Iván Hevesy (1893-1966) was one of the most significant Hungarian popularizers and theorists of modern art, new technical media and the avant-garde. Twice in his life he came into intensive contact with photography. In the 1930s, he opened up new avenues in modern photography with his books, which were popular with a wider public, and his own photographs, which are still little known. In the 1960s he wrote the first monograph on the history of Hungarian photography, and in his reviews, which appeared regularly in the columns of Magyar Nemzet, he published insightful analyses of the new aspirations of the second wave of modern photography.
The Kassák Museum’s new exhibition is divided into two parts, presenting the complex relationship between Iván Hevesy and modern photography. Hevesy himself was an active photographer in the 1930s. In the first part of the exhibition, these bold, hand-enlarged vintage works will be shown alongside works by other photographers who played a key role in the 1930s. Hevesy’s views on photography, as expressed in books and studies, become clearer when read in conjunction with the work of the leading photographers of the period.
The European and Hungarian connections are represented, among others, by the works of László Moholy-Nagy, an outstanding figure of modern photography, with his characteristic pictorial types, the photogram, photoplastics and figurative-abstraction experiments. A friend from his youth, Moholy-Nagy was initially a fundamental influence on Iván Hevesy’s thoughts on photography. The second selection includes the work of photographers who played a key role in the photographic scene of the 1930s and whose work reveals the currents that defined modern photography of the period.
Hevesy’s wife and his partner, Kata Kálmán, also known as a photographer, editor and socio-photographer, or Károly Escher, were also the embodiment of the modern photographer for Hevesy. Ernő Vadas and Imre Kinszki also played an important role in Hevesy’s interests, and in addition to their wide-ranging activities, they were also founding members of the Modern Hungarian Photographers Group, which was established in 1937. Iván Hevesy’s theoretical work was in sync with international trends, despite the fact that he created a largely different media theory. The books in the exhibition from Hevesy’s library (Albert Renger-Patzsch, Helmar Lerski, Arvid Gutschow, etc.), which were also important sources for Walter Benjamin’s still influential study A Brief History of Photography, are evidence of his up-to-date knowledge.
The second part of the exhibition looks at a decade of Hungarian photography between 1957 and 1966 from a single perspective, through the thick glasses of the important, though by then tired, critic Iván Hevesy. In the new post-1945 world, Hevesy moved precariously, as a stranger. It is not known whether he had already experienced, or whether it was only in these years that he became aware that the principles and radical artistic ideas he professed and conveyed, art as a social action, had no meaning. His writings, which were deeply left-wing in their commitment, were not ‘linear’ enough, and were harshly rejected. He lost his job in 1950, and was mercilessly forced into forced retirement. In 1957 he began to publish again – mostly on contemporary photography.
More than eighty articles were published in Magyar Nemzet, mainly about photo exhibitions. He followed the events of the then professionalizing photographic profession, its modern aspirations – despite its isolation, keeping pace with European photography – and his writings also created Hungarian photography criticism. The corpus of Hevesy’s writings is sufficiently diverse to allow us to perceive his critical thinking and to discuss the photography of the “sixties”, the beginning of the consolidation of the Kádár era, in more nuanced terms. From renowned or now forgotten photographers, we see works that oriented their formal language towards post-war modernity, towards humanist photography, and that moved away from the rigid imagery of the fifties in their subject matter, experimenting with a new, lively iconography of work and everyday life. At the same time, the early sixties saw the emergence of a neo-avant-garde tendency, to which the elder Hevesy was open.