Dávid Fehér
Director, Museum of Fine Arts - Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI), Budapest
Curator, 20th Century and Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Assistant Professor, Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
Dávid Fehér is the Director of Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI) and Curator of 20th Century and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. He earned his PhD in art history from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest in 2018, where he recently works as Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art History. His research focuses on the art history of Hungary and Eastern Europe after 1960, especially the reception of photorealism, pop art and conceptual art, and the theories of contemporary painting. His work on photorealism and his survey of the transformations of Pop Art in Hungary and Eastern Europe have been published in the exhibition catalogues "East of Eden. Photorealism: Versions of Reality" (Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2012) and "International Pop" (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2015), respectively, as well as in major Hungarian journals. He contributed to such publications as "Art in Hungary 1956-1980: Doublespeak and Beyond" (Thames & Hudson, London, 2018); "Promote, Tolerate, Ban: Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary" (Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2018); "Abstract Hungary" (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2019) and "Dóra Maurer" (Tate Publishing, London, 2019). His recent publications include essays on key figures of contemporary painting (Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter) and on questions of the fate of the medium ("Painting after Painting", "Timeless Figuration"). Fehér’s curatorial works include "László Lakner: Seamstresses Listen to Hitler’s Speech" (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 2011); "Imre Bak: Timely Timelessness. The Layers of an Oeuvre / 1967-2015" (Art Gallery of Paks, 2016); "László Lakner: References – Conceptual Works" (Collegium Hungaricum Vienna, 2016); "Bacon, Freud and the Painting of the School of London" (co-curated with Elena Crippa, Museum of Fine Arts - Hungarian National Gallery - in cooperation with Tate Britain -, Budapest, 2018); "Sean Scully: Passenger – A Retrospective" (Museum of Fine Arts - Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 2020; Benaki Museum, Athens, 2021; MAMbo Bologna, 2022; MSU Zagreb, 2022); "Henri Matisse: The Colour of Ideas" (co-curated with Aurélie Verdier, Museum of Fine Arts - in cooperation with Centre Pompidou -, Budapest 2022); "William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance" (NEO Contemporary Art Space, House of the Hungarian Millennium, Budapest, 2022); "László Lakner: Alter ego. Retrospective Exhibition" (MODEM, Debrecen, 2022); "Imre Bak: Situations. Works 2004-2022" (Vaszary Gallery, Balatonfüred, 2023). He was a DAAD-fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2013-2014. In 2011, and later, in 2019-2020 he received the Ernő Kállai Scholarship for art historians and art critics. He is the member of the Hungarian section of AICA.
list of publications: https://m2.mtmt.hu/gui2/?type=authors&mode=browse&sel=10050707&paging=1;1000
Curator, 20th Century and Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Assistant Professor, Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
Dávid Fehér is the Director of Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI) and Curator of 20th Century and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. He earned his PhD in art history from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest in 2018, where he recently works as Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art History. His research focuses on the art history of Hungary and Eastern Europe after 1960, especially the reception of photorealism, pop art and conceptual art, and the theories of contemporary painting. His work on photorealism and his survey of the transformations of Pop Art in Hungary and Eastern Europe have been published in the exhibition catalogues "East of Eden. Photorealism: Versions of Reality" (Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2012) and "International Pop" (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2015), respectively, as well as in major Hungarian journals. He contributed to such publications as "Art in Hungary 1956-1980: Doublespeak and Beyond" (Thames & Hudson, London, 2018); "Promote, Tolerate, Ban: Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary" (Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2018); "Abstract Hungary" (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2019) and "Dóra Maurer" (Tate Publishing, London, 2019). His recent publications include essays on key figures of contemporary painting (Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter) and on questions of the fate of the medium ("Painting after Painting", "Timeless Figuration"). Fehér’s curatorial works include "László Lakner: Seamstresses Listen to Hitler’s Speech" (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 2011); "Imre Bak: Timely Timelessness. The Layers of an Oeuvre / 1967-2015" (Art Gallery of Paks, 2016); "László Lakner: References – Conceptual Works" (Collegium Hungaricum Vienna, 2016); "Bacon, Freud and the Painting of the School of London" (co-curated with Elena Crippa, Museum of Fine Arts - Hungarian National Gallery - in cooperation with Tate Britain -, Budapest, 2018); "Sean Scully: Passenger – A Retrospective" (Museum of Fine Arts - Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 2020; Benaki Museum, Athens, 2021; MAMbo Bologna, 2022; MSU Zagreb, 2022); "Henri Matisse: The Colour of Ideas" (co-curated with Aurélie Verdier, Museum of Fine Arts - in cooperation with Centre Pompidou -, Budapest 2022); "William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance" (NEO Contemporary Art Space, House of the Hungarian Millennium, Budapest, 2022); "László Lakner: Alter ego. Retrospective Exhibition" (MODEM, Debrecen, 2022); "Imre Bak: Situations. Works 2004-2022" (Vaszary Gallery, Balatonfüred, 2023). He was a DAAD-fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2013-2014. In 2011, and later, in 2019-2020 he received the Ernő Kállai Scholarship for art historians and art critics. He is the member of the Hungarian section of AICA.
