"The Ecstatic Barriers of Silence." Lili Ország Part II
The Labyrinth of Reims Cathedral, 13th century, photo from Loyola University Chicago
December/January 2020-2021
In part one of this essay about Lili Ország, I ended in the borderland of two eras of her artistic explorations: between her period of Icons (1957-1960), and her subsequent era of Townscapes (1960-1965). For Lili Ország, moving from one artistic era to another was not only an intellectual quest for a restless mind, it was a spiritual search for enlightenment and transcendence. Ország felt strongly that the answers she was looking for were in the past, and not just the recent past of her own family, but deep in antiquity. Why was that? Why was the past so alluring for Ország? And what did her present look like in the early 1960s? She was still married at that stage, still living in Budapest, still working at the State Puppet Theatre as a set and costume designer, her lifelong day job. The tacit artistic symbiosis she shared with the poet János Pilinszky continued to be an important source of inspiration and strength for her. She still suffered from bouts of debilitating anxiety and depression, through which she sometimes managed to work, and at other times shut herself off completely from the world. Seen in this light, the escapist appeal of antiquity begins to make sense. A trip to Prague in the spring of 1960, and in particular her discovery of the old Jewish Cemetery, galvanized her and provided the foundation for her era of Townscapes. The ancient towns and cities which she rendered into paint would act as a portal to the deep past where Lili would continue her artistic explorations until the end of her life.
Townscapes (1960-1965)
Record
what your city, the everlasting city
has watched,
with its towers, its roofs,
its living and dead citizens,
to this very hour.
From “Exhortation”, by János Pilinszky 1
Old Jewish Cemetary Prague, photo from ScienceWanders
The oldest tombstones of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague date back to 1439. Space was always limited as the cemetery was/is situated in the Old Town of Prague, in what was for centuries a walled Jewish ghetto. As Jewish law forbids the removal of any graves, the decision was made to bury the dead in successive layers. As a result, in some places as many as twelve layers of gravestones exist. New burial layers were added by heaping soil on top of the older gravestones, and placing the newer stones higher up. Whilst the coffins always remained in place, sometimes the older gravestones were elevated, so that many of the visible gravestones actually commemorate someone buried centuries ago, many layers down. Today the cemetery rises above the surrounding city streets, and over time retaining walls have had to be built to keep the soil and graves in place. 2 The result is an extraordinarily dense forest of gravestones, varying in height and jutting out at astonishing angles. For Ország the cemetery was a revelation, a physical manifestation of the four dimensions: width, depth, height and time. It led her back to her Jewish roots and was a means of connecting with her heritage that was not marked by the trauma of her wartime experiences.
Lili Ország, Walls of Jerusalem, 1962, ©Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, photo from Kieselbach Gallery, Budapest
Ország described her Townscapes in the following way: “Complete reduction led me to the threshold of the greatest realm: that of history and myth.” 3 The complete reduction of which Ország spoke was the flattened bird’s eye perspective over her ancient stone towns: buildings, city walls and gates, streets, alleyways, columns, arches, glyphs, even tombstones and rubble. The myth is what Ország herself injected into these paintings, as all of her towns were fictitious. These mythical places represented both a rejection of modernity and an idealisation of the ancient past, of different forms of existence and thinking. It was an idealisation that had already begun in her period of Icons, with her reverence for the mastery and devotion of the medieval icon painters. https://www.nicolewaldner.com/poetic-boost/2020/9/21/this-world-is-not-my-world-lili-orszg-part-1
Lili Ország, City with Arcades, 1964, ©Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, photo from artnet.com
Through strict compositions of architectural verisimilitude, a reduced palette and an astonishing manipulation of surface paint, Ország was able to conjure the atmosphere of antiquity. The successive layers of paint Ország applied were regularly scraped off, scratched, engraved and thereby sculpted to resemble ancient stones. In this way her paintings acquired a tangible second dimension which is sadly lost to us in these pixelated reproductions. By using earthy tones – black, grey, ochre, clay, brown - on primed white backgrounds, she was able to create dramatic shadows which emphasised the architectural details. What also emerged for the first time in these paintings was Ország’s use of recurring motifs, which she would sometimes reproduce with obsessive markings, or by stamping objects directly onto the surface. Cardboard cut-outs, pieces of rubber, even potatoes were recruited.
