RARE VIEW

RARE VIEW

Displaying two painters, twenty-one works and one collection, Rare View offers the New York audience an exceptional look at postwar Hungarian art and the holdings of a New York-based private collection, never before shown to the public. Through their competence, passion, and curiosity, Miklós Müller and Jan S. Keithly formed an outstanding collection, linking artists and works of different historical periods and stylistic trends from 1920s Expressionism through the organic abstractions of the European School in the 1940s to contemporary Hungarian art. Although it presents only a glimpse of the collection’s riches, Rare View hopes to demonstrate these relationships between epochs and generations through the works of two leading figures of postwar Hungarian art, Dezsö Korniss and Pál Deim.

Throughout his career, Dezsö Korniss wished to reconcile and synthesize idioms of Modernist painting with elements of folk art, with the regional, vernacular traditions of architecture and crafts. As the musical and ethnographical practice of Bartók and Kodály, Korniss’s art aimed to bring together high and low, local and universal, abstract and figurative, folklore and avant-garde. His joining of tradition and innovation lead him to create highly original, Constructivist-Surrealist paintings built on the motifs of Hungarian folk culture, as well as an unexpected series of calligraphic works. The drippings, surface accidents and spontaneous, dynamic marks appearing from the late 1940s on in the latter, not only relate to, but even anticipate the calligraphic trends of European lyrical abstraction and of the New York School, especially the works of Georges Mathieu, Wols, or the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock.

The houses and alleys of Szentendre—a small town on the outskirts of Budapest—served as a point of departure for both Korniss’s and Deim’s work. It was in Szentendre, in the 1930s, that Korniss, with his friend and fellow painter, Lajos Vajda, started to collect and then use the motifs of local architecture in his pictorial and graphic works. It was also on the streets of Szentendre, that Deim, following Korniss’s and Vajda’s example, found the raw material of his art. In Deim’s oeuvre, the semi-geometric, decorative compositions of Korniss’s folk motif-based art are turned into repetitively structured overlapping color planes. Building on Korniss’s collages, he created Surrealistic intersections between architecture and figure, surface and depth further developing the flatness and the ornamental character of his fellow painter’s work. Through their shared heritage and interest in vision and construction, he doesn’t only refer to, but also expands Korniss’s oeuvre, thus forming a dialogue between them. Rare View invites viewers to become partners in this conversation, to explore places and their memories, cultures and their traditions.

About the artists:

DEZSÖ KORNISS (1908 - 1984)

An outstanding painter and graphic artist of the Hungarian avant-garde, Korniss was educated at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (1925-1929), spent a year in Paris and then traveled to the Netherlands and Belgium. From 1934 to 1940, with his friend, the painter Lajos Vajda, he worked in Szentendre—a small town and artist colony, located on the Danube bank, close to Budapest—as well as in the nearby village of Szigetmonostor. Working with the ornamental motifs of the local architecture and folk culture, they created paintings and drawings in a highly individual style combining the characteristic features of both Constructivist and Surrealist painting. Aiming to create a distinctly Modernist visual vocabulary based on the tradition of folk art, they followed an artistic model exemplified in the musical and ethnographical activities of Bartók and Kodály. After WWII and Vajda’s death in 1941, Korniss became a leading figure of the European School, a short-lived Hungarian artist group, active between 1945 and 1948. His often-decorative compositions reflect his continuing interest both in the figurative heritage of Hungarian folklore and in tendencies of postwar abstraction. From the early 1950s, he created a series of calligraphic paintings and a large group of graphic works in which he introduced surface experiments, as well as a diverse range of pictorial methods from dripping to décalcomanie. From the 1960s, Korniss became known for his grotesque and humorous collages, his colorful panels and often monumental oil paintings featuring patterns of the Hungarian “cifraször” (Hungarian folk embroidery).

PÁL DEIM (1932-)

Painter, sculptor and graphic artist, a native and a resident of Szentendre, Deim studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Following the tradition of such painters as Lajos Vajda, Jenö Barcsay and Dezsö Korniss, his early oil and tempera paintings were populated by the fragmented, geometric images of local alleys and houses, as well as the landscape surrounding Szentendre. In the 1960s he traveled to the Soviet Union, to Brussels and Paris, and visited the Prilep monastery in Macedonia. From the late 1960s, he constructed his paintings and graphic series out of a collage-like arrangement of patterned -- hatched or dotted – surfaces, applied a reduced palette composed of mostly grayish and blue tones. The decorative, geometric planes were juxtaposed with organic shapes, and with ciphers and shadows of puppet-like human figures. This decorative yet strictly structured tension between organic and geometric, abstract and figurative became a chief characteristic of Deim’s art, and also appeared on his aluminum-based silk screens. Following his 1974 mid-career retrospective at the Kunsthalle of Budapest, his work achieved serious critical attention. From the late 1970s, he also worked on bronze sculptures and produced a series of rather freely composed works featuring organic motifs and fluid, graphic signs.