list of publications: https://m2.mtmt.hu/gui2/?type=authors&mode=browse&sel=10050707&paging=1;1000
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amikor a Medici család tagjai utazásaik és ügynökeik révén
szerezték meg az Alpokon túli országok kiváló művészeinek képmásait. Ez egy élő, nemzetközi kapcsolatrendszer, amelynek életben tartása az Uffizit övező világhír erejének köszönhető. Nincsen olyan festő vagy szobrász, aki a szívében ne éltetné a reményt, hogy portréja egyszer bekerül a világhírű önarckép-galériába. (…)
Az önarcképgyűjtemény nemzetközi jellege az alapítás óta – érthető módon – továbbra is megmaradt, sőt dominánsabb lett. Az azóta eltelt idő alatt sem lankadtak az erre irányuló nemes törekvések. Ezt tanúsítják a magyar önarcképek is, amelyeknek a bemutatására született meg ez a jelen kötet.”
Antonio Natali
az Uffizi Képtár főigazgatója
The exhibition was created in close collaboration with Imre Bak, and is the last exhibition in which the artist was personally involved. The exhibition concludes with the artist’s latest paintings, intended to be his final work, as a survey of the last almost two decades of his œuvre, tracing the changing formal systems of the works from one painting cycle to the next, the variations in geometric motifs and the stages of Imre Bak's consistent (self-)construction, on which he made the following statement to his monographer István Hajdu: „As Béla Hamvas says »build the work of your life, the work.« One keeps building his or her life, brick after brick, has a vision of what the chances or the meaning of this one-time life here can be and I think that I am very lucky that I have painting as my profession because somehow, this process is reflected in every painting. A work can very accurately show which stage of building myself I am at. So I can feel a very close connection between my existence – not my everyday life – and art. On the other hand, of course, I live in the history of art, and it is probably a problem characteristic of the end of the 20th century that art history has become a subject of reflection. I can choose from a storehouse of preliminary formulated thoughts, spiritual or intellectual contents and techniques when I try to find a solution for fixing or reflecting my life, which is constantly in the process of construction, in an object.” (Conversation between István Hajdu and Imre Bak, in Imre Bak: Mintha... Quasi... 1999–2000, exh. cat., trans. Zsolt Kozma [Budapest: Platán Gallery, Polish Institute, 2000], 12–13.)
Looking at Sean Scully’s oeuvre from the mid-sixties to the present day, the upcoming retrospective opens up a whole series of potential narratives, concurrences and contacts that may have happened in the past, as well as the foreboding of some future, perhaps unexpected recognitions of affinities and aspirations. The exhibition opens with the Passenger as its title section which, in its nomadic features, combines the utopia of the universal language of art – constantly aspired to, at least declaratively – with the life experience of the artist, himself an emigrant. His intimate statement and personal history, abstracted into the visual language and its signs, construct the exhibition as an authentic testimony to an artistic journey that retains traces of doubts, uncertainties and disappointed hopes in the world of art and its complex unwritten rules and never-published laws.
In MSU’s exhibition halls, Scully’s works, ranging from intimate drawings and pastels to early figural experiments and further to sculptural painting surfaces, are ment to become, as the artist would say, “hard won insistent surface”. The exhibition layout will introduce the audience to the oeuvre of an artist whom critics consider to be one of the most important active painters in the world. A walk through the exhibition reveals the starting points and inspirations for some of his anthological interventions in the medium of painting, to which he has restored dignity and innovation. Therefore, in front of his monumental compositions, time stops – at least for a moment.
