György Kovásznai: Self-Interview (excerpt), written around 1975 

- What do you consider yourself?  Artist, writer, animation filmmaker?

- There is a lot of tension in me, just like in us all, and in some way ? as we all do ? I have to channel these tensions. From now on, I would like to be useful in my own way, and if my longing becomes strong enough, and if the outcome can entirely attain this aim, then I think these categories of genre and style will melt away, become neutral…evaporate…I don?t know?

- If I understand it well, your ?ars poetica? faces the future. You pursue a certain goal systematically.

-Yes, that?s right?

- What about your schools?

- Thank God, they are quite multifaceted. I got my first oil paints and canvas as a boy, as a gift from Piroska Szántó; my first nude study at age 14 was corrected by Jenő Béres at an evening school; and at the art high school?s painting department, Andor Kántor taught the ins and outs of handling pigments, priming the canvas and observing reality. It was also there that my honourable teacher and school director György Z. Gács, with his enormous intelligence in art education, assured an art-historic continuity during the ?Rákosi era? by transforming the then dominant naturalist painting with the gorgeous unveiling of reality by the grand old masters. In other words, instead of Laktionov and Sándor Ék, he focused our attention on Velazquez, Goya and Cézanne, and well, what can I say …he has brought about a joy of creativity, which spared us from the dogmatism of both naturalism and avant-gardism… and during these significant years he taught us things that we couldn?t have possibly learned anywhere else.

- Who else were your ?lucky? classmates?

- First of all, I think of János Major and Ilona Keserű.

- How were your works classified at the high school?

- All the way through our academic years, the three of us were the most eminent students. A year before the entrance examination to the Art Academy, my high school teachers had informed the professors of the Art Academy ? Domanovszky and Bortnik ? that I paint like Gauguin and I draw like Dürer.

- As a result, you were instantly accepted to the Academy, without delay.

- Yes, and perhaps my aforementioned colleagues and I were somewhat overly sure of ourselves. We took it for granted, but very soon we had to realise that the happy and innocent times of high school were over, and we found ourselves in a completely new system of ideas and values…

- You were kept on a short leash…

- It was not that that was the trouble. I would have loved to be kept in a tight hold, as I can be manically diligent, and hard discipline is actually exhilarating… This was a completely different issue… Instead of a strong discipline, they mauled us about; the masters enjoyed a totally authoritarian domination, even though ? with all due respect to the exceptions ? they were not even worthy of any professional title… It was a hell of a story… Professors one-hundred times more talented could not have made their way out of this situation that was a million times more complicated in terms of art history… Alongside the toughest political monitoring, we saw the most fantastic professional and pedagogical fooling around?

- Do you think, then, that the art pedagogy of the fifties was explicitly negative?

- Not in the least. I completely agree with my former colleagues, that we, who suffered the most in that art academy (even though coming from the art high school, our professional credits were better than in general), were not wasting our time there. Even the professors such as Fónyi, Kádár, Sándor Ék, Bernáth and Barcsay were inspired by a so to say stubborn, often obstinate ? please excuse my slightly arrogant phrasing ? touching devotion…for what reason?… For the sake of unveiling reality, the unfolding of the spectacle, the phenomenon and the whole point of it, this is like an avid obsession: to stick to the model, inch by inch, progressing from shade to shade, to develop, to refine and to elaborate, and finally to identify the study with the model on the highest level. This was just as much a categorical imperative and an Archimedean point, as the ? unquestionably simplified, schematised and forced ? social goals of the era… The aim was right and magnificent, but the methods tragically primitive…

- Sounds like you think back to these schematic times with a certain nostalgia…

- Ha-ha-ha, yes, certainly I remember like that, as we always recall with fond emotion such periods when things seemed to be wonderfully simple…There was, nevertheless, in this predominantly bad art pedagogy a potential ingenuity… How can I explain it?… You know, the eyes of the art students were fixed onto the model? They could not possibly leave the model… they had to watch… If they couldn?t go on and wanted to run away, they were chased back to the model… If they turned away, they were hit on the head and forced back toward the model… If they stepped back to keep a distance from the model, they were kicked back close? Even if they could no longer breathe, it didn?t matter… and then the student comrade either drowned… ha-ha-ha… the poor wretch…

- Or?

- Ha-ha-ha, or… developed gills… growing out from themselves in this miserable condition, a unique shortwave antenna…

- And you? Did you also grow that?

- Ha-ha-ha-ha, have you ever heard of Husserl? yes, the philosopher Husserl… Well, it would be a bit long to go into this now… Reality is a given, so that given a segment of it as a model, can be taken as subject for a phenomenological research.

- And so?

