication of New Verses until his death, Ady, as one of the leading figures of Nyugat, was undeniably a “prince of poets” with a definite poetical mission (Kappanyos, 2007).

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Following his death in 1919 a fight began for the monopolization of his intellectual heritage, and he was soon elevated into the national pantheon (Serf, 2009, pp. 40-42). It is therefore perhaps not surprising that an artist searching for (or coming across by chance) poetic inspiration in the early 1920s thought first and foremost of Ady (Kovalovszky, 1985, p. 45). It is also worth considering why György Leszkovszky chose to illustrate one of Ady’s less widely known poems, To Cry, To Cry, To Cry. His decision may have been related to tragic events in his life at the time. In 1920 both Leszkovszky’s brother and his beloved master at the Gödöllô Artists’ Colony, Aladár Körösfôi-Kriesch, died. Their deaths may well have prompted the creation of the illustrations. Ady had manifold connections with the world of visual arts. Besides his poems and prose works he wrote numerous critical writings about the fine arts as well. His interest in the fine arts was an intellectual awareness. He dealt with some of the old masters, but he preferred contemporary French and Hungarian art. When he visited Paris he also encountered works by Rodin and Gauguin, for whom he held great admiration. Among the Hungarian artists he had high regard for the work of László Mednyánszky, Béla Iványi Grünwald, and Károly Ferenczy, and he was also a friend of Károly Kernstok and József Rippl-Rónai, who were all in contact with the Parisian art scene and whose works he greatly appreciated (Varga, 1977, pp. 7-19). Ady had some ties to the artists of the Gödöllô Artists’ Colony, and it was Sándor Nagy, one of the leading figures of the colony, who illustrated Ady’s epoch-making poems New Verses in 1906. One of the drawings was done at Ady’s request, and he was quite pleased with the final product.1 Also many artists illustrated his poems in the early twentieth century, including Lajos Kozma in a Beardsley-like style and Álmos Jaschik, who brooded over his illustrations for quite a long time (Németh, 1977, pp. 97-106). Álmos Jaschik, who himself did eight drawings for Ady’s poems, wrote about Ady illustrations in Nyugat, expressing his view that it was both a rewarding and a demanding task, since Ady’s poems are visual in themselves, entwined with the colourfulness and richness of his symbolism. According to Jaschik, Ady did not want the illustrator to follow his thoughts submissively, nor did he want him to make them profane for the sake of clarity. He writes: “Ady cannot bear a word-for-word

Illustrations of the Poetry of Endre Ady

graphical transposition, and he does not need a graphical explanation or creation of a painterly atmosphere either, and above all he does not need an individualistic artist who merely indulges one of the seemingly important periods of his artistic development on the pretext of illustrating [his work].” For Jaschik it was not enough to read and understand Ady, one had to unify oneself with him. Good Ady-illustrations prolong the effects of the poem. In Jaschik’s words: “A graphic, when it comes to Ady, must not give more than Ady himself has given, and if he reduces it, he will lose the inner relationship with the poet, and his illustration will be a simple picture, inspired by the unique impression of Ady.”(Jaschik, 1920, p. 566). The contemporary critic Artúr Elek also wrote about the difficulties of illustrating Ady: “the majority of the poems are so pictorially imagined, so concretely envisioned, that the illustrator cannot add anything to them. To summarize, Ady’s works are rather unsuitable for illustration.” (Elek, 1920, pp. 391-392). It is a recognized fact that translating a work of literature from one language to another is exceedingly complex. The loyal, word-for-word translation of a literary – not liturgical or professional – text is a vain pretension, since the latent meaning often falls prey to the striving to preserve original meaning. As Yves Bonneyfoy puts it, “words are untranslatable, though ideas are universal”. (Bonneyfoy, 2000, p. 48).2 These universal ideas, embodied in other types of works of art, such as music or the visual arts, may be more accessible to common understanding. According to Paul Valéry, images, sculptures, sonatas, and symphonies are international, while poems are untranslatable (Valéry, 1987, p. 153).3 Many critics have remarked on the difficulty of translation in reference to Ady’s poems.4 In the case of To Cry, To Cry, To Cry, as I was unable to find an English translation of the poem, I had to translate it myself. As I am not a professional translator, I ask my reader to be indulgent with respect to my humble effort. I ignored both rhyme scheme and the number of syllables, attempting simply to give a word-for-word translation of the poem in the hopes that it might prove useful in a discussion of Leszkovszky’s illustration, as Leszkovszky did a sort of word-for-word illustration of the literary work.

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Ady Endre: Sírni, sírni, sírni

Endre Ady: To Cry, To Cry, To Cry

Várni, ha éjfélt üt az óra, Egy közeledô koporsóra.

To wait when the clock strikes midnight For an approaching coffin’s sight.

Nem kérdezni, hogy kit temetnek, Csengettyűzni a gyászmenetnek.

Not to ask who’s being buried, Ring a hand-bell for the mourners.

Ezüst sátrak, fekete leplek Alatt lóbálni egy keresztet.

To swing a cross under Silver tents and black dresses,

Állni gyászban, súlyos ezüstben, Fuldokolni a fáklyafüstben.

To stand in mourning, in heavy silver, To breath in the fume of torches

Zörgô árnyakkal harcra kelni, Fojtott zsolozsmát énekelni.

To struggle with rattling shadows, To sing a subdued chant.

Hallgatni orgonák búgását, Síri harangok mély zúgását.

To listen to the humming organ And the deep rumbling of the grave bells.

Lépni mély, tárt sírokon által Komor pappal, néma szolgákkal.

To step over deep, open graves With silent churchmen and sombre priest

Remegve, bújva, lesve lopva Nézni egy idegen halottra.

Shaking, hiding, secretly peeping, To look at an unknown dead man

Fázni holdas, babonás éjen Tömjén árban, lihegve mélyen.

To feel cold on a superstitious, moonlighted night In flood of incense, gasping for breath.

Tagadni múltat, mellet verve, Megbabonázva, térdepelve. Megbánni mindent. Törve, gyónva Borulni rá egy koporsóra. Testamentumot, szörnyűt, írni És sírni, sírni, sírni, sírni.

To deny the past, beating your breast Enchanted, down on your knees To regret everything. To lay over a coffin Broken, confessing. To write a testament, one terrifying And to cry, to cry, to cry, to cry.

Illustrations of the Poetry of Endre Ady

As Emôke Varga observes, “an illustration in some sense repeats, or paraphrases the textual world of the literary work with visual signs, re-writes the verbal narrative with a visual narrative.” (Varga, 2004, p. 259). In this case Leszkovszky indeed repeats the textual world of Ady’s poem, though he does so slavishly, so much so that his illustration resembles more an explanatory illustration from a children’s book of terms and ideas than a work of art inspired by a poem. His illustration deprives the observer of the joy of free association and independent interpretation, it is not an ekphrastic work but a didactic representation. In loose terms ekphrasis is the verbal portrayal of visual representation, and ekphrastic poems speak to, for or about works of visual art. In the words of W. J. T. Mitchell, “ekphrastic poetry is the genre is which texts encounter their own semiotic ‘others’, those rival, alien modes of representation called the visual, graphic, plastic, or spatial arts.” (Mitchell, 1994, pp. 156,159). Leszkovszky turns this process backwards. Here the visual work speaks about or rather literally describes the poem. Unfortunately his enterprise was not a wholly successful one. To quote Lessing, “for poets to employ the same artistic machinery as the painter would be to convert a superior being into a doll.” One cannot help but suspect that this is what befell Ady’s poem via Leszkovszky’s illustration. (Lessing, 1969, pp. 68-69).5 According to Kristóf Nyíri, “people initially think in terms of images and only later in words” (Nyíri, 2003, p. 264). In this sense, with his slavish imitation Leszkovszky seemingly tried to reconstruct the original mental images of the poet. However, one should not forget that the identification of the author’s original intention is misleading, or rather one cannot always identify this intention unambiguously. We should also take into consideration that interpretation is a constantly changing and continuous practice, which occurs in the mind of an era. Thus the same work of art is not identical in different eras and contexts (Szegedy-Maszák, 2007, pp. 51-62). Presumably we do not experience an old work of art in precisely the same manner as our predecessors, since the message of the artwork is a factor of history, and we can only substitute a new understanding for a forgotten one (Szegedy-Maszák, 2007, pp. 113, 117). Both literary texts and works of the visual arts usually have several meanings, depending on the reader/viewer and the circumstances, which is not a negative but rather a positive feature. If everyone interprets a poem or a painting

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differently, this may be an indication of the talent of the artist (Kibédi Varga, 2003, p. 75). It is unfortunate that Leszkovszky’s word-for-word illustration narrows down the possible understandings to a single, particular interpretation. Since he presents a young woman in mourning attire, he excludes possible embodiments of the subject of the poem, including men and elderly characters (colour image 6, see colour plates). As in other cases when verbal narrative precedes the image, the poem evokes a visual image. The reader, here Leszkovszky, does not create, but rather reacts and translates the verbal narrative to the visual medium. This translation, like any translation, is not without consequences. Just as verbal narration deletes some information (like shades of colour) and introduces others aspects that could not be present in a visual narrative (disjunction, hypothesis), visual portrayal deprives the narrative of several important features. However, the translation from verbal to visual has positive consequences as well. An image includes movement, a contextualised present that is delimited by its own past and future.6 Thus the illustration of this poem is a kind of a triple translation of the same idea, in the sense that an idea appears first as a mental image or mental narrative in the poet’s mind, then in verbal/written form, and finally as a visual image or narrative. It is a process of gradual widening of reception and understanding: the mental image inside the poet’s mind becomes accessible to a broader circle of readers or listeners, providing new, subjective interpretations (which can be very different from the artist’s intention), and with a visual representation the confinement of solitary reading gives way to an even wider range of possible interpretations. In Leszkovszky’s visual translation of Ady’s poem, from the semantic point of view, from the standpoint of referring, expressing intentions and provoking response in a reader/viewer, there is no essential semantic difference between the text and the image. As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, “language can stand in for depiction and depiction can stand in for language because communicative, expressive acts, narration, argument, description, exposition and other so-called ‘speech acts’ are not medium specific, are not ‘proper’ to some medium or other,” although “there are important differences between visual and verbal media at the level of sign-types, forms, materials of representation, and institutional traditions” (Mitchell, 1994, pp. 160-161).

Illustrations of the Poetry of Endre Ady

The poem Leszkovszky illustrated is in the book Blood and Gold, published in 1907. The book consists of seven cycles, and To Cry, To Cry, To Cry is the seventeenth poem in the second cycle, Kinsman of Death. However, from the point of view of poetic development Blood and Gold can be regarded as part of the same unit as New Verses, though it has more sombre hues. The subject of the opening cycle, Kinsman of Death, is the intermingling of the fear of death with love for the excitement of living. “Once the thought has risen to the surface, death is thereafter recognized as the never plumbed depth of the unconscious,” writes Anton Nyerges (Nyerges, 1969, p. 31). Thus the cycle’s poems are replete with Freudian symbols and allegories, as well as religious mysteries (Nyerges, 1969, pp. 11-56). To Cry, To Cry, To Cry is tragic in its emotional content and frightening in its atmosphere. But in addition to fear, the reader might sense another kind of disturbance, some uncertainty concerning the persona of the speaker. This question – who is crying – is not answered. The poem does not have a subject and the verbs are all in the infinitive. The poem does not refer to a specific time or place. It is dreamlike and mysterious, and this indefiniteness adds to its meanings. According to Leszkovszky’s illustration, the temporal setting is his era, the physical setting includes several sites (a chapel, a cemetery, a room in a house etc.), and the subject is a young woman. Without the text of the poem, viewer might have several guesses regarding the subject of the poem. For example, the young woman could be a “professional” mourner, or some female relative or helper of one of the clerics. If one observes the series one by one, the list of possible identifications grows even longer. She might be a character of one of the ghost stories popular at the turn of the century, or a grief-stricken young widow, or a mourner informing someone in a letter about the death of a beloved (colour images 7-8, see colour plates). The list is virtually endless. According to Aladár Komlós the subject is Ady himself, and the poem is not about the inconsolable grief of some loss, but rather the regret over his wasted life, and the role of the infinitives is to hide this truth (Komlós, 2007, pp. 15-20). However, this constitutes the first instance when the observer might notice the differences caused simply by the differences between the two media, text and image. In the poem the reader is not told exactly who the subject is. He or she can freely associate and meditate on the possibilities, or even identify

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himself or herself with the subject, thus providing endless variations of understanding. Conversely, in the case of the image, the viewer is faced with a definite identification, and given less freedom to construe. Though a series is usually easier to interpret if the parts are joined together, in the case of Leszkovszky’s illustration the opposite is the case. The observer is free to associate freely when viewing the paintings individually, but when they are united, interpretation is restricted. While the viewer could doubtlessly identify the young woman in every painting as the same person, the narrative nonetheless does not seem to form a complete, logical whole. The scenes are apparently independent of one another, as if they were portrayals of equally important events. And this is indeed the case. There are several structures that have crucial importance in the text, one of them is repetition. Syntactically, repetition is the tool of co-ordination, and it can pinpoint the things lined up one-byone, each of which is given equal stress because of the repetitive grammatical structures (Kibédi Varga, 2003, p. 80). Thus repetition represents a significant difference between the verbal and the visual representation: while in the poem repetition adds to the atmosphere of the text, increasing the tension, in the illustrations repetition causes confusion, since it deprives the observer of the inherent desire for (chronological or other) order in narration. Consequently the illustration cannot convey the “message”; it cannot exist without the poem. Luckily (perhaps because he foresaw this problem, or perhaps as part of deliberate adherence to the tradition of Körösfôi, who often wrote explanatory titles on his pictures) the painter included the explanatory two lines in the illustration itself. The quoted and visually depicted lines are at the bottom of each painting, which is the “normal” relation (narrative explanation is generally located in the margins of the image, in a position understood to be “outside” the present moment of depicted action, following a more traditional formula involving the clear subordination of one medium to the other) (Mitchell, 1994, pp. 91-92). In addition to the extremely rich and intense visual impressions conveyed by Ady’s poem, Leszkovszky used other sources in the creation of his work. On the one hand there is the verbal inspiration of the poem, on the other hand the whole “storehouse” of visual tradition. Related to the question of probable sources, I would refer to Arthur Koestler’s work (The Act of Creation, 1964) on the genre of illustration and the terms for

Illustrations of the Poetry of Endre Ady

the creation of artworks by Emôke Varga. Koestler states that whatever claims one might venture concerning the identity of the system of verbal codes/signs for the illustrator and the observer, no such contentions can be made in the case of visual codes/signs. The illustrator chooses from the elements of visual tradition (including previous illustrations of the given literary work, and the codes/signs of his own world), but for the observer these elements become duplicated information. The observer sees the common visual tradition through the concrete illustration, via the illustrator’s interpretation and choice, (Varga, 2005) and thus “the reader evidently becomes a viewer, too, who familiarizes himself with a duplicated virtual world.” (Varga, 2003, p. 238). The illustrator is inspired by the text itself, previous illustrations, and other visual predecessors. Since there was no earlier illustration of the poem To Cry, To Cry, To Cry, visual inspiration lay elsewhere (colour image 9, see colour plates). The painter may have known the work of Sándor Nagy from 1906, but there is no significant similarity between the two pictures. However, Leszkovszky’s illustration bears considerable resemblances with the female figures of Aladár Körösfôi-Kriesch. This is not surprising, as Leszkovszky slavishly imitated the style of his master. To take only one example, there is a striking similarity to the features of the tapestry of Körösfôi-Kriesch, Sitting Woman with Roses (around 1906). Contemporary critics emphasised the similarity of the painting to Pre-Raphaelite works of art as well, and indeed one can find several common features of the mourning woman of Leszkovszky’s illustration and the figures of his personal favourite Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Burne-Jones (The Marriage of Psyche, 1895). His gothic S-shaped female figures also evoke the works of several symbolist artists, for example the kneeling, painfully waving characters of Belgian Georges Minne (Crying Mother, 1890) or the enervated, living corpselike women of Netherlander Jan Toorop (Fatalism, 1893). In this sense Leszkovszky’s illustration “wins over” the text, since while the poem awakens the observer’s own mental images, the picture also works as an evocation of images of the common, inherited visual tradition. This also refers to more abstract subjects, such as rage, fear, and amazement, and their depiction, including for instance portrayals found in various model books and even in the code system of baroque art theory, which categorised human affects and emotions. (Varga, 2003, p. 241).

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On examining the relationship between György Leszkovszky’s illustration and Endre Ady’s poem one finds several differences that have less to do with the characteristics of the two media (text and image) than one might have anticipated. To quote W. J. T. Mitchell, “the real question to ask when confronted with these kinds of image-text relations is not ‘what is the difference (or similarity) between the words and the images,’ but ‘what difference do the differences (and similarities) make?’” (Mitchell, 1994, p. 91). In this case the viewer is confronted with issues of interpretation, whether the verbal or the visual representation of the given poem offers more opportunities for understanding. In some cases the text proves to be more fertile, for instance in the realisation of the narrative; while in other cases the image is more inspiring, as it revives the store of the visual tradition.

Illustrations of the Poetry of Endre Ady

In: Kulcsár Szabó, E., ed. 2003. Történelem, kultúra, medialitás. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó. pp. 15-30. For example, in Nyugat in 1941 György Somlyó reacted quite harshly to a freshlypublished English translation of Ady poems by René Bonnerjea. He claimed that the translation is dilettante, mannerist and handles rhyme scheme irresponsibly. Somlyó, 1941. Ady-angolul. René Bonnerjea fordítása. Nyugat. 1941/5. p. 432. English translations of Ady’s poems include: Nyerges, Anton. N., 1946. A Selection of Poems from the Writings of Endre Ady. Bloomington: Indiana Universty Press, 1946; Nyerges, Anton N., 1969. Poems of Endre Ady. Buffalo: Hungarian Cultural Foundation; Bard, E., 1987. Selected Poems, with an introduction. Munich: Hieronymus.

Lessing, G., Laocoon (1766), transl. by E. Frothingham, 1969. New York: Noonday Press, 1969, pp.68-69. Cited by Mitchell p.155.

Kibédi Varga, 2003, p. 55; Debray, R., 1992. Vie et mort de l’image – Une histoire du regard en Occident, Gallimard. Paris, pp. 347-348. Cited by Kibédi Varga, 2003, pp. 52-53.

Notes 1

Endre Ady himself wrote to Léda (Adél Brüll) about Sándor Nagy’s drawing of his poem Our Children, commenting that in his assessment the illustration was magnificent. (G. Merva, 2007, p. 226.; Révész B. s.a., Ady és Léda. Budapest, pp. 146, 153). Sándor Nagy mentions in his memoirs that Ady personally asked him to illustrate his book of poems. (G. Merva, 2007, p. 227.) Ady also asked Nagy to illustrate the title page of New Verses, published in 1906, but long after Ady’s death in 1928 Nagy made a new series of illustrations for Ady’s poems which never appeared in public. Still, it shows the continuing influence of the poet. It is generally observed, however, that his illustrations are more the visions of the painter than the poet. Gellér, K., 1977 Nagy Sándor versillusztrációiról. Művészettörténeti Értesítô, 1977/1, pp. 2123; Gellér-Keserü, 1987, pp. 20-23.; Nagy S., 1928. Ady rajzaim. Magyar Művészet. pp. 607-608.; G. Merva, 2007, pp. 156-158. Elek, A., 1928. Nagy Sándor Ady rajzai. Nyugat. 1928/II. p. 566.

Cited by Szegedy-Maszák, who amongst others refers to the works of Bonneyfoy, Horváth, Neumer and Taruskin. Bonnefoy, Y., 2000. La Communauté des traducteurs. Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg; Horváth I. 2006. Gépeskönyv. Budapest: Balassi; Neumer K., ed. 2003. Kép, beszéd, írás. Budapest: Gondolat; Taruskin, R., 1995. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Szegedy-Maszák, 2007, pp. 121, 123.

Valéry, P., 1987. Zur Theorie der Dichtkunst. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 153. Cited by Kulcsár Szabó, E. 2003. Kötészettörténet és a mediális kultúrtechnikák.

References Ady Endre összes versei. Budapest: Anno Kiadó, 2003. (Reprint. Atheneum, 1930) Elek, A., 1920. Jaschik Álmos Ady-illusztrációi. Nyugat, 1920/7-8., pp. 391-392. Gellér, K., 1997. A szecessziós könyvillusztráció Magyarországon (1895-1925). Miskolc: Miskolci Galéria. A Miskolci Galéria Könyvei 11. Gellér, K., 1977. Nagy Sándor versillusztrációiról. Művészettörténeti Értesítô, 1977/1., pp. 21-23. Gellér, K. – Keserü K., 1987. A gödöllôi művésztelep. Budapest: Corvina. G. Merva, M., 2007. Írók és múzsák Gödöllôn. Gödöllô: Gödöllôi Városi Múzeum. Jaschik, Á., 1920. Ady-illusztrációk Nyugat 1920/ 7-8. p. 566.Kappanyos, B., 2007. Az irodalomtörténet mítoszai. Alföld, 2007. October. [Online]. Available at: http://www.alfoldfolyoirat.hu/?q=node/66 [Accessed 25 August 2009]. Kibédi Varga, Á., 2003. A jelen. Irodalom és művészet a századfordulón. Pozsony: Kalligram Kiadó. Komlós, A., 2007. Ady Endre Sírni, sírni, sírni című versének elemzése. In: Híres Magyar költôk verseinek elemzése. Nyíregyháza. pp. 15-20. Kovalovszky, M., 1985. Jaschik Álmos és az Ady-illusztrációk. Új Tükör, 1985/17., p. 45. Mitchell, W. J. T., 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

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Németh, L., 1977. Utószó. In: J. Varga, ed. 1977. Az élet szobra. Ady Endre képzôművészeti írásai. Budapest: Corvina. pp. 97-106. Nyerges, Anton N., 1969. Poems of Endre Ady. Buffalo, New York: Hungarian Cultural Foundation. Nyíri, K., 2003. A gondolkodás képelmélete. In: K. Neumer, ed. 2003. Kép, beszéd, írás. Budapest: Gondolat. pp. 264-277. Somlyó, Gy., 1941. Ady – angolul, René Bonnerjea fordítása. Nyugat, 1941/5. Figyelô. p. 653. Serf, A., 2009. Volt képe hozzá: Az Ady kultusz kezdetei. HVG, 2009. Jan.31., pp. 40-42. Szegedy-Maszák, M., 2007. Szó, kép, zene. A művészetek összehasonlító vizsgálata. Pozsony: Kalligram Kiadó. Varga, E., 2005. A kód, a matrix, a biszociáció – meg az illusztráció. In: Pro Philosophia füzetek. Történet és kultúrbölcseleti al-manah. 2005 /3. [Online] Availale at: http://www.c3.hu/~prophil/profi053/varga.html [Accessed 23 August 2009] Varga, E., 2003. Madách és Kass Mózese. Téma és térképezés. In: K. Bene, ed. 2004. XI. Madách Szimpózium. Balassagyarmat-Szügy-Alsósztregova. Madách Irodalmi Társaság Budapest-Balassagyarmat. pp. 238-247. Varga, E., 2004. Nincs elefántcsonttorony. Az illusztrátor Kass János az irodalmi műhelyek vonzásában. In: A. Schaffner, ed. 2004. Új tendenciák a komparatisztikában IV. Szeged-Amiens: Juhász Gyula Tanárképzô Fôiskola. pp. 256-262. Varga, J., 1977. Elôszó. In: J. Varga, ed. 1977. Az élet szobra. Ady Endre képzôművészeti írásai. Budapest: Corvina, pp. 7-19.

Tomáš Winter Robinson Crusoe, František Tichý and the Cannibals

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s celebrated novel, was first published in 1719. The book, a fictional autobiography that reflected but at the same time challenged the stereotypes of colonial discourse, quickly won popularity among the Czech readership. Throughout the nineteenth century, the novel inspired numerous literary adaptations in which the original story was more or less adapted and adjusted to the local milieu. Only the 1920 edition of Robinson Crusoe’s first volume, translated by Albert Vyskočil, was considered a faithful translation (Hlinka, 1983, pp. 67–77; Brožová, 2008, pp. 293–305). The second volume was published in 1933, in Timothy Vodička’s translation, and the third and final volume has not been published in Czech to this day. Czech adaptations and translations of Robinson Crusoe have been richly illustrated by a range of local and international artists. The most highly regarded among these works are the illustrations by František Tichý. Born in 1896, Tichý was a talented and versatile artist whose oeuvre included painting, drawing and prints. One of the solitary figures of Czech modern art, Tichý was never part of any avant-garde movement, and his work is most commonly linked to the so-called École de Paris. In his art, to a great extent focused on circus themes, Tichý reworked in a highly distinctive manner the traditions of Post-Impressionism and Expressionism. Tichý produced the illustrations for the first volume of Vyskočil’s abridged translation of Robinson Crusoe published in 1941 by the Prague-based Orbis publishing house. The artist exhibited these drawings in April 1942 in Poš’s Gallery in Prague and the book had its first re-edition the same year. The reviewers all emphasised the deliberate

Tomáš Winter

archaism and refined primitivism of the illustrations, well suited to the text and based on old woodcarvings (Halas, 1942, pp. 4–6; Nvk [Novák], 1942, pp. 58–59). The translator Albert Vyskočil stressed that Tichý’s illustrations were no mere accessory to the text. He saw them as a “vivid, remarkable whole, capturing in the refined primitivism of their rendition something of the charm of woodcarvings we know from folk literature, and an intimate sense of magic that remains with us from our childhood reading” (Vyskočil, 1942, no page no.). The confrontation with cannibalism forms one of the key themes in Robinson Crusoe’s first volume (See e.g. Jooma, 2001, pp. 57–78). The novel presents Robinson’s encounter with the cannibals in a drawn-out way, keeping the reader in suspense. It begins with the castaway’s early worries that the more distant shores may be inhabited by cannibals. This then turns into a certainty, sealed by the discovery of a smouldering fire with human bones scattered around it. These were the remains of a traditional ritual, in which the savages rode in their canoes to ‘Robinson’s’ island to devour their prisoners there. Robinson saves one of the prisoners, civilises him and cures him of cannibalism, and he also violently intervenes to end the entire course of the cannibalistic festivities. Robinson’s view of the cannibals is not consistent, however, but develops over time. Defoe likewise describes the cannibals as terrible monsters, and comments on their diabolical perversity and the nauseating and disgusting foulness of human nature, but as time goes by, thanks to his Christian faith and its teachings concerning the origins of man, Robinson finds a certain sympathy for these rituals without ever being able to accept them fully. His thinking thus undergoes an interesting trajectory from initial vague ideas to certainty in his condemnation of cannibalism and later to an attempt to understand the savages. In a wider context, Robinson’s attitude and his behaviour represent the common colonial attitude of the English, while at the same time transgressing certain schemes and opening up new questions in the colonialist discourse (Lestringant, 1997, p. 142). Tichý’s illustrations for Robinson Crusoe refer directly to cannibalism in the decorative initial at the beginning of the chapter ‘A Terrible Theatre’ (fig. 1). Tichý depicts Robinson’s revelation as it is described in the text: “[...] nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of

Robinson Crusoe, František Tichý and the Cannibals

human bodies; and particularly I observed a place where there had been a fire made [...].”

Fig. 1. František Tichý, Decorative initial from the book by Daniel Defoe Tales of Robinson Crusoe. Praha, Orbis 1941. (photo: Institute for Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague)

This particular scene featured, in various interpretations, in the majority of Czech illustrated editions of the book, such as the editions of 1870, 1890, 1894 and 1912, all with illustrations by foreign artists. Illustrations of this scene by Czech artists consist of the coloured prints jointly produced by Vojtěch Preissig and René Klapač in 1934, drawings by Em. Posledník for the 1940 edition of the book, and a later drawing by Zdeněk Burian, the second best-known Czech illustrator of Robinson Crusoe. When poet František Halas described and evaluated Tichý’s illustrations for Robinson Crusoe in 1942, he emphasised that Tichý “has been pondering illustrating this work for years and the resulting images show all the marks of maturity” (Halas, 1942, p. 5). Halas’s remark raises the question as to whether inspiration from Defoe’s novel might be discernible in Tichý’s work before the artist produced the actual illustrations. In 1933, during his sojourn in Paris, Tichý produced the first variant of the painting White Blacks. It depicts a canoe with ‘savages’ being tossed about by heavy seas. The painting was apparently inspired by a wooden ‘Negro’ boat carving, possibly of African origin, which

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Tichý acquired from a Hungarian exile named Ormos. (Šafránek, 1965, pp. 68–71; Tomeš, 1976, p. 72). According to the recollections of Jan Šafránek, Tichý used to meet with Ormos at the Flea Market in the vicinity of Porte de Clignancourt (Šafránek, 1965, p. 68). At the time when Tichý made his first sketches for White Blacks he was fascinated by adventure novels. In November 1932, Tichý asked František Springer to send him Bret Harte’s maritime stories, published in instalments by the Prague-based Bedřich Kočí publishing house during the late 1920s (Springer, 1962, p. 8). Literary themes from adventure fiction are reflected in several other paintings and drawings by Tichý that date from this period. The inspiration behind his gouache Enoch Arden (1931) was the famous ballad by Alfred Tennyson. Jan Tomeš has identified the model for Ship of the Dead, painted by Tichý in the same year as the first variant of White Blacks, in a passage from the Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym, the book by Edgar Allan Poe, published in Czech translation in the 1920s (Tomeš, 1976, p. 68, note 70).

Robinson Crusoe, František Tichý and the Cannibals

In the final variant on the theme, Tichý monumentalised the figures depicted and reinforced their savage character by portraying their ritually painted bodies. The title for the entire series – White Blacks – refers to the ritual adornment of the body characteristic of certain native tribes. It is possible that Tichý’s inspiration for the subject matter came not solely from the aforementioned woodcarving of a canoe, but also from his familiarity with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, to which the figures in the canoes refer. In earlier illustrations, paddling savages can be seen in the drawings by Walter Paget, included in the 1894 and 1938 Czech editions of the book. A year prior to Tichý’s work on the illustrations, the same theme was rendered in the edition featuring the drawings by Em. Posledník. As well as paddling figures, a further drawing by Posledník depicts warriors stepping out of a canoe, holding spears and shields painted with motifs copied from the tribal art of New Guinea. The canoe with savages on the open sea also feature in the background of a scene in Vyskočil’s first unabridged translation of the first volume of Robinson Crusoe, dating from 1920.

The expressive rendering of the facial features of the figures in Ship of the Dead can be interpreted as a reference to savage masks. The same is true of some of the variants of White Blacks, including the final variant of 1936 (fig. 2). A sketch from this same year, now unfortunately lost, is exceptionally remarkable in this regard. The inspiration drawn from the African and Oceanic masks, and also from the masks of Indian tribes from the north-west coast of America, is strikingly evident.

