I Wanted to Reflect Society

Gudrun Szczepanek: You began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in the early 1970s. Please tell me about the artistic movements and the situation at the Academy at that time.

László Fehér: I began my studies in 1971. The curriculum included the usual assignments and requirements, so we had to paint scenes from life, landscapes and nudes, but avoid anything connected with politics. I will tell you a story that conveys the ordinary, everyday atmosphere at the Academy. My aunt’s husband gave me an old jacket, a Hungarian railwayman’s jacket. I removed the badges and happily wore it to classes at the Academy every day. I soon noticed that people around me had begun to avoid me. One day a female student approached and asked whether I supported Mao and wore the jacket for that reason. I thought it would be best not to wear it any more. This story shows that I was not interested in politics at the time.

That was also because people who held different views or approached the world critically could suddenly be expelled, including from the Academy. It was enough to be suspected of presenting a different attitude, as happened to Péter Forgács (a Hungarian multimedia artist and independent filmmaker born in 1950, known, among other things, for the award-winning Private Hungary film series—J.M.), who was dismissed.

Returning to my studies, I initially studied under Lajos Szentiványi (a painter born in 1909 who died on 9 September 1973—J.M.), who passed away suddenly, many years too soon. I then became a student of Ignác Kokas (a Hungarian artist who lived from 1926 to 2009 and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts; alongside László Fehér, his most outstanding pupils included El Kazovszkij—J.M.). In our third semester he urged us to show greater confidence. He believed an artist could express anything they wished. He was my greatest inspiration. In my fourth year, I began to follow my own artistic path with an unusual mixture of Hyperrealism and social criticism. I also began using photography. Using photographs instead of a model had a significant effect on my painting. I developed this idea consistently, painting pictures based, for example, on photographs from a shipyard magazine. The magazine officially presented the best shipyard workers of the month. In 1975, I used those photographs to create a series of works entitled Részlet a Brigádnaplóból.

I again used photographs of workers from the magazine as models, and in this way created a Photorealist work that also had a sociographic dimension. At the time I also made a series of works featuring trams and pedestrian underpasses. These series included paintings that caused a scandal, such as Törött aluljáró (Defective Underpass) and Aluljáró I (Underpass I) from 1975.

These works were inspired by Vörösmarty utca metro station (Vörösmarty Street), where I took many photographs. I wanted to use one of them to make a painting, but I could not achieve what I wanted. I became very angry, threw the photograph on the floor and walked over it until I had destroyed it; the photograph was torn. I suddenly saw that the photograph was exactly like the bleak everyday reality of socialism. This destroyed photograph perfectly matched my daily life, my tormented world. I used it as the basis for a large-format painting (2.5 × 2 m). The painting caused an uproar at the Academy, and soon afterwards I was called up for military service.

G.S.: Looking at your work, I often think that you have an excellent grounding in naturalistic painting. I know that students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kyiv spend a great deal of time painting in a faithfully representational manner. What was it like in Budapest?

L.F.: It was different here. My class, taught by Szentiványi and Kokas, was more relaxed; we did not follow the Soviet educational model as closely as they did in Kyiv. There were, of course, classes such as that of Aurél Bernáth (an artist who lived from 1895 to 1982 and taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1945 to 1974—J.M.), whose students painted in a peculiar realist style. Professor Szentiványi had a freer attitude towards the world. As I mentioned earlier, I developed my critical realism in the fourth and fifth years of study. Besides, Socialist Realism, which had dominated in the 1950s, was no longer accepted in the 1960s and was therefore absent from our lives. Expectations and requirements regarding painting in the 1970s were defined by several tendencies: a little Realism, a little figuration and a little abstraction. Nevertheless, art at that time could not be political—or, if it was, it had to reflect the Party’s views.

You can imagine the storm my severe, critical Realism created around me. People were afraid to have anything to do with these paintings, afraid of confronting them; they exposed and laid everything bare. I portrayed ordinary people in a painful, realistic manner, confronting viewers with an unpleasant reality. Hard Realism was the only way I could communicate anything. Essentially, it was an ascetic, realistic stance for an artist, because I had to contend with the purity of painting. I wanted to reflect society. My paintings were a mirror showing the bleakness and colourlessness of everyday life.

G.S.: Is that also why you distorted your paintings—to break Realism apart and introduce new values?