Lili Ország, Red City, 1965, ©Lili Orszag, oil on wood, photo from Artkartell.hu
With this metaphorical archaeology, this digging below the surfaces, Lili was excavating the hidden recesses of her own psyche. She was also putting space - metaphoric and historical space - between herself and her emotional turbulence. In her own words: “My message was somehow more literary than pictorial, so it was worrying, although I only realised it in retrospect, that I would drift away into the fields of literature and psychology.” 4 Ország’s ever-restless imagination meant that she never lingered for long in a single era. Her intellectual and spiritual yearnings were constantly pulling her in new directions. In her subsequent era of Inscribed Paintings, she would pull off a brilliant painterly feat. She would make stone dance.
Inscribed Paintings (1966-1969)
Which of us shall dare reach into
the flames of the hidden? Who shall dare grope
among the dense leaves of the sealed book?
And how shall he dare, with his bare hand?
From “Introitus”, by János Pilinszky 5
Lili Ország, The Beginning of Writing (The Birth of Writing) I, 1966, ©Lili Orszag, oil, enamel, fibreboard, photo from Kieselbach Gallery, Budapest
In 1950, the year Lili graduated with distinction from the Academy of Fine Arts, she married György Majláth, a child psychologist. It was also the year she began working at the State Puppet Theatre. The Puppet Theatre was a kind of liberal haven, where many fellow artists found intellectual and artistic refuge from the brutal, post-war Stalinist dictatorship. What began as a loving union between Lili and György eventually gave way to unhappiness. Marianna Kolozsváry, who curated the Ország retrospective in Budapest in 2016, wrote that Lili’s anxieties and fears gradually eroded the couple’s harmony: “She made a habit of calling her husband at his work places, at the ministry and the paediatric clinic, or waiting for him at the gate for hours, not knowing when he would finish work.” 6 György’s friends laughed about his jealous wife, but it was not jealousy that drove Lili to such extremes, but rather anxiety. She lived in constant fear for him. The slightest cold would send her into agonies of anxiety. At one point in their marriage her husband did become quite ill and required hospitalisation for ileus. Lili believed that it was her prayers and her endless visits that had cured her husband. Majláth, on the other hand, believed that he had subconsciously conjured the disease in order to escape from Lili’s hyper-possessiveness. 7
By 1964 her husband had had enough and wished to separate, but he feared that his wife would not cope with a divorce. However, Majláth’s boss - a very savvy woman by the name of Lucy Liebermann - told him that the exact opposite would happen. Not only would Lili cope, her art would thrive, and her career would soar. 8 And so it was. The possessive devotion she had thrust on her long-suffering husband she would now lavish exclusively on her art. She would work with single-minded obsession, when not felled by her recurrent depression. She would never again be distracted by earthly love. She would become the monk she was always destined to be.
With each successive era of Ország’s career something always remained. In particular the stone walls of her Townscape paintings, which would serve as the backdrop to her Inscribed paintings, and would later become the building blocks of her Labyrinth paintings. The Hebrew letters with which she began this series had already begun to appear in the early 1960s. It was a language that Lili had learned to read as a child before the war.
Lili Ország, Lament, 1967, ©Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, photo from Kieselbach Gallery, Budapest
Letters, fragmented letters, shards of letters. Vertically dancing letters, dynamic, moving forms, animated by a spirit in search of God. Letters as prayers, from Lili’s paintbrush to God’s ear. A sacred, abstract alphabet, at once a supplication, and a very modern construct. Other ancient alphabets were also called upon. Persian, Phoenician, Coptic, Greek, Cyrillic and Latin, but none of these letters ever coalesced into words. They were never intended to communicate in the traditional sense of language. They weren’t messages scrawled on a wall; they were inscribed signposts to guide us back in time. For what purpose? To remember. Both the traumas of history and the wisdom of lost civilisations. To be carried into the deep past, to a time when we all lived closer to Ein Sof, the endless, infinite God. 9 It is art made for contemplation not for celebration. Art the colour of the cycles of life: the greys of ash, dust and mortality; the black of the universe, mystery, chaos and death; and the white of resurrection, peace, purity and transcendence.