If Tichý was inspired to create his series of White Blacks by the savages from Defoe’s novel, he must have been aware that they were can-

Tomáš Winter

nibals. The fact is further supported by another pencil drawing of a head of a black man from 1936 that was a detailed treatment of one of the paddling figures and which Tichý later also rendered as a print (fig. 3). One of the most striking elements of this face is its highlighted half-open mouth, revealing two rows of bared teeth. This element is entirely consistent with the character of the ‘savages’ featured in Defoe’s book. At the same time it introduces the subject of vagina dentata, a theme that Sigmund Freud associated with cannibalism (Freud, 1905, pp. 158–161). It was by no means a coincidence that Tichý used the head of the black man in the decorative initial at the beginning of the chapter ‘An Old Wound Reopened’, which includes mention of the cannibalism of the savages and the danger they posed to Robinson (fig. 4). A direct link is thus established between the first series of White Blacks and the illustrations for Defoe’s novel. The question remains as to the logic of this link. The fact that the figures of White Blacks are cannibals contributes to the depth of content and lends a special status to the painting. Cannibalistic rituals in general involved a natural belief that by eating fellow human beings a man would acquire their physical, moral and intellectual qualities. This was behind the exceptional significance attributed to the ritual of eating a god, mirrored in the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, the communion of the body of Christ (See Frazer, 1890).

Fig. 4. František Tichý, Decorative initial from the book by Daniel Defoe Tales of Robinson Crusoe, Praha, Orbis 1941, (photo: Institute for Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague)

Robinson Crusoe, František Tichý and the Cannibals

Faced with the gaze of the cannibals, the viewer is placed in the position of the victim in Tichý’s painting. The work’s power increases with each new viewing. Whereas Pablo Picasso situates the viewer in front of his best known painting as a customer and victim of the animalistic sexuality of the prostitutes, Tichý in the final version of White Blacks does away with the viewer altogether by allowing him to be devoured. An empty space replaces the viewer standing before the eternal painting. From the original literary inspiration, the path leads to more general conclusions, disengaging with Defoe’s text and suggesting rumination on the meaning and timelessness of art, eternity, and the power of painting constantly to renew itself, with the viewer, alongside the artist, giving the necessary legitimacy to its existence. This contribution is part of the Czech Science Foundation project Primitivism in Czech Visual Art and Theory 1850–1950 (No. 408/08/ P490). Translated by Branislava Kuburović

References Brožová, V., 2008. Robinson v Čechách: k českým adaptacím Defoeova Robinsona v 19. století (Robinson in Bohemia: for 19th century Czech adaptations of Defoe’s Robinson). In: K. Bláhová – V. Petrbok, ed. 2008. Cizí, jiné, exotické v české kultuře 19. století (Foreign, Other, Exotic in the Czech 19th Century Culture). Sborník příspěvků z 27. ročníku sympozia k problematice 19. století. Plzeň, 22.–24. února 2007. Praha: Academia – Koniasch Latin Press, pp. 293–305. Frazer, J. G., 1890. The Golden Bough. London: Macmillan. Freud, S., 1905. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905). London: Hogarth Press, pp. 158–161. Halas, F., 1942. Konečně český Robinson! (A Czech Robinson At Last!). 3 týdny v umění. Tři týdny od 27. dubna do 17. května 1942. Praha: F. Topič, pp. 4-6. Hlinka, B., 1983. Robinson Crusoe. Mýtus a skutečnost (Myth and Reality). Praha: Práce. Jooma, M., 2001. Robinson Crusoe Inc(orporates): Domestic Economy, Incest, and the Trope of Cannibalism. In: K. Guest, ed. 2001. Eating Their Words: cannibalism and the boundaries of cultural identity. New York: State University of New York Press 2001, pp. 57–78.

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Lestringant, F., 1997. Cannibals: the discovery and representation of the cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne. Berkeley – Los Angeles: University of California Press. Nvk [Novák A.], 1942. František Tichý. Hollar, 18, pp. 58–59. Šafránek M., 1965. Francouzská léta Františka Tichého (František Tichý’s French Years). Praha: NČSVU 1965. Springer, F., 1962. Vzpomínky na Františka Tichého (Memories of František Tichý). Výtvarná práce 10 (7), pp. 4-5, 8. Tomeš, J., 1976. František Tichý. Malířské dílo (František Tichý. Painting). Praha: Odeon 1976. Vyskočil, A., 1942. Český Robinson (Czech Robinson). In: I. výstava Pošovy galerie. Ilustrace – grafika – kresby Františka Tichého (First Exhibition at Poš’s Gallery. Illustrations – Prints – Drawings by František Tichý). Praha: Pošova galerie, no page no.

II. Cultural Studies Imre Kovács Saint Francis as Christian Orpheus. Liszt’s Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi in a Cultural Context The figure of Saint Francis and the spirituality of the Franciscan order meant a great deal to Liszt (Gajdoš, 1964; Bucsi, 1987). The composer was a member of the tertiary order of Saint Francis, and whenever the course of events allowed, he made his confession to Franciscan friars (Liszt, 1998, p. 752). As a final homage to the Franciscan order, he wished to be buried in his third order habit made by the Franciscans of Budapest (Liszt, 1998, pp. 759, 902). His devotion to the founder of the order became increasingly deep as he grew old. A letter written by the composer in 1881 – at the age of 70 – bears witness to this fact. He states that beside the penitent thief, Dismas, he feels the most passionate devotion for Saint Francis (Liszt, 1998, p. 868). We also know from the same letter that he was revising his cantata written in 1862 for the poem by Saint Francis, the Cantico del Sol, so we cannot but state that the motivation for composing the piece was deep and internal. The topic of my article is this piece, Liszt’s Cantico del Sol for baritone solo, men’s chorus, orchestra and organ, which was finally published in 1884. (Liszt, 1936, pp. V-VI; Raabe, 1968, pp. 318-19). Nevertheless, my paper will not deal with this work from the aspect of music history, but rather adopts a cultural historical and reception historical approach and examines the nature of Liszt’s inspiration. I shall try to describe the elements of the inner image of Saint Francis that filled Liszt’s mind while composing the cantata.

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The main spiritual source of this work was a book by Antoine Ozanam entitled Les Poëtes Franciscains en Italie au treizième siècle (Paris, 1852). In a letter written in 1862 – the time at which he was composing the first version of the cantata – Liszt already writes about rereading the book; he says that it was this book that sparked his creative fantasy (Liszt, 1998, p. 590). The book was so important to him that he included the part of the book related to the origin of the Cantico (together with the poem itself) as an Introduction to the score. We should thus begin our examination with a review of the part of the book relating to Saint Francis. Perhaps the most important element of Ozanam’s Saint Francis reception was the portrayal of the saint as a new type of artist, as the Orpheus of the Middle Ages. The author was concerned with the problem of the origin of the art of Saint Francis, and this is also what aroused the interest of Liszt. Ozanam looked at the saint as a kind of medium in whom the holy inspiration was embodied. He referred to Saint Bonaventure, according to whom Saint Francis was filled with the Christ and thus went through a process of transformation. He heard a new, inner tune continually haunting him, the sounds of which he wished to reproduce, and this lead him finally to compose the Cantico. The saint became an artist by the holy inspiration manifesting itself in poetical form. Ozanam believed that the only true medium of mystic ecstasy was poetry. Prose, being the rational language, is unable to reach the essence of emotions. The heart fired by passion, as he says, cannot be satisfied with mere preaching, the glorification of God in prose (Ozanam, 1914, pp. 78-79). Undoubtedly, Ozanam created a Christian Orpheus from Saint Francis by utilising the topoi of his age applied in aesthetics and genre theory. When he described poetic language revealed by holy inspiration as the adequate means of ars sacra, he only echoed the aesthetic creed of romanticism, which put poetic language on a high pedestal. Furthermore, poetry here is music as well (since the Cantico was sung by Saint Francis and his brothers), which as a form of art most directly expressing feelings was considered the highest form of art in the hierarchy of romanticism, an idea referred to by many, including Liszt himself. Liszt published a series of articles entitled De la situation des artistes, et de leur condition dans la société in the Gazette musicale, the leading music magazine of Paris, in 1835 (Liszt, 2000), some ideas of

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which show striking resemblance to those expressed by Ozanam on certain points. Through the comparative analyses of the two texts, I hope to get closer to the Saint Francis reception of Liszt. According to Liszt, God – the creator of the world – is the highestranking artist, who is present everywhere in his creations. Thus, art can only be of a holy origin and the works of art have to express God as reflected in his creations. The artistic manifesto of Liszt stated the following about the nature of inspiration: Artists are not ordinary people and they were chosen by God to express the most elevated emotions of man … These chosen, lightening struck, bewildered people, who brought to us the holy flame from heaven, brought life to matter, form to ideas, and by reaching perfection they elevate us to a state of ecstasy and heavenly visions. Artists are priests, apostles of the unspeakable, mystic and eternal religion, which is rooted in our hearts to grow from there continually (Liszt, 2000 p. 4). He defined the essence of his art as follows: Earlier and now even more, music should centre around PEOPLE and GOD, to create a connection between them, to refine and console humanity and to praise and glorify the Lord (Liszt, 2000, p. 58). The art aesthetics of Liszt are thus twofold: on the one hand, they include the glorification of God, while on the other hand they bear the utopian idea of the refinement and improvement of humanity. These expectations correspond to the romantic interpretation of the aesthetics of the Cantico del Sol. The poem by Saint Francis put in the centre the glorification of God through his creations, however, the idea of art refining morality is also present. The latter idea is strongly emphasised in Ozanam’s romantic interpretation. He says on the basis of Saint Francis’s Legend of Perugia that one of the stanzas of the Cantico filled with secret, heavenly power, is able to soothe the quarrel between the bishop and the magistrates of the city. In Liszt’s view the artist is the chosen one inspired by God – just like Saint Francis in Ozanam’s writing – a mediator between God and people. This is possible by putting the

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artistic vocation in a pseudo-sacral sphere. The artist becomes similar to the saint, their vocation can be compared on the basis of a similarity in function. The similarities between Liszt’s and Ozanam’s ideas, however, are more likely to be attributable to their common cultural, inspirational source than a direct influence on each other’s thinking. Both Liszt and Ozanam were surrounded by the intellectual climate of Paris in the 1830s and strongly influenced by the Christian-Socialist movements of the era: the ideas of the Saint Simonists and Abbé Lamennais (cf. Locke, 1986; Merrick, 1987, pp. 9-25). Therefore it is not surprising that both of them created their own heroes – Ozanam the figure of Saint Francis and Liszt that of the Artist – based on the neo-catholic literature’s clichés of the ideal image of the artist. The Saint Simonists and Lamennais believed in the mediating role of the artist, who as the apostle of the intellect can prepare the coming of the Kingdom of God. In the artistic creed of Liszt the Artist becomes the prophet of ars sacra, a view which directly reflects this standpoint. It is obvious that in the Artist Liszt saw his own spiritual self-portrait. This is the way Ary Scheffer depicted the composer in this curious picture of the Three Magi, where Liszt – in the guise of the young king looking at the star of Betlehem – appears as the inspired prophet of ars sacra (Kovács, 2008). Returning to the cantata after 20 years to revise it must have conjured up the image of Saint Francis in Liszt, especially since according to Ozanam the saint did not write his poem at one go either, but rather composed it by submitting to the moment and occasion. This occasion for Liszt was definitely connected to the 1882 Saint Francis anniversary, the seventh centennial of the birth of the saint, when many people – both clerics and secular believers – wished to pay their respects to the saint. A musical “monument” was still missing though, not counting Liszt’s first version of the Cantico. The composer’s aim was – as he stated in one of his letters written in 1881 – to compose a piece that was worthy of the masterpieces of fine arts centering around the figure of Saint Francis (Liszt, 1998 p. 870). This way of thinking suited Liszt, who deeply believed in the unity of sister arts and for whom the inspiration drawn from fine arts and literature was the essence of his creative method. He planned to show the unity of the sister arts, in this case by putting a representation of Saint Francis on the title page of the score as a token.

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The “Gesamkunstwerk” concept of the front page of the music was not a new phenomenon in the oeuvre of Liszt. Consider for instance the piano piece entitled Il Penseroso of the Italian cycle Années de pèlerinage. Liszt not only included the lithography of the statue of Michelangelo (the source of his inspiration), but also the poem of the renaissance artist, Grato me il sonno on the front page of this work (Kovács, 2009, p. 393). The situation in the case of the Cantico was somewhat different though. The source of inspiration for Liszt was not some image, but a poem. The need for imagery only arose in Liszt during the final phase of the work. Although it is only a supplementary motif in terms of the piece of music itself, in terms of the creative method and the worldview of Liszt it is very important.

Fig. 1. Giovanni Duprè, Saint Francis of Assisi, 1882. Assisi, (photo: Imre Kovács) Fig. 2. Jean-Antoine Houdon, Saint Bruno, 1766-1767, Rome, Santa Maria degli Angeli, (photo: Imre Kovács)

Liszt’s letters prove how extremely fastidious he was about choosing the representation of Saint Francis that was to appear on the title page. His arguments in rejecting the reproduction of a statue by Giovanni Duprè (fig. 1.) sent to him by his second companion, the princess Wittgenstein, are worth recalling (Liszt, 1998, p. 887). The statue was closely connected to the 1882 anniversary of Saint Francis, since it was made for the event to stand in front of the Cathedral of Assisi (Frieze, 1886, pp. 147-150). The princess probably suggested the use of the reproduction to the composer

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as she thought a sculptural monument would be a great counterpart to the musical monument by Liszt. The composer, however, did not agree. He did not dispute the artistic qualities of the work, but whether the statue expressed the essence of the spirituality of the saint. He rejected the idea by comparing the statue by Duprè to that of Saint Bruno (1766-1767) created by Houdon, which made use of similar gestures (fig. 2.) (Poulet, 2003, cat. 4). He believed that while in the case of the statue depicting Saint Bruno, the inward look and the arms folded in the front suggesting an internal focus in line with the Carthusian vow was understandable, in the case of Saint Francis the same gestures were not justifiable.

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will hardly serve as the title picture of my Cantico del Sol – neither the gesture nor the accessories, the crown of thorns or the skull suit the Cantico (Liszt, 1998, p. 892). Finally the reproduction of a statue suggested by the princess – considered at the time the work of Alonso Cano – was used as a title picture (fig. 3). The composer was not satisfied with this either, but accepted it in want of a better solution. The statue can be identified as one carved in 1663/64 – now part of the Cathedral Treasury of Toledo (fig. 4). Modern experts attribute the work to a pupil of Alonso Cano – Pedro de Mena (Anderson, 1998).

Well, Saint Francis spoke and even sang, wrote Liszt, – his Rule does not impose silence, nor total confinement within the cloister. He has in common with Saint Bruno only saintliness. In my opinion, he must be portrayed on his knees, arm outstretched, lovingly asking for the divine stigmata – which Our Lord Jesus Christ granted him. (Liszt, 1998, p. 887) It is the requirement of decorum that we are witnessing here, which appears so many times when Liszt expressed his opinion on questions of art. The composer saw the embodiment of the spirituality of the saint in a specific iconographic type, and he did not have any stylistic or other criteria. However, the actual representations visualised by him are not known. Liszt’s description suits the iconographic type of the stigmatisation of Saint Francis. He may have seen some early fresco versions of it painted by Giotto and Pietro Lorenzetti during his pilgrimage to the Assisi San Francesco in 1868 (Liszt, 1998, pp. 680-682). Nevertheless, he could have been thinking of Baroque depictions as well, since when he mentioned that he had been planning to compose a cantata worthy of the fine art masterpieces depicting Saint Francis he referred to the works of Rubens, Murillo or some other Spanish masters (Liszt, 1998, p. 870). It seems, however, that Liszt’s idea concerning the title picture was only definite in terms of the iconography of the saint. This is proven by his letter in 1882, addressed to the princess Wittgenstein: Hohenlohe sent me directly the photograph of the statuette of Saint Francis given to me at the Villa d’Este by the Cardinal Falloux. It

Fig. 3. Cover page of Liszt’s Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi, Leipzig, Kahnt, 1884. Budapest, Ferenc Liszt Memorial Museum and Research Centre, Liszt’s estate (photo: Imre Kovács)

Fig. 4. Pedro de Mena, Saint Francis of Assisi in His Tomb, 1663-1664. Toledo, Sacristy of the Cathedral, (photo: Imre Kovács)

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The literary source of the iconographic type of the statue is a Franciscan legend (LCI VI, 1994, p. 311; Mâle, 1951, pp. 480-483). According to this legend when Pope Nicholas V and his retinue of attendants searched the crypt of the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi in 1449 for the tomb of the saint, the light of the torch fell on the miraculously preserved body of the saint standing in his tomb. The legend provided a topic for depiction in the seventeenth century, however, Saint Francis was also portrayed alone, taken out of the narrative context. Depictions of this kind show Saint Francis in a motionless, standing posture as he clasps his hands in front in his habit. The iconic figure was often coupled with the expression of mystic ecstasy portrayed by naturalistic means, which was taken almost to the limits by Pedro de Mena. So, this is a specific iconographic type, but it is doubtful that either Liszt or the princess Wittgenstein knew of its literary source. It is quite obvious though, that the composer had a different vision of the ecstasy of the saint, and he repeated his expectations concerning the representation of Saint Francis to be used as title picture: If I could paint, I would represent him not with clasped hands but with arms outstretched in an ecstasy of love, imploring the gran perdono di Dio for the sinful world and the stigmata for himself (Liszt, 1998, p. 895). Finally we are faced with the question of what connects a thirteenth century poem with the reproduction of a seventeenth century Spanish statue and the nineteenth century music composed by Liszt. If we were to approach the question from Liszt’s point of view, we would say that it was Franciscan piety. This would be both a relevant and historic explanation, even if the idea of piety is a rather elusive category due to its subjectivity resulting from the need for emotional identification. Piety, however, is a central category in the works of Rio (1836), Montalambert (1836) and Thode (1885) whose books were well-known by Liszt. The basic aspect of the Saint Francis image shared by these authors was the idea that the piety of Saint Francis was the source of a new Christian art which could enrich other fields of art as well. Montalambert wrote the following in his La Vie de sainte Élisabeth de Hongrie, for example:

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The triple church built around the tomb of Saint Francis in Assisi became a shrine for the arts and glowing belief… Saint Francis exerted an enormous influence on secular artists as well: as if secular painters could also hit upon the secret of their art in the piety of the artist of love (Montalambert, 2006, p. 52). That Liszt accepted these ideas can be proved by a comment he once made on the frescoes in the Lower Church of the San Francesco in Assisi depicting the Allegories of the fundamental vows of the Franciscans (Schönau, 1985, pp. 338-343). He viewed the frescoes, attributed to Giotto in the nineteenth century, as “the imperishable holy stigmata of the Genius of Christian painting” (Liszt, 1998, p. 684). This metaphoric use of expression is easily decipherable. It refers to the idea that the stigmata appearing on the body of the saint – as the imprint of God’s presence – have made an indelible mark on the paintings of Giotto. Basing the Saint Francis phenomenon so characteristically on piety during the time of Liszt, and thus enlarging upon it, resulted in an understanding of art so wide that it did not accept any limitations of genre or period. Liszt obviously believed that by understanding the inspiration of the saint, that is by identifying with the piety of Saint Francis, he himself could become a continuer of the art of Saint Francis. The figure of the saint as the Orpheus of the Middle Ages thus became a model for Liszt’s Catholic artistic self identification. He found in Saint Francis the ideal of the holy inspired artist, in whom life and art achieved harmony.

References Anderson, J. A., 1998. Pedro De Mena, Seventeenth-Century Spanish Sculptor. Mellen Press. Bucsi, L., 1987. Liszt és a magyar ferencesek. Magyar zene, 28, pp. 50-52. Frieze, H. S., 1886. Giovanni Duprè, with two Dialogues on Art from Italian of Augusto Conti. Hontion: Sampson Low etc. Gajdoš, V. J., 1964. War Franz Liszt Franziskaner? Studia Musicologica, 6, pp. 299310. Kovács, I., 2008. The Portrait of Liszt as an Allegory of the Artist in Ary Scheffer’s Three Magi. Studia Musicologica, 49 (1-2), pp. 91-104.

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Kovács, I., 2009. Megjegyzések Liszt Michelangelo-recepciójához. In: Tüskés A., ed. Omnis creatura significans. Essays in Honour of Mária Prokopp. CentrART Egyesület. LCI VI, 1994. Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie. Hrsg. W. Braunfels. Freiburg: Herder Liszt, F., 1936. Liszt Ferenc Zeneművei. V/5. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Liszt, F., 1998. Selected Letters. Transl. and ed. A. Williams. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Liszt, F., 2000. Sämtliche Schriften. hrsg. D. Altenburg. I. Frühe Schriften, hrsg. R. Kleinertz. Wiesbaden, Leipzig, Paris: Breitkopf & Härtel. Locke, R., 1986. Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Mâle, É., 1951. L’art religieux de la fin du XVIe siècle du XVIIe siècle et du XVIIIe siècle. Étude sur l’iconographie après le concile Trente. 2. éd. Paris: Libraire Armand Colin. Montalambert, Ch., 1836. La Vie de sainte Élisabeth de Hongrie, duchesse de Thuringe (1207-1231). Paris. Montalambert, Ch., 2006. Árpád-házi Szent Erzsébet, türingiai hercegné élete. Budapest: Új ember Merrick, P., 1987. Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt. Cambridge University Press. Ozanam, A. F., 1914. The Franciscan Poets in Italy of the Theerteenth Century. Transl. by A. E. Nellen and N.C. Craig. London: David Nutt Poulet, A. L., 2003. Jean-Antoine Houdon. Sculptor of the Enlightement. The University of Chicago Press. Raabe, P., 1968. Liszts Schaffen. II. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. Rio, A-F., 1836. De la poésie chrétienne dans son principe dans sa matière et dans ses formes. Paris: Debécourt, Hachette. Schönau, D. W., 1985. A New Hypothesis on the Vele in the Lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi. Franziskanische Studien, 67, pp. 338-343. Thode, H. 1885. Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien. Berlin

III. Interart studies 1. Image and Text Kókai Károly Kassák and Constructivism 1920-1922 Lajos Kassák began his career as a writer and a poet, the organizer of an avant-garde group and an editor.1 He started dealing with the fine arts (not counting two realistic landscapes of 1914 and 1916) around 1920. This change apparently wasn’t easy for his contemporaries, and was not smooth professionally either. Sándor Ék recalls his arrival in Vienna in August 1921: “I visited Kassák in the hospital. When I went in to his room he was sitting in his bed painting abstract pictures with tempera in the portfolio in front of him. This surprised me, as he had never shown any inclination to paint and this side of him had never come up in his environment either” (Ék, 1968, p. 152). Of course the parallel work of Kassák in literature and the fine arts has been the subject of thorough study for a long time. Products of this include Imre Bori’s and Éva Körner’s Kassák’s Literature and Painting and the Hungarian National Gallery’s Kassák exhibition, just to mention two larger efforts – and of course works by Kassák that appeared in numerous exhibitions and essays dealing with the subject.2 So despite the fact that Kassák was originally not a visual artist, his work in this field is an important subject of avant-garde studies. Parallel to the development of Kassák’s activities in the fine arts, 3 Ma (Today) was evolving from an apparently literary magazine (since there were practically no illustrations beyond the cover page) into a magazine that demonstratively tried to involve the whole of contemporary culture. In addition to literature and politics, it became a mouthpiece for the fine arts, theatre, design and – by reacting to events, advertisements

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and reviews – the avant-garde movement. Of course this is not a change regarding the group itself, since Ma also had an exhibition space in Hungary until 1919, and some of those gathering around Ma were artists. For example, Mácza had dealt with theatre earlier, and Kassák’s circle circulated publications by Sturm. This regards exclusively the appearance of the magazine, which probably changed in part because the possibilities for the émigré artists in Vienna decreased as there was no permanent exhibition room. Kassák was a representative of several of the avant-garde movements, e.g. Constructivism that developed at the end of the 1910s and early 1920s. I would like to mention two elements of his relationship with Constructivism. One is his leading role and the other is the numerous problematic issues regarding this relationship. This is also true of the beginnings of Kassák’s Constructivist fine arts activities: It is not quite clear what inspired him to work with Constructivist art and exactly when this inspiration took place. The question as to which of his artworks count as the first ones is difficult to answer, mostly because the originality and dating of many of them is dubious, as the question marks listed in Mariann Gergely et al’s 1987 Kassák catalogue indicate.4 Also the connection between Kassák’s literary and artistic activities of the time is questionable. Scholarship hasn’t given an answer to the question of what prompted Kassák to make Constructivist art. He started to create art in this style in 1921, but neither he nor his contemporaries (such as Ernô Kállai, who published a review on his art the same year5) gave any information on this. As this change of style led to the creation of remarkable products, including Kassák’s works of art, which are noteworthy in themselves, and the appearance of a new style in Western Europe, for example in the works of Hungarian artists in Western emigration, it is worth taking a closer look into the history. I do not intend to address each of these issues or to offer an exhaustive answer to this question, but rather merely to focus on one specific detail, namely the distinctive stylistic features of Kassák’s picture poems of this period. According to the 1987 exhibition catalogue, apart from the aforementioned realistic landscapes of 1914 and 1916, Kassák’s first work of fine art is Rajzköltészet (Drawing Poetry) on the cover page of Ma of January 1st, 1921 (fig.1). The most striking aspect of Rajzköltészet is that

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it actually “fails”. One’s suspicion is that the artist could control neither the details of the image, giving the impression of an untutored hand, nor the composition as a whole, which falls into its constituent parts. From a fine arts perspective this was a misguided attempt. However, on the other hand, this is exactly why the individual elements of the image can be distinguished, and furthermore why it seems clear to us what the artist intended. I do not wish to interpret each of these individual elements here, but merely to offer a few words on the work of art as a whole. It is striking that a number of realistic elements can be seen, that these are parts of an industrial landscape, and that the details of the landscape can be interpreted in different frames of symbols: railways or power lines from one point of view and sheets of music with notes from another. Similarly, the letters on the picture, partly Hungarian and partly German

Fig. 1. Lajos Kassák, Drawing poetry, 1920, print on paper, 30.5 × 23.5 cm. Kassák Museum, Budapest (photo: Kassák Museum)

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words, partly elements of the landscape (“tűz” (fire), “lied” (song) and “hullás” (falling) could be signs painted on the chimneys), partly names of elements of the picture (“Ente” (canard)), and partly collage-like quotations, could be situated in several interpretive frameworks. According to the title the work is a picture poem (Rajzköltészet), i.e. primarily a poetical artwork. Stylistically it could be called “Dadaist”, or an “enginedada composition” according to another recognised category. In other words: this is definitely not a Constructivist artwork. It should furthermore be noted that the picture appeared on a cover page, and thus exists for us only with the other related elements.6 The magazine’s title, subtitle and price are therefore also part of the composition. The significance of this is clear if the font of the word “Ma” is compared with the font used on a later cover page (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Lajos Kassák, Woodcut, c. 1921, print on paper, 30.5 × 23.5 cm Kassák Museum, Budapest (photo: Kassák Museum)

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The question as to when Kassák started to create Constructivist art is difficult to answer in view of the lack of sources. However, we know the specific date of the publishing of the Constructivist graphic work Fametszet (Woodcut), as it was on the cover page of Ma dated March 15th, 1921. As this graphic work appeared in a prominent space, the cover page of Ma, and can be defined as a formally successful artwork, Kassák can be said to have become a “Constructivist artist” with this work. Of course it cannot be ruled out that he made stylistically related artworks in the two-and-a-half month period during which the development to Fametszet could be detected.

Chronology In 1921 Kassák published two volumes of poetry.7 In the February 15th, 1921 edition of Ma seven poems appeared from “Lajos Kassák’s new volume of poetry”, the first seven so-called numbered poems. On the last page of this same edition there is a notice: “From the circle of Ma. Books: Lajos Kassák’s volume of poetry is now being published, edited by our magazine with four picture poems cut in wood in 500 numbered editions.” In the next, March 15th, 1921 edition a notice reads: “Ma edited the following books: Lajos Kassák: New Poems. With four woodcuts by Kassák (altogether 200 numbered editions).” So the plan in midFebruary was to publish a book in 500 editions, and by mid-March this was realised with less than half of the planned number. The first volume, 1 Ma, the so called Új versek (New Poems), therefore had to appear between February 15th and March 15th, 1921, in the period between the two aforementioned cover pages. Many illustrations of the volume are combinations of letters and graphic elements. Stylistically, the woodcut – or as Kassák calls it, picture poem – entitled Indulj (Go, fig. 3.) can be placed between the two cover pages. The stem of the letter Z ending as a tail, the indefinite geometrical form framing the composition, and the graphic value of the letters all remind us of the January picture, while the reduced geometrical forms, the balanced composition and the advanced abstraction suggest the March cover page. The four woodcuts of 1 Ma show Kassák’s development from the Ma cover page graphic of January 1st to the one on March 15th: four steps on his path to Constructivism.8

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The first 1921 volume of poetry was “sold out”, according to the June 1st, 1921 edition of Ma, which probably also prompted Kassák to edit a second volume of poetry the same year, Világanyám (My World Mother).

Fig. 3. Lajos Kassák, Go, 1921, print on paper, 27.4 × 20.6 cm. Kassák Museum, Budapest (photo: Kassák Museum)

My aim is to trace the evolution of Kassák’s Constructivism from his other activities, such as his literary endeavours or his artistic undertakings as a whole. This is not to imply that simple formal analysis, such as that sketched above regarding the comparison of two cover pages of Ma and a woodcut from a volume of poetry, cannot reveal a continuous line of progress, or that Kassák was not affected by other influences. The intention is merely to draw attention to the fact that these are only formal

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solutions in which those (hypothetical and possibly informal) influences appeared. Since the chronology of the formation of Kassák’s Constructivist art is an open question, it is noteworthy that several of his new, numbered poems are dated: 3 “Spring craze”, 6 “we are on the thirty-first of December, 1920”, 14 “August 22nd, 1921” – the one titled 0x0=0 is put directly before the numbered ones, thus also counting as the poem number 0. It seems that the sequence of the numbers is in accordance with their creation. The fact that the poems appeared in Ma roughly in the sequence of the numbering suggests the same conclusion. As mentioned before, the first seven poems appeared on February 15th, 1921. Poem number 8, which appeared in Ma (along with numbers 11, 12, 13) on June 1st, 1921 (i.e. after numbers 9 and 10, which appeared on April 25th, 1921), is an exception. Another problem regarding this sequence is that the numbering of the poems in Ma and in Világanyám is not the same. Poem number 14 in the August 1st edition of Ma is number 13 in Világanyám. The September 15th edition of Ma contained poem number 15, which was number 14 in Világanyám. This contains the date August 22nd, 1921. In this September 15th edition’s advertisement, “new books of Ma”, “Kassák picture architecture study with 7 linoleum cuts” appeared. Since this album has the name Picture Architecture, which is considered Kassák’s contribution to Constructivism, it could be argued that Kassák arrived at this style only in the fall of 1921. But, as we have seen, this happened already in February and March of that year. The cover page of the Picture Architecture album is remarkable in the sense that it shows a minimum of basic geometrical forms set in a well-balanced and dynamic composition, thus exhibiting the full control of an artist over his means. The February 1st, 1922 edition of Ma mentions three new editions: “Kassák: Drawing album with 5 original black ink drawings in 15 numbered and signed copies”, “Kassák: Coloured picture album with 4 original paintings in 15 numbered, hand-painted copies, signed”, and “Lajos Kassák My World Mother (volume of poetry)”. The previous January 1st edition did not mention Világanyám, so it seems that the editor retroactively dated the publication to the previous year. This does not necessarily mean that the picture poems included were created in the same chronological order, especially since their sequence

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in Világanyám is markedly methodical (they stand at the front, middle and end of the cycle). We also find references to the Viennese avant-garde group and its internal development in the cycle of numbered poems included in Világanyám: “Bortnyik (…) keeps wandering towards picture architecture”, as stated in poem number 10. If we accept that the poems were numbered in the sequence of their creation and number 6 was written on December 31st, 1920 and number 14 on August 22nd, 1921, then number 10 was probably written during the spring of 1921. Since this poem appeared in the April 25th, 1921 edition of Ma, this date of origin is reasonable – which is interesting in light of the fact that Bortnyik’s so-called picture architecture album, the Bortnyik “six coloured cuts in album format”, is advertised as “published” in the March 15th, 1921 edition of Ma. As the previous February 15th, 1921 edition only refers to it as “forthcoming”, one can assume that the publication appeared in the period between the two dates. Therefore, Kassák seems to suggest in poem number 10 that the pictures in Bortnyik’s 1921 coloured cuts album are not yet picture architecture, but only tend in that direction. This constitutes a significant contribution to the interpretation of the Constructivist works of the Viennese emigrants. There are further references to the Viennese avant-garde in other poems as well: “bartasándor debates that the house is a better painting than the picture” (13), “we are really very happy to have among us János Mácza the pale hauler of joie de vivre / Sándor Barta the wooden headed relativist / Lajos Kudlák the married engineer / and we are happier muchmore happier / with Jolán Simon first rate dadaist actress” (16). So Kassák weaves facts of his everyday life into his text as a collage. The volume entitled Világanyám, dated 1921 by Bán Publisher in Vienna, included all Kassák’s existing poems, i.e. those that had appeared in the volume 1 Ma and in Ma. The last poem of the volume’s middle section (Second section 1916-1920), entitled 0x0=0, was written in the Wiedner Hospital in 1920. The third section of Világanyám (Third section 1920-1921) includes three picture poems and eighteen numbered poems. The closing number 18 is itself also one of the three aforementioned picture poems. Each of the three picture poems included in the volume contains a number: 17, 15 and 18, which would make them numbered poems as well. While the poems 15 and 17 actually exist, number 18 is this

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picture poem. Therefore, the titling and genre classification of Kassák’s works is a highly complex task, and any attempt to simplify it e. g. by constructing a step-by-step “development” is necessarily misleading.

