Drawing from the International Collection dating from after 1800, this cabinet exhibition presents works by Zoltán Kemény and Madeleine Kemény-Szemere, commemorating a double anniversary by tracing the dual horizons of the artist couple’s life and work. Sixty years ago, in 1964, Zoltán Kemény won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale, representing Switzerland. Forty years ago, in 1984, his wife, Madeleine Kemény–Szemere, enriched the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts with a donation of nearly 400 works, comprising pieces by both herself and her husband.
Zoltán Kemény (1907–1965) and Madeleine Kemény-Szemere (1906–1993) met in Paris in 1930, where they worked as fashion illustrators while putting their painting careers on hold. During World War II, they fled to Switzerland due to their Jewish heritage and began painting again. Zoltán Kemény gained international renown for his metal reliefs created from the 1950s onward, while Madeleine Kemény-Szemere ceased creating art in 1956 to support her husband. Their careers unfolded along the lines of choices between artistic and “bourgeois” existence, and the possibilities of male and female roles, encompassing dualities such as matter and immateriality, the archaic and the modern, tradition and its negation, or the relationship between part and whole. The exhibition simultaneously reveals their shared inspirations—tribal art, children’s drawings, and an interest in materials unusual in art—and the autonomous character of their works: Kemény–Szemere’s social sensitivity reflected in her rough–hewn figures, her perspective centering on the fate of women, as well as Zoltán Kemény’s oeuvre, which spans from his early, ironically toned paintings to metal reliefs evoking the structures of the micro– and macrocosm.
The robust figures in Madeleine Kemény–Szemere’s paintings evoke the stylistic world of children’s drawings and the anatomy of archaic, “naive” figures. In her works, the isolated female figures, absorbed in their labor, almost merge with their immediate surroundings. She was greatly influenced by the works of Jean Dubuffet, whom she met in person in 1946. Dubuffet incorporated elements of forms of expression outside the realm of classical art — such as graffiti or tribal art — into his own works. Two paintings that Kemény-Szemere donated to the museum in 1984 are now on view to the public for the first time.
The exhibition features works from every significant period of Zoltán Kemény’s career. In his paintings from the 1940s, he simultaneously reflected in a humorous way on art–historical tradition and the tools of traditional image–making, while at times also articulating subtle social criticism. Starting in 1947, he began using alternative materials for his paintings: the basis of his works became malleable Pavatex (an insulating material used in construction), onto which he applied, for example, sand or plaster. His relief collages feature dense earth tones and surfaces reminiscent of cave paintings. Through the materiality of his works and the simplified forms reminiscent of tribal art or children’s drawings, he became associated with the COBRA group, in whose 1949 debut exhibition in Amsterdam he participated—along with his wife, who shared a similar artistic approach. From 1953 onward, he worked exclusively with metal: for his new abstract compositions, he initially used prefabricated industrial parts, which he transformed into dynamic, pulsating reliefs that engaged the space. His works evoked countless associations, ranging from microscopic photographs to images of the solar system. The metal reliefs brought him international recognition, and in 1964, he won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale.