ORSZÁG LILI WORKS
FROM THE VASILESCU COLLECTION
A SUMMARY OF THE OEUVRE
The one wandering in a maze is always overcome with doubts, fears, the feeling of being abandoned. On the other hand, he is urged by mysticism, the experience of discovering, the unknown. The one who enters a maze should have vocation, should be able to find the signs left by different cultures and ancestors on the wall, which lead the wanderer, as Ariadne's thread, to the secret of the maze, to a final, perhaps incomprehensible truth.
The wanderer in the maze can only see walls around him. The pieces of works by Lili Ország reveal the viewer walls as well. Her life - just as the life of every other - is a maze, too, in which the viewer can find his own life, and in the middle of which there is death itself. Nevertheless, her sensitive soul, tearing along the labyrinth of our common ancient consciousness, experienced all of the universal secrets and myths of existence. Ibolya Laczkó wrote: " This labyrinth belongs both to the self and to history, its dimensions are finite and infinite at the same time."
A red brick-wall - this is the beginning of the maze. The little girl is standing in front of it. ( In front of a Wall, 1955.) A memory of a child whose name was Lili Österreicher and who lived in Ungvár with her young, beautiful mother and with her father who was selling wine. However, she spent most of her time with her grandmother who taught her that one should find a field where he or she can be better than the average. She drew a lot and wanted to be a painter from the age of 12. Her first master was Miklós Róbert, who showed her the most important exhibitions in Budapest and who regularly helped the young artits in his letters written to Ungvár.
The holocaust, the cruelty of war put an end to the idyll and towered in front of the adolescent as a red brick-wall. She was contracted to a little orphan who, just like Imre Kertész's teenager hero, was waiting for fate - without having any fate - between the brick-walls of a brick factory, where Jewish people of Ungvár were gathered in the spring of 1944. Leaving all their belongings behind, they were living without any shelter for a whole month, having only a bowl of soup and lots of suffering for a day. The only hope of the little family - Lili, her mother and her little brother - was the father; they hoped that he would be able to get the necessary documents even before their train would leave for Auschwitz.
The clock is floating threateningly above the girl's head. It is perhaps the clock of the station in Kassa. They could hardly take any breath in the wagon jolting to the death camp when it stopped at Kassa. They were waiting for hours there. Finally, those who got exemption were ordered to get off the wagon. Their names were also there on the list, which meant life itself. They escaped, but the walls of fear and angst had already been built in the sensitive soul of the young girl. She survived the war hiding in Budapest with false documents. After the war she began to study at the Academy of Art, where she studied under István Szőnyi, the most prominent figure of the Post-Nagybánya School. Katalin S. Nagy wrote: "The reliable student, who was eager to study, seemed to become one with the master
She took over the lyrical tone and the soft colors, the sensitive, clean painting that was developed from plain air. This new painting wanted to have an effect by the beauty of sight."
During her studies at the Academy, she changed her surname to "Ország" and she would have liked to change other things as well. She wrote as follows: " Actually, I wanted to empty myself, I wanted to forget everything I had learned as it did not satisfy me at all
That kind of way of looking at things held me as a captive, I could not escape, but I was trying to get free, because I thought it was superficial, it was not my own." At the beginning of the 1950s, she was eagerly looking for a topic that could have been her own. She was looking for an object through which she could express herself, an object, the outlines of which could be similar to the silhouettes of her inner world. She painted a lonely dry stalk and she found a mysterious granary with prison-like, yellow walls. ( The Granary, 1955.) Taking a look at her inside world, she found the wall, the labyrinth built in her sub-conscious in the figure of the granary instinctively. " I have found the objects. The walls appeared as objects" - she wrote.
Endre Bálint, with whom she became friends at that time, helped her a lot with his advice, experiences and perspicacity. He wrote as follows: " When I had a look at Lili Ország's pictures in 1953, for me only the picture with the dry stalk and the other with the granary had the meaning from which, on the one hand, I could recognise the artist's real self, and, on the other hand, I could recognise her future, too, from those characteristic contents which were radiating from those pictures
This was the beginning of her so-called surrealist period."
Lili Ország wanted to paint her dreams full with angst, the pictures coming out of the nooks in the labyrinth of her soul. She wanted to grasp her fears on the canvas, so that she could be able to face them. " Why was I looking for the walls? Why did I want to tell something with walls, or with a figure, or with a representation of space that suggested a kind of angst, fear, the feeling of imprisonment? Because I had these feelings in me and my primal expectation from the picture was to express my own self , the way I looked at things."
In her Woman in Black Dress , she is representing a woman feeling for her way in a labyrinth. Her shadow already knows where to look for the secret: it points to the stone-wall of imprisonment. In the Angst from 1955 a beautiful, Renaissance lady appears with a veil; her inner cleanness is in a harsh contrast with the threat and horror surrounding her. In the In front of the Wall the little girl wearing a hat is pushed in front of a wall where she has to face death without a shawl on her eyes. Her Pink Dress from 1956 recalls the terrifying memory of the deportation as well. The foamy, light pink dress, the illusion of a child is left there hanging on the pole of the railway station in Kassa, while the rails are running into the cold, black night, towards death and annihilation.
The surrealistic voice of her confessions is very individual in Hungarian art. She was deeply influenced by Chirico, in whose paintings she discovered a voice and way of looking at things akin to her own. A close connection can be discovered between her world and that of Toyen, the Czech artist, whose surrealism is also characterised by a kind of sad lyricism.
The depressing atmosphere of the Rákosi-era in the 1950s deepened her angst again. As her paintings did not meet the requirements of the propaganda in the 1950s at all, she had to work in the Puppet Theatre together with many other artists whose works were rejected at that time. The intellectual atmosphere at the theatre was very defining for Ország.
In 1956, she thought that her surrealist pictures were born too easily. She also had the feeling that the field she was working in had become too psychological. The space of orthodox surrealism seemed to be narrower and narrower; from the fixed colors, figures and walls she wanted to get to a more unbound world. " Actually, I had to break the walls, the visual walls I had built up to that time" - she wrote. Her Sea with Swimming Figure from 1957 was already a representative piece of her new period. " After that " - she wrote - " I painted some pictures where there were no walls, where there were only layers of ground that appeared as kind of walls. I buried myself symbolically. My burying appeared in some of my pictures in the form of a mummy. I wanted to fall asleep somewhere. I made myself sleep to forget all the horrors I had to experience in pictures at that time. I had to be set free, and that was what I tried to reach through a dream." The picture mentioned above helped her to get to the world of dreams where his friend, Endre Bálint, had already found a shelter by that time. Their artistic approaches came very close to each other at that time. Bálint's figures of dreams, like the mummy of Frost Killing or the waning moon, were buried into the walls of silence built of waving layers of ground in Ország's paintings. Sediments of different periods, levels of time unbinding from each other in the ground and in the walls: this is the landscape which she perambulated, and where she could find herself. At that time, she did not search for the secrets of the layers of past, she only buried herself among them, longing for silence and peace after a troubled period. By this new style Ország did not only joined the art of Vajda, Bálint and Korniss consciously, but she also shaped a very individual way of looking at things.
However, she could not live in the ground swaddled, in a state of suspended animation. After the angst and surrealistic self-flagellation it was evident that she was looking for a remedy in the direction of the transcendental. During her travels in Russia and Bulgaria she met the beauty of the Slavic icons ,the humbleness of their painters and the mysticism of religion in the half-light of the monasteries. Her Birth II. from 1958 is the first piece of her icon-period. The child born with a caul is represented as a silhouette of an icon.
Her abstracted figures appear on the wall, leaving the illusion of space behind. She was deeply influenced by the horizontal-vertical composition of the icons, though she created an order in the picture with a severity that evokes Lajos Vajda's pictures. In this painting inspirited by the Eastern monasteries, the fine outlines of the Serb churches and houses of Szentendre appear, just as in Bálint's Houses in Hastings and in his Vision in Rouen, both from 1959. This fact is a beautiful evidence of their common spiritual roots, as they could not see each other's works at that time. The colors in Országh's picture are alive and liberated. " She used fine shadows of vivid blue, lilac-red and warm grey" - writes Katalin S. Nagy. " A mystical radiation is streaming from the colors lit by sonorific lights and between the forms which seem hardly connect to each other in the plain. Nothing is plastic, the forms are floating and swimming in the mystical, impalpable medium. The colors with their deep tones evoke the mixed feelings of angst and happiness, freedom and belief, sadness and trust. This is the struggle of good and evil, beauty and ugly, just like in the Bulgarian and Russian icons. And these contrasts do not really contradict each other, they belong to each other, and in this way a reconcilement, a calmness is created."
The bluish-grey walls, which have already been cleaned of their brick-red pain, are enclosed by the ethereal calmness of a Gregorian tune. The Birth, in this way, is not only a biblical citation but also a wonderful re-birth of a painter full of angst.
In her icon-period, the artist drew mummy-like angels, saints and bones onto the walls, then her feeling that the figures were getting more and more identical with the walls became stronger and stronger. She began to look for more ancient signs under the crumbling layers, as if she was just gaining back her memory. The traces of distant worlds appeared in the stones. " I had to take a step further in the past" - she wrote - " I had to search for a place farther, a place where I could feel at home
I am already looking for the stones, though I do not know yet, where I am." The fingers of her memory were touching stones from Assyria, Babylon and Egypt. She did not want to represent holy myths on the walls anymore; she wanted to build mythical walls herself, out of the stones of history. Around 1960, she began to paint ground plans of cities. Ancient cities which lived in her, ancient cities in which she used to live. She made the Golden City in 1960. It was a very colorful picture. The experience had come from her inner world, but when she travelled to Prague later, she recognised there her Golden City. Walking among the stones of the Jewish cemetery in Prague, she was sure that she had been there before. In the stones she could find the objects that her art needed, but not in the traditional sense, when the artist is inspired by the sight. She found objects in the outer world that she had always been carrying in herself, so these objects were only the evidences of the existence of her inner world. At once, she could find her way in the maze, she knew the passages, the towns from the time of kings. She felt at home. " I felt that I had been there before, I felt that I should build houses, churches, I should walk in the mazes, I should see the wailing walls." The experiences were very intensive, she was busy with working in her small flat in Budapest, she could hardly wait to begin to paint day by day. Ernő Kolozsváry wrote about this period as follows: "You crossed the borderlines of historical time as your inner anxiety wanted you to do it. You carry us in these non-existent cities with a nostalgic fanaticism, from Jerusalem to Babel, through the gate of East to Necropolis
from Ur to Hiroshima. You built these spaces from inside, and what is new in their spirit is that you drew from the deeper layers of time, or, better to say, you pushed the past into the present in a way that it can shape future as well
In this simultaneity you were so deeply touched by the humbleness of history and by your own feelings coming to the surface that you hardly dared to touch colors. The spiritual attitude of your anxious loneliness is leading to velvet black through silent greys and drowned browns."
Her colors bear the monochrome face of dying cities. In these works her individual form of expression, which is not similar to anybody's, can already be clearly recognised. The theme of these pictures is not a nostalgia for historical past but the perception of continuity, the continuity of stones, lives, nations, cultures and human existence. The most outstanding piece of this period is her Requiem on Seven Boards, In Memory of Destroyed Cities and People, from 1963. This is a requiem for the walls coming down, for the walls which seemed to be strong and eternal. An intimate prayer for the destroyed lives, for people whose bones are buried in the cemeteries, whose names are carved in stones. A prayer for light, strength, belief and rebirth.
If the Requiem is the synthesis of the ground plans of cities, the Study for the Requiem from 1965 can be called the synthesis of the synthesis. Among the browns and greys of the ruins, red and blue stains of colors are shining. They evoke the vivid colors of the Golden City. The whirling of the picture showing into the upper direction and its hopeful musicality evoke the mood of the last board of Requiem. Building after destroying, life after death. Blood is washed from stones by water, the stones become grey, lives become history. New cities are build in the place of the old ones, new cultures blossom. This piece of art is not only a retrospection but also a picture of future as the ground plans rather function as signs here, signs which lead the viewer into the artist's following period.
By that time, two outstanding collectors of the era had already regularly bought Lili Országh's pictures. István Rácz and Ernő Kolozsváry, who both had collected classical paintings before, turned to than contemporary Hungarian painting under the influence of Országh's art.
The artist exhibited her pictures in Israel in 1964 and met a huge success. Walking in the ancient cities, she realised that all the walls, gates and streets that her instincts had painted were real. The experience of deja vu was shocking for her. " I already had been walking in that city, two thousand years before. What is threatening about this experience is that I have painted Jerusalem for ten years, and now, that I am here face to face with it, I do not know whether I will have the courage to paint it again" - she wrote. Meanwhile, her works became well-known in Hungary as well. Her first one-man show was held in Székesfehérvár in 1967 and in the following year she exhibited her pictures in Budapest.
She was always attracted to signs and letters. "She regularly translated from the kabbala literature" - Katalin S. Nagy wrote - "and she was an expert in numerology. She made notes on the Jewish mystical tract called The Book of Creation which discusses the claim that the world consists of letters and numbers
" She put down the stones as if they were letters. She wrote signs, letters on the walls, evoking different periods as they had been written into each other. " The Ground Plans and Ruins evoke times falling into each other - Endre Bálint wrote - the absolute meaning of letters has been lost, as the letters are made into buildings, the ruins are made into ground plans, the ground plans are made into letters and all of these are made into buildings and pictures, and she projects the prefiguration of a future memory into the space."
Her next period from 1966 to 1969 was created out of the mysticism of stones, letters, secrets and myths. A masterpiece of this period is the picture The Pages of History, which was painted in 1969. The signs here do not appear on the walls as in most of the pictures from that time but on papyrus rolling from the walls in layers. The vulnerable, crumbling material shows how cruelly messages are exposed to time. The monochrome, brown colorit is very characteristic of the period. The pieces of papyrus with notes, messages, hieroglyphs that were solved and than forgotten again seemed to be throbbing in the picture. One of the pages covers something, the other is just coming off, the change and decay is ceaseless. Nevertheless, one has to fall silent thinking of the wonder of writing, which attempts to make thoughts permanent.
After an exhibition in Spain in 1979, the Prado in Madrid wanted to buy the painting but the educational policy of the era made it impossible. In 1969, Ország had a one-man show in Rome, where critics wrote appreciatively about her art. She met there Paolo Santarcangeli, who supported her art all through his life. In the following years, she returned to Italy regularly. As Lajos Németh wrote: " The meaning that she read out from the ancient walls and stones talking about history, Lili Országh could experience best in the atmosphere of Pompeii. The material fragments of a heroic past were suitable for mobilising the strengths of spiritual structure and it was possible to mould the dimension of history." In this period Országh made masterpieces like The Cry, the Romanesque Christ, and the pictures representing the Madonna. The colors are still monochrome: red, azure, marble white. In 1972 she painted the Green Walls. The sitting figure of the picture and the mood lead the viewer to her last period, to the pieces of the Labyrinth-series from 1974 on.
One of the outstanding pieces of the period is the Guard in front of a Palace from 1976.The picture is a top-view of the human fate, and, at the same time, the story of a rugged life. The guardian angel is waiting at the entrance. Do not be afraid! - say the letters.
The latest works were painted by an artist who is wise. She does not wander blind in the labyrinth of history and fate any longer. She is emerging among the towering walls with the strength of the Chosen and is looking at the system from above with the peace of Clarification. She is flying over the maze in the form of an angel, and, at the same time, she knows that this wonderful metamorphoses is the last station of her human life. " The series of labyrinth I am painting now is my own labyrinth. I must go through it and I am going through by painting it. This is a terrible suffer, but one mustn't give up here. One must go through it" - she wrote.
Most of Lili Ország's works can be found in museums and in private collections. Their coming under the hammer is a rare occurrence. At our present sale the most prominent pieces of the oeuvre are auctioned from János Vasilescu's collection who possesses most of the masterpieces.