Image and text All three picture poems of Világanyám appeared in the Ma as well. Number 18 appeared as Vers (Poem) on January 1st, 1922 in four blocks (fig. 4), instead of the seven blocks (and seven pages) in Világanyám. As this poem begins in Világanyám on an uneven page (the right side of an open book), one can only view two pages connected into one block in Ma by turning the page. The seventh page of Világanyám is an individual block in Ma. Thus it seems that Kassák felt the text more important than the image – otherwise the poem of Világanyám and Ma would be two different works of art and not a reprint. So Kassák treated this picture poem as a work intended for continual reading, i.e. as a text. Picture poems 15 and 17 appeared in the February 1st, 1922 edition of Ma on the same page beside each other. Thus it seems that here Kassák changed the visual value of the poems compared to Világanyám, where they were published on single pages. Seeing these picture poems, the question arises whether one can speak in these cases about Constructivism. A simple formal analysis would suggest that the answer to this question is no. In picture poems 15 and 17 there is not a single trace of Constructivism. Nevertheless, Constructivism is present in this volume as well. The typography of the numbered poems contains Constructivist elements. The typeset of the titles of these poems, thick black numbers, are without serif, in contrast with the text of the poems, which are. The arrangement of the lines corresponds with free poetry: the reading or visual rhythm (i.e. the make-up of the lines) does not facilitate the understanding of a story, but rather interrupts the narrative. The punctuation (comma, period etc, capital letters at the beginning of the lines) is missing, and this has the same effect: the rhythm lies only in certain words or groups of words. Thus the presentation of the literary text is not contextual, but seemingly follows formal, indeed abstracting requirements. Therefore, in the texts of the poems we see – in contrast with the picture poems, which are texts – that these are

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set by formal criteria. Obviously Kassák was working on a solution that applied to both areas (fine arts and literature).

Fig. 4. Lajos Kassák, 18., 1921, print on paper, 30.8 × 47 cm. Kassák Museum, Budapest (photo: Kassák Museum)

Comparing poem number 18 with poems 17 and 15, it is striking that this is “less like a drawing” or rather “more abstract”. The few graphic elements are the second block’s lines and arrows, and the last block’s slanted line and dot. It is noteworthy that here other, more regular, fonts dominate. We can talk about Constructivism regarding these three picture poems (15, 17 and 18), although this is not typical of the format of these works.9 Visual poetry in itself is already a step towards abstraction. It is striking that – following symbolist precedents – this method was used mainly by avant-garde artists (Italian Futurists, Guillaume Apollinaire, etc). Its use was most important from the mid-1910s to the late 1920s, i.e. in the age of the classical avant-garde. Visual poetry and classical avantgarde practically coincide. It seems therefore well-founded to focus on such works in Kassák’s oeuvre, even if in the context of a short article.

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Beyond applied graphics, such as magazine or album cover pages and picture poems, we know of further groups of artworks that are based on the combination of text and picture. One of these is the collages, such as Bécsi Magyar Újság (Viennese Hungarian Paper) (November 15th, 1921 Ma). The artwork in Ma illustrates Péter Mátyás’ Lajos Kassák piece (entitled “Kassák Lajos képarchitektúrájáról“ (On the picture architecture of Lajos Kassák) in the content list of the next edition). The other illustrations of this edition of Ma all come from Kassák’s Picture Architecture album, which was published that fall. The paper collage is known only from this reproduction in Ma. Its technique can be guessed at only on the basis of this source. Probably it was made of paper slips stuck onto one another. There seem to be several different layers on the picture. A French paper or poster is on the bottom, with dark shadows of geometrical forms (their setting seems coincidental, as if someone just threw them on the surface) on the next level, on top the size and layout of the title words (Bécsi Magyar Újság) set in such a way so as specifically not to make the connection (the meaning of the text) clear at first glance. The peculiarity of this collage in contrast to the previous ones is that the geometrical forms and letters do not appear on a space left empty, but on a material-like, structured background. The letters are mainly graphic signs in front of or sinking into the background, with the text’s materiallike nature dominating and its meaning being secondary. The effect of the artwork is provided by the dynamics of the different light value of the layers turning upon one another. We are talking, therefore, about a well thought-out and carefully composed artwork. Finally, two graphic artworks merit mention as examples of Kassák’s next art groups, where letters also appear as graphic elements: Tipográfia (Typography) from the May 1st, 1922 edition of Ma and Rur from De Stijl’s seventh 1922 edition. The first artwork is basically a typically Dadaist letter collage in which the emphasis is on the differently typed and styled letters. The second is a substantially stricter and more reduced composition consisting of few elements. The comparison of the typography (the three cover pages) and the picture poems Rajzköltészet, Indulj, and poems number 15, 17 and 18 clearly reveals that although one can construct a process of development leading to Constructivism, Kassák produced artworks after arriving at that style that seems to be formed by other stylistic considerations. The

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further artworks of 1922, such as Rur, show that Kassák later made use of Constructivism again on a formal mature level. Thus in the case of Kassák’s 1920-1922 works, to allege a simple formal stylistic development seems insufficient. During the given period, the first years of exile in Vienna, Kassák’s art shows the marks of several avant-garde styles. One notices Expressionist, Dadaist, and Constructivist elements, and one can attempt to pinpoint Futurist elements as well, and it would even be plausible to ask whether Kassák’s Expressionist, Dadaist, and Constructivist phases can be separated and how the exact beginnings and ends of these phases would be determined. Based on what we see, it makes more sense to ask in what measure these phases overlap, which of course means that different styles were manifested in clear forms and exclusively (in some given works) on the one hand, and in parallel (in other works) on the other. Kassák’s Constructivist “turn” therefore does not mean that from the moment of this alleged turn onwards all his works were Constructivist, but rather that his artworks contain Constructivist stylistic elements and were at times conceived in the spirit of Constructivism.

Political activism All of the artworks under discussion here were experimental, and this is especially true of the earlier ones. By 1922 Kassák seems to have reached a level as a fine artist where he worked routinely. This experimenting is naturally in accordance with the aims of the avant-garde, which placed emphasis on laboratory-like experimentation. The audience for which these artworks were intended were of course the closest colleagues among the Viennese Hungarians, those living in Western emigration, but at the same time and primarily those wider classes of society that were to learn the new art as the language of a new world coming to life. This is why they set up and kept these laboratories, which naturally ceased being productive when it turned out that the new world would not arise after all. This is obvious from Kassák’s career as much as from his works and actions. This activity has a name too, which refers precisely to this fact. This can be read in the subtitle on all the cover pages of Ma.

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In Kassák’s case, therefore, we are not talking about popular but avant-garde culture, “un-intelligible” to the masses. However, the aim of his activities was the cultural education of the working masses, or rather the creation of a modern culture for these people. Kassák’s avant-garde artistic practice was political activism in emigrant status. It seems that the most effective way to analyse these two aspects is the method that approaches cultural phenomena not academically but as “living experience”, as theoretical practice. The field of Cultural Studies as developed in Birmingham in the 1960s (from Richard Hoggart to Stuart Hall) was primarily popular culture. Naturally the preferred methods can also be used in the study of the more abstract works of so-called high culture. Kassák’s road to Constructivism can also be understood in this context, and not only by formal studies, as they are traditionally seen as the exclusive methods of art history. The kind of formal analysis done here regarding the cover pages of Ma (January 1st and March 15th, 1921), Indulj, picture poems 15, 17 and 18, and Bécsi Magyar Újság has its limits. It can explain certain visual elements and imply a process of artistic development, but it is of no use in understanding why these artworks were made or what they mean. For Kassák, Constructivism was the building of a new world – a new art – made for the new man. Thus, one should highlight the social-movement aspects, namely that Constructivism is progress in itself (it therefore does not matter that the picture on the cover page of the January 1st, 1921 Ma “failed“), that it is a new style (i.e. a step forward in the stylistic sense as well), that it is a vehicle and not a goal (which is why it uses cheap and transient materials, as in the case of a paper collage), that it is experimental (e.g. with basic graphic forms and letters), that it redefines the artist who “works” (as opposed to the artist who “creates”, according to the bourgeois conception) for the new emerging social class (more or less anonymously10), using new instruments (e.g. typography). The enthusiasm for technology, machines and architecture is also an important criterion. This is why many Constructivist artworks look like blueprints. The geometric abstraction as a formal answer also arises from this – and not vica versa. The formal solution of the artworks is not a cause, but one of the results, which is why each thorough study must eventually arrive at the social, political and “movement” aspects of the works. The primary aim of Constructivism was to assemble a set of instruments reduced to their basics. The

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methods by which these were created, or how given artworks were made, is the abstraction or the montage, which – by analogy to the abstract phases of industrial production – happens on a basic level, e.g. through the rhythmic arrangement of dark and light blocks. Kassák’s works are Constructivist mostly in their spirit, and not only in their form. Kassák is related to the dominant culture as the representative of an avant-garde artistic subculture, in the given period as the member of a migrant colony in the Austrian capital, and thus to the German-language Austrian cultural surroundings as well. Being different, opposing the dominant conservative bourgeois culture, was determinative for him too. This detachment was not only class-based (which would correspond to an orthodox Marxist pattern), but shaped more by a community, a political aim. In this emigrant avant-garde setting, the “hybridity of culture” (and with this naturally the criticism of a “homogenous cultural identity” – to use a second, more recent term) must have been a fundamental experience. Kassák’s defining conviction was that culture does not reflect reality, but forms it. Kassák endeavoured to exert an influence as an integral member of a community, not as an outside alien impulse. This contradictory situation, having the aim to reform society as a whole and acting from a position of isolation (emigrant, representative of the avant-garde, etc.), couldn’t last too long, on the one hand, but it is a determining influence for Kassák’s work in this period on the other. It is evident that the artworks discussed here could only arise in a situation formed by contradictory forces. In discussing the issues of Kassák’s Constructivist activities, i.e. when and why he began to show Constructivist tendencies, how this is related to his works in the fine arts and literature, what role this plays in his development and the development of émigré Hungarian artists and Constructivism itself, one inevitably stumbles across yet another question: the social and art-political aspects of the movement.

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defined by the transgression of boundaries between given art forms. Moving on the borderline between literature and the fine arts, Kassák created groups of artworks that can be considered poetic (numbered poems, picture poems) and simultaneously created a fine arts oeuvre that moves on the fringe both formally and stylistically. Of course one can attempt to categorize these in art historical terms. However, we can get closer to understanding these works if we view them as an avant-garde artistic practice with the aim of having a political and social effect. The picture poem, the montage, erases the boundaries between traditional groupings of artwork, thus providing opportunities for the renewed contextualizing of certain elements. The artworks of this period – the picture poems, letters in fine art pieces, collages, the typography of Ma in 19201922 – redefine the usual relationship between image and text, undermining their strict separation. The visual poetry annuls the opposition between image and text, i.e. one shows something and the other names it. Kassák’s works use many different frames of signs and can be put into different systems of interpretation. Their importance lies precisely in the fact that they provide a glance into a living process.

Notes I am indebted for help with relevant documents and information to Gábor Andrási in Budapest and Pál Deréky in Vienna.

A few of the most significant texts touching on problems similar to those addressed here are: Passuth, 1974; Brendel, 1980; Levinger, 1987; and Mazzone, 1997.

Ma, the journal edited by Kassák, appeared in 1916-1919 in Budapest and 19201925 in Vienna.

I consider only artworks which appeared in publications at the time, and the dates and authorship of which are therefore beyond doubt.

See Péter Mátyás (Pseudonym for Ernô Kállai) in Mátyás, 1921.

Conclusion The aim of the present article was to examine, through discussion of a few selected artworks of Kassák from his period of emigration in Vienna, aspects of the contemporary avant-garde artistic practice that were

We do not know whether the original artwork is lost or whether Kassák specifically designed it as a “cover page graphic”.

At least according to the publication dates printed in these volumes. The second volume was most likely published in the following year, in 1922.

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For an alternative interpretation see Andrási, 1987, p. 69.

Pál Deréky discusses Constructivism in literature in Deréky, 1991, pp. 66-92.

These works can be interpreted as anonymous regarding the stylistic specificity of their ingenieur-like approach. The artists involved were nevertheless at the same time strong personalities with their own artistic visions, at least in all cases meriting attention here.

Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák Autobiography as Image, as Text Miklós Barabás

References Andrási, G., 1987. Forma és képtest Kassák korai művein 1920-1924. In: Gergely, 1987. pp. 65-72. Bori, I. and Körner, É., 1967. Kassák irodalma és festészete. Budapest: Magvetô. Brendel, J., 1980. The Bildgedichte of Lajos Kassák. Constructivism in Hungarian Avant Garde Poetry. In: The Hungarian Avant Garde: The Eight and the Activists, London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, pp. 28-30. Deréky, P., 1991. Ungarische Avantgarde-Dichtung in Wien 1920-1926. Wien: Böhlau. Ék, S., 1968. Mába érô tegnapok. Budapest: Kossuth Könyvkiadó. Gergely, M. et al. eds., 1987. Kassák Lajos. A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria és a Petôfi Irodalmi Múzeum emlékkiállítása. Budapest. Levinger, E., 1987. Hungarian Avant-garde Typography and Posters. In: Kish, J., ed. The Hungarian Avant-garde 1914-1933. Storrs: The William Benton Museum of Art, pp. 112-120. Mazzone, M., 1997. The Art of Visual Poetry in Central Europe. Kassák & Schwitters between Dada and Constructivism. Hungarian Studies, 12 (1-2), pp. 205-221. Mátyás, P. 1921. Kassák Lajos. Ma, 7 (1), p. 139. Passuth, K., 1974. Magyar művészek az európai avantgarde-ban 1919-1925. A kubizmustól a konstruktivizmusig. Budapest: Corvina.

The focus of my inquiry is the comparison of verbal and pictorial portrayals of personality. More specifically, I focus on self-portraits and the autobiography of nineteenth century Hungarian painter Miklós Barabás (1810-1898). The point of departure for my paper is what Richard Wendorf formulated with respect to the ut picture poesis doctrine: the examples of the two forms of self-representation mentioned below can be compared not because they strive to be like each other, but rather because they have similar functions, impetus, and methods (Wendorf, 1990, p. 6). In spite of the fact that theoretical writings concerning the arts have dealt with the parallel between a painted portrait and a written biography for centuries (one thinks of Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt, among others), there is surprisingly little literature to be found on this particular area of genre studies. Within the existing literature the scholarship of the literary and art historian, Richard Wendorf, who introduced the expression ut pictura biographia, offers the most comprehensive and exhaustive study on the subject (Wendorf, 1983). Wendorf however does not discuss autobiographies with reference to self-portraits. For this parallel one must look to the writings of William L. Howarth (Howarth, 1974, see also Salgado, 1986). Howarth defines three types of autobiographies: autobiography as oratory, autobiography as drama, and autobiography as poetry. He draws comparisons with examples in the visual arts, but using pictorial and verbal expressions not by the same artist, and indeed not even from the same century. He pairs Raphael and Michelangelo with (among others) Augustine, Parmegiano and Hogarth with Benvenuto Cellini, Benjamin Franklin and William Carlos Williams, and Rem-

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brandt and Van Gogh with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and William Butler Yeats. The history of nineteenth and twentieth century European and American art has no dearth of captivating autobiographies by artists who also depicted themselves in paint (such as Vigée Le Brun, Courbet, Hazlitt, William Holman Hunt, Severini, Malevich, Nolde, Charles Willson Peale, or Cecilia Beaux), many of which have not only been used as sources for scholarship, but read as entertainment and literature. Similarly there exist several autobiographies by Hungarian painters who also did self-portraits, such as Mihály Kovács, Mihály Munkácsy or Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (Csiffáry, 2002). The case of Kovács (1818-1892) is a particularly telling example in the context of comparison of text and image, as his autobiography, together with his numerous self-portraits, attest to his reflective interest in himself (Ludányi, 1992). He was a child of serfs, and his Self-Portrait in Kossuth-Hat of 1850 (the Kossuth-hat was a wide-rimmed, bent hat which was worn by some of the generals of the 1848 Revolution and was consequently forbidden in the early 1850s) provides a revealing parallel to his relationship with the Habsburg Empire, despite the fact that according to his autobiography he later lost his enthusiasm for the ideas of the Revolution. Munkácsy’s (1844-1900) autobiography (Munkácsy, 1950), which was published in his lifetime in Hungarian as well as in French (under the title Souvenirs in 1897, with a foreword by Boyer d’Agen), is in reality a collection of letters and notes sent by the painter to his friend Madame Chaplin which were somewhat rewritten and sewn into a compact narrative by several people (Malonyai, 1902). The account ends, however, at age 19, well before any of his known self-portraits. Csontváry (1853-1919) is another case in which verbal and pictorial self-analysis offers a convenient parallel. Many critics see signs of psychosis in his autobiography (Csontváry Kosztka, 1982), which recounts, among others things, how as a child he conversed with bugs, and at age 27 was told through a mystic vision that he was “to be the greatest painter of the Sunpath, greater than Raphael”. While one should not jump overly hastily to the conclusion that Csontváry suffered from a mental disorder, his portrayal of himself in word and in picture both seem to suggest that he saw himself as an artist with a weighty mission, with which, however, he had reconciled himself.

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As intriguing as these cases may be, the verbal and pictorial expressions left behind by Barabás offer the additional possibility of comparing two mediums of expression, one which inevitably incorporates time, the other which inevitably incorporates space. The numerous self-portraits, painted at various stages of his long life, as well as his autobiography, which begins with early childhood and ends in old age, reveal a – real or perceived – change of character. His case is one in which text and image were tools of equal significance in the pursuit of a reputation. Our approach to art, rooted in romanticism, is driven by the desire to glean an inner glimpse of an artist’s mind and the creative process. As M. H. Abrams argues in The Mirror and the Lamp, a rigorously documented study of European Romanticism, conceptions of art since the early nineteenth century were strongly influenced by the tendency to view a work of art as a source of insight into the mind of the artist and the creative process, an approach the influence of which remains palpable to this day. While there is a large body of nineteenth century autobiographies that tend to have more information about the tribulations and successes of a given artist, texts that focus on an artist’s conception of art and contain comments on theoretical perspectives that can be quoted in compilations on art theory have nevertheless been given more attention. However, writings that recount the social and economic aspirations of an artist and focus on the self might provide more insight into the transformations that took place in his or her character, and might therefore constitute a closer analogy with self-portraiture. Like an autobiography, a series of self-portraits by an artist (made at various stages of his/her life) may even offer the opportunity to portray changes in the character of the person depicted. The most famous examples of this of course are the numerous self-portraits by Rembrandt. Examples such as Ingres retouching his Self-Portrait of the Artist at the Age of Twentyfour some forty years later, Henri Rousseau’s Le passé et le present (The Past and the Present), showing two portraits of the artist on one picture, or Miklós Barabás drawing an image of himself as a young boy when he was in his late seventies amply illustrate that retrospection and self-reconstruction are not limited to the auto-biographer (the first two examples are offered by Heffernan, 1989). The drawing, which shows Barabás as a young boy with a bouquet in his hands, bears the following inscription: “They say that in old age one becomes almost a child again.

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If I live to that age I imagine I would look like this as I offer a bouquet of forget-me-nots to Erda. This is as true and faithful an image of me as all of the ideal representations. Who could say that I can’t depict myself as a child…” (The drawing was made for Erna Villecz, the stepdaughter of writer Gergely Csiky.) What happens when one person practices both forms of self-representation? How do these two art forms influence each other? In short, my paper proposes to demonstrate through the example of Barabás the ways in which these forms of self-depiction and self-creation may overlap. The most immediate difference between literary and painterly selfrepresentation is that while self-portraits tend to depict the subject at a certain moment or stage of his or her life, the autobiography is usually written in older age and is a retrospective look back on the memorable events of a life. As George May suggested, journal entries therefore offer a better parallel, providing similar moments of self-insight (or at least self-perception) (May, 1978).. In the case of Barabás, the autobiography and self-portraits offer us a similarly high degree of identityconstruction. And this is not solely because the relevance of an event in the course of one’s life often only becomes apparent long after the fact, but rather, as I plan to show, because the self-portrait was not a snapshot resembling a journal entry, but rather was more similar functionally to an autobiography. While an author of an autobiography writes in a process of a deliberate self-creation, the author of a journal is less selective in his reflections and confessions. It is also not by accident that the autobiography emerged as a separate form from similar types of texts, such as confessions and memoirs, in the eighteenth century (Danahay, 1993, p. 12). It is not unheard of that written documents about the present have been claimed to form a sort of autobiography. Possibly the most famous case is the large collection of letters written by Van Gogh to his brother Theo. However, one should be cautious with such reinterpretations. There are self-portraits in the history of Hungarian art which could be likened to journal entries, but in the case of the self-portraits of Barabás, considering their function and purpose, the autobiography is a much more fitting analogy. The autobiography and the self-portraits discussed in this paper can be considered representations, to varying degrees, of a concocted personal myth. The painter is not merely a convenient model for an exercise

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in portraiture. Rather, he uses his self-portraits to articulate his place in contemporaneous society and for later generations in art history. In Timothy Dow Adams’ book on American autobiographies, the emphasis falls on the act of lying. Quoting Montaigne, Adams argues that just as telling the truth is one of the main premises of the autobiography, the opposite, lying, is also one of its attributes, and furthermore, it has “a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field” (Adams, 1990, p. 3). What then would be the equivalent of equivocation, deception, manipulation, falsehood, dissembling and distortion in a painting? How do fakery, evasion, suppression, and exaggeration manifest themselves in a self-portrait? Idealization and beautification of the model? Showing the model to be younger, more sophisticated, richer, or better established? As selfportraits were often publicity (advertisements) of an artist’s skill, it is certainly not foreign to the art of self-portraiture to give the portrayed an appearance of higher social and economic status. It is these issues of selfcreation in painting and in writing that I would like to address. Self-portraiture had antecedents in nineteenth century Hungary, but it was in the middle of the century that events such as the first board meeting of the Association for the Formation of a National Picture-Gallery on March 4th 1847 began to give a strong impetus to painters in Hungary to turn to their own likeness (Csernitzky, 1995, p. 185). Three years later the director of the National Museum Ágoston Kubinyi individually sent 43 Hungarian artists at home and abroad a letter in which he asked for a self-portrait and a short autobiography to add to the collection of the National Picture-Gallery (Kapossy, 1946; Basics, 2001, p. 7). In the late 1850s József Marastoni began his Gallery of Artists’ Portraits, a series of lithographs depicting the major figures of mid-nineteenth century Hungarian fine arts (including the sculptor Miklós Izsó and the architect Miklós Ybl). His son, József Marastoni the Younger, even planned a publication in which, along with lithograph reproductions of major works of Hungarian artists, a biography of each artist would appear (Csernitzky, 1995, pp. 192-96). This however was never realized. Self-portraits even appeared at the Műegylet (Art Association) of Pest (at the time the single most important exhibition institution in Hungary), such as Amerling’s Self-Portrait in 1851 (Szvoboda, 2005, p. 353). This was only one aspect of the growing cult of artists, a phenomenon which materialized in poems, eulogies, commemorative speeches, etc. on artists of the time,

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an attitude which gained particular importance in the second half of the century (Király, 1995, p. 59). Barabás also had a fair share of such celebrations of achievement, whether we are speaking of his award of the Order of the Iron Crown, the 50 year jubilee exhibition organized by the Society of the Fine Arts in 1878, the verse written by Gyula Reviczky on the occasion of the celebration organized in 1883 by the Society of Writers and Artists, or the 50th and 60th anniversary of his entry into the Hungarian Academy. A public, but due to the familial relationship between Barabás and Hugó Maszák also somewhat personal laudation is the verse entitled Barabás művészi pályája (The Artistic Career of Barabás), published in 1887 (Maszák 1887). The list of works which Barabás began at the age of twenty mentions altogether 10 self-portraits. As part of the original function of the list was to record the revenues of each artwork, many works – even those of large scale – which he made of his own family members and of himself, or which were personal in other ways, were omitted. Also noteworthy is how he labels these self portrayals: until 1859 he doesn’t refer to them as self-portraits or as portraits of his own likeness, but rather writes: “Magamat” (Myself). (Although interestingly he used the word “portrait” even as early as his “Portrait gyűjtemény” (portrait collection) of 1827.) Of course, the word used for self-portrait in modern Hungarian is “önarckép,” a compound word using the anterior constituent “ön,” which was the creation of the language reform. Therefore most words based on it, such as “önéletrajz” (autobiography), originate from the 1830s (Benkô-Kiss-Papp 1967, p. 28). This array of new words beginning with “ön” was undoubtedly not just a curious coincidence in time in the growing cult of the individual. An amendment to the 1942 publication of Barabás’s autobiography and list of works made by his descendents mentions a further 11 self-portrayals, including a seated, life-size, three-quarter length version which was a companion to a portrait of his wife. The list compiled by Gabriella Szvoboda Dománszky in the 1980s when she was working on her biography of Barabás (which for the moment exists only as a handwritten manuscript) includes 5 additional self-portrayals, including a watercolour in the Hungarian National Gallery from around 1840 which shows him holding a long pipe. These 26 portrayals span six decades and are of various sizes, making use of various techniques, from drawings to lithographs, mini-

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atures, and life-size oil paintings. Of course, in addition to these 26 portraits there are further drawings, aquarelles and oil paintings which depict the painter in a genre or a landscape setting, such as the aquarelle Painter on the Seaside (1834. Hungarian National Gallery) or the oil painting showing the artist as he converses with his student and friend, Mihály Kovács, in the garden of the artist’s house in Buda (the copy made by his daughter is in a private collection). The 26 self-portraits were made at various times throughout his career, but it is noteworthy that while several originate from the 1830s and 1840s and he seemed to return frequently to his own likeness again in the 1870s and 1880s, there are comparably few from the period in between. His early self-portrayals, often made as gifts to a friend, have a more personal feel to them, while the portraits of the 1870s and 1880s depict him as an aged and well-respected member of the art world as well as of contemporaneous society.

Fig 1. Miklós Barabás, Autobiography, bound manuscript, 21 × 17 cm. Private Collection, Budapest (photo: Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák)

Barabás began writing his autobiography when still in good physical and mental health; his daughter notes in an amendment that her father’s memory was perfectly clear until his death. As the entire autobiography was handwritten by the artist himself, we see his handwriting declin-

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ing and becoming shakier with time. The last entry refers to an event in 1886, twelve years before his death. The autobiography was published for the first time in 1902, edited by László Kézdi-Kovács for the publishing house Olcsó Könyvtár (Cheap Library), but this was a greatly abridged and significantly rewritten version. An unabridged version was published in 1944, and on this occasion it not only had a detailed critical foreword by Béla Bíró, but also included the list of works Barabás had kept between 1830 and 1893. In 1985 another, again slightly rewritten version was published by the Dacia Publishing House in Cluj, only to be replaced by what was essentially a republishing of the 1944 version in 1998, the centennial anniversary of the artist’s death. The original handwritten autobiography is to this day in the possession of the artist’s descendants (fig. 1). As is often the case, the autobiography gives a lengthy account of his youth and the early years of his artistic career. As the years progress, the account becomes faster and is less detailed. In the 1944 version Béla Bíró had separated the unbroken text into chapters, such as Struggling Childhood, On the Path to Independency, At the Vienna Academy, etc. These artificial chapters cover just a couple of years at the beginning, but towards the end of the book they span almost two decades. As artificial as these chapters might seem, some of them seem to provide us with convenient contemporaneous self-portraits by the artist. One might even wonder, did Béla Bíró have these self-portrayals in mind when dividing up the text? Or conversely, when Barabás wrote his autobiography in his old age, did he not look back at his life through his self-portrayals? The depiction that was part of the quodlibet composition made by Barabás at the age of 16 as a student in Nagyenyed (today the town of Alud in Romania) is believed to be the earliest self-representation by the painter. The pose is repeated in the miniature self-portrait painted on ivory from 1839 (Hungarian National Gallery). Unfortunately the numerous self-portrayals from the period between these two images (the majority of which the artist himself recorded in his list) are unknown to us. These two representations, however, provide us with insight into Barabás’s early self-perception. Both show an image of an elegant youth of middle-class society turning slightly to the left but looking back at us. Their small size presumably accounts for the lack of allusion to his chosen profession, although he had begun establishing himself as an artist in

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his early twenties. Of this time he proudly recounts in his autobiography that although he was poor, through his portrait commissions he “acquired the manners and conduct necessary for society outside the college”. Anecdotes about the importance of appearance are scattered in the narrative about his youth. There are numerous recollections about how a nice outfit or respectable attire won respect from strangers or even relatives (he claims his own grandfather did not recognize him when he saw him well-dressed), and this seems to have had a lasting effect on his visual depictions of himself.

Fig 2. Miklós Barabás, Self-Portrait, c. 1862, oil on canvas, 122 × 92 cm. Private Collection, Budapest (photo: Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák)

Of his many self-portraits, only a few, such as the oil paintings of 1841 or 1862, show him with references to his profession as a painter, and even then he alludes to the art of painting with only a few objects. Possibly under the influence of classical art theory valuing line over colour and emphasising the intellectual aspect of the art of painting, he prefers the chalk and a sketchbook to the palette, brush and canvas. His clothes never attest to the work of a painter: he never wears a painter’s robe or cap. Rather he is always dressed in middle-class attire, and while he may have a painter’s utensils nearby, he places himself in a middle-class interior (fig. 2), not in a studio with draperies or other props, such as those

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seen in the Self-Portrait of 1845 (Hungarian National Museum) by his colleague and rival Jakab Marastoni. Neither do any of his portraits depict him in the actual act of creation, again a marked difference between his self-portrayals and works such as the aforementioned self-portrait by Marastoni or that of Frigyes Lieder (1850, Hungarian National Museum) or Gusztáv Kratzmann (Hungarian National Museum). A lithograph he made of himself in 1846 portrays him in much the same manner as he portrayed models who since have either become historical figures or faded into oblivion: a middle-class man in his thirties looks back at us from his armchair (fig. 3). A signed copy of a late lithograph self-portrait made at age 75 is a prime example of how in words and in picture he gave no indication of his line of work. He depicted himself as a man of considerable respect, adorned with the medal of the Iron Crown and wearing the Hungarian ceremonial attire (fig. 4). When he autographed a few copies to send to his relatives in Transylvania, he made no mention of his profession, but rather described himself as a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Jánó 1998).