Lili Ország, Calligraphy I-III, 1970, ©Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest
For almost her entire adult life, Lili lived and worked in a 30sqm flat. As such, she learned to do much in a small space. She would lie her canvases on the floor so that the materials would not run. In this way she could also control the densely complex surface build-up that carried over from her era of Townscapes. She only sometimes painted her letters with a brush, mostly she shaped them by scratching and clawing into the built-up surface with the end of her brush, or a cloth, or with her hand.
Who shall dare grope among the dense leaves of the sealed book?
And how shall he dare, with his bare hand? 10
Labyrinths (1969-1978)
Labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral, 12th century, photo from the Smithsonian Magazine
The era of Labyrinth paintings would be Lili Ország’s last. The title of this post, “The Ecstatic Barriers of Silence”, is taken from the Pilinszky poem, “By the Time You Come”. 11 The ecstatic silence which Ország longed for was both an end to her inner turmoil, and the peace of spiritual transcendence. The labyrinth would be the ultimate, and final manifestation of her search. The cover image of this essay is of the great labyrinth of Reims, which graced the nave of the cathedral from 1286 until 1779, when the Canons had it removed as they did not like the noisy disturbance of the children playing in it during prayers. 12 The extraordinary image above is from the labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral, which dates from the early 12th century and still exists today. It remains a symbol of the long and difficult path to salvation. 13 Ország understood this path, as did Pilinszky. The labyrinth, so rich in archetypal symbolism, both secular and religious, universal and psychological, was a deep well of inspiration for both Lili and János. Once again the artistic symbiosis that existed between the painter and the poet manifested in striking ways, most profoundly in their understanding that faith means work, and work is faith. In Lili’s own words: “…I feel that my life, everyone’s life, resembles the passages of a labyrinth that we must walk down on, always coming up against walls, gates, having to change direction, losing our way, and continuing on towards deep-lying secrets.” 14
On YouTube I found an hour-long interview with Pilinszky from 1978 called “Loyalty to the Labyrinth” (“Hűseg a Labirintushoz”, unfortunately not subtitled). The first link below is of an original recording of Pilinszky reading his poem “Straight Labyrinth”. It’s short and in Hungarian, but non-native speakers please listen anyway so that you can hear the shrill glass delicacy of the master himself. The second link is a stunning, contemporary clip of “Straight Labyrinth”, set to a gorgeous track by Yonderboi. Below is the beautiful Ted Hughes/János Csokits translation in its entirety:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozk4cn7e5fo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePftphGyat4
“Straight Labyrinth”
by János Pilinszky
How will it be, that flying back
of which only symbols tell-
altar, shrine, handshake,
homecoming, embrace,
table laid in the grass, under the trees,
where there is no first and no last guest-
how will it be, in the end how will it be
the wide-winged ascending plunge
back into the flaming
common nest of the focus?-I don’t know,
and yet, if I know anything,
I know this-this hot corridor,
this labyrinth straight as an arrow
and fuller and fuller, freer and freer
the fact that we are flying. 15
Lili Ország, Labyrinth Icarus, 1974-75, ©Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, photo by John Coulthart
In 1966 Ország visited Israel. Of Jerusalem she said, “I walked in this city before; I walked here two thousand years ago.” 16 Two years later a trip to Rome for a solo exhibition revitalized her spirits. Her travels in Italy would continue to inspire further experimentation in her work. Upon visiting Pompeii, she wrote: “…if my paintings ever grow colourful, it is because of this place.” 17 With her Labyrinth paintings, the walls to which Ország was so attached remained, as did the complex surface build-up of paint. There was also the re-introduction of greater colour and figuration. The repetition of motifs and stamping were still there, only now the novel use of circuit boards appeared in her work, a refreshingly post-modern touch amidst all the antiquity. There was also a greater sense of openness with Ország’s labyrinth paintings which arguably had not been seen since her period of Icons in the late 1950s. The compositions still remained dense and highly structured, only now they gave way to the inherent possibilities of the labyrinth. The fiery supplication of her sacred, vertical alphabet acceded to a quieter meditation. Gates, doorways, and arches welcomed. Mirrors, ovals and circles, invited pause and reflection. Parisian blue conjured the sky and the sea, whilst white spaces suggested purification and re-birth. The stone figures that appeared were sometimes fully rendered, and sometimes just suggestions of solidity. These angels and sphinxes were guardians and messengers, spirit beings, both of the labyrinth and aloof from it.
