GK1: “Kovásznai did not exist.”

György Kovásznai, Self-Portrait, circa 1956, © Estate of Gyorgy Kovasznai, mixed technique on paper

March 2019

The Communist Party in Hungary – as elsewhere in the Eastern bloc – set out to control all aspects of its citizens’ lives in the service of its ideology. This ideology also extended to all branches of the arts, where Realism, and in particular Socialist Realism, was the only artistic style that was officially acceptable. The four main criterion of Socialist Realism were that art must be proletarian (relevant to and able to be understood by the proletariat); it must depict scenes from the everyday life of the proletariat; it must be realistic in its execution; and lastly it must be partisan (i.e. supporting the aims of the Party and the State). High school teachers and university professors alike had to be either true believers themselves, or at least willing to toe the Party line. For all its rigidity, that Party line was not straight, nor was it straightforward. It was a shape-shifting beast subject to the opaque, changeable whims of high-ranking Party members known as the Nomenklatura. It was a world in which lives were made, destroyed and re-made for reasons that were in theory ideological, but in practice were far more nebulous and subjective.  

The Stalinist 1950s - the era in which György Kovásznai entered the Arts Academy of Budapest - was an era utterly deprived of outside information. It was a void that is almost impossible to imagine today. It was not only difficult to know what was happening beyond Hungary’s western border, but also what had happened in the art world in Hungary prior to the war because Modern art was taboo. Students were not given access to art periodicals and catalogues from the west, exhibitions were strictly controlled and travel outside the bloc was forbidden.

Into this artistically conservative and paranoid environment came the supremely talented György Kovásznai. The year was 1952. The teachers at the prestigious visual arts high school he’d attended had told the professors of the Fine Arts Academy that he painted like Gauguin and drew like Dürer. Take for example his “Socialist Industrial Landscape” from circa 1950 (see below), painted in his teens, roughly two years before he was to enter the Academy. It is utterly committed in its Socialist Realist subject matter but painted in ecstatic, Expressionist colours, and yet there is no awkwardness in reconciling these two opposing movements, for even from the youngest age Kovásznai was intellectually and artistically nimble. His classmate from high school, József Bartl (who went on to have a distinguished career) put it this way:

“Kovásznai was soon to stand out with his personality, perception of colour and knowledge. He introduced us to the art of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso… Kovásznai was drawing with a certain slackness and ease; we were all marveling at his unique vision of colour.”

Kovásznai was not only gifted, but he had a boundless capacity for work and a passion for art so great that it would never be contained by a single, rigidly defined genre.

In the early days at the Academy Kovásznai did not yet clash with his teachers. His memories of that time were fond:

“We were happy and joyful because we had gained admission to the Academy of Fine Arts. We recognised the chance and appreciated the fact that practically from the ages of 14 to 24 we were trained to draw the most ruthless naturalist studies for four or five hours a day. As for our models, heating tools and cafeteria services, they were all financed by the State.”

However in 1954, after two short years, Kovásznai left the cloistered walls of the Academy in search of real life experiences. He went to work in the mines.

György Kovásznai, Socialist Industrial Landscape, 1950, © Estate of Gyorgy Kovasznai, oil on canvas

There seemed to be many reasons for his radical action, perhaps chief among them a desire for radicalism. There was also his commitment to Marxism and a desire to be at one with the mythical proletariat that was nowhere to be found in the capital’s Art Academy. There was also his desire to avoid conscription. Two years later, in 1956, he was back in painting class at the Academy. He had returned from the mines somewhat disillusioned. He’d found the miners:

“…intellectually primitive, almost totally lacking an outlook on the world, wavering and unpredictable…

Public morale here always equals wages.”

His Miner Series (which he included in his 1965 film “The Joy of Light”) was not viewed favourably in spite of its subject matter. The images were too filled with the suffering of the miners and they lacked the kind of Stakhanovite heroism that the Party propagandists insisted upon.

György Kovásznai, In the Mine, 1965 (after a sketch from 1955), © Estate of Gyorgy Kovasznai, oil on canvas

In “Self-Portrait” from 1956 (see above), the year he returned from the mines, Kovásznai was 22 and somewhat disillusioned not just with the proletariat, but also his teachers at the Academy. See how he so skillfully and confidently combines the looseness of line with the intense darkness of the gaze, the softness of colour with the intensely gripping fingers, fingers that curl over the top of the constraining box in which he depicts himself. Kovásznai was increasingly at odds with his teachers and felt stifled intellectually and artistically in the Academy. After returning from the mines he lasted another two years before he was kicked out of the Academy for good, and without a degree. He was altogether too argumentative, too critical, too impossibly individual. He no longer had any faith in his teachers nor in their ability to teach him anything he hadn’t already taught himself.

In the mines Kovásznai had written copiously. His prospects of earning a living from his painting were non-existent so increasingly he turned to writing. He found work as the arts editor of a literary periodical called “Nagyvilág” (Wide World). He stayed there for 16 years and this relative stability eventually allowed him to continue his painting and develop relationships outside of the Academy. The artists he met belonged to the unofficial art world of Budapest, a place that inhabited the dangerous grey zone of semi-legal, barely tolerated art. It was centred around the private apartments of several different artists in Budapest, where artists of different generations and genres would gather to show their work, have readings and performances, criticise the regime and share whatever information they could get their hands on from abroad. It was an invented space in which their art could not be proscribed by the State.