Fig 3. Miklós Barabás, Self-Portrait, c. 1846, lithograph, 50 × 33.5 cm. Private Collection, Budapest (photo: Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák) Fig 4. Miklós Barabás, Self-Portrait, c. 1884, lithograph, 62 × 45 cm. Private Collection, Budapest (photo: Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák)

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When writing his autobiography however, Barabás was keenly aware of his audience. The narrative therefore centres on him as an artist, although interestingly, not necessarily as a portraitist. Indeed he even claims that he turned to portraiture because that was the genre in which he could earn a living and advance in society, there being “no prospect of making a living from painting other things” (Barabás, 1998, p. 124). Contemporaneous writers have also noted that if it had not been for the “vanity” of his contemporaries, Barabás could have turned to his true passion: landscape painting (Szana, 1899). He must have been somewhat familiar, however, with art historical idioms, as his account of the reaction one of his portraits elicited makes evident: he recounts that when a portrait painted by him of (by then deceased) József Kiss was placed on a couch and seen by a servant, the servant mistook it for the man himself, crying out, “The Sir from Magura is sitting in there!” (Barabás, 1998, p. 98). The objection that there is little mention of theoretical issues in the autobiography is a commonplace in the scholarship on Barabás (while at the same time several of his writings attest to the fact that he was deeply occupied with certain questions concerning the arts). Instead the majority of the anecdotes are intertwined with the development of his career in art, if not necessarily his art per se. In fact, in a passage about the period when he already had a stable reputation he writes: “To dwell in detail on uniform everyday life is not worthwhile, because I could only describe it by saying that I was continuously painting; however, with regards to my actions in public affairs, I consider mentioning some of them as having been not insignificant..” (Barabás, 1998, p. 186). The beginning of the autobiography relates when he made his first drawings, when he bought his first materials, from whom he had his first lessons, when he made an earning from a drawing, where and when he saw paintings for the first time, etc. He points the reader to the influences and milestones in the development of his career. He describes how he learned and worked; friends, paintings and experiences that affected him, such as the acquaintance with William Leighton Leitch or his trip to Western Europe. Knowing full well the reader’s interests, he mentions well-known works of his, such as Laying of the Foundation Stone of the Chain Bridge. The biography also gives a detailed account of the role he played in the cultural activities of Hungary, such as the establishment of the Műegylet (Association of Art) of Pest.

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While his autobiography is filled with personal anecdotes about experiences with others, we find little character analysis of any of his acquaintances. At most, he briefly comments on someone’s actions, like those of the Deputy Steward named Trauner, about whom he writes, “Undoubtedly he swindled a lot, and when this was realized he was so ashamed that he took his own life.” (Barabás 1998, p. 175). One could make the argument that his painted portraits also lack the kind of psychologising practiced by some of his contemporaries. As his biographer, Gabriella Szvoboda Dománszky keenly observed “he was interested in character, not the soul” (Szvoboda Dománszky, 1983, p. 48). When writing about himself, he seldom describes emotions; a rare instance is his reminiscence of October 1849, of which he wrote: “Palette in my hand, but I did nothing, as only the sad events swarmed in my head” (Barabás, 1998, p. 177). In his self portrayals Barabás also never provides us with a close-up of his face, a method implying the reflective intellect of an artist, like the self-portraits of his contemporaries, Albert Tikos (1845, Hungarian National Museum), Henrik Weber (1847, Hungarian National Gallery), Károly Brocky (n. d., Hungarian National Gallery), or Lajos Latkóczy (c. 1850, Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs). It is not just his playful self-depiction, at the age of 77, as a young boy through which Barabás suggests to us that portraits or self-portraits should be re-examined as portrayals of a person at a particular moment in time. As there are relatively numerous examples of portraits in his oeuvre which were made after the death of the person depicted, one asks the question: was the portrait not done on the basis of memories fixed at various moments of life? The portrait of János Arany, painted in 1884, depicts the poet (who had died two years earlier at age 65) as a young man. The seven previous occasions on which Barabás had depicted Arany undoubtedly left an impression on the visual artist (Majoros, 1992). Another example is the companion to his self-portrait, the life-size oil painting of his wife, Susanne Bois de Chesne, painted after her death in 1862. Closely examining a face and then painting a portrait of someone from memory is a recurring theme in the autobiography, but no example of painting from memory is a better illustration than his painting of József Kiss, who died in 1830. The request for a portrait came in 1861, and according to Barabás, anyone who had known Kiss agreed that it was a perfect likeness (Barabás, 1998, pp. 183-85).

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Barabás had a special and close relationship with verbal expression, and therefore it is no surprise that he felt inclined to portray himself in words as well as in painting. Undoubtedly he was highly selective in what he chose to reveal to the public, whether with paint or with words. His self-portraits, like his autobiography, are not manifestations of an ars poetica. Instead, they attest to the same self-understanding: the self-made man occasionally shows himself with the attributes of a painter, but even then only in a restrained manner, with a few objects. The environment and his clothes never attest to his work. The similarities between examples of these two art forms are found in the manner in which, by using to a greater or lesser degree the tools of distortion, evasion, exaggeration, etc., the artist attempted to fashion and control the image he wanted to present to the public, and thus to determine his place in society and in art history. When comparing the self-representations in image and in text, it is their similar function and approach that makes them analogous.

References Abrams, M. H., 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp. Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. Adams, T. D., 1990. Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Basics, B., 2001. Művész (ön)arcképek. Budapesti Történeti Múzeum. Barabás, M., 1998. Barabás Miklós önéletrajza. Sepsiszentgyörgy: Kaláka Könyvek. Benkô-Kiss-Papp, 1967. A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára. Vol. II. Akadémiai Kiadó. p. 28. Csernitzky, M., 1995. Önarcképek, művészképmások. In: Nagy I. and Imre Gy., ed. 1995. Aranyérmek-ezüstkoszorúk. Exh. Cat. Hungarian National Gallery, pp. 185-196. Csiffáry, G., 2002. Születtem… Magyar művészek önéletrajzai. Palatinus. Csontváry Kosztka, T., 1982. Önéletrajz. Szigethy G., ed. Magvetô. Danahay, M. A., 1993. A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain. State University of New York Press. Heffernan, J. A. W., 1989. Self-Representation in Byron and Turner. Poetics Today, 10 (2), pp. 207-241. Howarth, W. L., 1974. Some Principles of Autobiography. New Literary History, 5 pp. 363-81. Jánó, M., 1998. Katalógus a Barabás Miklós rajzaiból és festményeibôl rendezett emlékkiállításhoz. Sepsiszentgyörgy.

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Kapossy, J., 1946. XIX. századi magyar művészek önéletrajzának kérdéseihez. Magyar Múzeum, pp. 29-34. Király, E., 1995. “Laudatio artis”. 19. századi képzôművészetünk dicséretének egykorú emlékei. In: Nagy I. and Imre Gy., ed. 1995. Aranyérmek-ezüstkoszorúk. Exh. Cat. Hungarian National Gallery, pp. 56-73. Ludányi, G., 1992. Kovács Mihály önéletrajza. Eger. Majoros, V., 1992. Catalogue entry for the portrait of János Arany by Miklós Barabás. In: Szabó J. and Majoros V., ed. 1992. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Fine Arts in the Nineteenth Century. MTA Művészettörténeti Kutató Intézet. pp. 163-64. Malonyai, D., 1902. Munkácsy elsô festménye. Művészet. 1 (4) pp. 274-283. Maszák, Hugó 1887. Barabás művészi pályája. Ország-Világ (8). May, G., 1978. Autobiography and the Eighteenth Century. In: L. L. Martz and A. Williams, ed. 1978. The Author and His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 323-4. Munkácsy, M., 1950. Emlékeim. Introductory essay by Végvári L., Hungária Könyvkiadó. Salgado, M. A., 1986. Mirrors, Portraits, and the Self. Romance Quarterly, 33, pp. 439-52. Szana, T., 1899. Barabás Miklós. Vasárnapi Újság, 46 (43), pp. 717-718. Szvoboda Dománszky, G., 1983. Barabás Miklós 1810-1898. Képzôművészeti Kiadó. Szvoboda Dománszky, G., 2007. A Pesti Műegylet története. Miskolci Egyetem Kiadója. Wendorf, R., 1990. The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England. Oxford University Press. Wendorf, R., 1983. ‘Ut Pictura Biographia’: Biography and Portrait Painting as Sister Arts. In: R. Wendorf, ed. 1983. Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ch. 2.

Gábor Marosvölgyi Words and Images from Na’Conxypan Na’Conxypan is the name of a fantasy world, that of Lajos Gulácsy (1882-1932), a Hungarian artist who had a tragic fate. It was created at the beginning of the twentieth century in his pictures and texts, which have parodic, grotesque, fantastic, fairytale-like, constructive and deconstructive features. In his early period his style was Art Nouveau Symbolism, but later he turned to visionary painting. His contemporaries regarded this world as a fairy tale-like fantasy and a funny game with forms, often considering it the key to his oeuvre. On the occasion of Gulácsy’s last exhibition at the Ernst Museum in Budapest, the great art-historian Károly Lyka called him “the painter of Na’Conxypan” in 1922 (Lyka, 1922. p. 204). The exhibition itself was organized without the cooperation of the artist. Gulácsy had had a nervous breakdown caused by the outbreak of the First World War, after which he mentally deteriorated quickly. After 1918 he had to be treated in a sanatorium permanently, hence his contemporaries linked Na’Conxypan with his insanity, and saw the signs of madness in it. This paper concentrates on the visual and verbal forms of this imagined world, studying their connections in order to determine whether they have a common origin. My aim is to find and show the roots of the artistic behaviour that led to the creation of Na’Conxypan, and to point out that Na’Conxypan represents more than just a fictive topic, but also an attitude on the part of the artist as well as an aesthetic quality. It is worth beginning by identifying related works of art. These include texts with the word “Na’Conxypan” in them and pictures the titles of which contain the word, not as a reference but as a coherent, integral part. There are relatively few such texts and pictures, and their chronology is uncertain because of the lack of exact dates. It is, however, a very peculiar world, the essence of which is its unusualness and dis-

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tance from everyday life. One can determine which works of art belong here on the basis of topic and style and the recurrent places and characters in the texts. For example, in the text “The Big Ladder and other things” (A nagy Létra és egyebek) the word “Na’Conxypan” is not mentioned, but many of the characters and places appear in “From Na’Conxypan” (Na’Conxypanból), including Prince Piripiri, Aunt Bolboll, etc. The most important criterion on the basis of which to select texts is the creative attitude to language, in particular to words, including unusual words, newly formed words, altered words, or words that have no meaning, for example the word “Na’Conxypan” itself. The use of such words is so important that the story itself is of only secondary importance. There are more pictures than texts, and it is more difficult to establish the criteria on the basis of which to select them. Some of the pictures have “Na’Conxypan” in their titles or inscriptions, and there are often meaningless words in the compositions, like on some of the pictures depicting streets (colour image 10, see colour plates). Besides these trademark-like inscriptions, these pictures bear considerable stylistic affinities. The use of flexible outlines show that the technique of line drawing is determinant. The forms are made up of continuous cross hatching with intense colours. Sources prove that there were many “Na’Conxypan” paintings, but unfortunately today we only know of graphics and drawings. On the whole we can state, that the technique of drawing, especially the line, is the most significant, even in the case of colour pictures, which were made using a composite technique. It was around the turn of the century that drawing achieved the same rank as painting in aesthetics, due to its spontaneous and sensible character. In selecting the material to observe the text-image relations I follow the structural categories of text-and-image theories based on semiotics, according to Áron Kibédi Varga (Kibédi Varga, 1997, pp. 300–320) and György Endre Szônyi (Szônyi, 2004, pp. 19–22), from the less direct relations towards the inter-referential relations. The loosest relationship between text and image is when they are not synchronous, when it is clear that the text and the picture have similar features, but their chronological order and direct connection cannot be determined.

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The texts referring to Na’Conxypan do not form a homogeneous group. One can establish three categories on the basis of the background world they describe and their narratives: the first one consists primarily of narratives resembling the folktale, the second resembling the fairytale, and the third resembling science-fiction. This can also be considered a kind of chronological order, reflecting the evolution of Na’Conxypan, because the texts resembling the folktale (for example: The Big Ladder and other things, Prince Savoury Scone in the pastry shop [Pogácsa herceg a cukrászdában] etc.) are the least homogeneous, there are often contradictions, the word “Na’Conxypan” is not mentioned in some of them, and the pictures related to them are among the earliest. The science-fictionlike texts (The house in Kepleenstohl [Kepleenstohli ház], Xuhyt, etc.) are the most coherent ones. They can be understood as the parts of one work and the illustrations (because of their style) cannot be earlier than 1910. There are two texts that belong to the fairytale-like category (Magic [Varázslat], Magic in Na’Conxypan [Varázslat Na’Conxypanban]): one of them is a short play, the other is the sketch of this play. The unusual expressions and neologisms are characteristic of all three categories, but the style of the words and source of the newly created words are different, according to the world they describe. The texts resembling folktales fit well in the cult of tales at the turn of the century. One thinks of Anna Lesznai, who wrote and illustrated her tales. These texts have vocabulary from folktales, as well as words from distinctive dialects, children’s language, and onomatopoeic words, but in contrast they also have expressions from an over-refined Rococo environment. I cite the following example: Grand Duke Piripiri, Nol-Hoy’s nephew, the Lord of Sweet-tree-root country was pirouetting happily in front of the castle built of savoury scone. He kept on lifting his triangle-shaped hat. Miss Mooncroissant welcomed him happily from behind the paprika-red tower. Juhhy, juhhy, ol hik muff. (From Na’Conxypan) The pictures related to these texts on the basis of their topics and style are similar to children’s drawings, with their lively stylization which seems at times a bit clumsy. This expresses their affinity with tales. The

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space is not marked in them, there is no shadowing. This may also reflect the influence of graphics from the Far East, a source of inspiration for many visual artists at the time. The decorative, playful lines, the clothes of some of the characters, and the use of calligraphic signs remind us of Japanese pictures. The proof of this seems to be given by Gyula Juhász, the great poet and Gulácsy’s friend since his first exhibition in Nagyvárad (today the town of Oradea in Romania). He writes that in Gulácsy’s view Na’Conxypan “lies between Japan and the Moon” (Juhász, 1925, pp. 10–13). We could also add that the name of Japan in Japanese sounds similar to Na’Conxypan. It is certainly not a coincidence that Juhász mentioned the Moon. The cosmic space is part of Na’Conxypan. There are extraterrestrial places in many of the texts. For example, “Magic” is set on Saturn and “The house in Kepleenstohl” is set on Mars. They save the fantasy from the rules of logic and from the laws of physics on Earth, and make the foreign language legitimate. Some of the characters resemble ornaments, in part because of the lack of modelling. Their clothes parody fashions at the turn of the century. The top hats, for example, are as tall as towers. The women and their clothes sometimes look like plants or flower-cups. These characteristics seem to follow the method of Art Nouveau illustrations. The sketch done in 1902 for the competition held by the periodical Művészet (Art) for its cover design offers a good example. Here the muse of nature is like a fairy from a folktale, and she leads the painter, dressed as a prince. On the Na’Conxypan drawings the characters have very strange, caricature-like proportions. As for these drawings, given the close connection between text and picture, we have to take into account the influence of caricature, which began to flourish in Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially considering that this was the time at which bold line drawing began in Hungarian periodicals. There is an interesting example of the relationship between fine art and caricatures: Victor Wollemann’s caricature, the style of which was brought into connection with Gulácsy’s. This caricature shows ironic drawings of some of the paintings exhibited in 1909 by a group of artists called MIÉNK (the letters stand for the Circle of Hungarian Impression-

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ists and Naturalists). In addition to the paintings by Károly Kernstok and Béla Czóbel, there was a painting entitled “Aurelia” by Gulácsy, which has since been lost. The texts resembling fairytales use the archaizing style of the legends from the Middle Ages, myths and fairytales. The nonsense expressions are only used as magic words or texts of songs. Foreign words, especially words of Latin origin, are transformed, for example: THE VOICE OF THE ANCIENT-KING: You are the Lord of Na’Conxypan. Your country should have no end – so I will send you the eternal Bad, Satan in the person of the dwarf Borgborg, who takes with him his daughter, Satan’s niece who will melt eternal Bad in eternal Good. (Magic from Na’Conxypan) [Bumburin’s magic (Detail)] Za alfena in Vezullo Te barghas el Lamo Terrentorre ol Banna Inor medina del Caro Janas zego toritudonis Esmena il beginas Raporinus de Rago (Magic) As there is only one drama in this category, we cannot find intense relationships between text and image. The archaizing and the mystical medieval topics are very significant in Gulácsy’s painting, not in an ironic or playful way, but in a pathetic, melancholic or sinister way. Therefore on the basis of the content of this text no typical Na’Conxypan pictures can be found. The science-fiction texts use the terminology of modern science, especially from chemistry (for example names of elements, combinations and medicine). The letters “x” “y” and “h” and consonant clusters are often used. In this category of texts not only are new words created, but even entire sentences made up of fictitious words are constructed. Gulácsy gives the translation of these texts, thus the world of Na’Conxypan has its own language:

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Thel al unt donc, ilem Emertanomi! [Our hope will not remain a fruitless thing.] (The house in Kepleenstohl) I cite the following example: Keht made an electric bell work, to study the sound recording capacity of the new material. The result was a surprise. The new material, which he called Ehilhapront, that is life basis, absorbed sound completely and then gave it back clearly. (The house in Kepleenstohl) Contrary to the consequentially constructed personal mythologies, such as that of William Blake, the world of Na’Conxypan is not a topic based on certain conceptions and growing larger and richer. Rather it shows various shifts of view. Compared to the playful, humorous folktale-like texts or the old poetry of the fairytale-like texts, the sciencefiction texts are rarely funny. Some characters are deformed, half-animal beings with bizarre habits, and the grotesque features often have a menacingly horrific quality. The turning from the playful and tale-like to the grotesque-fantastic can be observed in the case of the pictures as well. In the early years of his career his works follow the style of Art Nouveau illustrations. Later they look like caricatures. From 1910 on he has increasingly bizarre, sometimes surrealistic topics, deformed, half-human half-animal forms. In other words, the grotesque view becomes dominant. As the source of inspiration for the pictures, especially for the grotesque ones, one should mention the influence of the vulgar genre pictures by seventeenth century Netherlandish painters. In one of his writings published in 1909 in Egyetemi Lapok (University Papers) he gives an imagined guided tour to show his favourite pictures. He writes about these Netherlandish painters: “Everything is so strange. The trees grow such flexuous bunches. Foolish trees, foolish people. Franz Hals, Van Ostade, Van Ruysdael, Brouwer …they are all merry boys.” (Dreams about a slumbering exhibition/Álmok egy alvó tárlaton) He used the same terms when he described Na’Conxypan in 1911 in Nagyváradi Napló, (Diary of Nagyvárad):

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Everything was absurd here. Foolish trees. Foolish people. Gaudy blue clouds and flexuous streets, like the brains of the small people who lived in this fairytale city. (From Na’Conxypan) Turning things upside down, playful humour and grotesque irony are the typical characteristics of Na’Conxypan, and their primary sources are the masters mentioned above, as the citations from Gulácsy’s writings demonstrates. Moreover, the painting entitled Carousing Peasants by Van Ostade had served as a model for a photograph showing Gulácsy and his colleagues. In the text “Dreams about a slumbering exhibition” Gulácsy writes about Jacques Callot (1592-1635), who worked with commedia dell’arte topics. Gulácsy mentions him after the Netherlandish masters and emphasizes his bizarre style. Alessandro Magnasco, with his eccentric expressive painting, must have had an influence on Gulácsy’s grotesque view. Gulácsy copied many of his pictures as well. We can find word and image synchrony as inscriptions on the pictures, or as illustrations in the texts. The latter are not series of pictures, they are unique works, but because of the similarity of the topic and style the viewer is likely to regard the whole group of works as the virtual context of the individual works. If text and image are synchronous they are in an inter-referential relationship from the point of view of form. They can be arranged according to their places in the hierarchy. In other words, we should observe the cases of priority of text and image. In the case of Na’Conxypan the fact that this fantasy world has a name and therefore can be denoted with a single word indicates the dominance of the verbal. This fictitious term, a nonsense word used as a name, expresses the basic organizing principle of this world: it follows reality, but it is a playful creative method that freely transforms the given constructions. It is worth noting that Gulácsy held the linguistic forms so important he made a list of the words he created. The classic example of the priority of the image over the text is the inscription. Letters grouped similarly to the word “Na’Conxypan” are like trade marks on the Na’Conxypan pictures. They work like “Once upon a time” in tales: after reading these words we know that we are in the world of tales or imagination. For example the picture “Xhieh Ba

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Na’Conxypan” is like a postcard with the inscription “Greetings from Na’Conxypan”. On the aforementioned pictures of streets these words appear on sign-boards and on the walls of the houses and tables, giving information for the characters in the picture. They show the function of the place. On the picture Gyxvilp (colour image 11, see colour plates) the letters calligraphically fit the surface and the Art Nouveau style of the picture. The most frequent type of image having a text as its antecedent is the illustration. Gulácsy made covers for many works, illustrations for poems (for example Artúr Keleti: The Hooded Painter’s Strophes) and for his own writings (Helen and the Flower, Lamentations). It should be noted that the period from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1920s was a golden age for illustrated books (for example Doré’s and Moreau’s illustrations). Only a few illustrations remained that were made for the topic Na’Conxypan. One of them is a plan for the book cover of the fantastic novel “Guyp”. The novel was never finished, but the characteristics of the drawing fit Gulácsy’s other science-fiction story illustrations (such as “The House in Kepleenstohl”). Two of them are particularly worthy of mention (colour images 12-13, see colour plates). Examples from the texts:

technique of caricatures, but because of the bizarre deformities they also belong to the genre of the grotesque. It should be noted that Na’Conxypan cannot be separated from Gulácsy’s other works, just as we have seen in the case of the fairytale topic. The transformation of Na’Conxypan followed that of his oeuvre, in which Art Nouveau, the archaizing and the surreal, and grotesque tendencies came in turns. The texts related to the Na’Conxypan topic are just a fragment of Gulácsy’s literary activity. He wrote many poems and love and adventure stories, set in medieval and modern times, in villages and in cities. Like the name Na’Conxypan, which can neither be translated nor analyzed etymologically, the meanings and origins of the verbal and visual elements belonging here cannot be determined precisely. It is the attitude to the world (which exists visually and verbally) that matters, the attitude of the artist, which dismantles and deconstructs traditional elements and reconstructs the parts in accordance with a new system. In this context, one might interpret the fact that Doctor Huttertonn, like Doctor Frankenstein, divides thing into their elements in his laboratory and then applies various impulses to unite them and construct a creature named “artificial being” as a form of self-reflection on the part of Gulácsy.

Bam, the caretaker, is an idiot blockhead, he is showing his teeth from his ugly, swollen face, like a bloodhound, one should not talk to him, because he bites people – a dangerous beast. Now I am going to show the most interesting figure in the house, Doctor Huttertonn, who is always very busy in his chemical laboratory, and if he comes out sometimes, he wears his dark coat, has his hat deep on his bald head, grey, sulphur light is shining from his eyes frightfully from under the brim of the hat; if he comes, people give him a wide berth because he emits strong magnetic rays that stiffen and push away people who come near him. This is how he keeps intruders away. A practical person.

Works of Lajos Gulácsy cited

These illustrations are true to the texts, they visualize the verbal humour, for example the broom behind the caretaker is the sign-board of his job and the fat character’s hair looks like a brush. The base is the

Dreams about a sleeping exhibition (Álmok egy alvó tárlaton), Egyetemi Lapok, November 25, 1909. pp. 15-16. House in Kepleenstohl (Kepleenstohli ház), Lajos Gulácsy Bequest, Budapest, National Széchenyi Library, Manuscript Collection, Fond 124/281. From Na’Conxypan (Na’Conxypanból), Nagyváradi Napló, May 28, 1911. p. 5. Magic from Na’Conxypan (Na’Conxypani varázslat), Lajos Gulácsy Bequest, Budapest, National Széchenyi Library, Manuscript Collection, Fond 124/11. Magic (Varázslat), Lajos Gulácsy Bequest, Budapest, National Széchenyi Library, Manuscript Collection, Fond 124/53.

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References Lyka, K., 1922. Na’Conxypan festôje. Gulácsy Lajos kiállítása az Ernst Múzeumban, Új Idôk, p. 204. Kibédi Varga, Á., 1997. A szó-és-kép viszonyok leírásának ismérvei [originally: Criteria for Describing Word-and-Image Relations]. In: B. Bacsó, ed. 1997. Kép, Fenomén, Valóság, Budapest: Kijárat Publisher, pp. 300-320. Szônyi, Gy. E., 2004. Pictura&Scriptura. Hagyományalapú kulturális reprezentációk huszadik századi elméletei, Ikonológia és Műértelmezés 10. vol., Szeged: JATE Press, pp. 19-22. Juhász, Gy., 1925. A szépség betege, Magyarság, 1st of february, pp. 10-13. Kassák, L., 1914. Isten báránykái. Three one-acts, Budapest: Benkô Publishing

2. Image in literary texts Miklós Takács No sound, no picture? – The visual narrativity of trauma in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz

The term trauma (a word borrowed from psychoanalysis) has been used a lot recently, not only in psychology, but also in sociology, literary studies and the science of history. The most relevant theoretical approaches to trauma studies related to cultural sciences operate with variable definitions of the word (cultural) trauma, even if they refer to the same etymological meaning (Greek: wound, hurt). Most theorists agree that the word was used to refer to psychic injuries for the first time at the turn of the century, and that it came into increasingly common use in 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association included posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a recognized condition in its Diagnose Manual. The international popularity of trauma studies and the relevance of the category trauma for the literary sciences are due not only to psychoanalysis, but also to the so-called trauma novel. This new genre, which emerged after the First World War, highlights the narratological consequences of traumatic experience, in other words the linguistic figures and tropes that correspond to the phenomenon of trauma. The notion of trauma can also be interpreted as a cultural strategy of remembering and forgetting which manifests itself in linguistic forms, narratives, and discourses. The linguistically polyphonic literary text therefore becomes a basis for the study of traumatic language, suppressive narratives, and their confrontation. The trauma novel indicates the impossibility of narration, storytelling about traumas, and forced speech about the traumatic experience, which seems to be inconsistent with the silence surrounding traumas. In

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this context even the great collective narratives of trauma appear arbitrary. Thus, the question of the narratibility of traumatic experience leads to complex issues, such as the question of false memory and the (re)presentability of memory. These issues are of crucial importance from the point of view of narratology and historical science as well. W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz was published in 2001, the year of his death. The German university lecturer settled and worked in England. He started to publish literary texts in the 1990s and did not live to see the international success of his works. His most popular and innovative novels, Austerlitz and The Emigrants, both have a distinctive feature: the narrative is continuously interrupted by black-and-white photographs. This use of visual images (or the absence of image) in Austerlitz can be interpreted as a reflection on the absence of presentation of traumatic experience and the impossibility of narrating trauma. Neither the narrator nor the protagonist can depict memory, although both are repeatedly forced to do so. The novel has a distinctive double-narrative structure. It is difficult to identify the first speaker, who yields the floor to the title character, Jacques Austerlitz, after the first thirty pages. One can only conclude from some of his personal remarks in the introduction and from his comments interrupting Austerlitz’s long narrative that he is a native of Germany living in England. Since we know nothing more about him, we cannot identify him with Sebald, even if the analogy is obvious. This can be explained by the fact that the narration focuses only on Austerlitz, and the narrator mentions only those events of his life that can be connected to Austerlitz. For example, he tells the story of their encounters with each other. The elaborate description of places like the fortress of Breendonk or the Nocturama in Antwerp, which had been visited by the narrator alone, are exceptions to the rule, and therefore have a particular significance. The predominance of Austerlitz can be explained with a phrase introduced by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, namely that he must bear witness, no matter who may be listening (Felman-Laub, 1992). At first he refuses to talk about himself because of strong self-repression: “It was almost impossible to talk with Austerlitz about himself or his person” (“Da es mit Austerlitz so gut wie unmöglich war, von sich selber beziehungsweise über seine Person zu reden” p. 50). Following a decade-long

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investigation he discovers that Austerlitz was one of the Jewish children who had been saved by train from Prague in 1939 (he was a four-yearold boy at the time, and he never saw his parents again). This event can definitely be called traumatic; it demolishes Austerlitz’s psyche, even after a long period of silence: “It was obviously of little use to me that I had discovered the source of my perturbation, that I could see myself, across the distance of all the years that had passed, with the greatest clarity as the child who had been severed from one day to the next from his familiar life: reason could not cope with the feeling, long suppressed and now violently erupting from within me, of having been cast out, annihilated” (“Es nutzte mir offenbar wenig, daß ich die Quellen meiner Verstörung entdeckt hatte, mich selber, über all die vergangenen Jahre hinweg, mit größter Deutlichkeit sehen konnte als das von seinem vertrauten Leben von einem Tag auf den anderen abgesonderte Kind: die Vernunft kam nicht an gegen das seit jeher von mir unterdrückte und jetzt gewaltsam aus mir hervorbrechende Gefühl des Verstoßen- und Ausgelöschtseins.” p. 330). In the 1990s Austerlitz obsessively travels not only to Prague, but also to Terezin (Theresienstadt), the fortress city which had been made into a ghetto by the Germans and where Austerlitz’s mother had supposedly been held captive. He travels to Paris for the same reason, where his father was thought to have been in hiding in the first part of the Second World War. “I felt […] as if my father were still in Paris and were almost waiting for the opportunity to show himself. Such feelings unfailingly stir in me in places that belong more to the past than the present” („…es war mir […] als sei der Vater nach wie vor in Paris und warte gewissermaßen nur auf eine gute Gelegenheit, um sich zeigen zu können. Dergleichen Empfindungen regen sich in mir unfehlbar an Orten, die eher zur Vergangenheit als in die Gegenwart gehören“ p. 367). The traumatic experience has a special temporal structure. The past event failed to become an integrated part of the narrative identity. It is haunting, like a present event. Trauma abolishes the linear experience of time, which is why a person who has suffered trauma has the feeling that he or she involuntarily relives the event with which he or she cannot come to terms. This general experience complements Austerlitz’s peculiar perception of space, which can be described with Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopy. According to Foucault, we can distinguish, in addi-

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tion to traditional spaces, real places with specific structures and unique rules, such as cemeteries, prisons, libraries, museums, cinemas, brothels, or a sea-ship. Each deviates somehow from a traditional place, either because they exclude empiric time (like the cemetery or the museum), that is, they develop a so-called heterochrony, or because they create illusions (like the brothel) (Foucault, 1999). Austerlitz’s interests are directed towards stations, libraries and fortresses not only because they can be interpreted as signifiers of the traumatic event, but also because they incorporate in space the timelessness of the trauma (which, however, proves to be an illusion, since the buildings themselves change in time, and indeed can even be demolished.) The timelessness of trauma also manifests itself in the photograph, which is a fixed, focused picture of the moment. However, before considering questions of the visual or figurative representation of trauma, it is worth offering some further explanation of the relationship between the two narrative voices in the context of trauma studies. Affected by Austerlitz, the German-speaking narrator visits the fortress of Breendonk, and at the end of the story he is unable to enter it for a second time, since he is aware of the story of Austerlitz. He is therefore not a simple recipient of or listener to Austerlitz’s life-story, but himself undergoes a “secondary traumatization”, which according to Felman and Laub is a common demand of listeners to testimonials (Felman-Laub, 1992). Furthermore, he is depressed by his consciousness of guilt, which he confesses in the first and only footnote in the text at the beginning of the novel: on the 5th of February, 1971 the station in Luzern had burnt down, where he had boarded a train some hours earlier, and he has the feeling, “I am to blame, or at least, I am one of the people to blame for the fire in Luzern” („…daß ich der Schuldige oder zumindenst einer der Mitschuldigen sei an dem Luzerner Brand” p. 20). The narrator’s behaviour can be interpreted with Bernhard Giesen’s theory of the perpetrator’s trauma. The German sociologist considers the perpetrators’ trauma a metaphor characterising the collective state of mind of the generation in Germany that was born after the Second World War and that led the students’ revolt in 1968. German national identity was defined by the trauma suffered by the bystanders, and not by that of the actual perpetrators of the atrocities (Giesen, 2004, p. 23). These war criminals gradually died out, but the bystanders’ sense of guilt spanned

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generations and formed the base of identities. This phenomenon can basically be explained by taking three symbolic figures of the extreme situations of human existence into consideration: the hero, the perpetrator, and the victim (Giesen, 2004, pp. 15-16). The hero stands above everyday laws, and what is more, he himself makes laws, he is immortal. The victim, on the contrary, is an object without a face or a name. The hero and the perpetrator have in common that both of them rule over the world outside. The perpetrator, however, damages his own subjectivity (he recognises it as relative, not absolute), since by making other subjects into objects, he questions even his own subjectivity. In summary, the perpetrator’s trauma refers to the unexpected change of heroes into perpetrators, to their loss of full powers, of the power over life and death (Giesen, 2004, p. 22). In this context it becomes clear why the narrator says, when visiting the fortress of Breedonk (which was a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War), that he can easily imagine the guards, the SS-soldiers, since he himself had lived among such “family men and good sons” until he was twenty. Sebald himself was born in 1944, and he used only the first letters of his first names, Winfried and Georg, which he considered Nazi names. This is only one of the ways in which the individual trauma can become a collective one, a perpetrator’s trauma. On the other hand, Austerlitz also becomes a medium, a medium of the victims, which is especially arresting when the other first person narrator, who keeps on repeating “Austerlitz said,” also reports what Austerlitz says, for instance: “Vera said”. As he tells the story of the occupation of Prague, a collective trauma becomes narratable or re-narratable through the individual trauma: the original story of the occupation (of a collective trauma) was first recollected by Austerlitz’s former nurse. Other media, in addition to people, make it possible for cultural traumas to become parts of individual identity. This is striking in the case of Austerlitz, whose knowledge, gained over several decades, is based on art history, but he lacks any knowledge of modern history, as he puts it: “For me, the world came to an end at the close of the nineteenth century” (Für mich war die Welt mit dem Ausgang des 19. Jahrhunderts zu Ende” p. 205). When he visits the Ghetto Museum in Terezin he says, “[I] could not believe my eyes and had to turn away several times and look out of one of the windows into the garden in the back, for the first time having an idea of the history of persecu-

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tion, which my system of avoidance had kept at a distance for so long” („[ich] habe nicht meine Augen getraut und habe verschiedentlich mich abwenden und durch eines der Fenster in den rückwärtigen Garten hinabsehen müssen, zum erstenmal mit einer Vorstellung von der Geschichte der Verfolgung, die mein Vermeidungssystem so lange abgehalten hatte von mir…” p. 286). The book of H. G. Adler on the ghetto in Theresienstadt has the same effect on Austerlitz as Dan Jacobson’s text about his research on his great father, a rabbi, has on the narrator. Thus, the book can also function as a medium of transferring the traumatic experience of others – so as to emphasise this, the novel also contains some catalogues and the ground plan of the fortress. Media of the storage-memory (museums, libraries), however, can prove unsuitable for the work of functional memory: the librarian Lemoine says of the new national library in Paris: “ The new library, which […] seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy, is […] a quasi official manifestation of an increasingly pressing demand to put an end to everything that still has a life in the past” („Das neue Bibliotheksgebäude, das […] den Leser als einen potenziellen Feind auszuschließen suche, sei […] quasi die offizielle Manifestation des immer dringender sich anmeldenden Bedürfnisses, mit all dem ein Ende zu machen, was noch ein Leben habe an der Vergangenheit” p. 404). And although Lemoine and Austerlitz speak for some time about the “dissolution of our capability of recollection in proportion with the proliferation of information technology” (“über die im Gleichmaß mit der Proliferation des Informationswesens fortschreitende Auflösung unserer Erinnerungsfähigkeit” p. 404), the last medium of memory, photography, has a crucial role in the novel. He received the picture of the costumed boy on the cover (Sebald insisted on using this cover picture for all editions) in Prague from Vera, with the following comments: “Vera kept on talking about the inscrutability of such forgotten pictures emerging from the past. One has the impression, she said, that something is stirring in them, as if one were heaving small sighs of despair, gémissements de désespoir, so she said, Austerlitz said, as if the pictures themselves had a memory and they remembered us, how we, survivors and those no longer among us, had been before. ( „…und bis ich Věra weitersprechen hörte von dem Unergründlichen, das solchen aus der Vergessenheit aufgetauchten Photographien zu eigen sei. Man habe den Eindruck, sagte sie,

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es rühre sich etwas in ihnen, als vernehme man kleine Verzweiflungsseufzer, gémissements de désespoir, so sagte sie, sagte Austerlitz, als hätten die Bilder selbst ein Gedächtnis und errinerten sich an uns, daran, wie wir, die Überlebenden, und diejenigen, die nicht mehr unter uns weilen, vordem gewesen sind” p. 266). Austerlitz does not dare touch the picture, he cannot think or say a word. He is unable to integrate his origin, his memory (which has become independent), into himself. The picture opens a traumatic gap, through which, as suggested by Juliet Mitchell, the personality also becomes empty (Mitchell, 1998): “I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I did not even exist, and this feeling has never been stronger than on the night on Sporkova Street, when the gaze of the Rose Queen’s page penetrated me” („…habe ich mich immer gefühlt, als hätte ich keinen Platz in der Wirklichkeit, als sei ich gar nicht vorhanden, und nie ist dieses Gefühl stärker in mir gewesen als an jenem Abend in der Šporkova, als mich der Blick des Pagen der Rosenkönigin durchdrang.” p. 269). If one were to try to catalogue the pictures interrupting the narrative, the title picture would be among the exceptions. Most of the photos were taken by Austerlitz to illustrate his text, his story. This was also the intention of the first, nameless narrator, who talks less than Austerlitz and therefore inserts fewer pictures into the narrative. In case of the narration, the reader can easily tell who is speaking, whereas with the pictures one cannot determine who chose the locus (this indeterminacy itself establishes a connection between the two narrators). There are, however, several pictures that do not belong to any of these categories, for which reason their function is not merely that of an illustration. Three of these merit particular mention in the context of the narration (verbal or textual) of trauma. In case of the first, Austerlitz only mentions an imaginary picture, but a photograph of a wanderer does in fact figure in the text, just before Austerlitz begin to speak about it: “I started to cut up and rearrange what bore up in some degree in order to see, once again before my very eyes, like in an album, the picture emerge of the landscape traversed by the wanderer, now almost forgotten, sunk into oblivion” (“Was einigermaßen standhielt, begann ich neu zuzuschneiden und anzuordnen, um vor meinem eigenen Augen noch einmal, ähnlich wie in einem Album, das Bild der von dem Wanderer durchquerten, beinahe schon in der Vergessenheit versunkenen Landschaft entstehen zu lassen”

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p. 179). This irregular picture allows us to constitute an allegory, which is confirmed by several other parts of the text. Austerlitz feels drawn to pictures of biblical wandering, and he always wears hiking boots and carries a rucksack. The wanderer is obviously an allegory of homelessness and the search for identity. The second picture can also be read allegorically, but here in the context of trauma. In the hopes of recognising his mother, Austerlitz acquires a 14-minute long fragment of a propaganda film made by the Nazis in the ghetto of Theresienstadt. Determined to succeed, he even lets a slow-motion version of the film be made, which completely changes the pictures: not only do the motions of the figures become slower, but the figures themselves become fuzzy and diffuse. The numerous damaged parts of the strip “melted into the middle of a picture, erased it and left bright white patterns sprinkled with black flecks” (“…zerflossen jetzt mitten in einem Bild, löschten es aus und ließen hellweiße, von schwarzen Flecken durchsprenkelte Muster entstehen…” p. 353) The trauma can be located in an oscillation between representability and unrepresentability in a similar way: the fixed image and the moving picture can both become a basis for coherent narratives. The trauma disturbs or destroys this coherence, and like a slow-motion film, it completely transmutes: the tone and the background music become depressing, for example: they “were moving in a sort of subterranean world, in terrifying depths, Austerlitz said, to which no human voice had ever descended” („…bewegen sich in einer sozusagen subterranen Welt, in schreckensvollen Tiefen, so sagte Austerlitz, in die keine menschliche Stimme jemals hinabgestiegen ist” p. 356). The third group of pictures (the first ones in order of their appearance) is unique, since the four pictures (fragments of pictures) laying side by side constitute a montage, so their artistic character is more obvious than in the case of the other illustrations. In the second half of the 1960s the narrator visits the newly opened Nocturama in Antwerp, which is a terrarium showing the night life of animals. This is the only event recounted by the narrator before his encounter with Austerlitz. When trying to recall the visit, he only can remember the large eyes of the animals, and he draws a parallel between the eyes and the glance of painters and philosophers in the text, and with the pictures as well: They all try “to interfuse the darkness surrounding us through pure perception and pure reason” („…die vermittels der reinen Anschauung und

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des reinen Denkens versuchen, das Dunkel zu durchdringen, das uns umgibt” p. 11). The Nocturama is the most important mise en abyme (prospective metaphor) of the novel, since all the motifs (the inverted subterranean world, the night, the owl) recur in the text later, in other mises en abyme, such as in the two texts of Austerlitz’s stepfather (a preacher from Wales) from the Bible. Both quotes originate in a time when it was already clear that the pastor cannot come to terms with the death of his wife. His last entry is a quote from Psalm 102: “I am like a pelican of the wilderness. I am like an owl of the desert” (p. 54), and in his last, unfinished sermon he can only read the biblical saying from the book of lamentations: “He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.” (p. 73). The nights and the animals living in the darkness refer to the world of traumatised people, who are unable to adjust to normal daily life. The uniqueness of the montage is even greater, because most of the photos in the novel are not of humans. Austerlitz deliberately refuses to take pictures of people: “It has always seemed unallowable to me to turn the viewfinder of the camera on individual persons. During the photographic work I was always particularly enchanted by the moment in which you see the shadows of reality emerge on the exposed paper, so to speak out of nothing, just like memories, Austerlitz said, which also arise in the middle of the night in us and dim just as quickly in one who tries to hold them fast, not unlike a photographic reprint which has been left too long in the developing bath” (“wohingegen es mir immer unstatthaft schien, den Sucher der Kamera auf einzelne Personen zu richten. Besonders in den Bann gezogen hat mich bei der photographischen Arbeit stets der Augenblick, in dem man auf dem belichteten Papier die Schatten der Wirklichkeit sozusagen aus dem Nichts hervorkommen sieht, genau wie Erinnerungen, sagte Austerlitz, die ja auch inmitten der Nacht in uns auftauchen und die sich dem, der sie festhalten will, so schnell wieder verdunkeln, nicht anders als ein photographischer Abzug, den man zu lang im Entwicklungsbad liegenläßt” p. 117). Photography is therefore a model of traumatic memory. The flashback is like the developed picture, which emerges despite repression, and which also disappears. But what about the well-developed pictures? There are no humans in them, much as the traumatised person, who lives in the imaginary past because of the traumatic event, is also absent in his physical present.

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Does trauma have a tone and an illustration? The interpretation of the title of the novel gives us an answer. In the context of the whole novel Austerlitz is no longer only “a small place in Moravia, the site of a famous battle” (p. 77), as one of his teachers put it, not merely the setting of one of Napoleon’s victories of 1805. From now on the word signifies something more, like the railway station in Paris (Gare d’Austerlitz), which made this victory part of collective memory, but when the Nazis used this station to store goods plundered from the Parisian Jews, the prisoners working there used to call it Les Galeries d’ Austerlitz. Thus, what used to signify victory can also become a signifier of trauma. Through the springs bearing the similar name Auschowitz, the name Austerlitz denotes something akin to the word Auschwitz. For who today knows what Slavkov u Brna or Oświęcim are famous for? They became part of collective memory by their German names, which are not used to denote real towns today. The sound or tone and the picture of trauma can be characterised by the rhetorical figure, the trope of catachresis. These words and pictures had already been used to denote other real things, but in their new, perhaps distorted form they can recall something from the Nocturama, the subterranean world caused and created by trauma. Our task is nothing more than to look those who live there in the eye.

References Sebald, W. G., 2006. Austerlitz. 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Giesen, B., 2004. Das Tätertrauma der Deutschen: Eine Einleitung. In: B. Giesen and C. Schneider, ed. 2004. Tätertrauma: Nationale Erinnerungen im öffentlichen Diskurs. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, pp. 11-53. Felman, S.-Laub, D., 1992. Testimony (Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York-London: Routledge. Foucault, M., 1967. Eltérô terek [Of Other Spaces] In: T. Sutyák, ed. 1999. Nyelv a végtelenhez. Tanulmányok, elôadások, beszélgetések. Debrecen: Latin Betűk, pp. 147-156. Mitchell, J., 1998. Trauma, Recognition and the Place of Language. Diacritics, 28, pp. 121-133.

Tamás Lénárt Master Frenhofer and the “deep green dimness”. The figure of ekhprasis in texts by Honoré de Balzac and Péter Nádas1

For some decades the so-called “pictorial” or “iconic turn” has been one of the most significant aspirations in the humanities, shaping remarkably new paths of Anglo-Saxon, German and – although with a slightly different accent (Didi-Huberman, 2008) – French aesthetic thinking. Interdisciplinarity has been of particular significance for the theoreticians of this turn, not only because it facilitates the cooperation between the institutes of the humanities, but for a more essential reason as well. A broader context of the pictorial turn is the changing role of pictures and visuality in culture, more precisely the changing relationship between pictures and their (non-pictorial) cultural environment. Therefore, the problem of picture and visuality is not an autonomous area of study, but an interdisciplinary interest in cultural connections. Thus the uniting term of “Cultural Studies” (“Kulturwissenschaften”) for a branch of the Humanities is necessary and justified. The expression “iconic turn” refers specifically to an interdisciplinary, dialectic relationship, as far as it is connected to another term, the “linguistic turn” proposed by Richard Rorty, referring to the philosophical tradition of the twentieth century. (Stiegler, 2008) The “new power of pictures” (Burda, Maar ed., 2004) emerges first of all in opposition to texts and a culture based on verbal and written language. The relationship between picture and text is of great theoretical value for the theoreticians of the pictorial turn. The inventor of this term, W. J. T. Mitchell, discusses the relationship between picture and text in the first chapter of his book “Iconology”. Summarising his work, he writes: “What are we to make of this contest between the interest of verbal and pictorial representation? I propose that we historicize it, and treat it, not

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as a matter for peaceful settlement under the terms of some all-embracing theory of signs, but as a struggle that carries the fundamental contradictions of our culture into the heart of theoretical discourse itself.” (Mitchell, 1986, p. 44) While the expression “struggle” might not be the best (given its slightly militaristic connotations) to describe the relationship (“contest”), his wording makes clear that Mitchell’s theory bears closer affinities with Anglo-Saxon post-modern, post-semiotic, deconstructive aesthetics than with a structuralist semiology that contrasts pictures and texts only as realization and categories of general semiotics. The relationship between pictures and texts is not only a matter of categorizing signs, but also defines the possibilities and competence of visual and textual representation, and the theoretical aesthetic discourse on them as well. Gottfried Boehm, one of the most influential German theoreticians of the iconic turn, formulated the inherent dialectics of pictures and texts based on a completely different theoretical tradition, namely continental hermeneutics and phenomenology. He edited and published two volumes of essays and studies in 1995. The title of the first volume (“Was ist ein Bild?”) recalls Mitchell’s essay, and the work summarizes the most important theories of the image, while the other volume seems to be closer to a history of art (Boehm’s original profession): “Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung: Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart”. Here the figure of ekphrasis, the description of a picture – which in Boehm’s view should be neither too close nor too far from the picture (Boehm, Pfotenhauer ed., 1995, p. 39) – becomes the basis of the dialogue between picture and text. The theoretical questions of the pictorial turn serve as the basis of several diverse research endeavours; since this turn literary studies have shown great interest in the problems of the picture and visuality. The international literature on this topic has become immense. Even the Hungarian humanities have shown such avid interest that in addition to the publication of the “classic” works of Mitchell and Boehm, several translations have been published on this topic, as well as numerous original volumes. This paper is concerned primarily with two literary texts describing fictitious pictures: A short story of Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, and a chapter of A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas, “On an Antique Mural”. The two texts have hardly anything in common but the figure of ekphrasis. Therefore, my interpretation is much more an illustration than

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an analysis. Hopefully it will also reveal why I chose these two distinctive texts, showing the path from the examination of the figure of ekphrasis to the interpretation of the whole literary text, keeping Mitchell’s suggestion in mind: “I propose that we historicize [the contest between the interest of verbal and pictorial representation].” The Unknown Masterpiece is one of Balzac’s most well-known short stories. It takes place in 1612, when three painters meet. Two of them are real historic characters; Porbus, the royal painter, and the young Poussin, and there is a fictitious character, the old master, Frenhofer, a former student of another real person, Mabuse. The short story is a tale of a painting, the chef d’oeuvre of the wonderful Frenhofer. Although the master has been working on his masterpiece for ten years, when Porbus and Poussin finally have the opportunity to take a look at the canvas, they cannot see anything, “que des couleurs confusément amassés et contenues par une multitude de lignes bizarres qui forment une muraille de peinture”. (Balzac, 1891, p. 34) There is no trace of the model of the painting, Catherine Lescault, apart from a single toe: “le bout d’un pied nu qui sortait de ce chaos de couleurs”. (Ibid.) Today’s reader might have the impression of reading a description of an avant-garde painting, and it is no wonder that Pablo Picasso admired the short story and not only illustrated the text but rented a studio at the real scene of the fictitious story, in Rue des Grands-Augustins, Paris. Still, most interpreters read the short story as a general aesthetic tract with a stirring plot, only slightly referring to its relevance to the history of art, modern painting schools, impressionism or to be concrete, William Turner. (James, 1984, p. 97, quoted by Szegedy-Maszák, 2007, p. 167) From this point of view the essence of the short story might be the relationship between art and reality, with a broad range of possible conclusions. Here the painting is always compared to reality, it is expected to show life or life-likeness – for example Frenhofer’s Catherine is compared to Gillette, the meek love of Poussin, the embodiment of living beauty. At the same time the master transcends this problem: “[l]a mission de l’art n’est pas de copier la nature, mais de l’exprimer! […] Nous avons à saisir l’esprit, l’âme, la physionomie des choses et des êtres” – he says (Balzac, 1891, p. 8), but his masterpiece does not support his theory. As he sees the uneasiness of Porbus and Poussin, he starts to doubt whether he has managed to represent anything, and eventually he hides the canvas from his col-

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leagues, and the short story ends with him destroying his painting and dying. The short story depicts the conflict between art and reality through the tragic fate of an artist. Thus, it might be connected to the tradition of the “Künstlerroman” (artist’s novel), which prospered in the literature of romanticism and modernity. It would be inappropriate here to characterize the whole of this impressive literary tradition. I would like only to point out, instead, the self-reflective feature of this sub-genre: it articulates the world of the artist or art (as the short-story of Balzac does), and the conclusion refers to itself, being an artistic product itself. This self-reflection has become an essential feature in most novels by the greatest artists of the twentieth century. (The most famous examples might be the novel-in-the-novel structure in A. Gide’s “Les faux-monnayeurs” or the “Entstehung des Doktor Faustus” by Thomas Mann.) Some scholars claim that this is similar to self-referential and intertextual structures characteristic of literary postmodernism (Bodnár, 2009, pp. 149-159). The other example might be a less known text for most readers. The novel A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas was considered a masterpiece and a revolutionary work in prose poetics both by Hungarian critics and international audiences. The story is composed of three parallel threads. One concerns the young writer, Thomas Thoenissen, a fictitious alter ego of Thomas Mann, living an upper-middle class life at the end of the nineteenth century; the second is about a Hungarian adolescent and his adventures in totalitarian Hungary of the 1950s; while the third narrates a homosexual love-triangle in East-Berlin in the 1970s. This paper focuses on one of the central chapters in the novel: Thoenissen, the young writer, gives a detailed description of an antique mural, trying to decode the secret of the picture, thus, at the same time exploring the reasons for his own blunders as a person and failures as an artist. There is a scene in the mural depicting gods, semi-gods and nymphs, and as the description goes on, the different details make the narrator stop to ponder and remember various moments of his life. The complex relationship between the figures and motives is a metaphor that refers to the characters of the novel itself, so that the mural functions here as a reducing mirror for the novel, a mise en abyme. The plot of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece is driven by a secret, which is, admittedly, quite typical of his oeuvre. (Szávai, n.d.) Here the

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secret is that of the masterpiece, of art and creation, but it is impossible to solve, since it seeks to surpass the divine creation. (Ibid.) It is crucial to point out that this minor difficulty, which leads to the burning of the canvas and to Frenhofer’s death, is not reflected by the language of the text. It becomes evident if we take a close look at the figure of ekphrasis. Frenhofer explains the essence of painting and the weakness of the portrait of Mary without any doubts or efforts, just as easily as he adds a few touches to the picture to correct it. Porbus and Poussin overcome their surprise rather quickly, when they see Fernhofer’s masterpiece; Poussin talks about “poetry”, Porbus about “divine art”, and it is certainly not a problem for the narrator to find a fitting simile: the toe depicted in the painting is “comme un torse de quelque Vénus en marbre de Paros qui surgirait parmi les décombres d’une ville incendiée”. (Balzac, 1891, p. 34.) The text (especially the dynamic commentary of Frenhofer) is full of witty bon-mots and apt remarks on painting styles: they talk about the German masters’ “flegme minutieux, la raideur précise”, about the Italian painters’ “l’ardeur éblouissante, l’heureuse abondance”, about the “light hand” of Poussin and his promising career, and about the “trois parties essentielles de l’Art”, which are none other than “couleur, sentiment et dessin” (Ibid., p. 7, 11). These phrases are empty and revealing at the same time, as Fernhofer says: “Qu’y manque-t-il? Un rien, mais ce rien est tout”, giving a name to this “rien” immediately: that “might be the soul”. The descriptions given in the text end up using transcendent concepts, such as soul, divine creation, and “vaste poésie” (Ibid., p. 10, 9). The frequent mention of poetry (in contrast with “inferior” painting, a form of art the slavish task of which was “merely to copy nature”), which contains the Greek root “poiesis” (for general composition, creation), reveals that the short story offers well-established artistic answers (such as the myth of the creative genius, or more specifically the tragedy) to the specific problems of painting. Frenhofer’s ambition is to exceed divine creation, and is therefore condemned to failure. The narration sublimates the problems of painting into transcendent ideas that are similar to the “unknown masterpiece”: they contain the totality of art for the initiated few, while the obtuse can see nothing but empty chaos; one must believe in art, as Frenhofer believes in his masterpiece. The linguistic self-confidence of Balzac’s short-story becomes even more striking in comparison with the text by Péter Nádas. In the latter,

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the story again is driven by a puzzle that remains unsolved. Thoenissen, the narrator, finds the secret of the picture not in the style of the painting but in the scene and the identity of its characters. His quest is the exploration of his failure, which he acknowledges at the beginning: “I would have described [the picture] in my planned narrative as the multisecret world of my presentiments and presumptions – had I the necessary talent and strength to do it, of course […]”. (Nádas, 1998, p. 227) The rhetoric of the text is based on doubt, uncertainty, careful hypothesis, and denial, reflected by the elaborate and complex sentences seeking accuracy and exactness. Thoenissen explains and offers commentary on the stories of Greek mythology presented in the mural, also retelling his personal memories, which are tenuously connected to the picture. The reader gets a detailed description of the legend of Pan’s birth, and at the same time is informed when and how the narrator acquainted himself with the joy of masturbation. Like Frenhofer’s strokes of the brush, the figure of ekphrasis tries to revive the picture by telling stories about and around it. The narration diverges and returns to the mural, approaching its secret in a spiral (Ráfi, 1996; Balassa, 1997, p. 373) – and this very secret, at the same time, is the depressing mystery of Thoenissen’s life, which leads him finally to the painted forest, the impenetrable wilderness. Describing this “deep-green dimness” (Nádas, 1998, p. 249), the narration changes from first person singular to second person singular, as if talking to someone who has just arrived in the forest. This “someone” becomes as mysterious as everything else in this forest, appearing and vanishing again: “Behind the loose curtain of the thicket a tree seems to move, as if someone who’d been standing behind it now stirred, just as you keep stirring from behind something and then being covered again by the thicket.” This exciting mysteriousness as something disappears, appears, and finally remains hidden, is reminiscent of Frenhofer’s painting. We almost see the masterpiece, but in the end it is not revealed, it remains “unknown”: “everyone can see you […] and yet you are still covered.” (Ibid.) However, this forest is not static, it constantly moves away from the point of view that itself also moves and changes: sometimes you are watching and sometimes you are being watched. The addressed “someone” seems to get lost in the forest (“the silence [of the forest] has eaten itself into your skin”, Ibid, p. 251), while the narrator gives up writing the planned story about the mural once and for all.

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Without going into detailed analysis of this almost enigmatic text by Nádas, it might be fruitful to compare the two texts from the perspective of the relationship between picture and text. Both texts describe a picture that is inaccessible, being beyond description, after all. It is not an exaggeration to claim that both texts focus (although in different ways) on the tension between text and picture. In Balzac’s short story, all the reader “sees” is the picture: the text – like the narrator – is invisible, transparent; the inaccessibility of the picture leads to tragedy only in the sujet, as the fictitious painting and its painter decay. In Nádas’ text, the same inaccessibility leads to a crisis in the identity of the text and the narrator. Here, the precise description collapses in front of the reader, while the narrator, Thoanissen, comes to the edge of insanity. In Balzac’s short story, the narration leads from the given time and place (Paris, Rue des Grands-Augustins, December, 1612) to the universality of the masterpiece, that is more than the earthy beauty of Poussin’s love, Gillette, because it is timeless and universal. The divine and transcendent content is represented much more by the artist-genius (who is in touch with Heaven and Earth) than by the picture or the text. The tragedy of Frenhofer exceeds the romantic genius-aesthetics only by portraying the aspiration of the genius as aporetic, which leads to his alienation and death. This quest for transcendence is present in Nádas’ text, as well, but here it leads from the general to the individual: Thoenissen recognizes himself and the secret of his own life in the mural with the help of the Greek mythological scene. Still, Nádas seems to be less interested in the metaphysics of the secret than in the way that leads to this, or to put it more precisely, he is interested in the media that shape the mystery: the personality of the artist and the linguistic form of the text. Thoenissen is not like a genius, chasing transcendence: he tries to formulate his own life with the help of his texts, but in vain. Hence, Nádas’ text belongs to the modernist tradition (no wonder the main character is Thomas Mann’s alter ego), but at the same time its insecurity unsettles faith in great myths (for now, Greek mythology) and the universality of languages, which could form the basis of culture, thus leading the reader to the post-modern era. This obscurity might carry to the examination of the linguistic “borderlands”, the non-linguistic or the intermingled representation techniques. From this point of view the new studies on the relationship between picture and text seem to be

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a continuation or even consequence of certain post-modern linguistic considerations. Based on these two literary texts the subordination of the history of ekphrasis to the change between the modern and post-modern era would be an overstatement, but this short illustration demonstrates that in the interpretation of the relationship between pictures and texts the pure categorization of certain representative strategies (such as semiotics) is insufficient, as is the promise of a common platform of a general artistic theory. A broader context of the relationship under discussion and its integration into the tradition of cultural history must be revealed; Mitchell might have referred to this when he presented his suggestion of historicizing the relation between verbal and pictorial representation.

Notes I would like to acknowledge Luca Nemeskéri for the translation of my paper and Tamás Scheibner for his help.

References Balassa, P., 1997. Nádas Péter. Bratislava: Kalligram. Balzac, H. de, 1891. Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu - Les Marana - Un drame au bord de la mer - L’auberge rouge - Maître Cornelius, Paris: Lévy. Boehm, G., Pfotenhauer, H., ed. 1995. Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung: Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. München: Fink. Bodnár, Gy., 2009. Párbeszéd az idôvel, Budapest: Argumentum. Burda, H., Maar, C., ed. 2004. Iconic turn. Die neue Macht der Bilder. Köln: DuMont. Didi-Huberman, G., 2008. Un ordre dispersé. Trivium, [Online] (1), Available at: http:// trivium.revues.org/index351.html [Accessed 21. September 2009]. James, H. Jr., 1984. Literary Criticism, Volume II.: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: The Library of America. Mitchell, W. J. T., 1986. Iconology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Nádas, P., 1998. A Book of Memories. Translated from Hungarian by Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein. London: Vintage, 1998. Ráfi, D., 1996. Csigák és istenek. A mindenség képmodelljei Nádas Péter: Emlékiratok könyve című művében. Tiszatáj (8), pp. 56–66.

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Stiegler, B., 2008. „Iconic turn” und gesellschaftliche Reflexion, Trivium, [Online] (1), Available at: http://trivium.revues.org/index391.html [Accessed 21. September 2009]. Szávai, J., n.d. A forma Proteusa: Forma és költészet. [Online] Available at: http:// www.szavaijanos.hu/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/ismeretlen.doc [Accessed at 21. September 2009]. Szegedy-Maszák, M., 2007. Szó, kép, zene: A művészetek összehasonlító vizsgálata. Pozsony, Kalligram.

3. Texts in images Edit Tóth Adventures of the Signature: Lajos Kassák’s Vienna Collages, 1920-1921

As a leftist poet, writer, editor of the modernist journal MA (Today, 19161925), and the leading figure of the Hungarian avant-garde, Lajos Kassák approached the collage medium from a unique angle. His involvement in the cultural politics of the short-lived 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic ended with his escape to Vienna, following the exodus of leftist intellectuals and radicalized workers, who were forced out of the country by the subsequent right-wing regime. As a way to overcome linguistic barriers, to re-evaluate his previous artistic practice indebted to German literary activism, as well as his role as an artist in postwar modernity, Kassák started to assemble collages in a Futurist and Dadaist vein. His interest in text-oriented work and self-referencing mythology gave his collages a distinct character, driven by his role as artistic leader and editor striving to re-establish the artistic community of MA in exile. As the present analysis will show, Kassák’s self-reflexive questioning built on the manipulation of his authorial mark within the polysemious framework of the collage. This preoccupation helped to bring forward his views about the dissolution of the heroic artistic self in a gradually emerging, new constructive art. Whereas Dadaist, Futurist, or Surrealist collages and photomontages are usually concerned with the negation of artistic purity or suggest a psyche in need of repair (Poggi, 1992; Doherty, 1997), Kassák’s collage arrangements can be read in terms of poetic imagery and associations, and as informed by the practice of journal editing. A photo of

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a now lost collage, often published under the title Donkey (fig. 1), from 1921 provides an important clue to the understanding of Kassák’s early collage-crafting as a search for the artistic self amidst the postwar and failed revolutionary turmoil. For reasons to follow I will call it Don Juan after the famous adventurer, whose name is prominently placed next to Kassák’s signature at the bottom right hand corner, the artist’s authorial self-referencing field. After his eventful escape from Hungary by hiding in a commercial cargo barge (Kassák, 1983) and then living on the margins in poverty-stricken Vienna, Kassák, like many exiles, would have felt an affinity with this mythic vagabond. In the collage, which would have been only the size of a sheet of notebook, the printed concert program in the background – maybe of Don Juan by Richard Strauss performed in Vienna in May 1921 (Anon., 1921a) – and the fragment of the headline-style word vagabund (“agabun”) above it anchors the theme of Don Juan within the everyday news. The donkey, with its simplified outlines, oversized eye, and rough, primitivist look, as well as the geometric shapes around it, however, complicate this theme, making it more abstract and ambiguous.

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Although Strauss’s Don Juan was on the Viennese music program that year, being a poet, Kassák should have rather identified with Byron’s satirical version of the Don Juan myth, which turns the protagonist into a vagabond anti-hero who is thrown about in the world by a series of unpredictable events. To some extent sharing Kassák’s fate, Byron wrote his unconventional satire in a self-imposed exile, mocking his critics and contemporaries, to picture an endless quest for the self in a society devoid of progressive values. For Kassák in Vienna the Don Juan persona would have implied a critique: what was available for the artist in bourgeois society was the role of displaced vagabond, which was not of his own choosing. In these turbulent times the modern artist became a Don Juantype hero facing the unexpected and the unplanned. While Don Juan is pictured only in the form of circling letters, by echoing other circular forms in the picture it turns into a dynamic actor conjoining Kassák, Don Juan, and potentially Byron into a hermeneutic circle of mutual influence. The opening of Don Juan’s first canto could in fact have evoked for the Hungarian poet his own émigré situation and his unfulfilled desire for a revolutionary hero. Here Byron writes: I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan – (…) (Byron, 1978, p. 187)

Fig. 1. Lajos Kassák, Don Juan, 1921, collage, dimensions unknown, whereabouts unknown (published in Júlia Szabó: A Magyar Aktivizmus művészete. Budapest: Corvina, 1981, no. 150) (photo: Kassák Museum)

It is not surprising, then, that the Don Juan-type wanderer, with which Kassák associated himself with a mixture of satire and heroism, was transported over to the collage from his own contemporary poems and appeared in the “drawing poem” Gelächter / Wanderer (MA cover, January 1921) as well. Contrary to more impersonal Dada poetry, Kassák made use of two literary forms of “self-fiction” popular in early twentieth-century Vienna, autobiography and diary, as vehicles for his existential search. The 1921 poetry collection My World Mother, in which some of the poems read like collaged diary notes set in fragmented syntax, describes Kassák’s exile as an uprooted life full of uncertainties and priva-

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tion. His long autobiographical poem “The horse dies, the birds fly out,” on which he was also working that year, in turn, tells the story of his pedestrian wanderings of his youth across Europe in a half-humorous, halfheroic tone (similarly to Byron’s Don Juan), as reconstructed from the perspective of his present vicissitudes (Kassák, 1922a, pp. 161-179). Another important element in the Don Juan collage indicating mockery and a sort of embarrassment is the donkey figure, which forms a block with the Romantic persona and the artist’s signature. The figure of the donkey is also a reappearing element of tropes in Kassák’s poetry of the time. In his autobiographical verse Kassák referred to himself with the same irony: “I was sad like some old donkey / and washed my head in every puddle” (Kassák, 1922a, p. 170). Yet, elsewhere, in My World Mother, the image of the donkey is associated with the negative values of the failed communist leaders, as in “the donkeys are screaming night / everything has come to an end” (Kassák, 1921, p. 133). A donkey-faced bourgeois figured in a collection of short stories by Kassák’s sister, Erzsi Újvári as well, which was illustrated by George Grosz in 1920. Kassák’s shifting usage of the donkey implies the poet’s double-sided criticism, fluctuating between self and other, between the “poet-Don Juan” and his bourgeois critics or political enemies (and their disquieting acts). In Central Europe 1920-21 was indeed a turning point in artistic self-definition and the evaluation of the radical artist’s role in society. The unsuccessful revolutionary events in Hungary and Germany made it clear that art cannot bring redemption, while the Austrian and German hyperinflation brutally exposed the faulty mechanism of the market, including that of art, hitherto considered as an elevated realm. The Berlin Dadaists revealed these changes by turning against the Expressionists’ revolutionary prophetism and praise of artistic genius. At the infamous Dada Fair of 1920, George Grosz and John Heartfield proposed instead the embrace of the fragmented subject, exemplified by the patched up body of their Petit-Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild, the product of modernity’s disintegrating effects (Doherty, 2003). Raoul Hausmann’s Self-Portrait of the Dadasoph (1920), in turn, exhibited at the same venue, with his pressure-gauge head and bourgeois suit brought to the fore our reified consciousness in the technological world and replaced the “New Man genius” with the cyborg (Biro, 2007). Whereas the Don Juan collage suggests a similar self-mockery, Kassák’s Romantic

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persona tries to counteract the dispersion of the artistic self and resists its mechanical determination. In place of Dadaist defiance, the poet Kassák’s subtle self-questioning was concerned with testing, manipulating, and orienting his authorial mark and initial, by setting them in “textual adventures” that asserted and questioned them at the same time. The somewhat earlier Bruits (Noises, 1920, Neues Museum, Nürnberg) is still a seemingly spontaneous textual play of the literary man thinking in terms of literary imagery and authorial presence. In order to incorporate his name more fully within the printed and hand-written textual signs, he inscribed it in capital letters. The encircled “K,” standing in a self-important way for Kassák and doubling the authorial mark (the signature) at the opposite corner of the composition, seems to be the most assertive feature amidst the chaotic noise of fragmented signs emphasized by three clippings of the word “bruits” near the initial. The large “K” is at the same time surrounded by clues referencing eternal aesthetic values and artistic creativity through poetic imagery. The latter is alluded to by the presence of the “K” in the word fragment “KOTN,” which by association calls to mind alkotni (to create) in Hungarian. The artist even mixed in hand-written letters to counterbalance the mass-produced, printed text with his personal touch. The involvement of irony is nonetheless revealed by the close association of the symbolic word “du Panthéon” (the hall of fame and the resting place of geniuses) with “K” to represent a heroic identity, whose traditional artistic disposition is characterized below by a fragment of an exhibition catalogue filled with classical titles such as Nude and Still Life. The joining of the initial with fragments plucked from Carra’s bruitist manifesto on the right (Csaplár, 1994, p. 6) also implies that Kassák in reality is a similar modernist noise-maker, defying his critics and responding to the confusing sensations of the city. Despite his assertiveness, “K,” “poet laureate of the Pantheon,” is overwhelmed by the street noises reverberating on the walls, as evoked by the multi-language words “bruits” (noises), “contre” (against), “falak” (walls), “envoi(s)” (sends), fragments like “barr” (maybe from barrage), and vibrating lines. Postwar Vienna, beset by hyperinflation and rampant unemployment, was indeed a place of cacophony, filled with its inhabitants’ dissatisfied noises that culminated in the cries of a workers’ hunger strike in December (Anon., 1921b, p. 1). The fractured collage and montage

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techniques saw a new postwar flowering precisely because they reflected a fundamental experience of everyday life. German Dadaist collages and photomontages for instance were saturated by the signs of economic distress, like ration tickets and devalued banknotes figuring in Schwitters’s works or Grosz’s references to the financial speculations of big capitalists. In Schwitters’s Das Kotsbild (1920), beside a decorative Polish mark, he even glued in a torn-up 25 pfennig, revealing that once its signifying power disappears the banknote would be devoid of any material value. In 1921 for Kassák, however, the modernist artwork, charged with the illuminating mission of “showing-forth,” to use the philosopher Ernst Bloch’s term, was not compatible with the vulgarity of consumer society, nonetheless it had to work through its contingency and randomness. The poet’s subdued version of what he called “nauseating the bourgeoisie” (Kassák, 1922b) who avoided dramatic social change, turned upon itself as well as the Expressionist creed of messianic artistic creativity in a different way. With the placement and displacement of his authorial mark and initial “K” in Bruits, on the one hand Kassák called attention to the artist as a privileged manipulator of signs, while he also challenged the authorial subject by suggesting pictorial randomness. Besides Bruits and Don Juan, the same tactic is used in Bécsi Magyar Újság (Hungarian News of Vienna, 1921, now lost, fig. 2), where the placement of the signature turns the author into a part of the news network.

Fig. 2. Lajos Kassák, Bécsi Magyar Újság, 1921, collage, dimensions unknown, whereabouts unknown (published in 1921, MA, 7 (1), p. 139.) (photo: Kassák Museum)

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Kassák’s testing of his authorial power in pictorial “adventures” lends itself to a comparison with Derrida’s concept of signature event, which maintains that given its “double bind” effect, the signature fails to completely secure the presence of the subject-writer. In a signature event, on the one hand the insertion of the signature into the body of the text invests the subject with an authorial identity. At the same time, the signature also divests the subject of ownership over the text by turning it into “a moment or a part of the text, as a thing or a common noun” (Derrida, 1984, p. 56), that is, by submerging it into the material basis of language. Something similar is at work in our case in the Bruits, Don Juan, and Bécsi Magyar Újság collages, where Kassák’s signature (or handwritten name and initial), inscribed in the “text” of the collage, becomes an integrated part of the pictorial events, as a compositional element as well as a mark of authorial presence. The poet thereby gradually leads us (and himself) to the recognition that in the framework of the fragmented collage – itself a metaphor for the disintegrating social space – the authorial subject and its artistic will are continuously destabilized, unless they can be anchored by a constructive, all-around structure. In this way the signature and collage compose visual dialogues about the role that art and artist served or failed to serve. This constructive structure started to be worked out more carefully in the Bécsi Magyar Újság collage. Here the geometric shapes already advanced to the surface, while the previously prominent textual fragments receded into the background, indicating Kassák’s move towards a Constructivist-type abstraction, which he called Picture Architecture. What earlier had seemed as arbitrary vocabulary now turned into more cohesive artistic articulation and meaning. The authorial mark, as a rectangular clipping among other geometric forms in the lower right corner, still plays an active role in the picture, but instead of satirizing as earlier, it assumes an indexical function. Coupled with the title of the Hungarian émigré daily that appears at the perimeter of the composition, it “transforms” the artist into a newspaper editor who redirects public discourse, and thus marks out a subtext within the largely abstract work. For the exiled, who found themselves cut off from the Hungarian social environment, newspapers fulfilled the vital role of providing connection both with home and with the international working class movements. The textual components of the picture nonetheless are now subordinated

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to the overall “Constructivist” design. The dynamic diagonal thrust and pointer-like geometric shapes of the composition, reminiscent of Lissitzky’s works (for instance Town, 1920), hint at determination and faith in the (future) possibility of reconstruction despite the chaos of the present. The authorial mark follows their forceful oblique orientation so as to appear as the generator and commander of pictorial action.

Fig. 3. Lajos Kassák, MA collage, collage, dimensions unknown, whereabouts unknown, (published in Júlia Szabó: A Magyar Aktivizmus művészete. Budapest: Corvina, 1981, no. 149) (photo: Kassák Museum)

Yet ironically, Kassák’s full adherence to the revolutionary art of Constructivism, towards which he had been progressing in his collages, corresponded to his final disappointment with the idea of world revolution as a potential reality. For him the collage as a critical interactive medium, as well as a satirical shifting place of self-questioning, could be meaningful only as long as some, even if a faint hope for revolution subsisted. With Lenin’s announcement of the New Economic Policy (NEP) at the 1921 Third Comintern conference – referenced in the MA collage with great expectations (fig. 3), – however, it became clear that the time of revolutions was over (Serge, 1963, pp. 115-156). In the geometricallyframed “picture poem” number “18” of the same year the poet remarked bitterly that “… there is nothing left for us/ but a small/ island BEHIND

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THE EAR/ OF THE ICEBREAKER…” (Kassák, 1921, p. 157). In his new manifesto, in turn, he declared that “Picture Architecture tore itself away from the arms of ‘art’ and stepped over Dada. Picture Architecture thinks itself as the beginning of a new world” (Kassák, 1922b). Picture Architecture thus became an emblem beyond art of this new world emerging in Russia’s communist society but out of reach in Kassák’s own. Kassák gave up on challenging communication and self-questioning through the medium of the collage in favor of a more hermetic futurebuilding, which inevitably left open the gap between form and experience, between self and world. What soon remained from the collages were only the geometric shapes, as they evolved into Constructivist-type paintings. His clippings increasingly took the form of colored geometric figures arranged as overlapping planes; the occasional letters, in turn, started to reference only the flatness of the surface instead of conveying some kind of message (as in VO, 1921). Interestingly, in one of his first abstract paintings Untitled (1921, Museum of Modern Art, New York), in which Kassák’s glaring proper name is placed in the center of the black and white surface of superimposed planes as the main focus of the work, the artist legitimized his authorial defacement by “signing.” For the performance of his last self-mythologizing gesture, the poet’s proper name in red has been stretched over a Constructivist “cross,” evoking martyrdom. This symbolic ritual allowed for Picture Architecture to emerge on the horizon as the “small island behind the ear of the icebreaker.” It became the poet’s collectivist response to the new political status quo and émigré life under surveillance, a more cautious “showing-forth” in the face of triumphing capitalist mass culture.

References Anonymous, 1921a. Die Bombe, June. Anonymous, 1921b. Bécsi munkások éhségtüntetése. Bécsi Magyar Újság, 2 Dec., p. 1. Biro, M., 2007. Raoul Hausmann’s Revolutionary Media: Dada Performance, Photomontage and the Cyborg. Art History, 30 (1), pp. 26-56. Byron, Gordon G., 1978. Don Juan. In Frank D. McDonnell, ed. Byron’s Poetry. New York: Norton & Company.

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Csaplár, F., 1994. Kassák az európai avantgárd mozgalmakban, 1926-1928. Budapest: Kassák Museum. Derrida, J., 1984. Signéponge / Signsponge, Translated by Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University Press. Doherty, B., 1997. “See: We Are All Neurasthenics!” or, The Trauma of Dada Montage. Critical Inquiry, Autumn, 24 (1), pp. 82-132. Doherty, B., 2003. The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada. October, Summer, 105, pp. 73-92. Kassák, L., 1921. Világanyám. Wien: Ban Verlag. Reproduced in: Csaba Sík, ed. 1983. Kassák Lajos, Válogatott művek. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó, pp. 121-162. Kassák, L., 1922a. A ló meghal, a madarak kirepülnek. In: Csaba Sík, ed. 1983. Kassák Lajos, Válogatott művek, vol. 1. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó, pp. 161-179. Kassák, L., 1922b. Képarchitektúra. MA, 7 (4), pp. 52-54. Kassák, L., 1983. Egy ember élete. Budapest: Magvetô. Poggi, Ch., 1992. In defiance of painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the invention of collage. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Serge, V. 1963. Memoirs of a revolutionary, 1901-1941. London: Oxford University Press.

Lenka Bydžovská The Gift

The starting point for this essay is the Surrealist painting The Gift, which Jindřich Štyrský painted in 1937 (fig. 1). It depicts a bizarre object: a mutilated and torn book in grey and flesh tones. An ear grows out of the front cover of the book, casting a dark shadow. The ear is part both of the book and of a largely hidden masculine profile. The viewer is presented with a dual way of reading the painting, akin to Salvador Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method. As the structuralist Jan Mukařovský wrote in his 1938 essay “On the Epistemology and Poetry of Surrealism in Painting”, in The Gift we see “a face which is simultaneously a charred book” (Mukařovský, 1966, p. 310). The oscillation between the two ways of viewing the painting produces an almost physical tension that need not, however, be associated solely with surrealism. Gustav Meyrink included a similar device in his novel The Golem, in which a sacred book comes to life and its dreamlike narrative merges with the protagonist’s thoughts: “And I read the book to the very end… and it was as though I were searching for something, turning the pages of my mind rather than the book.” (Meyrink, 1971, p. 20) The combination of book and body part in The Gift also points to a specific meaning: Štyrský once remarked that he considered the painting to be a portrait of the Marquis de Sade, whose life and work he had avidly studied over the years (Le Brun, 1989, p. 135). The original inspiration for The Gift came from Jindřich Štyrský’s “Dream about Books”. Štyrský had examined the link between waking life and dreams for many years. Not long before his early yet anticipated death (he died in the spring of 1942 after a serious illness) he had compiled a unique book, Dreams, with selected verbal and visual records of his dreams from 1925 to 1941. He included drawings, paintings and collages in which he continued to work with motifs from his dreams,

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sometimes immediately after waking from them, sometimes many years later. Štyrský wished to follow the example of Breton’s Communicating Vessels and append Dreams with detailed commentary and analysis, but he never had time. Nonetheless, the book, thanks to its very conception and composition, presents a highly original account of the artist’s work. It was impossible to publish Dreams under German occupation. Eventually it was published in 1970, some three decades after Štyrský’s death.

from Paris to Prague. Štyrský goes to find a book for Toyen to read on the train. He finds his most peculiar quarry at the end of the dream: “…I had to go all the way to Notre-Dame, to a well-known bookseller’s where I had often bought good books. I went there and pulled out an old, bound book at random, and when I looked at it I saw that there was an ear squashed on the front cover, and when I took it out of the row it straightened up. I looked furtively at the bookseller, who was sitting behind me. In front of him there was a basin of water on a stool. He took eared books, one after another, off a shelf, dusted off the ears, and then washed them before drying them with a clean towel. – The ears were thriving…” (Štyrský, 1970).

Fig. 1. Jindřich Štyrský, The Gift, 1937, oil on canvas, 54 × 42 cm. Private collection, Prague (photo: Hana Hamplová).

Fig. 2. Jindřich Štyrský in Paris, 1932, photograph.

In the book’s relatively complicated structure, “Dream about Books” is atypical in its apparent simplicity: a detailed account of the dream is accompanied by a single work, the painting The Gift, which dates from the same year. It should, however, be borne in mind that Štyrský did not illustrate his dreams: the relations between the dream, the literary account of it, and the painting are much more profound and ambiguous. “Dream about Books” is concerned with one of Štyrský’s life-long passions – he was a bibliophile, an illustrator, a book designer and sometimes a publisher. He wrote poems, essays, criticism and biographies of people he admired. “Dream about Books” is set among Parisian booksellers (fig. 2). Štyrský and the painter Toyen, with whom he worked from the beginning of the 1920s until his death, were preparing to return

The ear was traditionally considered the gateway through which divine wisdom came to man, but it was also associated with sexual symbolism, in which the word represented semen and the ear took on the function of the vagina. The Surrealists favoured the latter interpretation. Meret Oppenheim touched on it in her ironically playful drawing Gia cometti’s Ear (1933), which she later had cast in bronze (1959). In 1934 Max Ernst published a polemic in which he noted the fear of the German National Socialist press of subversive postcards and posters that they suspected concealed communist propaganda. A hidden picture of Lenin and an ear becoming a sensual image were given as examples. Ernst returned to the ear as a hidden picture the following year in his oil painting, The Lent Ear. Dalí and Magritte also worked with the motif of the ear. In that sense the emphasis on the ear in Štyrský’s The Gift fits in with the

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reference to the concealed likeness of the Marquis de Sade. At the beginning of the 1930s Štyrský had published erotic books in his Edice 69, as well as the Erotic Review. Štyrský’s “Dream about Books” had a well-known precursor in Surrealism. In a lecture entitled “Surrealist Situation of the Object: Situation of the Surrealist Object”, first delivered in Prague in the spring of 1935, Breton related a dream he had mentioned at the beginning of the 1920s in “Introduction to a Discourse on the Paucity of Reality” (L’introduction au discours sur le peu de realité): “One night recently, while sleeping at an open-air market… I put my hand on a rather peculiar book. The book’s spine was a wooden pixie, and his white beard, cut in the Assyrian style, came down to his feet. The thickness of the sculpture was quite normal, and did not hamper turning the pages of the book, which were made of thick black wool. I was anxious to acquire the book, and when I woke up I was sorry not to see it beside me.” (Breton, 1937, p. 105) The dream encouraged Breton to propose designing and circulating similar books. Unlike the Parisian Surrealists and the younger generation of Czech Surrealists, Štyrský was not interested in three-dimensional objects, but focused on painting his mental objects, as The Gift confirms. Štyrský occasionally included lettering in his paintings, collages and drawings. Sometimes there were personal remarks and comments, sometimes Chinese characters or incomprehensible and mysterious inscriptions. In contrast, the book in The Gift – the only book he ever painted, if we exclude his very early Expressionist/Cubist The Reader from 1921 – is shut and offers no text. I would like to compare Štyrský’s approach with open books by two other Czechs. The first example is the wooden relief Exposition of the Word Madonna from 1896-97. It is the work of Symbolist sculptor František Bílek, who sought in the Bible a way out of the metaphysical torment of his feelings of guilt and isolation. Bílek’s religious beliefs, based on his powerful mystical visions, were so far removed from Catholic doctrine that the church considered his art and writings deliriously heretical and described them as an instance of pride: Bílek’s messiah complex. In Exposition of the Word Madonna the Gospel of Saint John lies open before the viewer. Christ’s face and hand, pierced by a nail, appear above it and inside it. Bílek interpreted the relief as an image of Christ, who is the sun of our souls and in times of darkness embraces the world through “our moon” – the Virgin Mary.

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Mankind is represented in the lower part of the relief by the slumped figure of a “rough, weary man who does not accept the light of God through the Virgin Mary” (Bílek, 1948, p. 208). He sits in a boat in the middle of the ocean of time, beneath clouds that represent our blindness and inability to accept divine light. The symbolism of light, which was of crucial importance in Bílek’s work, comes from the Bible. For Bílek, light represented a Neoplatonic emanation of creative energy that exists beyond matter and beyond man, but which can illuminate his works. If in Exposition of the Word Madonna Bílek depicted his very personal vision of the traditional book of books in order to speak to all mankind, half a century later Jindřich Heisler produced a trio of books of an entirely new type, each of which was intended for a specific person. Heisler, a poet who joined the Prague Surrealist Group at the end of the 1930s, left for exile in France with Toyen in 1947 in anticipation of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Exiled from his native language, he could not express himself with the precision he required for his poetry. The acuteness of the situation only strengthened his desire to make poems out of objects. In some sense he drew on Breton’s poem-objects, which combined hand-written poetry (or individual words) with real, tangible objects to produce an integrated whole, and he no doubt also had in mind his own experience of working with Toyen on the book From the Casemates of Sleep during the years of occupation. In his new books-objects-poems he decided to adopt an even more radical approach, leaving out the text altogether. He was not satisfied with the first version, which he presented at the international Surréalisme en 1947 exhibition in Paris, and he destroyed it. In May 1948 he wrote to Kiesler that he was still producing “poems written with objects” (Heisler, 1999, p. 328). The definitive outcome came two years later, when he produced his Book-Object-Poem for André Breton (1950), for Toyen (1950) and for Benjamin Péret (1951) (fig. 3). He used a variety of small objects in his poems – used and unused matches, cogs from watches, safety pins, beads, small light bulbs, plaques with numbers, fishing lures, coloured string, twigs and other natural artefacts. When arranging them on a surface he retained the classic form of a poem, placing a “title” made of objects at top left, below it on the right a dedication, and then lines made of objects, with the author’s signature at bottom right. He did not adhere rigidly to that basic design, but came up with unique visual approaches

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for each of his books-objects-poems. For Breton he chose a base with his favourite colours: swelling white lines emerge from a field of green, creating a backdrop for poems made of objects arranged around a central axis. A thin black circle running through the open book offers another way of finding connections between the objects, rather than the obvious rows. Unlike the other works, Book-Object-Poem for Toyen is narrative: the individual lines include scenes and stories made of fragments of photographs and small figures. For Péret, Heisler designed striking images recalling calligrams on both pages of the book. There was a different set of objects for each recipient. A particular item might be repeated in a single poem, but would never be found in another: it always had an individual significance for the specific person. Heisler gave the books to his close friends from the Paris Surrealist Group.

Fig. 3. Jindřich Heisler, Book-object-poem for André Breton, 1950, mixed media, 40 × 65 cm. Private collection, Prague (photo: Jan Malý).

Returning to Štyrský, the question arises as to why he entitled his painting The Gift. The simplest – though unsatisfactory – answer is that in his dream he had wanted to give the book to Toyen. However, he did not give her the painting that depicts the book, but hung it in his apartment, where it remained until his death, and only then did it go to Toyen, to whom Štyrský also left his library and the responsibility for the fate of his work. According to “Dream about Books”, however, the recipient could just as well have been Štyrský himself: chance, represented by

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the bookseller, had given him his unusual find. Nevertheless, I believe that when interpreting the painting it is necessary to avoid the narrative aspects that have been outlined, and to point to the concept of art and literary works as gifts. In a distinctive and provocative way Štyrský joined a long tradition the most exalted examples of which include the gifts that Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo produced for one another, as Alexander Nagel proved a few years ago in a remarkable essay in The Art Bulletin (Nagel, 1997). James H. Rubin highlighted the shift in the meaning of the gift in modern painting in his analysis of Manet’s still-lifes for his girlfriends, including Berthe Morisot (Rubin, 1994, pp. 192-197). Man Ray took an extreme approach with his ironic object Gift from 1921, which the authors of the book Art Since 1900 have now subjected to thorough analysis (Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, 2004, pp. 250-251). The 1925 essay The Gift (Essai sur le don) by French anthropologist Marcel Mauss was warmly received in art circles; he emphasised the dual nature of a gift in ancient societies as both an offering and the imposition of an obligation. In the recent past Jacques Derrida argued against Mauss’ views, taking the gift out of the economic context (Derrida, 1992, pp. 1-83, 1995, p. 95). Among the wealth of scholarly literature on the subject it is also worth recalling Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Hyde, 1979). By coincidence Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift was first published as a magazine serial in 1937, the same year that Štyrský painted The Gift. “Gift” can be described as a philosophical category in Nabo kov’s thought. It is life, for which the gift is a metaphor; it is language, literature, memories of childhood and youth, but also emigration, which allowed him to work without fear of censorship. Jindřich Štyrský’s circumstances were rather different. His Gift is above all subversive. It conceals a reference to the Marquis de Sade, and it refers to the gift of freedom, however perilous that gift may be. The contents of the ravaged book remain unknown. The roles have been reversed: rather than the book offering something to the viewer’s gaze, it is furnished with an ear that is ready to listen. Maurice Blanchot described the task it sets us: “…to read, see and hear a work of art requires… a gift, which is not given beforehand, which must each time be obtained through self-denial, mastered, and then lost again.” (Blanchot, 1999, p. 258).

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References Bílek, F., 1948. Básník a sochař. Dopisy Julia Zeyera a Františka Bílka. Praha: Za svobodu. Blanchot, M., 1999. Literární prostor. Praha: Hermann & synové. Breton, A., 1937. Co je surrealismus? Tři přednášky o vývoji surrealismu, o surrealistické situaci objektu a politické pozici dnešního umění. Brno: J. Jícha. Derrida, J., 1992. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Chicago – London: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J., 1995. The Gift of Death. Chicago – London: University of Chicago Press. Foster, H. – Krauss, R. – Bois, Y.-A. – Buchloh, B. H. D., 2004. Art since 1900. London: Thames & Hudson. Heisler, J., 1999. Z kasemat spánku. Praha: Torst. Hyde, L., 1979. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of the Property. New York: Vintage Books (Random House). Le Brun, A., 1989. Petits et grands théâtres du Marquis de Sade. Paris: Paris Art Center. Meyrink, G., 1971. Golem. Praha: Lidové nakladatelství. Mukařovský, J., 1966. Studie z estetiky. Praha: Odeon. Nagel, A., 1997. Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. Art Bulletin 79, pp. 647-668. Rubin, J. H., 1994. Manet´s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Štyrský, J., 1970. Sny. Praha: Odeon.

Anna Baranowa Intertwining. Zbigniew Makowski’s Search for the Whole “To see the whole is the most difficult and most fundamental thing for the painter. This kind of perception is apparently impossible to reconcile with love.” Zbigniew Makowski

For several months I had the pleasure of corresponding with Zbigniew Makowski, who participates in this form of exchange – quite rare today – with great generosity. What makes the correspondence exceptional is that the letters from Warsaw, which I have been receiving since the painter’s exhibition in the Fine Arts Academy Museum in Kraków, are written calligraphically on handmade paper and often illustrated. Makowski can be referred to as homo pingens et scribens – not only in the sense that as a painter and poet he uses the paintbrush and the fountain pen (never the biro or the computer), but primarily because his paintings and unique books are painted, drawn and written to an equal extent. The artist treats the word and picture as two complementary forms of expression, two orders of things which cannot exist without each other (colour images 14-17, see colour plates). Zbigniew Makowski, born in 1930 in Warsaw, belongs to the generation of masters or contemporary classics. His own style was formed after 1960. He had attempted surrealism of the Carlo Carrà variety, Informel and lyrical abstraction. While staying in Paris in 1962 he mixed with the international Phases group and participated in several of their exhibitions. There he also encountered André Breton, who wished to see the young Pole among his acolytes. Makowski is considered part of the

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international surrealist circle (Passeron, 1993, pp. 241-42), although he himself and some other researchers are likely to consider his approach entirely original. The erudite-painter, entrenched in the whole of culture (particularly Mediterranean culture), operates with a language elaborate in form and rich in symbolism, sometimes hermetic in reception, which draws on esoteric traditions of Europe and the Orient. A characteristic feature of his style is the multiple presence of writing in the imagery area – Latin sayings, quotations from literature, his own calligraphic notes. The works of the artist, which he exhibited many times in Poland and abroad, are stored in the art collections of important museums across the world. In 1991, his painting entitled Mirabilitas secundum diversos modos exire potest a rebus was donated to the UN Office in Geneva as a gift of the Polish government. Makowski read and absorbed paintings with equal passion. In his autobiography he remembers his return to the ruins of Warsaw: “in the early spring of 1945, with a bundle on his back, which included several potatoes and onions as well as 1) several dozen colour reproductions, particularly of works by seventeenth century Dutch painters, but also Turner and Pre-Raphaelites, 2) several books: Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blavatsky, Ruskin. … 3) a notebook with his poems, 4) loose sheets of paper with drawings – copies of Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Baldung Grien, drawings of nature, initials, ornaments.” (Makowski, 1978, pp. 15-16) This was spiritual nourishment for the 15-year old, already well beyond his years. The 15-year-old Central European, hungry without doubt, returns to the ruins of his home town – the capital city of Poland, which had been almost completely burnt down by the Nazis. He knows, although he may not have read Paul Valéry yet, that civilizations are mortal. He also suspects that he can reconstruct his own world only through art. “All art gives us is an experience freed from the disturbing conditions of actual life,” he noted from the article by Roger Fry on William Blake (Fry, 1904). Makowski was never an escapist. In one of his most recent letters he wrote of himself that he is “in search of simplicity” (form a letter dated August 11, 2009). He searches for the principle of the world, pushing his way through the thicket of signs. Somebody like this would not be able to exist in the desert. The artist hates emptiness – he has strong symptoms of horror vacui. This is why he could not bear the avant-garde dictate to start afresh. The empty

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canvas, the tabula rasa, scared him and put him off. In his autobiography he remembers the borderline year 1960, when he painted a work that was a metaphorical desert for him: “the painting, completely white with a small vertical red line and remains of the texture obtained by spreading sand on part of the canvas.” (Makowski, 1978, p. 29) He saw only two solutions before him: “1. to walk back the way I came (who likes it?); 2. to build on the spot (out of what?). The panicky retreat, known as Passeism, was out of the question.” Affected by the spirit of time – apparently against his better judgment –, the painter, who had rejected figuration, was assisted by the word. Initially, these were even surrealistic games in the spirit of the “Lettrist” Informel. Nonetheless, Makowski primarily drew on the letter as an elementary building block through which language materializes. “We could thus build from letters, if we wanted some coherent, non-contradictory arrangement of non-mimetic forms. It was naivety for somebody to state that I used letters to describe the world literally when I stopped painting it literally,” he wrote years later. It soon turned out that the alphabet may give a sense of control over the whole. He discovered that letters have a mystical dimension, they are “roots of the universe.” This reflected the influence of the ideas of the Spanish Cabbalist and Jewish prophet of the thirteenth century, Abraham Ben Samuel Abulafia, who “found the Archimedean point in twenty-two Hebrew letters.” What was not insignificant for the painter was the visual aspect of the Lettrism he practiced – the “drawing texture,” which came into being when Latin, Gothic, and Hebrew letters, runic rites, hieroglyphs, cuneiform writing, Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, and early musical notation were used. In time, parchments of Opicinus de Canistris, the inspired Italian cartographer from the turn of the thirteenth century who created anthropomorphic maps of the world, grew into an equally important source of inspiration. For the painter, who lived with the image and the word, it was an impulse to reconcile the two orders. In spite of the limitless formal possibilities offered by art freed from the mimetic, it is not by any means obvious how to go about reconciling the represented and the written on one plane. Image and the word coexist on the basis of permanent paradox, because the image becomes manifest immediately, while the word requires reading and develops in time (Bowman, 1985).

