Presence-of-mind Calligraphies

Lajos Szabó (1902, Budapest – 1967, Düsseldorf), calligrapher and thinker. Szabó starts out from Lajos Kassák’s famous Workshop Munka-Kör, which he leaves in 1930 on account of Kassák’s views on the Soviet Union which he perceives to be insufficiently critical. His move is followed by some fifty other members, with Pál Justus foremost among them. He becomes one of the leading figures of the newly formed, anti-capitalist, anti-Horthian and anti-bolshevik oppositional movement. He meets the artist Lajos Vajda while still in the Workshop. The profound effect of the resulting friendship on Hungarian intellectual life is not widely known; one of the aims of the exhibition is to give an account of this.

In the oppositional movement he meets the thinker Béla Tábor. Their close friendship and working relationship results in the book Indictment against the spirit, published in 1936. In 1937 he publishes the pamphlet The logic of faith. An emblematic moment: the two Lajoses, Szabó and Vajda, together with Tábor, plan a joint periodical. The first cover design is by Lajos Vajda, with a front page article by Tábor and an essay by Szabó entitled Addenda to a critique of Marxism. Alas, only one copy of the first issue of Habonim survives, and there were to be no further issues.

In 1944, he gets deported to Auschwitz; he survives. After he returns to Budapest, he gives lectures under the aegis of the artistic movement European School, founded in the spring of 1945. He develops a close relationship with the art historian Lajos Fülep. 1945-46 sees the now legendary Thursday conversations between the thinkers Béla Hamvas, Lajos Szabó and Béla Tábor, at the apartment of Tábor and his wife, the art historian Stefánia Mándy, in Haris köz.

At the same place, between 1946-48, Szabó gives seminars to young people on the subjects of psychology, the critique of set theory, language mathesis, the theory of signs, and prismatics, his own term for the trinitarian unity of esthetics, ethics and logic. In one of his lectures, he analyses the central significance of Vajda’s “cosmogrammatic painting style” for the modernist painting movement. His works are banned from publication between 1948 and 1989. They appear for the first time in a special issue of the periodical Életünk in 1989, followed by publication of his Seminar lectures in 1997, collected by his students Attila Kotányi and György Kunszt; finally in 1999 his collected works appear under the title Fact and secret.

He starts making his first calligraphies in the early 1950s. At his first exhibition, held at a Budapest apartment, Hamvas exclaims “Lajos managed to break through again!”. He leaves Hungary in 1956. In 1957 he exhibits in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels alongside Endre Bálint, Attila Kotányi and Vajda; exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Essen and Hagen follow. He meets Ernst Bloch; when Yehudi Menuhin sees his works, he writes in a letter “lines can sometimes become music”. He dies in Düsseldorf in 1967.

Lajos Szabó had three individual exhibitions in Hungary: in 1980 in the Club of Young Artists in Budapest, in 1995 in Pannonhalma, and in 1997 in Museum Ernst, Budapest. The latter exhibition also travelled to Düsseldorf in 1998. To accompany these exhibitions, their organizer Attila Kotányi edited a catalogue entitled EIKÓN, which also contains selected texts.

The works of the present exhibition once formed part of the artist’s estate, and are now owned by a private collector. The exhibition will also present some works by Lajos Vajda and artists belonging to the European School who also had a close relationship or friendship with Szabó, such as Endre Bálint, Ilka Gedo, József Jakovits, Júlia Vajda and Béla Veszelszky.