Page 9 - 匈牙利当代艺术 - HUngarian Contemporary Art

In this period his painting is still very expressionist, but together with his friend
Lajos Vajda, they started a plan to make contemporary art, but following the
ideas of Kodály and Bartók in music they wanted the source of their art to be
the folk-art. For this reason they started collecting motives in Szentendre and
its surroundings and worked those motives as metaphors into their art. Korniss
was the more rational artist who tended to be more constructivist than Vajda,
whose work was more organic but both gave a surreal - surrealistic - vision
on the reality. At the end of World War II he joined the so called “European
School” – an artistic group in Budapest, founded by among others Kassák,
who strived for better contacts with artists in Western and Central Europe,
and to the nursing of surrealist art and other modern styles in art. Among
others they organised an exhibition with lithography’s of Jean (Hans) Arp, Max
Bill, Giorgio de Chirico, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Alberto Magnelli, Henri
Matisse and Juan Miró. In the fifties Korniss was excluded from the possibility
to get good materials, and for this he started making collages and, at the
same time, he occupied himself with calligraphies and ink drawings. He made
some animation films in which his collages were adapted, and then in the
mid/late sixties he started painting again. On the one hand there were these
abstract paintings based upon folk motives found on shepherd’s clothing
and on the other hand informal paintings and non-figurative so-called Art
Concrete paintings.

The Art Concrete originated in Paris in 1930 and was characterised by Theo
van Doesburg as a strictly geometrical art, free of personal interpretation
and based on mathematics. Dezső Korniss will continue his programs till his
death in 1984 – sometimes geometrical, sometimes surrealistic. I presented
his lifeline here because his work is strongly connected to the well-known
artists and at the same time it shows the influences and tendencies, which
are still observable in Hungarian art. Without doubt Paris is returning every
now and then. Among the artist on show here Victor Vasarely, Tamás Szikora
and Tamás Konok spent many years in Paris. Vasarely is probably the best
known as representative of the so called Op-Art. Konok is one of the best
representatives of a lyrical geometrical abstraction. Szikora is called to be a
neo-constructivist with the box as main subject of his painting.

Back to Hungary, I already mentioned, both Bartl and Gy. Molnár were
influenced by Korniss, who they had met personally. In the works of József
Bartl symbols of life and death, love and faith are built into his paintings. István
Gy. Molnár has series of works based on the peasantry of his native town,
but at the same time he was strongly influenced by Klee as well. János Fajó
and István Haász both work in the tradition of geometry, with the difference
that Fajó is much more a constructivist and Haász a lyrical representative
of the Hungarian Art Concrete. The Szentendre based László Balogh is a
representative of a traditional constructivism as introduced and taught by
Jenő Barcsay.

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