"This World Is Not My World." Lili Ország Part 1
Lili Ország, circa 1960, photo from Kieselbach Gallery, Budapest
September 2020
Prelude: János Pilinszky (b. Budapest 1921 - d. Budapest 1981)
János Pilinszky was one of Hungary’s greatest modern poets, one of the few able to render into language, into poetic language, the tragedy of war, and the horror of the death camps. He had what Ted Hughes called “spiritual distinction” 1, and it is thanks to Ted Hughes and János Csokits sublime translation that I am able to share a little of Pilinszky’s poetry with you in English. Simply put, the reason I wish to do so here is because Lili Ország and János Pilinszky were lifelong friends. The title of this post is taken from Pilinszky’s poem, “World Grown Cold” 2. The opening line of the poem, “This world is not my world”, echoes a sentiment expressed by Ország herself, and mirrored in her art that was throughout so deeply inspired by antiquity. What Pilinszky and Ország shared artistically is more complex, but perhaps it has to do with authority. What gives anyone the authority to write about the death camps? Especially a devout Catholic who has never himself been through that particular hell? Hughes believed that Pilinszky achieved this because there was no distinction between his personality, the life he led, and his poetry:
“The insistence of Pilinszky’s on paying for his words with his whole way of life attested the authority of his poems.” 3
Both the poet, and the painter, János and Lili, lived quiet lives of silent devotion. Devotion to the written word, devotion to the painted image. Childless. Often, but not always alone. Ignored by the dominant culture of their day, but not entirely. Both in their own ways deeply committed to the spirit realm.
I also have a more prosaic reason for wishing to use Pilinszky’s poetry to illuminate the story of Lili Ország’s art. Do you remember the film “Il Postino”? From all the way back in 1994. It is set on the island of Procida in the gulf of Naples in 1950. In the movie, an exiled Pablo Neruda and a hapless young postman named Mario strike up a friendship. Neruda never actually went to Procida, or befriended a postman (as far as I know), but given his lifelong commitment to “the people”, perhaps such a friendship might have existed. As there isn’t much to do on Procida, and Neruda is Mario’s only customer (there’s not a lot of letter writing on the island either), the two men get to talking about poetry, metaphors and damn good seduction lines. When Mario is confronted by Neruda for using his poems to woo his beloved and passing them off as his own, the flustered postman says:
“La poesia non è di chi la scrive, è di chi gli serve.” 4
“Poetry does not belong to the one who writes it, but to the one who needs it.”
In my case, I need Pilinszky to help me write about Lili Ország’s art because he understood her work so well. Because although one communicated using poetry, and the other using paint, fundamental affinities existed. Like the medieval icon painters that Ország so admired, they both strived for faith and an unswerving dedication to their craft. Please allow Pilinszky’s words to act as a beacon, quietly illuminating the successive periods of Lili Ország’s art with his numinous, unsparing language.
János Pilinszky, circa 1955?, photo from divany.hu
Surrealism (1952-1957)
As I was at the start
so, all along I have remained.
The way I began, so I will go on to the end.
From “As I Was”, Pilinszky 5
On October 23rd, 1956 Lili Ország went to the Hungária Café in Budapest to meet her friend, the writer Ákos Tordon. In his words Lili’s pale skin was “…gleaming in greenish flashes, and her dark glance vibrant with yellow flames.” 6 Trembling with emotion she spoke to her friend of a terrible premonition she was having. A hell of tanks and canons, of dead bodies, blood and flames; and significantly, of walls crashing down. (More on those walls later, much more.) Later that day, as Lili Ország completed the final version of her painting Hanged Woman (Pink Dress), the first gunshots were fired on the streets of Budapest. It was the beginning of the anti-Soviet uprising, the first popular insurrection against the Communist dictatorships in the Eastern bloc. The uprising raged until November 4th, by which time over 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops had been killed. 200,000 people fled west over the border. It was not Lili Ország’s only premonition. Since childhood she had been drawn to the mysterious, to the occult, to the unseen, omnipresent past. It would give her the ability to reach backwards in time and connect with bygone eras and disappeared places, and to render their spirit in paint.