Many important new relationships opened up for Kovásznai in this period, among them was Dezső Korniss, with whom he would go on to make many groundbreaking animated films which will be the subject of my next blog. But for now let’s talk about László Végh, or rather Dr. László Végh as he was known. He was a radiologist and a contemporary music composer, and for a decade, roughly between 1958 and 1968 he organised underground soirées and happenings in his Budapest apartment. It is due to Dr. Végh’s meticulous recording of these gatherings that many readings of Kovásznai’s unpublished writing – among them plays and scathing critiques of the official art scene - exist today. But Dr. Végh was not simply motivated by fraternal affection for Kovásznai, he was sending detailed reports on all of his activities to the secret service. Here’s a choice morsel from March 21, 1959:

“The enclosed tape, which contains the first act of his play as well, convincingly shows that G.Gy.K. is a dangerous literary hooligan, who subjects politics to literature, as well as writing and behaving in a destructive manner.”

György Kovásznai, Portrait of Dr. László Végh, 1959, © Estate of Gyorgy Kovasznai, mixed media on paper

 A very different Dr. Végh however wrote the following in 1990, presumably for posterity:

“We were aware of the secret agents and we deactivated them in a direct fashion. There was, for instance, an event in which a large bulletin board was posted with the following text: ‘Don’t report us, we’ve already reported ourselves!’ And what in fact did the authorities do meanwhile? They harassed us, beat us, kicked us out, spied on us, banned us, kept us in fear.”

Here is another disturbing and confusing quote from Végh from a 2007 interview:

“We drank Earl Grey tea and we were full of happiness. This tea was a rarity in those days, it was one of the prohibited smuggled goods from the West.”

Let’s try to look beyond the smoke and mirrors for a moment and imagine what these gatherings must have looked like. The assembled artists were all in one way or another at odds with the oppressive dictatorship. Their work was censored, marginalised and discredited. The only way in which they could exchange ideas and share their work was at these gatherings. Inner migration was a coping mechanism for them all, but it was a lonely experience and they needed a community in which they could trust. Which brings us to the single greatest problem with these gatherings. How could there be trust when they all knew that somewhere, somehow the secret service had wire-tapped these apartments and that there were informers among them? It seems that their very human need for community often overcame their fear of reprisals because in spite of the tension and paranoia that must have existed when they came together, these kinds of semi-private, semi-legal gatherings continued throughout the Communist era.  

So why did Dr. Végh inform on Kovásznai? There was always a reason why ordinary citizens became informers for the secret police and it was usually either because they were being coerced, or else from true conviction in the cause. In Dr. Végh’s case perhaps it was a little of both? It turns out that in the early 1950s Végh had been part of a failed religious uprising against the Communists. As he didn’t want to be stripped of his medical degree, or go to prison, he became an informer. However what was perhaps more difficult to understand was that Végh seemed to go above and beyond what was required of him. His reports were almost manically detailed and continued on for a decade. According to the director of the Archives of the Hungarian State Security Végh’s reports were the longest and most thoroughly written of all the informers from that era.*    

Végh was certainly not alone in his betrayals. I’ve just finished reading András Forgách’s heartbreaking memoir about his mother, “No Live Files Remain” (Scribner, 2018), in which he tells how his much beloved mother informed on her own family and friends for years. In 2002, Péter Esterházy published “Revised Edition”, a coda to “Celestial Harmonies” - the fictionalised account of his family’s history - where he revealed that his father had been an informant for the secret police. And most recently in Pawel Pawlikowski’s breathtaking film “Cold War” (2018), when the radiant Zula tells her lover that she’s been informing on him he is naturally enough outraged, but she is impassive and unrepentant as she tells him that her hand has been forced. In Hungary so much secrecy still surrounds the incomplete disclosures of the former State Security archives, so much is still unknown, including to what extent the network has actually been dismantled. One thing is certain, the consequences for Kovásznai’s life and career were immense and irreversible.

Kovásznai, the consummate painter who could paint in any genre (more on that next time), could never make a living from his paintings, let alone exhibit them. His editing work at the literary journal gave him a subsistence and a degree of standing in a society bent on shutting him out, but it was un-stimulating work for a man of his intellectual brilliance. His art was neither supported nor tolerated, nor was it prohibited. This was yet another way in which the Party line proved to be murky and unstable. Kovásznai was able to earn a living and rent an apartment. He was able to make his films and paintings, some were even monumental in scale, but in his lifetime his work was barely, rarely seen. The fact that his paintings have even survived is a miracle. What has happened with Kovásznai’s work in the last decade cannot be called a revival, it is a posthumous debut. As Dr. Végh put it so chillingly, “Kovásznai was not forbidden. Kovásznai did not exist.”

How was Kovásznai able to continue to work in such a hostile environment? How was this even possible? Because he was too talented to ignore. Influential people recognised his talent (from the time he was a high school student) and supported him. These included Katalin Imre the literary historian, Dr. György Matolcsy director of the Pannonia Film Studio where he made his films and János Komlós editor of Népszabadság the largest circulation newspaper at the time. The cruel irony of the silence in which he was forced to live and work was that it gave him time to become himself. Kovásznai was a multi-disciplinary artist decades before such a thing became common practice. He was a multi-disciplinary artist in a society with highly rigid genre boundaries. In the next Poetic Boost (June 2019) I’ll be writing about Kovásznai’s astonishing animated films, where the consummate painter and writer in him came together in unforgettable ways. ◊

*As told to Dr. Brigitta Iványi-Bitter, Kovásznai monographist & researcher, author of “Kovásznai” (Vince Books, Budapest 2010).

All quotes are taken from the monograph which was translated by Andrea Ágnes Szekeres.