The Underground Artists of Budapest

Jewish Renaissance - Spring 2023

From the ashes of World War II, a small group of Hungarian artists created a radical new art movement. Nicole Waldner explores this remarkable initiative

In May 1945, when WWII ended on European soil, eighty percent of Budapest’s buildings had been partially or entirely bombed, and all seven of the bridges that connected Buda to Pest were pulverized. The people were tired, traumatised, hungry and many were desperate to escape West. For others though 1945 represented a new dawn: an era of peace, democracy, and a chance to finally become one with all of Europe. Among those who chose to remain in the shattered city were a tenacious group of dreamers and idealists who banded together and launched an artistic revolution.

The European School, or Európai Iskola, was the name they gave their dream. It was the brainchild of Pál Gegesi Kiss, a physician; Ernő Kállai, an internationally renowned art critic; Árpád Mezei, a psychologist; and Imre Pán, Mezei’s cultural entrepreneur brother. Many of the School’s members had recently returned from the forced labour camps, others from the eternal night of the concentration camps. They were mostly young and undoubtedly strong, and despite the purgatory of their wartime experiences, or perhaps because of them, they were euphoric to be alive. They believed that a new era of liberal democracy would be built on the war’s ashes, and they were determined to be part of it. Their name was inspired by the École de Paris, a loose affiliation of mostly émigré artists who worked in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. The School of Paris, like the European School, did not encompass a single artistic style or institution, nor did they have an abiding home; instead, they embraced many different modern art movements, and exhibited in ad hoc locations. It was the broad plurality of that era which the founders of the European School sought to capture with their name, and their founding manifesto:

“From now on, we must think of a Unified Europe. This new Europe can only be constructed from a synthesis of West and East. We have to create a living European school that formulates a new connection between life, the individual and the community.”

The School encompassed roughly fifty artists, writers, poets, and musicians all of whom had been marginalised and/or forced into exile for their modernist practices. Many of them had fled to Vienna and Berlin in the interwar years, as it was common for educated Hungarians to speak good German at the time, and many to Paris. Some were Fauvists, some Surrealists, some Abstract painters, many of them were Jewish; and in the deeply antisemitic, nationalistic interwar era, when the art world was still firmly in thrall to Naturalism, they were pariahs. Here is a snippet from a review of a 1937 exhibition in which Endre Bálint, one of the School’s luminaries, had participated: “In keeping with the spirit of the alien race, Endre Bálint smears human wrecks on his canvases.”  

For three action-packed years, before the hostile takeover by the Communists in 1948, the School operated freely, galvanizing the city’s survivor artists with their pan-European idealism. Among their ranks was the grandfather of the pre-war avant-garde, the self-taught, multi-disciplinary radical Lajos Kassák. Two posthumous members of the School were named: Imre Ámos (1907-1944), often referred to as “Hungary’s Chagall”; and Lajos Vajda (1908-1941), a secular Jew whose art was a foundational inspiration to them all. Collectively they mounted thirty-eight exhibitions. Some examples include Slovakian surrealism (where a significant Hungarian minority lived); a French-Hungarian exhibition (featuring many of the Hungarian émigrés who lived in Paris); and Imre Ámos’ final works, a suite of twelve deeply moving drawings from 1944 entitled Apocalypse, completed just prior to his tragic death in the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany. Through their publishing arm, which they called the European School Library, they put out dozens of pamphlets, catalogues and books on subjects such as folk motifs and Abstraction. At their opening event on November 11 1945,  Miklós Szentkuthy - one of 20th century Hungary’s most prolific and celebrated writers – presented a talk entitled English Writers, English Artists. It took place in a classroom at the Children’s Clinic in Pest. The inaugural invitation specified that the event was free, that debate would follow the presentation, and that the room was heated. And so it was that these phoenixes built an entire movement and community, bringing new life to the devastated city.

In 1947, the first remotely democratic elections were held in Hungary. The Independent Smallholders party won, the Communists lost, but it was an outcome that would not be tolerated by the Soviets. At that point, any veneer of democracy that existed gave way to an outright hostile takeover by the Communist Party. In early 1948 the European School was officially blacklisted by the Communists. There would be no more exhibitions, and no more large gatherings. For the next decade and beyond, all of its members would be strictly forbidden from exhibiting or earning their living as independent artists. Choices for artists were stark: toe the party’s Socialist Realist line or become invisible. Furthermore, artists were cut off from every new manifestation of modernism, and hardline Communist propaganda mushroomed everywhere: blockish muscular men wielding hammers and sickles, fecund women carrying baskets of wheat, and rosy-cheeked children wearing red pioneer scarves. But the movement and community the European School had built would live on, in quiet and not-so-quiet resistance, throughout the Communist era, in a handful of private apartments. And one apartment in particular, would become the centre of the postwar Budapest underground, where the remains of the pre-war modernists and the School endured.

At 1 Rottenbiller Street, the painters Endre Bálint and Júlia Vajda (Lajos Vajda’s widow), and the sculptor József Jakovits lived together with their families. It was a cramped, tumbledown apartment in the 7th district of Pest, a working class, industrial area which was flat, treeless, and polluted; where bedrooms doubled as studios, as did the kitchen, which was never used. Their three children were often farmed out to relatives where there was heating and hot dinners. Although their material existence was so precarious, their spirits were not cowed, because the eighth member of their hectic household was with them: the ghost, spirit and life work of Lajos Vajda, visionary of the nascent and suppressed early Hungarian avant-garde, Júlia Vajda’s first husband, and an inspiration to the entire European School. Vajda’s art would lead them to seek ancient folk motifs, to experiment with Symbolism, Surrealism, and Abstraction. Vajda’s discipline, sincerity and purpose helped them to survive the worst of the Communist dictatorship: the marginalisation, the exclusion, the poverty, the stifling repression. The Rottenbiller apartment became a magnet for sensitive and curious artists who craved intellectual exchange and open dialogue. Food and heat may have been in short supply, but art, books and debate were not. That there were informers among their ranks is now known for certain, but as if by tacit agreement they refused to censor themselves between the walls of their sanctuary.

In 1956, the Hungarian anti-Soviet uprising broke out. Within weeks the uprising had been brutally suppressed by the Soviet army. Thousands of civilians were killed, hundreds more were executed. Dozens of the School’s members fled West. 1956 may have signalled the formal end of the European School, as its ranks were so depleted, but its cultural significance was only just beginning to be felt.

By the 1960s the Communist Party began to tolerate a wider cross-section of art, albeit sporadically. After more than a decade of enforced invisibility, the European School’s blacklisted artists began exhibiting once more in ad hoc locations, drawing audiences and acclaim. With this liberalising momentum, many members of the School began to receive their due, among them Endre Bálint, Lajos Vajda, Imre Ámos and Dezső Korniss. For the women artists, such as Júlia Vajda, Margit Anna and Lili Ország - all secular Jews - recognition would only come decades later, a post-Communist correction that continues to today, with large-scale museum retrospectives of many of the School’s luminaries.

In April 2022, Viktor Orbán cemented another four years in power by continuing to erode all of the pillars of democracy, including freedom of artistic expression. The European School’s vision of a unified Europe continues to be elusive, even as it remains a gold standard aspired to across the continent. In Budapest, private apartments are once again being transformed into alternative art spaces, acting as a parallel culture to the stifling confines of the regime. The European School’s post-war dream of building a pluralistic arts movement where divergent ideas and genres coexist within a community seems more prescient and urgent than ever.

 https://www.jewishrenaissance.org.uk/spring-2023