Lili Ország, Labyrinth IX. With a Figure in the Gesture of Orant, 1974, ©Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, photo from The Balaton Sun
In September 1978, the State finally granted Lili her request for a larger apartment/studio. She considered it a palace after the tiny apartment she’d lived in for almost three decades. Six months later she was admitted to hospital to remove tumours from her stomach. The surgery was a success, but on October 1st of that year she died of complications from pneumonia. It would be János Pilinszky who spoke at her funeral:
“Help us to live, if in no other way than through the gentle guidance of your hand from beyond the grave, that only you know and is only due to the dead: let us enter and pass through the labyrinth that you had passed through, and let us be like you one day. Amen.” 18
Lili Ország, Labyrinth. Ariadne’s Thread I, 1975, ©Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, photo by Peter Makrai for the Hungarian National Gallery
The deep-lying secrets that Lili sought throughout her life were finally revealed.
Enfolded into the eternal, ecstatic barriers of silence, Lili was now at peace.
She had passed through the hot corridors of the labyrinth. She had known it, borne witness to it, lived it. She had rendered it into paint.
The walls which had at once protected her and shut her in were gone.
Now all that remained was the fact of flying. ◊
The unforgettable, utterly unique Lili Ország, photo from artmagazin.hu
In 2021 my writing will be appearing in:
Lilith.org - where I’ll be writing about the painter Ilka Gedo on the occasion of her centenary.
Agenda Poetry - where I’ll be writing about the great poet Janos Pilinszky on the occasion of his centenary.
These stories will be uploaded to my website under published writing. Thank you as always for reading.
For some bite-size chunks of Poetic Boost, check me out on Instagram: @nwaldnerauthor
Stay safe wherever you are.
1. “The Desert of Love”, selected poems of János Pilinszky, translated by Ted Hughes & János Csokits, Anvil Press Poetry, London, 1989, from the poem “Exhortation”, p57
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Jewish_Cemetery,_Prague
3. From “Shadow on Stone: The Art of Lili Ország”, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 16 December 2016 – 26 March 2017. Curated by Marianna Kolozsváry. Catalogue translation by Steve Kane. What a superb catalogue! From the catalogue essay by Róna Kopeczky, p80
4. Ibid.
5. János Pilinszky, “Introitus”, from “The Desert of Love”, p49
Introitus: An introitus is any type of entrance or opening to a hollow organ or canal. The term often refers to the opening of the vagina, which leads to the vaginal canal. In music, it refers to a piece of music played before a mass; a musical introduction of any sort. From the Latin, “I go within, I enter”.
6. “Shadow On Stone: The Art of Lili Ország”, from the catalogue essay by Marianna Kolozsváry, p16
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ein Sof is the Kabbalistic name given to God from the Sefer Hayetzirah, the earliest Kabbalistic text which Lili studied
10. János Pilinszky, “Introitus”, from “The Desert of Love”, p49
11. János Pilinszky, “By the Time You Come”, from “The Desert of Love”, p27
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_of_the_Reims_Cathedral
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartres_Cathedral
14. “Shadow On Stone: The Art of Lili Ország”, from the catalogue essay by Katalin S. Nagy, p127
15. János Pilinszky, “Straight Labyrinth”, from “The Desert of Love”, p62
16. “Shadow On Stone: The Art of Lili Ország”, from the catalogue essay by Katalin S. Nagy, p96
17. From the catalogue bibliography, p350. Whilst Lili’s Labyrinth paintings never quite burst with colour the way her Icon paintings did, her use of Parisian blue was striking.
18. “Shadow On Stone: The Art of Lili Ország”, from the catalogue essay by Marianna Kolozsváry, p30