Dávid Fehér, the author of the retrospective, suggested hosting Scully’s exhibition to the curators of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Jasna Jakšić, Ivana Kancir and Ana Škegro, in February 2020, a few days before the pandemic. The world has turned upside down several times since then, and the future has never been more uncertain. From that time of fear, anxiety and confinement, we could learn a lot about the importance of the presence of another human being, of touch, warmth and closeness. All of this is necessary to experience art as well: a direct experience of the artwork, not only visually but also corporally, by entering the surface of paintings. The stories and memories of Sean Scully – his “emotional painting” as he himself calls it – can bring us back to what is essential: contact with ourselves and with others. Just as he says that he “using the language of the universal to make something personal” the visitors can reach the universal by starting from the personal – from humanism and empathy, the backbone of Scully’s message to the world.
In addition to the “lightness” manifest in harmonies of resplendent colours, light and forms – which Matisse strove to achieve throughout his art – visitors can get an insight into the fundamental questions of his oeuvre pertaining to space and plane, interior and figures, as well as colour and line. The exhibition also throws light on Matisse’s work method of revisiting and reinventing themes through variations of motifs – including windows marking the boundary between inner and outer space, objects in his studio, portraits and female figures – arranged in sequences. The selection of works demonstrate how the colour of ideas – a phrase attributed to Matisse by Louis Aragon – took shape in the course of Matisse’s almost sixty-year-long oeuvre through continually renewing colour chords and linear rhythms.
Visitors are invited on a chronological journey through Matisse’s almost sixty-year-long oeuvre, which can be described as a series of renewals. After his early period, defined by looking for his own artistic voice and hallmarked by works such as Woman Reading [La Liseuse] from 1895 and Pont Saint-Michel (ca 1900), the artist’s spectacular painting of pure colour unfolds, which was the main aspiration of his Fauve period. These pieces are represented here by one of the masterpieces, Le Luxe I (1907), made in the period following the “Fauve scandal” of 1905, and by Algerian Woman, painted two years later. During World War I Matisse’s light-infused paintings with a vivid palette were replaced by darker-toned compositions with a geometrical character and at times balancing on the verge of abstraction. The chief motif of this period is the window, which simultaneously connects and separates the interior and the world outside, forming a passage between the layers of space. One of Matisse’s most enigmatic window depictions is Glass Door in Collioure [Portre-fenêtre à Collioure] (1914), which can be seen at our exhibition.
In 1918 Matisse settled in Nice, where he produced a succession of pictures distinguished by harmony and intimacy, with models in interiors infused with light. The dearest model of the artist’s “Nice period”, Henriette Darricarrére, appears in the painting titled Odalisque in Red Trousers [Odalisque à la culotte rouge] (1921), which is the first piece in Matisse’s series of paintings depicting odalisques, i.e. seductive women dressed in Oriental clothes. In these compositions the artist was not so much preoccupied by the orientalising subject-matter but much more in creating a decorative unity between the figures and the interiors. The 1930s mark another experimental period, during which the female nudes were reduced to forms of virtually geometrical simplicity and transformed in several phases. The marks of repainting and scraping off paint are discernible, for example, on the surface of Pink Nude Sitting [Nu rose assis] (1935–1936), displayed at our exhibition.
Between 1946 and 1948 Matisse created his “Vence interiors”, which are built on the contrasts of homogenous colour fields and emphatic contours and can be called a summary of his painting oeuvre. After this Matisse almost exclusively made gouache paper cut-outs, displayed in the closing section of our exhibition. By developing the paper cut-out technique – initially only used to make compositions with but soon applied as an autonomous medium – Matisse was able to find a solution to one of the central problems in his oeuvre, i.e. harmony between colour and line in a new context. Then he revisited the question on a monumental scale when working on the cardinal work of his last period, his total work of art realised in the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence. The second version of the designs he made for the chapel’s stained glass windows, titled Pale Blue Glass Window [Vitrail bleu pâle] (1948–1949), is one of the centrepieces of our show.