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Artists who produced illuminated volumes in the past managed to tackle this double code well. Among countless successful examples of such symbiosis, it is worth recalling a page from the anonymous fourteenth-century incunabulum called The Life of Ramon Lull. Even more so, given that Lullus constituted another important model of universal science for Makowski, that of ars magna, which served to describe the entire world. The Blessed Raimundus Lullus, the medieval patron of today’s computer users, developed a system of signs which yielded to automatic ordering and which Makowski decided to apply to art. If this elaborate “alphabet” is designed to be ordered in various ways which allow us to survey all possible wholes consisting of its elements, then what happens when we assume that the basic set of elements is the entire world? Makowski formulated this question following the Polish logician Tadeusz Kotarbiński (Kotarbiński, 1957). The imagination of surrealistic origin, supported at the same time by age-old tradition, suggested the answer. What occurred to him was “constructions both artificial and infinitely odd, archi-heterogenic: the amusement park of all mythologies, old book stores hovering above the waters, underground birds, cloudy minerals.” (Makowski, 1978, p. 37). Returning to figuration in the mid1960s, Makowski built his own labyrinth of impossible spaces, filled with symbolic signs, hybrid shapes and writing. Concerning methodology, in the case of Makowski’s works, somebody who would attempt to decipher them using the iconographic key would quickly become dizzy. His art is fertile terrain for iconology, though, and more broadly hermeneutics, i.e. the art of reading, understanding and interpreting signs. Józef Życiński, in his collection of essays entitled Język i metoda (Language and Method) inspired by the ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer, wrote of the virtues of hermeneutics, which he called the “methodical interpretation which reveals meaning”: “A hermeneut does not stop at the superficial level of formulations, he does not confine himself to a register of symbols and signs. Entering the world of meanings, he presents their multiple combinations, which create a rich spectrum of shades of meaning. As a result of his hermeneutic interpretations, the subjects of our intellectual reflections start to point at a different reality and, as in Goethe, everything becomes a symbol. For this reason, the philosopher who employs hermeneutics resembles an archaeologist. Both discover a new reality, present but concealed. They are

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not satisfied with a superficial description, but going deep inside, they ask for arché. ... In the world of hermeneutics, one should avoid both the Scylla of superficiality and the Charibda of elaborate technical analyses, where the full, synthetic approach is supplanted by a mosaic-like collection of details.” (Życiński, 1983, p. 96.) Gadamer himself, the co-author of the philosophical foundations of hermeneutics, in his treatise The Relevance of the Beautiful emphasized the role of memory, which allows us to move simultaneously between the present, the past and the future. The description of spiritual space, which, thanks to this, becomes accessible to us, could be a commentary on Makowski’s art. In the mid 1970s, the author of Wahrheit und Methode wrote: “The essence of what is called spirit lies in the ability to move within the horizon of an open future and an unrepeatable past. Mnemosyne, the muse of memory and recollective appropriation, rules here as the Muse of spiritual freedom. The same activity of spirit finds expression in memory and recollection, which incorporates the art of the past along with our own artistic tradition, as well as in recent daring experiments with their unprecedented deformation of form.” (Gadamer, 1986, p. 10.) Zbigniew Makowski is reluctant to talk about any methodology. The theological hermeneutics in the form which it obtained in the thought of Giordano Bruno seems closest to him. The Italian Dominican, an expert in reading and commenting on the Bible who was burned at stake, wrote (I quote Makowski’s citation): “the Holy Scriptures have the infinite number of meanings (infinite significans), out of which I provide nine.” These are: historical, scientific, metaphysical, ethical, legal, anagogic, prophetic, mystical, and tropological meanings (Makowski, 1978, p. 37). Let us add that it was the philosopher Bruno whom Makowski had in mind when he confessed: “I owe it to him that I live and have the courage to think.” (Makowski, 1978, p. 37.) Makowski, who is an agnostic, creates the world of his own mythology, which is dense in meanings, strongly culture-specific, and autothematic. The symbols, which take the form of abstract signs or three-dimensional figures, and the quotations, which solemnly frame the imagery area or penetrate space with a network of intricate calligraphy, draw on his experiences and reflections. Their iterativeness is almost neurotic. Metamorphoses of the same motifs stem from one source and lead to it. It is the mind and heart of the artist. Makowski searches for simplicity

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within the confines of the labyrinth. In 1970 he wrote on the essence of his artistic path: “The individual creative path of the artist, resembling in close-up a frenetic, paroxysmal-heterogenic labyrinth (particularly for himself!), with its rock faces and shallows, forests of symbols and meadows grown over with the grass of memories, with its escapes and returns, attacks and defences, loves and fears, appears from far away (who knows from how far away?) to be driven by NECESSITY, which the artist either realizes … or perhaps does not realize, but he lives it, like a sentence, with his entire life” (Makowski, 1978, p. 16. From a letter dated May 6, 2009). Makowski’s labyrinths either open up from the bird’s-eye view or in a shortcut perspective or through formally contradictory but internally coherent clashes and intertwining of various spaces. The same symbols of initiation and spiritual path keep appearing: the well, chalice, sword, ladder, key, bird, sphere, dice etc. The same figures keep returning as guides: Dante and Beatrice, Muses and Charities, Eurydice, Ariadne, Mary Magdalene, Circe, often in the form of quotations from the masters: Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Rossetti, Gauguin, Picasso. The alternating words, sentences, sayings, the whole portions of classical texts and notes from his own autobiography keep growing back too as a tissue made out of letters, as erudite “metastasis.” These elements are often arranged in a kaleidoscopic mix or are revealed in a flash of illumination. That is why I intended to apply Breton’s concept of l’ écriture automatique to the analysis of Makowski’s paintings. Are the words of Paul Éluard from 1936 on automatism perhaps fitting here? I quote: “One could think that automatic writing would undermine the need to write poems. Far from it! It only expands, develops the experiential field of poetic awareness, enriching it considerably. If awareness is perfect, the elements which the automatic writing brings out of the internal world and the elements of the external world balance out. Reduced to equality, they mix and merge in order to form a poetic unity.” (Éluard, 1936. From a letter of mine dated April 27-28, 2009). Maestro Makowski, who is unenthusiastic about Breton’s ideas, replied with a sentence which paraphrased an automatic linguistic “lump”, and for the sake of elevation copied the poetic extract from his autobiography entitled “Mount Parnassus – Description.” To sum up: four streams have their sources under Mount Parnassus; Reason, Emotion, Perception and Intuition. Around the sacred mountain runs the circular road, on the sides

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of which lie immense rocks with the inscriptions: Ecstasy, Inspiration, Peace, Heavenly Tranquillity. These inscriptions announce the entrance to the labyrinth located under Mount Parnassus (From a letter dated May 6, 2009). Is there no room for the automatism of the subconscious here? When Makowski was very young, 17 years of age, just after the war, he read the freshly published treatise by Marian Morelowski entitled “Abstractionism and Naturalism in Art.” This was an introductory course in the history of art conceived as part of Geisteswissenchaften, and it made a considerable impression on the young Makowski, in particular the following sentence: “However, neither the extremely abstract nor the radically naturalistic tendency have ever been as fertile as their most diverse intertwining.” (Morelowski, 1947, pp. 46-47. From a letter dated March 31, 2009). Morelowski approached the creative act “not so much ‘subconsciously’… as superconsciously in ‘clairvoyance’.” The creative act thus turns into “embracing all factors of inspiration with one’s entire being,” into a state “in which everything that is the past, present and future of plastic art – one’s own or national, acquired or inherited by blood, ‘racial’ or human in general – is transfigured as embodiment into plastic signs, into lines, into chords of colour and into arrangements of spatial figures, into one’s own constellation of forms.” (Morelowski, 1947, p. 51.) Makowski, today nearly an octogenarian, eager – like many old masters – to find and see “the whole,” constantly confirms the validity of such an approach to creativity – against the recent dictates of art perceived as production of artefacts, commercial, politically correct, logistic, anti-individualistic, anonymous, formally bland and nondescript. Makowski’s art is the “fertile intertwining” of abstractionism and naturalism, experiment and canon, intuition and reason, body and mind, image and text.

References Bowman, R., 1985. Words and Images: Persistent Paradox. Art Journal, 4, pp. 335343. Éluard, P., 1936. Definicja. In: Ważyk, Adam, ed. and transl. 1973. Surrealizm. Teoria i praktyka literacka. Antologia, Warszawa: Czytelnik, pp. 169-170.

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Fry, R., 1904. Three pictures in tempera by William Blake. Burlington Magazine. In: Makowski, Z., 1978, p. 16. Gadamer, H-G., 1987. The relevance of the beautiful and other essays, trans. by N. Walker; ed. with an introduction by R. Bernasconi, Cambridge-New York-New Rochelle-Melbourbne-Sydney: Cambridge University Press. Kotarbiński, T., 1957. Wykłady z dziejów logiki, Łódź. In: Makowski, Z., 1978, p. 37. Passeron, R., 1993. Encyklopedia surrealizmu, transl. Krystyna Janicka, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i Filmowe. Makowski, Z., 1978. Autobiografia. In: Zbigniew Makowski, [exhibition catalogue] Wrocław National Museum, Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych Łódź. Morelowski, M., 1947. Abstrakcjonizm i naturalizm w sztuce. Uwagi wstępne do kursu powszechnej historii sztuki, uzupełnione wiadomościami o początkach tej nauki w Polsce. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL. Życiński, J., 1983. Język i metoda, Kraków: Znak.

Katalin T. Nagy Text and image in the art of Péter Ujházi It’s a well-known fact that text has considerable power in contemporary visual arts. Sometimes it relegates the visual element to the background or diminishes it, and sometimes it even dissolves it. Péter Ujházi belongs to the older generation of Hungarian artists. His career began in 1966, when he completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. He is primarily a painter, but in the 1970s he began making assemblages, sculptures and ceramics. In his multi-generic art, text and image have been interconnected from the outset. Today young artists often use English in their works in order to reach a wider audience. Ujházi speaks French and Russian, but with the exception of a few of his works he always writes his texts in Hungarian. This renders questions of representation additionally complex, because the translations sometimes do not suffice to convey the linguistic delicacy or the funny puns. For Péter Ujházi writing is a way of expressing emotions and articulating thoughts, but at the same time, it is a means of making forms. Though the message is in the text (which is understandable only for those who speak Hungarian), it has a visual effect, rhythm, and colour. It can have a plastic body, as in the case of calligraphy. Chinese characters and the Arabian alphabet contain an element of visual excitement that can be enjoyed by those who do not understand the scripts (one merely need think of Gauguin). Text has been present in Ujházi’s art from the beginning of his career. Since the end of the 1970s he has used found materials and various objects in his boxes. He realises that there are innumerable relics all around us, fragments of our culture, objects, thoughts, and written sentences, many of which are worth preserving in some form. In his view, the task of maintaining them and sustaining them falls to the artist.

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The question is, what notions influence Ujházi in his choices, and what kinds of materials does he use in his works? The 1980s was an era of appropriation. Artists borrowed images, objects, and sentences from the history of art and popular culture, both from low and high art. Two figures stand out as paradigmatic for the era: Duchamp, with the idea of the ready-made, and Comte de Lautréamont, with his famous sentence: “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!” Ujházi cannot be subsumed under any of the various trends of the century, but he owes a great deal to Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Art Brut. He incorporates texts into his paintings and other works with various aims, and he interprets the relationship between text and image in various ways. In what follows I offer a description of these methods, comparing them to his use of other pictorial elements. In the beginning of his career Ujházi followed real vision in his painting. His aim was to depict reality in a distinctive way, from a personal perspective, rich with irony, sarcasm and humour. An early painting entitled The Village Tavern shows the interior of a pub in Nadap, a small village close to Lake Velence, where Ujházi initially worked as part of a collective studio, later purchasing his own house. In this painting the text appears as part of the reality depicted. Ujházi drew a copy of the list of drinks on the fibreboard in order to give an authentic portrayal of the pub, very much as an Impressionist painter might have done. At the same time, in the early 1970s Ujházi made some joyful and playful works, in which the letters, which sometimes spell words and sometimes do not, are dancing like figures in a manner expressive of emotions and passions, as in the works of Miró. For Miró it was obvious that poetry and painting were inseparable. He often used letters, words and his own name in his works. Ujházi had a similar attitude towards poetry and painting, and he also uses his name as a symbol of his ego. The artist’s name is tantamount to the artist himself, as one can see in a work from 1987 in which the painter uses the letters of his name as guided missiles against the Turks during the siege of Eger (a famous battle from the period of the Turkish conquest of Hungary). The name symbolizes the painter. It can move in the space of the painting like a figure.

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I recently found some very interesting materials in Ujházi’s studio in Székesfehérvár, including painted sheets of an old edition of Népszabadság (People’s Freedom), the daily newspaper of the Communist Party from 1974. He made them for their own sake, never exhibiting them, because they could not have been put on exhibit in the socialist era. He cut the word “Népszabadság” into different parts, thereby creating new words. The method is reminiscent of Picasso and the Cubists, who did something similar with the word “journal.” While the French words – jou, jouer, jour – are only a matter of word play, the fragments of “Népszabadság” have a more immediate role, referring to the political situation and making something intangible, the official organ and alleged source of unquestionable truth, seem ridiculous. The newly created words (ép – unhurt, szabad – free, zaba – gorge) have real meaning. In fragments there is truth, in the whole there is untruth, the word and its meaning (Népszabadság) belong to the realm of lies. For Ujházi, Nadap means nature and amusing diversions in summertime, so the village became one of his main inspirations. The word Nadap is nearly a palindrome. It has a musical quality and as a form is almost symmetrical, so when Ujházi signs his works, the name of the village always appears. A palindrome is a special arrangement of individual letters which is the same when read forwards or backwards. ÓH HÓ and HÓ ÓH is a double palindrome, like the picture itself. Ujházi imitates the orthographic symmetry of the palindrome by using mirror images in the picture. Ed Ruscha’s palindrome, the Lion in Oil, signifies nothing in particular, but it achieves a kind of meaning through internal logic. Ruscha reveals that the word ‘lion’ belongs to a separate order of meaning distinct from the object it signifies, similar to Magritte’s pipe that is not a pipe. Ujházi always establishes the connection between the text and the image. In the beginning of the 1980s, the artist found (in the literal sense of the word) a pack of old documents in Székesfehérvár in front of the building of the Municipal Archives. The documents, which were records of lawsuits, had been written in the nineteenth century. They concerned everyday cases. Ujházi, whose narrative painting always focuses on human happenings and whose figures were always drawn from real life, realised that these bagatelles were similar to his themes. In art history many artists

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used the concept of bricolage, including Picasso, Braque, Miró, Schwitters, and Tápies. They used found materials, real objects, and pre-existing images or texts. Pière Alechinsky used old documents, manuscripts and typescripts as a surface, a background for his works. Both Alechinsky and Ujházi composed two different media: handwritten support (in the case of Alechinsky these include printed materials) and the superimposed drawing. While Alechinsky often obliterates parts of the original document, Ujházi is deeply involved in the story of the case, sometimes copying the signature of the letter-writer, for instance. He did not illustrate the written event, but rather put himself in the past. He always maintains great respect for the original composition. His artistic aim is to keep the papers alive with his drawings and writings külön (colour image 18, see colour plates). Another of Ujházi’s bricolages represents his individual attitude towards found objects. His method is experimental and conceptual at the same time. He decorates the writing spontaneously and then interprets the text. He puts his notes between the coloured letters. His comment is another found object, the borrowed lines from a folk song. As in the case of his boxes, Ujházi arranges the found elements according to a personal philosophy. He always calls attention to the fact that the images and texts can be explained in different ways. In the second half of the 1980s he introduced kitsch and fake paintings into new works. Sometimes he retouched the canvases, making corrections to the paintings, but many times he merely created new arrangements, building assemblages and adding generally humorous comments. Ujházi believes that anything can become valuable through the touch of the artist, and trashy material can be reinvigorated. In painting he follows the same principles when he chooses simple subjects, because he considers it his task to find the proper manner of speaking in order to show his ideas about the world. One of the most important works of this group is Small Pictures (colour image 19, see colour plates). The artist’s writings next to the paintings are apparently poetic sentences, but practically they are commonplaces which are as banal as the paintings themselves. The expressions seemed familiar to me. I didn’t know where I knew them from initially, but eventually I found them in Hungarian pop songs. Ujházi deals the same way with found objects, whether visual or textual elements of his works.

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The found pictures and the found expressions are both commonplaces. The idea of the images and the texts is the same. Among the found materials used by the artist one finds photos, as well. Ujházi decorates the images with drawings and texts, which are always full of irony. Through my research I discovered that in the case of a photograph of Kádár (János Kádár was General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, he was the leader of Hungary between 1958 and 1988) the artist is again referring to pop songs (colour image 20, see colour plates). For those who were coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, it is clear that the sentence, “Anything could come,” written in the right corner of the work, is a line from a popular love song by Mária Toldy, and the continuation is “We will defeat it, we will defeat it.” This connotation evidently refers to a key notion of the socialist era; the aim was to defeat the capitalist order with planned agriculture and economy. The hearts and the line of tear-drops strengthen the false expression of the “actors.” The title, which is written on the upper part of the work, is a citation drawn from another love song, Yellowing leaves are falling, and the continuation could be an explanation of the picture: “Tell me, that nothing came to an end / Tell me, that you weep sometimes.” Ujházi hides some lines of the song in the pictures, which are not written on the work, but the viewer familiar with the song recalls them. The notion that a motif or a fragment can evoke the whole and the viewer can finish the open work is an idea from the visual arts. After 1966 performances entitled Song Festival were organised as popular entertainment for the people. The texts of these songs were familiar to everyone. Radio and television broadcast the songs everyday, and this was the most popular branch of socialist culture. As we have seen, Ujházi takes texts from different sources. In his art there is a group of works containing expressions or sentences from literature, mainly from psalm-books and works by Hungarian writers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of his favourite writers is Bálint Balassi (1554-1594), whose poems often figure in his works. When I asked him why he liked the old Hungarian language, he answered that he felt he had a duty to keep these idioms alive through his art. When he copies lines and sentences from works by Balassi he forces his viewers to read the poetry, or at least excerpts from it (colour image 21, see colour plates). He does not have the same goal as Hungarian au-

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thor Péter Esterházy, who made a copy of a novel School at the Frontier (1959) by Géza Ottlik (1912-1990) on a single sheet of paper. It took him a year to write and it was a present for Ottlik’s seventieth birthday. Esterházy’s attitude was conceptual, while Ujházi’s art is always experimental. Esterházy’s work is an image of thousands of unreadable lines, Ujházi’s piece is a readable text image. In 1976 a graphics art camp was founded in Makó. Ujházi worked there in 1983. He took with him the memoirs of Miklós Bethlen, a work from the seventeenth century. He wrote down lines from the book. Without any drawing, it is a drawing of letters. Antoni Tàpies wrote the following about the inclusion of orthographic elements: “letters, as is well known, are first drawings, and words, before being converted into groups of abstract signs, are also plastic images, ideograms.” Many scholars note that the words grapheme and graphic derive from the same roots, so there is an ancient connection between them. The Makó papers primarily show Ujházi’s affinity with graffiti artists. In the 1970s he made photos of the scribblings on walls in Székesfehérvár. He exhibited them, as well. The style of writing owed a lot to graffiti. Graffiti has a destructive character that acts against high art. Ujházi, like e. g. Cy Twombly, is known for his scribbling and doodling. Their art mirrors the amazing mix of high and low, the philosophical and the grotesque. Twombly uses canonical texts (e. g. Shelley, Keats) within the body of his graffiti paintings. Ujházi borrows old Hungarian texts and incorporates them into his works in many ways. But why does one of the Makó papers include three vocabulary entries in French – tabac (tobacco), bière (beer) and femme (woman) – with their explanations? The answer lies in the history of the camp. The camp was held in August. This is the hottest month of the summer, and the artists were working a little in the morning and then spending the afternoons and evenings in the pub. So this print could be an homage to Comte de Lautréamont. Occasionally Ujházi uses the same sentence in different works, such as There is no excuse for death and the interrogative variation of the same thought, Who could have an excuse for death? This sentence functions as a substitute for the human skull, the symbol of vanitas. He does not attempt to represent death on the left wing of the diptychon, but rather invokes its presence through words, colour and calligraphy.

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The right wing, which bears the motif of a painter’s palette, constitutes a philosophical answer to the question, in the sense of the Latin phrase Ars longa vita brevis. All the other elements of the photo-collage, including the simple icon of the devil, the plant, Judas’ penny, and the cracking of the glass, refer to death. And the unusual signature, the repeated lines (one is written over the other), emphasize (the) living art(ist). The most ancient manner of including text in the body of a painting is speech-scrolls, and the more modern variant is speech balloons. They can represent vocal utterances, so when we are reading the texts we are thinking in terms of hearing rather than seeing. The speech-scroll or the speech balloon always implies that we are listening to a dialogue, in other words we are witnesses to a conversation. Roland Barthes introduced the concept of anchorage. (Barthes, 1977, pp. 34-37). The artist can anchor the preferred reading of an image, meaning that together with the image the meaning is also portrayed in the work. Barthes said that textual anchorage is usually used in the field of advertisements, but it applies of course to other genres, such as photographs with captions, maps, narrated television and film documentaries, and cartoons and comics with speech and thought balloons. Barthes argued that the principal function of anchorage was ideological. From the written words we know exactly how the subject’s expression ought to be read. Ujházi adopts this method as well. He directs the viewer and helps us understand the intended meaning. One encounters several variations of the mingling of text and image in Ujházi’s art. He treats the relationship between text and image fully in his works, exploiting all the artistic possibilities created through this interconnection. The main principle for Ujházi is the use of words or sentences as pictorial elements. They have visual meanings, and they can evoke associations in the same way visual signs or icons do. W. J. T. Mitchell introduces the notion of imagetext, which can symbolize the compact connection between image and text. (Mitchell, 1986). Ujházi is not necessarily familiar with Mitchell’s ideas, but one can hazard the contention that he shares similar views. A close examination of Ujházi’s treatment of text and image suggests that for him there is little or no difference between the two. He works with found materials, whether they are objects or texts, and he

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makes direct or concealed references with both. He is aware of the fact that the textual elements have visual features and the visual motifs exist in textual contexts. Motifs and letters are equal elements of a work, found and created materials become parts of the different structures. Ujházi is cutting up reality into segments, meanwhile he is collecting fragments from reality, then he builds up a personal detail of the world from the segments and the fragments.

References Barthes, R., 1977. Image/Music/Text. London: Fontana Press. Mitchell, W. J. T., 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CENTAUR Béla Balázs Studio, 1973-1975 Written and Directed by Tamás Szentjóby Camera: János Gulyás Editor: Éva „Etikus” Vörös Captions: Kornél Szilágyi Translated from the Hungarian by Jim Tucker

* - Sure, everything that exists is made up of totally different elements. Just look around! And if I go to the movies, say -- the walls, the door, the threshold, the glass, the putty, the nails -- or the ticket booth, the tickets, and the usher... - Not to mention his clothes. - Right -- ...the seats and the glue between the slats, the screen, the projector, the projectionist -- his fingers, his eyes -- the film, the light, shadow, sound, speakers -- all of these are made up of lots of parts. The membrane, the reels -- and even my brain, containing my plan to see a film. My legs, and gravity, and us being used to it, limits -- the film’s limits which tell us to transcend our limitations and all limitations – this is all what it is – all at once. Or to put it simply: it is this, here. - No need to complicate matters. Clothes and the body are two very different things. - Or a clothing factory, and the image of one in a film.

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- But they still have something in common. Take me -- I like to watch skirts running through a sewing machine just like I watch a film. That’s why I like to say Arise, clothing! Be a class warrior!

- Maybe there’s some point in my saying it.

- Uh-huh.

- Still, I hope it has an effect.

- Yes.

- So it’s all about efficacy.

- Doesn’t speech have an effect?

- Work is not economical.

- Only if you’re saying forbidden things. That’s how it liberates the unknown that is within us, and unleash on us the unknown that lies outside. Alright now, Margit, I’m getting off now.

- Well I hope what you call “work” is what keeps an autonomous and unfinished person dependent and locked up. Can’t have a change of consciousness without social change -- and no social change without a change of consciousness. - Don’t I know it. - But you know that’s true. - If I say don’t I know it, you know I know it. - Might be better if you knew about change instead. But you’re just repeating yourself: work isn’t economical. But we should be facilitating the development of a new consciousness through the panic-like process of enlightenment and recognition. What you say has nothing of panic in it. - Yes, that may be. - It’s not even stimulating. It’s a cliché. - Don’t you think whatever exists, is an incitement? That the tradition of efficacy nowadays is none other than the efficacy of tradition? But, we’re theoretically done with that. - So?

- You’re saying very little.

* - Hey boss! I love dismissing -- let me dismiss you! - Oh sweetheart, I’ve told you a hundred times, wait till the time comes. - Alri-iight! Everyone says the time has come. - There’ll be a huge mess when it turns out that the time for everything has come, and I start mixing up the useful and the useless. - That’s mixing, all right. Does it increase productivity? - Or it might be sabotage. - Which one will get rid of my repulsive exterior? - Yes, there’s something unknown about my plan too. Go ahead and hope. If we work together on spontaneous planning, you’ll be good looking. - Uh-huh. - I mean that’s kind of how I do it.

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- Uh-huh. Yes. Interesting. Uh-huh.

- Well alright! Doodle all over it! Doodle!

- Whatever requires money, is war!

- I’m a peasant, but I’m no idiot. If war is for money, then what are you hoeing for?!

- No Grass Grows Here! No Grass Grows Here! No Grass Grows Here! No Grass Grows Here is out! No Grass Grows Here! Mankind is not of this Earth! No Grass Grows Here! Mankind is not of this Earth! Nothing is of this Earth! No Grass Grows Here! No Grass Grows Here is out! No Grass Grows Here! No Grass Grows Here is out! - I’ll take a copy! - Alright. Mankind is not of this Earth! No Grass Grows Here! No Grass Grows Here is out! Mankind is not of this Earth! Nothing is of this Earth! No Grass Grows Here is out! No Grass Grows ... Yes. No Grass Grows Here is out! No Grass Grows Here! - It doesn’t bother me if I’m not of this earth. - Surely you don’t think it bothers anyone not to be of this earth? - The ones who thought this kind of thing could only happen in the movies are now going to unleash their secret capacities, to prove before God and man that they are truly creatures of heaven -- and free. - The old man is reaching for his coat, as if this was the moment he had been waiting for. He’s off to disorganize, because for him, the private and the political are one. I’m curious what it would take for you to get up too! - Oh, excuse me, I nurture my doubts with a crystal-clear conscience and with all my will, and I produce infertile reflections. Nothingness surges out of me. Truth, as you know, defeats me. It’s made manifest through me. I just hope this old anarchist doesn’t box my ears.

- Only idiots hoe for money! This is money that I’m hoeing. Cause nature is money’s raw material, so we’re hoeing money. For free. - That’s because you’re suckers of the merchants! Thinking that’s the only way to stay alive! They’ve formed us in their own image! We scarfed up all their shitty products, and our heads are spinning in delirium about finally getting our share of life’s true values and glory! They really laid it out for us -- what has value and what doesn’t. What’s right and what’s wrong! What’s praiseworthy and what’s dangerous! What we can say, and what’s worth saying! What’s the standard and where’s the limit! What we need and what we don’t! Basically they tell us what exists and what doesn’t! Though it’s obvious that no one’s interests are the same as anyone else’s, and certainly not the same as the interests of those who embalm us into thinking we’re the people! Meanwhile he’s preaching in the market square hoping to escape the trance of the open society! * - A radical knows that only the people can be radical, and not those who tremble at anything new. - At change. - At the unknown. - At whatever is new – at whatever offers ever more natural and interesting ideas for structuring our lives. Anything that denies that this is the only possible reality. That denies and heals the obsession with militarized world trade, and reveals all the boredom, misunderstanding, violence, and lies. Its better not to understand the language of merchants. Whoever

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does, will reek of banditry because he won’t profit from law and order. So girls, for my part, I shit on exports. * - The economic miracle proved there is a future, right? - Well then we’d better get to fixing the present. What do you trust? Technology or yourself? - One thing is for sure: whatever is tighter around me brings me closer to what is not me. - I love you. - What? - I love you. As Marx writes in “The Machine is a Time Bomb,” I love you because your needs are my needs, and because we represent our interests without hesitation, unconcerned with the interests of the outside world. Now we can see the day when the horizon has a hole in it, where even ultimate interests are revealed for what they are. We will all wake up to the void that is. Then my answer to the question What’s the world to me? will not be Myself, but the ecstatic difference between us. *

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- Good. Go on! - The servants freely elect their masters. - Good! Go on! - Art is a mere compromise! - Good. Go on! - This is not a euphoria amid unhappiness. - Ask the boss! - Excuse me, is this euphoria? - Yes. * - Making use of 24 hours of free time, at first, a waiting room is just a waiting room. - Later it’s a swimming pool.

- What do you think -- why are the forms of the struggle to survive now obsolete? Because we can no longer convince one another that change is the only reality?