Lili Ország, Hanged Woman (Pink Dress), 1956, © Lili Orszag, oil on canvas, Kolozsváry Collection, Győr
Lili Ország was born Lívia Oestereicher in 1926 in the provincial city of Ungvár 7. Her family was prosperous and Jewish. Her father was a vintner and 15 years her mother’s senior. They were unhappily married and would later divorce. Her uncle, Aladár Oestereicher, was a spiritual healer who dabbled in Kabbala and the occult, sparking an early interest in mysticism that would stay with Lili throughout her life. By the age of 12 she had already decided to be a painter, and despite her parents’ lack of emotional or material support she began taking drawing classes which she paid for herself by doing odd jobs. Her drawing teacher, Miklós Rosenberg (later Róbert), became one of many lifelong (male) friendships that Lili would have. From the age of 15 her education, and indeed her entire life, was disrupted and threatened by the Holocaust. In 1944, in her 18th year, she was forced into the ghetto of Ungvár, and then onto the train bound for Auschwitz. However, at the very last minute she and her family were allowed off the train due to her father’s impeccable WW1 service record. What rare luck, what extraordinary good fortune! After that the family obtained false papers, converted to Christianity, and for a time Lili Ország became Éva, a Roman Catholic refugee from Transylvania. She survived the rest of the war in Budapest. In early 1945, her parents separated and despite her mother’s objections Lili’s father returned to their hometown of Ungvár, which was already in Soviet hands. From 1948 nothing more was ever heard of him. The family stayed on in Budapest. Lili went to art school.
In 1950 Lili Ország married child psychologist Dr György Majláth. Perhaps it was with his encouragement that she first began to paint her anxiety out, as many of the paintings from her early period of Surrealism, which lasted roughly from 1952-1957, depict the horror of her wartime experiences, which although extraordinarily fortunate, nevertheless marked her for life.
Lili Ország, Self-portrait in Front of the Wall (Girl in Front of the Wall), 1955, © Lili Orszag, oil on canvas, Vasilescu Collection, Győr
Lili Ország, In Front of a Factory, 1955, © Lili Orszag, oil on canvas, photo Kieselbach Gallery, Budapest (sorry about the watermark readers!)
Two paintings from 1955, Self-portrait (Girl in front of a Wall), and In Front of a Factory, both unambiguously reach back in time to the Moskovitz brick factory in Ungvár where Lili was imprisoned with her family in 1944. They also mark the beginning of her depiction of walls which would come to dominate so much of her work. In Woman with Veil (Woman in front of a Wall), from 1956, the red brick walls again strongly allude to the ghetto walls in Ungvár. They are also the stifling walls of the Communist dictatorship imposed on Hungary after the war. The figure of the woman turned away from us is veiled and mysterious, her long ascetic robe is both monastic and from another era. Yet the pointed index finger and its shadow opposite on the wall have the deliberate look of mass printed signage, adding to the disquieting sense that what we are looking at is really a mannequin not a woman. The seagulls above and the turquoise skies suggest unattainable, open horizons that have been foreshortened by the lumpy red brick wall. The shadow the figure casts is tentative and spectral, less severe than a de Chirico shadow (whom Lili revered), and far less emphatic than the shadow cast by the figure in Woman in Black from the same year.
Lili Ország, Woman with Veil (Woman in front of a Wall), 1956, © Lili Orszag, oil on canvas, King St Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvár
Lili Ország, Woman in Black, 1956, © Lili Orszag, oil on canvas, Kolozsváry Collection, Győr
Anxiety, also from 1956, paints a portrait of deeply unhappy introspection. The veiled, nun-woman seems trapped, turned in on herself, cloistered with a greedy rat at her feet. Once again there is a shrouded face, nun-like garb and a brick wall, only here the wall is unrelenting, stretching the length of the canvas and suggesting confinement as opposed to the labyrinth-like walls in Woman with Veil and Woman in Black (but more on those labyrinths later). Her fingers are tensely knitted in prayer. Here the azure sky is just a patch seen through the cell wall. The window is open and beyond it the pylon of a sturdy bridge can be seen, suggesting that the world beyond awaits, however her shuttered eyes imply that she either can’t, or won’t, be a part of it.