Matisse’s extremely rich sculptural oeuvre is presented in parallel with his paintings, while a separate section is devoted to his Henriette portraits and to The Back series [Nu de dos] (1909–1930), the latter being regarded as one of the universal masterpieces of twentieth-century sculpture. Besides sculptures and paintings, the exhibition showcases Matisse’s original graphic sheets as well as his artist’s book, titled Jazz (1947) – which he designed using gouache paper cut-outs and published with texts he wrote himself – to demonstrate the diversity of mediums in his oeuvre.
The exhibition catalogue contains studies by foreign and Hungarian authors as well as a selection from Matisse’s writings, a significant part of which has been published in Hungarian translation for the first time.
The comprehensive picture of Scully’s art given by the exhibition is further enhanced by the accompanying bilingual (Hungarian and English) catalogue, with written contributions from the curator of the exhibition (Dávid Fehér) and from several eminent experts on Sean Scully’s oeuvre (David Carrier, Kelly Grovier, Raphy Sarkissian, and Arthur C. Danto). The catalogue also includes a rich selection of the artist’s own writings, many of which have never been published before.
The principal works of the Collection of International Art after 1800 have been exhibited in the Hungarian National Gallery since December 2018. A special feature of the show can be found in the “transitory zone” marked in grey in the middle of the row of halls: a cabinet room functioning as a project hall for dossier exhibitions. This can also be seen as an extension of the chamber exhibition series, launched in 2009 by the Department of International Art after 1800. The new exhibition to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death will be the second chamber exhibition mounted at this venue.
Rembrandt occupies a distinctive place even among the most distinguished masters of art history. His name is used as a household name for painting, what is more, it is synonymous with art in general. In most cases, remembering his œuvre and works go far beyond being a gesture of paying tribute to the great predecessor, as do their analysis, interpretation, and paraphrasing. Revisiting Rembrandt is a form of meditation about painting, visuality and art, while also manifest in it is the struggle with the commonplaces and clichés that have been attached to the name Rembrandt.
The works displayed at the exhibition to run through 22 September contextualise and subtly reinterpret one another and can even be assembled together into a train of thought on what the self-portrait constitutes. The three artists evoke Rembrandt as the great classic of self-portraiture; they present the creation of the self-portrait and the shaping of the face as a temporal process, while exploring the question of time passing as well as how artists and art change over time and how they can preserve their self-identity. Although each using a different medium, the artists address the same issue – the great traditions of art history living on – by looking back on the past from the vantage point of the present. Besides the six contemporary works – three paintings by Lakner, two pieces by Birkás and one video installation by Forgács – visitors will also be able to see Rembrandt’s print Self-portrait in a Cap and Scarf with the Face Dark (1633) from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Similarly to the 2006 exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts titled Re:mbrandt. Contemporary Hungarian Artists Respond – where Péter Forgács’s Rembrandt Morphs debuted – it is through contemporary artistic reflections and those from the recent past that the present show seeks to “re-read” Rembrandt, who is also represented in the exhibition space by a self-portrait print. Most of the displayed works come from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Gallery.
Opening this December, the new “cabinet room” is launching with a thematic dossier exhibition centred on one of the latest acquisitions of the Museum of Fine Arts, an installation entitled Lemniscate (2007) by Žilvinas Kempinas, which is making its Hungarian debut inside the walls of our institution. A few years ago, when preparing for the acquisition, we decided to purchase this specific work of the artist because it offered exciting opportunities for establishing a dialogue between Kempinas’s interpretation of the Möbius strip and Hungarian conceptual and post-conceptual uses of the same motif. Among Hungarians, the œuvres of two artists in particular stood out: Miklós Erdély and Attila Csörgő.
In our cabinet room, we are now bringing together works by these three artists: our recently acquired installation by Kempinas is joined by pieces borrowed from other collections, public and private. Conceptual photomontages by Miklós Erdély entitled Time Travel (1975) and Time Parenthesis (ca. 1976) are accompanied by Time Möbius (1975), a text written by the same artist; Clock-Work (2015) by Attila Csörgő, meanwhile, can be regarded as a continuation of Erdély’s train of thought about time circling in on itself.
These thematically associated works take the simple shape of the Möbius strip as their starting point and reflect on the complex relationship between time and space, pondering on the nature of infinity and on the challenges of trying to make infinity visible: by warping linear space and time, a kind of time loop is created, which adds a new layer of significance to the very location of the cabinet room, placed within the exhibition of highlights at the junction between the “past” and the “present”. In addition, this dossier exhibition sets up a dialogical exchange between works by Hungarian artists and those from abroad, examining the potential for discourse between national and international phenomena.
This first Hungarian exhibition about the art of the School of London celebrates the best-known exponents of the trend and introduces visitors to the dialogues on the London art scene in the second half of the twentieth century through the art of Michael Andrews, R. B. Kitaj, Paula Rego, F. N. Souza, and Euan Uglow. The exhibition bears witness to the surviving traditions of representational painting: the works take everyday life as their subject matter, and are exemplars of a human-centric, expressive approach to painting. The focal object of the paintings is often the human figure, the modelling of the body. An understanding of the artists’ experiments with the material of paint itself, and how this resulted in the tangibly sensory and material nature of the painted surface, provides one of the keys to interpreting the works on show. Crossing geographic boundaries, the exhibition takes a look at precedents and parallels of the expressive modelling of materials and figures through works by Alberto Giacometti and Chaïm Soutine but it places the art of the chief painters of the School of London primarily in the context of the local artistic traditions, presenting some important works by the most influential British artists, including Walter Richard Sickert, David Bomberg, Stanley Spencer, and William Coldstream.
The timeless questions of materiality and sensuality in painting have lost none of their currency. While the impending death of painting was announced several times during the twentieth century, the classic approach to the genre embodied by the School of London lives on in the art of successive generations, for example in the figurative painting of Cecily Brown and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, sustaining the traditions associated with the School of London.
Similarly to the Museum of Fine Arts’ highly successful Turner and Italy in 2010, the present exhibition was also organised in cooperation with Tate Britain. The Hungarian public is treated, for the first time, to an exceptionally rich selection of the painting of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and the School of London with highlighted masterpieces representing each artist. The exhibition raises some important issues that not only relate to the recent history of painting but also concern its contemporary and future status, thus inviting a different way of thinking about the history, recent past, and present of Hungary’s (figurative) painting.
The nineteenth-century rooms encompass art from late romanticism through to symbolism. Paintings by some of the greatest exponents of the French impressionist era – Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet – can be seen alongside works by Austrian, German, Belgian, and Scandinavian artists (Franz von Lenbach, Wilhelm Leibl, Constantin Meunier, Akseli Gallen-Kallela), building up a complex and nuanced overview of the European art of the period.
The twentieth-century and contemporary sections are organised around a variety of trends and artistic problems: some of the most important movements in modern international art (kinetic Art, op art, geometric abstraction) are represented with pieces by such major artists as Günther Uecker, Victor Vasarely, Josef Albers, and Peter Halley. We have also placed particular emphasis on acquisitions made in the last few years by including works of Michelangelo Pistoletto, Erwin Wurm, Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida, Vera Molnar, and Simon Hantaï, which illustrate the main directions in which the collection is expanding and developing.
Between these two units, functioning both as a physical divider and as a spiritual link, we have located a separate cabinet, which will play host to different dossier exhibitions every six months, examining various aspects of the collection, as well as the connections between “old and new” art.
Die Werke, die gesellschaftliche Empfindlichkeit zeigen, komplexe philosophische und linguistische Fragen untersuchen, Humor, Verspieltheit oder auch Ironie enthalten, haben auch nach vierzig Jahren von ihrer Frische und Aktualität nichts verloren. Die jetzt ausgestellten, selten zu besichtigenden Werke zeigen aus einem neuen Aspekt die konzeptuelle Seite des vor allem als Maler bekannten Künstlers.
Lakner hat 1972, 1976 und 1990 Einladung zu der Biennale in Venedig bekommen, und seine Werke ausgestellt, seine Arbeiten waren präsent auf der documenta in Kassel in 1977, und in der Sydney Biennale in 1979. Er hatte Einzelausstellungen 1974 in der Neuen Galerie - Sammlung Ludwig in Aachen, 1975 in dem Neuen Berliner Kunstverein, wo auch seine konzeptuellen Werke vorgestellt wurden. Im Jahre 2004 war eine begrenzte Auswahl von seinen konzeptuellen Werken bei seiner groβen retrospektiven Ausstellung in dem Ludwig Museum in Budapest zu sehen. Jetzt geschieht immer noch eine kunsthistorische Verarbeitung seiner konzeptuellen Tätigkeit und dazu kann auch diese Ausstellung beitragen.
