Exhibition marks 75th anniversary of artist Kondor's birth

A brilliant retrospective of some of Béla Kondor's oil paintings is now underway at KogART House. The exhibition, which celebrates the 75th anniversary of the his birth, confirms the significance of Kondor's brief but influential career in any discussion of 20th century Hungarian painting.

Though Kondor’s productive period lasted only fifteen years, to see many of his large oil canvases collected together in one room is to get an immediate window onto the particular combination of helplessness and beauty that drove so many artists here to pick up the grand themes of the mid-20th century. Kondor’s skillfully-controlled avant garde frenzy earns him a central part in this artistic story.

Born in Budapest in 1931, the multi-talented Kondor - who was also an accomplished harmonium player and a prize-winning publisher of original verse - managed to avoid the strictures of the state-sanctioned socialist realist style of the time, and fabulate his own artistic idiom from the start, fully-formed. In canvas after canvas we find a large, scribbled clutching after form and beauty, like a child with pastel crayons, balanced by a sheer talent for tempering these outbursts, with muted colors and serious expressions and themes, jazzed up with a small vocabulary of 20th century artistic flourishes (with hints of Picasso, Chagall and Paul Klee), and finished with a keenly mature instinct for overall composition which belies the epoch’s yearning for an ever-elusive harmony.

Kondor did have occasional brushes with the State: his first solo exhibit in 1960 was shut down three days after it opened, and even the guestbook was confiscated, which is not surprising if it included such late 50s works as “Revolution” (1959) - with its strong shadowy protagonists falling under the king’s wagon wheels - or his huge blood red Angel of Revolution (1960), with its small cannoneers and upraised hands overlain in red.

Yet, from the same years, we also have the wide wall panels of children he painted to decorate a school, re-asserting the primal value of striving for innocence by recreating it in art. In these panels, the ball games and sunflowers, toys and musical instruments all trumpet childhood, and although the faces of the children are old and the colors pared down, the overall tone is still celebratory and artistically advanced. These panels most clearly illustrate the meaningful distinction between “childish” and “child-like” which is so important for appreciating the Hungarian avant garde in which Kondor makes such a pleasing and persuasive case for the latter.

By the mid-60s, Kondor’s art had matured into the layered “Fall, the Temptation of Saint Anthony” (1966), with its playfulness taking on a range of compositional expressions, side groupings of figures, and a bold assertion of color. His large, man-sized canvases and increasingly religious themes are completed in the 1970 work, “Astronauts” - rendering our ultimate shared planetary myth now re-asserted into reality by science - captured by Kondor with a womb-and-wicker shimmer, as astronauts leave their capsule and float-walk in space near the moon.

These are redemptive paintings, playful-serious and evocative, with just enough freedom and just enough control to evoke, brilliantly and without pretension, the living tensions and grand yearnings of the culture and the times in which they were formed. The atmosphere of KogART House is well-suited to this exhibit, and their large bilingual catalogue on sale of Béla Kondor’s works is a welcome addition to the genre.

This 75th anniversary exhibit of the paintings of Béla Kondor is on display at KogART House until August 20, daily from 10 am-6 pm. This exhibit will also be highlighted on Museum Night, June 24th, with events planned from 6 pm til 2:00 in the morning! This will include talks on Kondor (in Hungarian) at 7:00 and 10:30 pm, a reading of his poetry at 8:00 pm, and a concert at 9:00 pm. Admission for the whole evening will be 1000 Ft for adults, and 500 Ft for under 18s.

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