Lili Ország, Anxiety, 1955, © Lili Orszag, oil on canvas, Kolozsváry Collection, Győr
Memento from 1957 is more difficult to decipher. It could perhaps be seen as a farewell to her Surrealist period, as the title may suggest. The faceless dummy-women with their cratered moon heads and uniform dark dresses seem more dead than alive. Although here the brick wall is low there is nowhere to run except into the black void beyond. This creature had already appeared the year before in Saint in Black Dress (With Tobacco Leaf). Talking about that painting in a 1963 interview Ország said:
“I wanted to make a figure of a Saint proclaiming something. Ominousness, fear, severity.” 8
Lili Ország, Memento, 1957, © Lili Orszag, oil on canvas, Estate of János Pilinszky
Lili Ország, Saint in Black Dress (With Tobacco Leaf), 1956, © Lili Orszag, oil on canvas, King St. Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvár, photo by Johannes Janssen
It’s interesting that she had intended these figures to be saints when they seem to conjure something closer to horror. They may be eyeless, but they are not unseeing. They see us, they accuse us, sure as if Ország had given them eyes. It was part of her painterly brilliance that she was able to make the presence of something felt without actually representing it. This technique would be used to extraordinary affect after 1960 with her inscribed paintings. Art historian Marianna Kolozsváry, who curated the 2017 Lili Ország retrospective at the Hungarian National Gallery, wrote that between Memento (1957) and Pilinszky’s poem “Passion of Ravensbrück” (1958), there existed “the closest kinship”. 9 After I read Pilinszky’s poem and looked once more at the two Ország paintings, I understood that her saints were the martyred victims of Ravensbrück, an unspeakable hell built by the Nazis in 1938, just 50 miles north of Berlin. It was second in size to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and by 1944 there were 70,000 women imprisoned, enslaved and tortured there. Medical experiments were carried out on the women, among them, sterilisations, amputations and mutilations. Forced labour included the production of armaments and a brothel. Tens of thousands of women in Ravensbrück were ultimately shot, gassed or died slow, agonising deaths from disease and sub-human brutality. Below is Pilinszky’s poem in its entirety. It is as spectral, haunting and remorseless as Ország’s painting.
“Passion of Ravensbrück”
by János Pilinszky
He steps out from the others.
He stands in the square silence.
The prison garb, the convict’s skull
blink like a projection.
He is horribly alone.
His pores are visible.
Everything about him is so gigantic,
everything is so tiny.
And this is all.
The rest-
the rest was simply
that he forgot to cry out
before he collapsed. 10
Icons (1957-1960)
Lili Ország, “Shell (Earth Magic)”, 1959, © Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, photo from Virág Judit Gallery, Budapest
And they thrust their faces towards the height
as if they strained for a scent
of the far-off celestial troughs
From “Harbach 1944”, Pilinszky 11
By 1956, Lili Ország was done with Surrealism. It no longer held any interest for her, neither thematically nor stylistically.
“In 1956, I could paint these pictures so easily that I felt, at the time, I could make hundreds, perhaps of consistent quality… Maybe I wanted to say too much about my fears, and possibly I bored even myself.” 12
Figuration would increasingly give way to her very own version of abstraction, as Ország then turned her considerable talents to the depiction of icons. These paintings would mark the beginning of Ország’s commitment to devotional art, as well as her personal quest for spiritual transcendence.
Two trips to Bulgaria in 1956 and 1957, were followed by a trip to Moscow. Lili was captivated by the monasteries and icons she saw there. Although she found the Russian icons more masterful, it was the Bulgarian icons with their naïve simplicity that so inspired her. On one of the postcards she sent Pilinszky from Bulgaria in 1957 were just the words:
“It’s a place for you!” 13
In these medieval icons, Ország had found what she was looking for: the seamless convergence of devotion and mastery. It was what she felt was utterly lacking in Modern art. Writing to her mentor and friend Endre Bálint around this time, she told him she felt nauseated by an exhibition of Italian Modernism. She referred to the exhibited art as “products”.
“I regard Ernst and Klee as geniuses, yet something’s not quite right. Icons and medieval art emanate something that no modern picture can, no matter who painted it.” 14
This world is not my world. However, it is no coincidence that she regarded the great Lajos Vajda as an exception among Modern artists. More than 20 years before her Vajda was already painting icons. https://www.nicolewaldner.com/poetic-boost/2020/6/28/show-me-a-plague-and-ill-show-you-the-world Ország’s mentor, Endre Bálint, who had in turn been mentored by Vajda, was also captivated by icons and painted many art works on wood. Ország was fascinated by the rustic texture of paint on wood and used various media to experiment with this such as fibreboard and chopping boards.
Lili Ország, Corpus, 1959, © Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, Kolozsváry Collection, Győr
Endre Bálint, Angel, 1959, © Endre Balint, oil on wood, photo from Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts, Budapest
Some of the forms Ország used in this period were borrowed directly from icons she’d seen on her travels: saints, angels and mystical winged creatures.