- Then a bank, a church, an insane asylum, a theater, a debtors’ prison, the Titanic, a mortuary, a necklace, a film, a dream, a brain cell, a revolution, and an airship. Then finally it’s a waiting room again. Everything has changed. I understand everything. Nothing has changed. I understand nothing.

- Of course not. We’re just impatient.

- Tell me what is weighing on you.

- Might we have a compulsive neurosis?

- Smashing up a smashed-up life.

- It doesn’t matter. Let’s talk some more about fashions in headscarves, or whipped cream, our children, and wage increases -- just to confuse the

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film crew. Let us live behind the mask of carefree compulsive neurosis, so we can get to the future through our secret inventions -- which we won’t speak of now. - But we might also say that we have recognized society’s needs, and by identifying with this enterprise... - Better just play the role of worker!

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- O bed-bodied angel, awake, now’s the time! - It’s certain that your illusion is more progressive than those who trick by false images. - I’ll say my piece too – soon.

- ...by identifying with this enterprise, we become free.

- But as long as you hold your tongue, don’t be surprised if someone refers to you when he starts talking-- because he can’t do anything on his own! And he will be holding your image – just like mine here now.

- They love this kind of babble.

- Wow, this is fuzzy!

- Yes, that’s just what they’re after.

- Hey Éva -- did you pick up your pay yesterday too?

Farewell, farewell, farewell, Away I go too far to tell, Leaving this broad flat field, This colored meadow, this green wood, Abandoning this dear sweet place. I leave to wander in the world, Awaiting me are the blue hills, And lovely unknown realms. My hand takes up the walking stick, The endless unknown calls to me, My road’s end - alas! - I cannot see. My hand takes up the walking stick, The endless unknown calls to me, My road’s end - alas! - I cannot see.

- Yes. No. Tomorrow we’re buying shoes for a box. * - Unexpected turn of events! He’s getting a well-deserved cheer for this. Go on, the way is clear! 27 minutes have passed, and things have changed enough that they can attack more boldly. Gadocha! What a great idea! He first ventures forward. But I doubt they practiced it this way. He stuck his leg out, and got right in front of Látó... So far, a beautiful attack. Látó again! - Reminds me of when we used to listen to the radio in secret, under cover of card games and birthday parties, to trick the Fascist pigs if they raided us. - There’s always a lot of tricking going on. - I know that well. We weren’t even listening to soccer games in those days. I often recall it. Just as this room reminds me of the military hospital.

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CENTAUR

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Fig. 1-4. Centaur (16 mm, b/w, 39 min), Written and directed by: Tamás Szentjóby, camera: János Gulyás, editor: Éva „Etikus” Vörös. (1973-75) © Tamás Szentjóby (TNPU-Archive)

Rezümék

Bevezetô Szegedy-Maszák Mihály Napjainkban sem a képzôművészetnek, sem az irodalomnak nem nyilvánvalóan magától értetôdô az önazonossága. Minden közeg (médium) kevert; minden művészet közegek között mozog (intermediális). Ezért vált különösen idôszerűvé a különbözô művészeteknek, így a szóbeliségnek és a láthatóságnak összehasonlító vizsgálata, mely olyan különbözô területekre terjed ki, mint a képleírás (ekphrasis), az illusztráció, az írás és a képalkotás közötti átmenet, a szöveg láthatósága, mely minden írásban benne rejlô lehetôség, a látható (vizuális) költészet, valamint olyan jelenségek, mint cím, kollázs vagy montázs. Mérlegelésük egyaránt gyarapíthatja a képzôművészetre és az irodalomra vonatkozó ismereteinket.

Hajtincsek, vonalak, húrok és egyéb szálak: megjegyzések Kondor Béla Sámson címû rézkarcáról Rényi András A tanulmány Kondor Béla 1967-ben készült Sámsonnak levágják a haját, avagy tisztelet Freud doktor emlékének c. rézkarcát vizsgálja – kép hermeneutikai megközelítésben. A hangsúly az értelem kép általi generálásának komplex eljárásaira kerül. A kép olyan dinamikus relációk, képfolyamatok játéka, amelynek eseményszerűségét csak az aktív és körültekintő befogadói “szemmunka” realizálhatja. Kondor a motívumok és referenciák kiválasztásának, csoportosításának, grafikai stilizálásának stb. kombinatorikája, valamint a képen belüli relációk, arány- és méretviszonyok, az elrendezés és a keretezés játékai révén bonyolult, sokszorosan rétegzett “képi szöveget” állít elő, aminek csak egy olyan, és módszertanilag kontrollált “szoros szemlélés” felelhet meg, amely te-

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kintetbe veszi a személyes életrajzi referenciák, az ikonográfiai tradíció és az európai képhagyomány értelemköveteléseit is.

Illusztráció-tipológia Varga Emôke Egy illusztráció(sorozat) kvalitásait nem pusztán képi értékek határozzák meg. Az illusztráció ugyanis képként megjelenô, de a szöveg nyomait, stigmáit mindig magán hordozó intermediális műfaj. Ebbôl következik az, hogy egy illusztrált mű befogadásának folyamatát az azonosság és a differencia játéka határozza meg: vagyis adott esetben a szöveg és a kép nagy mértékben, szinte saját mediális határait is legyôzve együttműködô, máskor épp ellenkezôleg, szöveg és kép különbsége a szembeötlô. A hasonlóság mértéke a közel azonostól a csaknem teljesen kü lönbözôig, gazdag átmeneti skálán érzékeltethetô. Lehetséges, hogy ez a heterogenitás négy kategória felállításával lényegében áttekinthetôvé tehetô. E kategóriák átjárhatók, egymás nyitott határú szomszédai, a retorikában használatos terminusokkal nevezhetôk meg: metafora, metonímia, szinekdoché, irónia. A szerzô ennek szemléltetésére az európai kultúra emblematikus irodalmi alkotásait és illusztráció-sorozatait választotta.

Az Öt Rend elsô cseh fordítása (1783): az illusztráció átírja a szöveget Taťána Petrasová A tanulmány Lucas Voch öt rendről írt könyvének cseh fordításával foglalkozik. Illusztrációi, melyek két esetben eltérnek azoktól, amelyek a fordítások alapjául szolgáló szövegekben szerepelnek, megvilágítják azt a kulturális kontextust, amelyben ez a kötet megszületett.

Mednyánszky naplói és illusztrációi – Dr. Samuel Weber és a Magas-Tátra új barlangjának felfedezése Katarína Beňová A festô Mednyánszky László (1852-1919) munkássága során számos grafikus művet is alkotott, amelyek illusztrációként vagy különleges grafikai albumok részeként (mint például az Osztrák-Magyar Monarchia

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írásban és képben) váltak ismertté. Oeuvre-jének rendkívül fontos darabjai saját “illusztrációi”, vázlatai, melyek naplóiban, görög betűkkel írott szöveg között találhatók. 1881-ben Dr. Samuel Weber (1835-1908) a Tátra keleti részén felfedezett egy új barlangot, amelyrôl 1883-ban könyvet írt. Mednyánszky számos illusztrációt készített ehhez a könyvhöz, s a barlang téma késôbb is foglalkoztatta.

Ady-illusztrációk a huszadik század elsô felében Leszkovszky György Ady-illusztrációi Benkô Zsuzsanna A tanulmány Leszkovszky György festôművész Ady Endre verseihez 1921-ben készült illusztrációit vizsgálja. Leszkovszky György a gödöllôi művésztelep egyik fô alakjának, Körösfôi Kriesch Aladárnak a tanítványa volt, és alkotói stílusában egész élete folyamán hűséges követôje maradt mesterének. Leszkovszky illusztrációit tudományközi összehasonlító elemzéssel vizsgálja a szerzô, kiindulva a művész személyes Ady értelmezésébôl, vagyis abból, hogyan fordította le festményre Ady szavait. Ezenkívül vizsgálja az adott korszak interpretációs gyakorlatát, az értelmezés és értékelés történeti változásait, valamint a képek és illusztráció közös tulajdonságait, kapcsolatait.

Robinson Crusoe, Frantisek Tichy és a kannibálok Tomáš Winter Daniel Defoe regénye, a Robinson Crusoe a legismertebb könyvek egyike a 19.századtól kezdve. A kalandtörténet, amely egyaránt tükrözte és átalakította a koloniális diskurzus sztereotípiáit, gazdag forrást biztosított az illusztráló művészek számára. A tanulmány a cseh festô, Frantisek Tichy munkásságának azzal a részével foglalkozik, amelyet ez a regény inspirált. Különös figyelmet szentel a szerzô annak a szemléltetési módnak, ahogyan a kannibalizmus – a regény egyik fontos témája – megjelenik a művész munkájában. Tichy számos festményt festett a „fehér feketék” téma változataira, és feltételezhetô, hogy ezeket Defoe regénye ihlette. Tichy 1933-ban Párizsban kezdett dolgozni ezeken a képein, ahol ebben az idôben élt. A festmény végsô változatát 1936-os prágai hazatérését követôen festette meg. A második világháború alatt Albert Vyskocil

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Robinson Crusoe fordítását illusztrálta. A tanulmány ezt a témát más cseh Robinson fordításokkal összehasonlítva, tágabb kontextusba helyezi, a különféle kiadásokban a kannibalizmus textuális és artisztikus kezelésére összpontosít.

Assisi Szent Ferenc mint keresztény Orpheusz. Liszt: Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi címû kantátájának kultúrtörténeti hátteréhez Kovács Imre Liszt mindig megkülönböztetett tisztelettel fordult Assisi Szent Ferenc felé, két művében is zenei emléket állítva alakjának. A tanulmány ezek közül a Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi című kantátát vizsgálja, de nem zenetörténeti szempontból. A cél a társművészetek egységében hívô zeneszerzô művészi inspirációjának egy tágasabb, kulturtörténetirecepciótörténeti horizontról való megközelítése. A tanulmány arra keresi a választ – a romantikus irodalomnak a keresztény művészrôl alkotott felfogásának középpontba állításával – hogy milyen elemekbôl állt ös�sze az a Szent Ferenc-kép, mely foglalkoztathatta Liszt Ferencet e mű komponálásakor. Konkrétan, egyfelôl Ozanamnak A ferences költôk a 13. századi Itáliában című könyvének a zeneszerzôre gyakorolt hatását vizsgálja, másfelôl pedig azt, hogy Liszt milyen Szent Ferenc képet szánt – és miért éppen ilyet – a mű elsô kiadású kottájának címlapjára, művének mintegy emblémájaként.

Kassák és a konstruktivizmus 1920-1922 között Kókai Károly Kassák Lajos konstruktivista művészetének kezdetei több szempontból problematikusak. Nem egyértelmű, mi késztette arra, hogy konstruktivista művészettel kezdjen foglalkozni, hogy ez pontosan mikor történt, mely műveket tekinthetjük az elsőknek (többek között amiatt, mert ezeknek a munkáknak eredetisége és datálása gyakran kétséges), vagy mi a kapcsolat Kassák irodalmi és képzőművészeti tevékenysége között. Az 1920-1922 közötti periódusban keletkezett képversek, kollázsok, a műalkotásokban megjelenô betűk, valamint a MA tipográfiája kép és szöveg számos kombinációját mutatják.

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Az 1960-as években Birminghamben kifejlődött Cultural Studies a kulturális jelenségeket, „élő tapasztalatként“, olyan „teoretikai gyakorlatként” közelíti meg, amelynek egyik célja a politikum feltárása. Emiatt kutatási területe – Richard Hoggarttól Stuart Hallig – leginkább a populáris kultúra. Kassák konstruktivista művészetének a Cultural Studies szempontjából történő vizsgálatakor két elem válik hangsúlyossá. (1) Nem populáris, hanem avantgárd kultúráról lehet beszélni, amely a szélesebb közönség számára érthetetlennek bizonyult, míg tevékenységének célja a szélesebb munkás tömegek kulturális nevelése, vagy inkább a modern kultúra számukra való megteremtése, volt. (2) Avantgárd művészeti gyakorlata emigráns politikai aktivizmus volt. Kassák bécsi konstruktivista periódusában készült néhány munkájának példájából kiindulva a tanulmány az avantgárd művészi gyakorlat egyes aspektusai val foglalkozik, amelyek a „kulturális formák” határainak átlépésével jellemezhetők.

Önéletrajz mint kép és mint szöveg Szegedy-Maszák Zsuzsanna A tanulmány a személyiség képi és verbális megjelenítésének összevetési lehetôségeit elemzi. Annak ellenére, hogy a festett portré és az írott életrajz közötti párhuzam – Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt és mások révén – évszázadok óta jelenlévô analógia a művészeti elméletírásban, a műfaj-elméletnek ezen ágáról meglepôen keveset írtak. Ezek közül a legaprólékosabb, legrészletesebb elemzés a műtörténész és irodalmár Richard Wendorf ut pictura biographia kifejezést meghonosító írásaiban található. A dolgozat a képi és a verbális portré párhuzamnak egy szűkebb területére, az egyazon festôtôl származó önarcképekre és önéletírásra teszi a hangsúlyt, Barabás Miklóstól származó verbális és képi önarcképeket veti össze, Hasonlóan az önéletrajzhoz, az egy művésztôl több, különbözô korában készült önarckép alkotta sorozat magában hordozza az ábrázolt személy jellemében bekövetkezett változások ábrázolásának lehetôségeit. Ebbôl a szempontból nem tekinthetô hátránynak, ha egy művész visszaemlékezésében nem művészeti/elméleti kérdésekrôl, hanem az élete alakulásáról számol be. A tanulmány megkísérli bemutatni milyen átfedések és milyen eltérések vannak az önábrázolás e két műfaja között.

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Szavak és képek Na’Conxypanból Marosvölgyi Gábor A tanulmány Gulácsy Lajos (1882-1932) szecessziós-szimbolista fes tôművész és grafikus képzeletbeli világának, Na’Conxypannak, ennek a festményeken, grafikákon és írásműveken keresztül inkarnálódott, hol meseszerű, hol pedig ijesztô, de mindig parodisztikus fikciónak a vizuális és nyelvi természetét kívánja bemutatni. Na’Conxypan ugyanis egyszerre és egymást áthatva létezik vizuális és nyelvi szinten. A szerzô vizsgálja e kétféle közeg forrásvidékének (pl. népművészet, népmese, gyerekrajzok, meseillusztrációk, paródia, karikatúra, groteszk, fantasztikum) kapcsolatát, továbbá a kép- és szövegalkotó technikák, valamint a vizuális és nyelvi gesztusok koncepciója közötti lehetséges párhuzamot. Ilyen például a hagyományos képi és nyelvi elemeket dekonstruáló, majd öntörvényűen újra konstruáló technika. A kép és szöveg együttműködésével kapcsolatos vizsgálatának középpontjában az a kérdés áll, hogy milyen szerepet játszik e sajátos nyelv (melynek rövid szójegyzékét is összeállította Gulácsy) a képeken olvasható feliratokként, illetve, hogy milyen viszonyban állnak a képek a szövegekhez viszonyítva. Végül utal a Na’Conxypannak nevezett világ egyetemes kontextusára.

Se kép, se hang? - A trauma képi narrativitásának kérdése W. G. Sebald Austerlitz címû regényében Takács Miklós A trauma pszichoanalízisbôl származó fogalmát a pszichológia mellett a szociológia, a történettudomány és az irodalomtudomány is egyre gyakrabban használja. A szó a mai jelentésében a nyolcvanas évektôl használatos, és a kultúratudományokban befutott karrierjét nemcsak a pszichoanalitikus elméleteknek köszönheti, hanem az úgynevezett „traumaregénynek” is. Ez a típusú regény (mely elôször az elsô világháború után jelent meg) felmutatja a traumatikus tapasztalat narratopoétikai következményeit, mivel ráébreszt az elbeszélés lehetetlenségére. Emellett ráirányítja a figyelmet a beszéd kikényszerítettségére, amely úgy tűnhet, hogy épp ellentétes a traumát körülölelô csenddel és nem is lehetne az adott tárgyra vonatkoztatni. Ez a második jelenség hasonlít a traumáról létrehozott nagy kollektív elbeszélésekre, amelyek így viszont önkényes-

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nek is tűnhetnek. A traumatikus esemény elbeszélhetôsége (vagy nemelbeszélhetôsége) olyan összetett problémahalmazokhoz vezet, mint a téves emlékezet kérdése vagy általában az emlékezet ábrázolhatósága, amely nemcsak a narratopoétikának, hanem a történettudománynak is kihívást jelent. W. G. Sebald regénye halálának évében, 2001-ben látott napvilágot. Az egykor Németországból kivándorolt angliai egyetemi tanár szépirodalmi alkotásai a kilencvenes évektôl kezdôdôen jelennek meg, igazán nagy sikereit már nem érhette meg. Németül írt regényei közül kiemelkedik az Austerlitz és A kivándoroltak, melyek egyedi jellegzetessége, hogy számos fekete-fehér fotó szakítja meg a szövegek folyamatosságát. A tanulmány azt kívánja bemutatni, hogy Sebald regénye állandóan reflektál a trauma ábrázolhatatlanságára, vagyis, hogy ezt a múltbeli emléket sem elbeszélni, sem képpel felmutatni nem lehet és mégis folyamatosan erre kényszerül a címszereplô és az elbeszélô egyaránt.

Frenhofer mester és a „mélyzöld homály”. Az ekphraszisz alakzata Honoré de Balzac és Nádas Péter szövegeiben. Lénárt Tamás A W. J. T. Mitchell nevével fémjelzett picturial turn egyik lehetséges elbeszélése szerint a képek „elôretörése”, kultúratudományos jelentôségük megnövekedése éppen a szöveg ellenében, a szövegek uralta kultúrával konkurálva ment végbe. A dolgozat a szöveg és kép dialektikus, mitchelli „harcát” vizsgálja Honoré de Balzac Az ismeretlen remekmű és Nádas Péter Emlékiratok könyve c. művek képleírásaiban. Az ekphraszisz alakzata, amely Balzac elbeszélését és Nádas regé nyének nevezetes antik falikép-fejezetét is szervezi, lehetôséget nyújt arra, hogy a „posztmodern” irodalmi szövegek – a modernitás esztétikai nézeteivel szemben – megváltozott nyelvi attitűdje (vagyis fôként a művészi reprezentáció lehetôségeinek kritikus felmérése) éppen a képekhez való viszonyulás, a szöveg-kép viszony síkján legyen tetten érhetô, amely, miként Mitchell fogalmaz, „kultúránk alapvetô ellentmondásait állítja magának az elméleti diskurzusnak a közepébe”.

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A signatura kalandjai: Kassák Lajos bécsi kollázsai, 1920-1921 Tóth Edit Kassák Lajos kollázsai, valamint konstruktivizmusának a kollázsgya korlatból való kifejlôdése, eddig nem kaptak kellô figyelmet a művészet történet kutatásban. A textualitás, szerzôi öntudat és önmitológia iránti vonzalma korai kollázsainak megkülönböztetett jelleget ad, amit meghatároz a MA-kört ujjászervezni próbáló folyóirat-szerkesztô és a vezér egyéniség szerepköre. 1920-22 között a diszintegráció fokozott érzése és a bécsi expresszionista közeg a költôt a művészi szubjektivizmus és a radikális művész fogalmának ujraértékelésére késztette. Korai kollazsai nak közeli, hermeneutikus olvasata nyomon követi Kassáknak ezen kon fliktusból fakadó szatirikus ön-heroizációját, amit a szerzôi névjegynek (aláirás, kézzel írott név és inicialé) a képi térbe való befoglalása és ugyanakkor a szerzôi “én” fokozatos, egy konstruktiv művészet irányában való feloldódasa jellemez. Kassák konstruktivizmus felé való fejlôdése tehát egy jellegzetesen nyugati, szubjektum-irányultságú és kritikusan megközelített kollázs gyakorlaton keresztül értelmezhetô, az orosz művészi iránytól eltérôen. Ez a folyamat több korai kollázst egy csoportba fog, amely a forradalmi aktivációnak, ön-iróniának és vegül a konstruktivista utopiának a folytonosan változó szinterévé válik.

Az ajándék Lenka Bydžovská A tanulmány a műalkotás vagy irodalmi alkotás ajándékként való kezelésével foglalkozik. A szerzô elôször Jindrich Styrsky 1937-ben készült Az ajándék című szürrealista festményét tárgyalja. A kép egy elképzelt tárgyat, egy emberi vonásokkal rendelkezô elszenesedett könyvet ábrázol, amelyet Styrsky Sade márki portréjaként ír le. Álmában ezt akarta adni a festô Toyennek, majd a valóságban a művésznônek ajándékozta a könyvet ábrázoló festményt. Ezzel személyesen csatlakozott ahhoz a hosszúéletű hagyományhoz, melynek legspirituálisabb példái közé tartoznak Vittoria Colonna és Michelangelo egymásnak készített művészi ajándékai, ahogy ezt Alexander Nagel tanulmányában bemutatta.

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James H. Rubin Manet Berthe Morisot-nak és más nôi barátainak szánt csendéleteinek analízisében felhívta a figyelmet az ajándék jelentésének elmozdulására a modern festészetben. Man Ray 1921-es ironikus műve, Az ajándék, a téma szélsôséges értelmezését mutatja. A szürrealizmus kifejlesztette az ajándék saját, megkülönböztetô ikonográfiáját. Az elôadás a francia antropológus, Marcel Mauss híres 1925-ös munkájával, az Essai sur le Don-nal is foglalkozik. Ez a mű hívta fel a figyelmet az ajándéknak az ôsi társadalmakban betöltött kettôs természetére: áldozat és kötelezettség. Az elôadás kitér Jacques Derrida és Mauss vitájára is.

Egymásba fonódás. Zbigniew Makowski teljesség keresése Anna Baranowa Az 1930-ban, Varsóban született Zbigniew Makowski festmények, költemények, könyvek alkotója, az egyik legnevesebb lengyel kortárs művész. Művészete, amely több technika és stílus szintézise, a szürrealizmus egyedi változata. Makowski ismerte André Bretont, és a „Mouvement Surrealiste Phases” résztvevôje volt Párizsban. Művészetének jellemzôje a képek és szavak látszólag kaotikus együttélése. Tanulmánya azt mutatja be, hogy Makowski műveiben fellelhetô belsô rend a „l’écriture automathique” módszer különleges, kreatív alkalmazása.

SZÖVEGel is a festô. Kép és szó Ujházi Péter mûvészetében Nagy T. Katalin A tanulmány azt vizsgálja, hogy Ujházi Péter sokműfajú művészetében a kép és a szó milyen viszonyban van egymással, és milyen változásokon ment keresztül a művész eddigi négy évtizedes pályafutása során. A kép és szöveg kapcsolata lehet interreferenciális, ide tartoznak a művész által megrajzolt és megírt plakátok és meghívók, valamint azok a festmények, melyeken a szignatúra mellett megjelenik a kép címe is. Egy másik csoportot alkotnak a képpé vált szövegek, amikor a művész egy-egy irodalmi művet, verset, versrészletet ír le, így változtatva a szöveget képpé, a szövegolvasás idôbeliségét felváltja a képnézés egyidejűsége. A szó-

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kép viszonyt firtató művek egy másik vonulata „talált” nyomdai termékek (újság, falinaptár), melyekben a művész a szöveget kiemeléssel, kitakarással, átfestéssel alakítja át, megváltoztatva eredeti értelmét, üzenetét. Az egymásra reflektáló, egymást kiegészítô, intermediális kapcsolatban álló szöveg és kép leggyakrabban az asszamblázsokban jelenik meg. A talált objektek, szemétbôl kiemelt hulladékok, amelyek lehetnek reprodukciók, fotók, vagy a tömegkultúra kliséi, hol magyarázó megjegyzésekkel, értelmetlen vagy csak értelmezhetetlen mondatfoszlányokkal, hol filozofikus gondolattöredékekkel, játékos szóképekkel, irodalmi idézetekkel vannak ellátva. Ujházi dobozaiban elmossa a határokat, melyek a talált és a művész által teremtett kép vagy szöveg között húzódnak. A dobozokban a személytelen találkozik a személyessel, a talált kép és szöveg a művész festett gesztusaival és írott megjegyzéseivel.

Contributors Baranowa, Anna (Librarian, art critic, Institute of Art History, Jagellonian University, Cracow) Beňová, Katarína (Lecturer, Department of Art History, Comenius University, Bratislava)

Kentaur címû film (37’, 1973-1975) Írta és rendezte: Szentjóby Tamás, fényképezte: Gulyás János, vágta: Vörös “Etikus” Éva

Benkô, Zsuzsanna (PhD student, Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)

A Kentaur című filmet 1975-ben sztenderdizálás elôtt betiltották, 16 mmes eredeti negatívja elveszett. 1983-ban Durst György, a Balázs Béla Stúdió akkori titkára a munkakópiát megtalálta és dupnegatívot készíttetett róla. Ennek alapján történt a film digitális felújítása a Magyar Filmlaboratórium Kft-nél 2009-ben.

Bydžovská, Lenka (Researcher, Head of Department of the Art of the 19th to 21st Centuries, Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague) Kókai, Károly (Lecturer, Department of European and Comparative Literature and Language Studies, University of Vienna) Kovács, Imre (Associate professor, Department of Art History, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Piliscsaba) Lénárt, Tamás (Lecturer, Department of Modern Hungarian Literature, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) Nagy T., Katalin (Associate professor, Department of Visual Arts, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger)

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Marosvölgyi, Gábor (PhD student, Budapest, Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) Petrasová, TaŤána (Researcher, Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague)

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Rényi, András (Department chair, Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák Opening Address to the Conference Text and Image in the 19-20th Century Art of Central Europe

Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály (Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) Szegedy-Maszák, Zsuzsanna (PhD student, Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) SZENTJÓBY – ST.AUBY, TAMÁS (Superintendent of IPUT – International Parallel Union of Telecommunications) Takács, Miklós (Assistant professor, Institute of Hungarian Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Debrecen) Tóth, Edit (PhD candidate, Pennsylvania State University, USA) Varga, Emôke (Associate professor, University of Szeged) Winter, Tomáš (Researcher, lecturer, Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague)

1. Imre Bukta, Sailing on Maize, 1992, installation object, wellingtons, maize, water, soldered copper-boats, 3 m², (photo: Imre Bukta)

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Emôke Varga Typologie de l’illustration

3. János Kass, Illustration of Imre Madách’s Mózes, 1966, etching, 15 × 24 cm, (Madách Imre: Mózes. Budapest: Magvető, 1966. p. 137) (photo: Imre Magony)

2. Endre Bálint, Illustration of Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man, 1972, monotype 23 × 15 cm, (Madách Imre: Az ember tagédiája. Bálint Endre rajzaival. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1972. p. 35.) (photo: Imre Magony)

4. Piroska Szántó, Illustration of Mihály Fazekas’ Mattie the Goose Boy, 2002. aquarelle, 15 × 23 cm, (Fazekas Mihály: Lúdas Matyi. Budapest: Holnap Kiadó, 1966. p. 137) (photo: Imre Magony)

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Zsuzsanna Benkô Illustrations of the Poetry of Endre Ady at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. György Leszkovszky’s Illustrations of Endre Ady’s Poem To Cry, To Cry, To Cry

6. György Leszkovszky, Study for “To listen to the humming organs/And the deep rumbling of the grave bells”, c. 1921, watercolour on paper, 495 × 400 mm. Gödöllői Municipial Museum, Gödöllő. Inv.No.: K.2007.117. (photo: Zsuzsanna Benkő)

5. Béla Kondor, Illustration of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, 1966, pen drawing, 17 × 10 cm, (Alfred Jarry: Übü király, avagy a lengyelek. Budapest: Európa Kiadó, 1966. p. 15) (photo: Imre Magony)

7. György Leszkovszky, “To wait when the clock strikes midnight/For an approaching coffin’s sight.” c. 1921, watercolour on paper, 520 × 415 mm. Gödöllői Municipial Museum, Gödöllő. Inv.No.: K.2007.121. (photo: Zsuzsanna Benkő)

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Gábor Marosvölgyi Words and Images from Na’Conxypan

8. György Leszkovszky, “To look at an unknown dead man/Shaking, hiding, peeping, secretly.” c. 1921, watercolour on paper, 495 × 400 mm. Gödöllői Municipial Museum, Gödöllő. Inv.No.: K.2007.114. (photo: Zsuzsanna Benkő)

9. György Leszkovszky György, “To listen to the humming organs/And the deep rumbling of the grave bells”, c. 1921, watercolour on paper, 495 × 400 mm. Gödöllői Municipial Museum, Gödöllő. Inv.No.: K.2007.113. (photo: Zsuzsanna Benkő)

10. Lajos Gulácsy, Cökxpón, c. 1909, oil, pen on cardboard, 29 × 19 cm. Private Collection, Budapest (photo: Zoltán Bakos)

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12. Lajos Gulácsy, Bam, the Caretaker, c. 1910, pen on paper, 14 × 20 cm. Budapest, National Széchenyi Library, Manuscript Collection, Fond 124/282. (photo: National Széchenyi Library)

11. Lajos Gulácsy, Gyxvilp, c. 1910, watercolour, pen on cardboard, 11.2 × 9.2 cm. Private Collection, Budapest (photo: First Hungarian Art & Artifact Repository Foundation) 13. Lajos Gulácsy, Doctor Huttertonn, c. 1910, pen on paper, 7.8 × 6.3 cm. Budapest, National Széchenyi Library, Manuscript Collection, Fond 124/282. (photo: National Széchenyi Library)

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15. Zbigniew Makowski, O saisons, o chateaux, 1966, ink, paper, 45.5 × 57.5 cm. Cracow Fine Arts Academy Museum Collection M 1398 (photo: MASP, Cracow)

14. Zbigniew Makowski, With Two Symmetric, Dark Forms, 1962, ink, paper, 48.5 × 61 cm. Cracow Fine Arts Academy Museum Collection M 1396 (photo: MASP, Cracow)

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Anna Baranowa Intertwining. Zbigniew Makowski’s Search for the Whole

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16. Zbigniew Makowski, Timeless and at a Happy Moment, 1991, gouache, ink, paper, 134 Ă&#x2014; 118 cm. Cracow Fine Arts Academy Museum Collection M 1395 (photo: MASP, Cracow)

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17. Zbigniew Makowski, November Night, 1996-2003, gouache, ink, paper. Cracow Fine Arts Academy Museum Collection M 1394 (photo: MASP, Cracow)

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18. Péter Ujházi, Six Receipts, 1982, ink, watercolour on paper, 400 × 500 mm. Private Collection, Budapest (photo: Katalin T. Nagy)

Katalin T. Nagy Text and Image in the Art of Péter Ujházi

19. Péter Ujházi, Small Pictures, 1987, oil on canvas, acrylic, mixed media on canvas, 110 × 75 cm. Collection of the artist, Székesfehérvár (photo: Katalin T. Nagy) Writings on the work: ...büszke rózsa... [proud rose] ...illatos csütörtök reggel... [sweet Thursday morning ] ...sűrű éj... [dense night] csütörtök este 19871022 [Thursday night 22. 10. 1987]

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20. Péter Ujházi, Come What May, 2002, photo, sandpaper, acrylic, mixed media on cardboard, 39 × 44 cm. Collection of Gábor Hunya, Budapest (photo: Miklós Sulyok) Writings on the work: Hull az elsárgult levél [Yellowing leaves are falling down... ] Jöhet bármi KJ Színház (múlt század) Record jelenet Come what may KJ Theatre [Kádár János](last century) Record scene

21. Péter Ujházi, In Time – Balassi, 1989, acrylic on fibreboard, 75 × 85 cm. Private Collection, Székesfehérvár (photo: Katalin T. Nagy)