A kiállítás mintegy térben kiteríti Bak Imre életművének különböző rétegeit, ahhoz hasonlóan, ahogy Bak festményein érintkeznek különböző térrétegek és festői minőségek. A kiállítás azt igyekszik demonstrálni, hogy Bak Imre művészetének nemcsak tárgya az analógiákon alapuló őslátás, hanem az életmű szakaszokra bontható egésze is felfogható (belső és külső) referenciákra épülő analógiák komplex szövedékeként: sajátos gondolatmenetként az absztrakció és a (képi) reprezentáció történetéről, mibenlétéről és változó kontextusairól, mely a jelentés születését és szertefoszlását, a jelentés mint jelenség nyitott kérdéseit kutatja. A művek kételyekkel teli, aktuális időtlen válaszlehetőségeknek tűnnek, ám - ahogy Bak Imre idézi egyik esszéjének mottójában Martin Heideggert - "az igazi kérdést a válasz nem szünteti meg".
Hungarian society under the regime of János Kádár was yet to face up to the repressed trauma of the Holocaust. This artist - very young at the time - defied the collective amnesia, and his provocative painting posed uncomfortable questions and urged reflection on the past, challenging the responsibility of the individual - it touched on issues that had been swept under the carpet of public social discourse. Hungary has still not dealt fully with these suppressed traumas, and the potential threatening consequences of this have an effect even on today's society. This makes Lakner's work all the more relevant, being not merely a depiction of the age of the Holocaust, but also a graphic representation of the way people must live in totalitarian societies and the mechanisms of power that dictatorships employ: the mass psychosis of the frenzied, propaganda-manipulated crowd, and the menacing atmosphere generated by this schizophrenic state of mind.
Lakner presents this to us in a documentary way: his dispassionate, inexorable work was at once a painterly and a political statement. If regarded as the earliest example of a medium-conscious, self-reflective use of photography (based on a photograph accompanying a 1937 article in a German magazine) - presaging and preceding by many years the advent of hyperrealism - it is much more than just a technical innovation, by virtue of its radical interrogativity and its political richness. Even in this early work, Lakner presents the Holocaust as the universal experience of existence by twentieth century humankind, as a modern condition humaine (as in the artist's later paraphrases of Celan). If this painting had been displayed to the public at the time, it would have caused a total upset of the illusory idyll of the age that was founded on collective forgetfulness, since in addition to referencing the past, it also held up a distorting mirror to the contemporary reality of the Kádár period, just a few years after the suppression of the revolution.
Rejected by the official jury, and even only accepted with uncertainty by his more progressive colleagues, the painting was bought in 1970 by an Italian married couple of biologists, and only made its return to Hungary this year; the owner, Roberto Tosi, has very generously loaned it on long-term deposit to the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts. The two-language catalogue published to coincide with the exhibition, with more than 100 pages illustrated with numerous lesser-known early works by Lakner, describes the eventful and fateful history of the painting, its context in the history of art and the iconography, its "pictorial rhetoric" and its relationship with classical art. As expressed by the famous German essayist, Manfred de la Motte: László Lakner is not just the "classicist of the avant-garde", he is also the "avant-gardist of the classics": this early painting of his is rich in classical allusions and art historical references, which are further accentuated by the "auratic" galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts (as has been shown by previous showcase exhibitions of his work in this museum). The white lace collars of Dutch group portraits and Van Eyck's boldly executed convex mirror are all saluted in the painting, though the idyllic beauty of classical painting and the luscious pathos of traditional portraits of seamstresses (on display in the neighbouring showcase) turns into something nightmarish at the end of Lakner's "surnaturalist" brush.
Lakner has emphasised several times that the spirituality of the demonic visions that he painted at the start of the sixties has an affinity with the spectral works of Francisco de Goya. "The sleep of reason produces monsters," is the Spanish master's oft-heard quotation, but frequently what we experience after waking up is more absurd than dreams - this is the experience of both Franz Kafka and László Lakner, and it never ceases to be relevant.