Lili Ország, Golden Bird, 1959, © Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, photo by Bob Bucklew
Other forms were silhouettes that she borrowed from the sacred spaces themselves: tombs, catacombs and architectural details from the monasteries she visited. These are what art historian Szilveszter Terdik calls “stylised quotations” 15. In these compositions, the colour fields often feel open-ended, magnifying the thematic core of the icon. The relative openness of these icon compositions - free of walls, ablaze with colour - would stand in stark contrast to Ország’s successive periods, where her compositions became highly structured and densely painted in. Whether she was conjuring moons or catacombs, birds or halos, the sense of new discovery at the heart of these pieces is nothing short of inspiring. Within a single bound, Ország had left behind the known world of Surrealism, and found herself in the rarefied world of devotional art where few Modern artists ventured. To breathe in the luminosity of Lili Ország’s icons is to mourn the fact that after 1960 she would drastically reduce her palette. She was a colourist of the calibre of Paul Klee, who she considered to be a genius, and whose influence can clearly be seen in her icon compositions.
Lili Ország, Light Blue Temple Birth II, 1958, © Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, photo from Kieselbach Gallery, Budapest (there’s that watermarking again…)
Paul Klee, The Messenger of Autumn, 1922, watercolour and pencil on paper, wikiart.org
“Golden City II” (1960)
And that will be seamless peace.
Even my heart inaudible.
All around me the ecstatic
barriers of silence.
From “By the Time You Come”, Pilinszky 16
Lili Ország, circa 1960s?, photo from artmagazin.hu
Lili Ország’s spiritual explorations would take her in various artistic directions, as would her travels. In 1960 she visited Prague, and in 1966 Israel. As she walked through the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and through the streets of Jerusalem, she had a profound sense of having been to these places before.
“I went further back into the past and I felt so much more at home than anywhere else I have been.” 17
This world is not my world. It would be Lili’s fascination with ancient towns and cities, with the spaces of antiquity, that would fuel her subsequent artistic leaps. The layering of time in these places would increasingly be mirrored by the layering of the surfaces on her canvases. I’m going to end this Poetic Boost with the shimmering beauty of “Golden City II”, one of Lili’s final icons, which so perfectly captures an artist on the cusp of two eras of great artistic exploration. Stay safe, and see you in December. ◊
Lili Ország, Golden City (Large Golden City), 1960, © Lili Orszag, oil on fibreboard, Kolozsváry Collection, Győr
1. “The Desert of Love”, selected poems of János Pilinszky, translated by Ted Hughes & János Csokits, Anvil Press Poetry, London, 1989. From the introduction by Ted Hughes, p.7
2. Ibid., Pilinszky, from World Grown Cold, p.25
3. Ibid., from Ted Hughes’ introduction, p.12
4. From the 1994 film “Il Postino”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Postino:_The_Postman
5. From As I Was, Pilinszky, p.55
6. 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! Ákos Tordon’s words, from the catalogue essay by Marianna Kolozsváry, p.17
7. In 1920 Ungvár ceased to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and was part of the lands ceded to Czechoslovakia. After 1945 Ungvár again switched hands and became absorbed by the Soviet empire, and since the dissolution of that empire in 1991 it has been part of Ukraine, known today as Uzhhorod
8. From the Lili Ország catalogue, essay by Szilveszter Terdik, p.67
9. From the Lili Ország catalogue, essay by Marianna Kolozsváry, p.29
10. Passion of Ravensbrück, Pilinszky, p.33
Passion: from the Latin verb patior, passus sum; "to suffer, bear, endure", from which also comes "patience, patient"
11. From Harbach 1944, Pilinszky, p.28-29
12. From the Lili Ország catalogue, essay by András Rényi, p.45-46
13. From the Lili Ország catalogue, essay by Szilveszter Terdik, p.63
14. Ibid., p.65
15. Ibid. p.68
16. From By the Time You Come, Pilinszky, p.27
17. From the Lili Ország catalogue, essay by Róna Kopeczky, p.78
I once went to an exhibition in Sydney and saw this beautiful excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s 1942 masterpiece. It must have been in pre-iPhone times because I wrote it down by hand, as you can see, on the back of the exhibition price list. The images from that long ago day have left me, but Eliot’s words have remained. This sheet of paper has been stuck on the inside of my office cupboard for the better part of a decade. As I re-read Eliot’s pristine words, taken from the last paragraph of “Little Gidding”, Part V, I thought of Lili Ország’s ceaseless, restless artistic explorations. As always, I am in awe of the artists I write about here in Poetic Boost.