- Ha-ha-ha-ha, no, no… the painter should be dumb, as Károly Lyka has already said: the painter should be dumb, or else he’ll be kicked in the head, ha-ha-ha…

( excerpt 2: )

(Self-Interview continued)

At the end of my second year, with good marks, I marched down to the registrar?s office, and I announced that I did not intend to continue being a student at the academy… Shall I tell you about that?… I was so excited about the working class, I felt such a longing for the working class like for an ideal, which is always alluded to, but from which the hermetical academy ? with the exception of a few clumsy operating excursions ? at its essence, just as from all of life ? is isolated. I would like to call your attention to the fact that the precursor to the aestheticising mentality, removed from life, of our present painting is the ?Soc-Real? that is mentioned nowadays with a certain measure of squeamishness. It is truly odd that things are so complicated, and yet the truth is that essentially, our painting, from Rákosism all the way up to today, is of an ?atelier? mentality. At most, the difference is that in the fifties it was ?workers? ateliers? that were made, while today they are ?atelier-ateliers?… If only the painting of the fifties had truly been rebellious, militant, leftist… Let me correct that: had it been truly leftist, rebellious, propagandist, the painting would have carried things to excess!… And then, well, I would not have left the academy. But that is not what I did, but…

- But?

- But I became distilled.

- There is no contradiction in this: this is not your discovery, but a commonplace of the aversion to life of Soc-Real.

- Well, but if this were truly such a cliché, then the years that passed since, that were filled with the painstaking avoidance of the previous mistakes… well, then, these subsequent years would not have passed in the spirit of further distillation, hermetical sealing, de-politisation, and the most disastrous ? de-concretisation. Hungarian visual art collapsed as a consequence not of party ideology, but of its own historical de-concretisation.

- The situation of visual art in Hungary was never particularly glorious…

- Of course: of course, we should steer clear of inflated declarations. But I, at the time, as a student at the academy, needed for the faith and enthusiasm stirred in me to be wisely nurtured, I needed ? and perhaps now I will confess what is most significant: to get something from society that was more avant-gardist than Western avant-gardism, something that was more novel than Western novelties. But I did not get this, and thus I was overcome by a wild hunger for life, which somehow was connected with the fact that I fell in love with the working class and, slightly madly, but sympathetically, I thought that if I had personal experience, thrown directly into the everyday dimensions of the workers, circulating in concrete life, acquiring real, human, working connections, I would immerse myself into the life of the factories, mines and industrial units ? and there I would come into contact with the Real Model ? and, well, then we would have to realise that the consequences of my anyway truly logical and correct steps were that I would participate in the art school that was finally more avant-gardist than avant-gardism, and more novel than novelty.

( excerpt 3:  )

- Well, of course, I was full of speculative nonsense! But from whom could I have gotten an answer?… From whom could I have gotten ? not one talented classmate ? an answer?… From poor uncle Fónyi, who painted such homely pictures?… From poor master Barcsay, who sidetracked the drawing class?…

- Barcsay?

- Uh-huh, Barcsay. Barcsay and his atelier-anatomy. The unfortunate drawing as such, as professional knowledge objectified into a thing, the workshop-bonelets and the workshop-muscles, orthopaedic shoemaker?s workshop, the corpus, as lecture hall phenomenon… the old man cooked up de-concretised soap from reality,… my friend sidetracked the kids like a shot!… And yet the old man was good, I still love him, I?m still grateful to him… He helped, and certainly not only me, to launch our antennae, if we didn?t want to drown among the common draperies, the stained cubes and the bones that belonged to a crypt! Those disgusting graphite studies of the dim light of iron-filings, those puppet-theatre puppets also excruciatingly badly drawn and the unhappy Barcsay-women and men in their own cruel clumsiness! [...] These statically defective formal complexes crippled everyone who came anywhere in the vicinity. Mule forms, you see, mule forms.

- What do you mean by ?mule forms?h?

-God forgive me, the mule forms have come into being precisely on the basis of lack of philosophical clarity.  The problem itself is extremely complicated. If I remember well, Lajos Németh writes in his brilliant essay in the memorial album, ?Csontváry-Anno 1975?, that Csontváry strived to reconcile the sensualist fundamental axiom with the conception of the idea… [...]

- [...] The renaissance idea conception finally crumbled to pieces under 19th century Positivism. In Csontváry, it was just this that was unprecedented and fantastic, that even with the passing of universal faith, he behaved as if universal belief still existed, upon which a monumental life oeuvre could be constructed. And with this, naturally, he humbled his contemporaries, who ? in an understandable defence ? ridiculed him.

- But let us return to Barcsay…

- Yes, all right. The essence of all I have said is that knowledge of drawing, professional knowledge can be derived from two sources. Either from universal faith, i.e., standing on the basis of the idea conception, or on that of a collective ideal; or rather on the basis of a non-collective, individual-sensualistic, positivistically ? individualistically, solitary undertaking of discovery. Perhaps I would modify Lajos Németh?s extremely profound train of thought only there, where the idea conception did not simply flow into 19th century academism, but from the idea that the so-called ?professional? knowledge formed, i.e., deformed, the paraphernalia of whose establishment insured an academic curriculum, which conversely stood on the pedagogical foundation of the natural studies and figure drawings, on the other hand, contrary to its own idealistic origin: sensualistic-naturalistic. The result ? and in this, Lajos Németh is again completely right ? is academic eclecticism. And it was precisely Barcsay who would become its later continuer. Thus, if I dare to speak to you about atelier-anatomy and mule-visual art, I do it not out of disrespect, but rather because I feel bitterness because in our revolutionary era, an antiquated, orthopaedic, removed from life, pseudo-professional ideal was inflicted on the fate of generations.