L.F.: It was the only thing I could do. Deformation or abstraction within the picture heightened the effect of Realism. I wanted to reflect society, to show how grim life was, to show the reality of socialism with all its difficulties.

G.S.: Your painting changed greatly in the 1980s. A clear gestural element appeared, reminding me of the Neue Wilde in Berlin. Did this expression have something to do with your desire at that time to broaden the horizons of Photorealism?

L.F.: No, it was connected with a trip to Switzerland with the artists’ association Fiatal Képzömüvészek Stúdiója (Studio of Young Artists). The journey had a tremendous impact on me. We also went to documenta in Kassel. We encountered art and other artists completely unlike anything we had known before. It made me ask whether I should reflect a political attitude in my art. Is the purpose of art to communicate anything political? I changed my style as a result, because I believe art should be something more.

The bold period lasted five years; it was a good, carefree time after the period of Hyperrealism. With Diaspora (1982), I returned to subjects that had interested me for a long time, such as Judaism and scenes from everyday life. I often painted the same subject again and again, but always sought new ways of approaching it, other points of view, thereby creating new situations. I also wanted to offer viewers different points of reference and ways of discovering meanings. If you keep painting, you have to make changes. In my view, an artist’s responsibility is to develop and expand the concept of art. If an artist adds nothing new, does not expand the concept of art or introduce new aspects that create dialogue, then their work is a meaningless gesture and art becomes irrelevant.

G.S.: After the period of expressive gesture, your painting changed again. It became very calm and restrained, and although it was still partly realistic, it was also surreal. It expressed more of what lay behind the scenes. When I look at the people in your paintings who sit with their backs to the viewers in vast, empty landscapes and gaze into the distance, I feel that your painting expresses a state of mind. These scenes also contain a great deal of social criticism that is not immediately visible.

L.F.: I would like to return once more to the question of Western art’s influence. You have to imagine that Hungary, and of course the Academy, was completely isolated from the West by the Iron Curtain; it was an independent, self-contained world. We did not know Western art. People have sometimes suggested connections or influences from the West. Photorealism did of course exist in the West, but we did not know it; these were two parallel and independent tendencies. People often speak of links with Gerhard Richter. One must remember that the roots and sources of our painting are exactly the same: a critical observation of society. But until our trip to Kassel, we had not encountered Western art. By the time I discovered Western artists, my Photorealist period had already ended. Photorealism developed independently in East and West, although it had common sources and foundations in social criticism.

G.S.: Initially your figures, although painted only in shades of grey, were nevertheless predominantly very naturalistic. Then everything suddenly changed and the figures became outlines through which the background, principally elements of landscape, could be seen. Did anything in particular cause this?

L.F.: There is a story behind it. After my wife had a miscarriage, I painted a picture in my studio showing three women standing around a child. I painted it very realistically, but the next day I did not like it. I suddenly realised it was wrong, took a piece of cloth and wiped away the interiors of the figures, leaving only their outlines. I then incorporated the background into the figures. This was something entirely new for me; I realised that the figures in the painting were symbolic. The symbolic character of the human form initiated a new body of paintings. In the West, including Germany, these figures are often compared with similar forms of expression in Western art, for example the work of Francis Picabia. My paintings have nothing to do with that. Instead, the Hungarian artist Lajos Vajda (1908–1941, regarded as an outstanding figure of the Hungarian avant-garde—J.M.) was important to me and had exerted a creative influence on me since childhood. He too painted outlines, for example outlines of heads. I will explain what I mean: one day a foreign art historian visited me and immediately presented his own interpretation of my motifs, connecting me with Picabia. When I showed him a book of Lajos Vajda’s work, he was astonished that similar forms of expression existed in Hungarian art. This is a general problem—the cultural arrogance of the West. There are repeated attempts to assess and understand Hungarian forms of artistic production from a Western perspective, by comparison with Western art history. They cannot succeed because of our own roots. Many people cannot accept that behind the Iron Curtain there were artists making independent art who were capable of thinking freely.

I will give another example. In 1989, a year before I took part in the Venice Biennale, I created my sculptures: outlines of figures taken out of the paintings and standing freely in the room. A year after the Biennale, similar sculptures appeared as the work of an artist from the United States, so gallerists and collectors asked whether I had copied them. I told them to look at the dates, which proved that my sculptures had been made two years earlier. I constantly have the feeling that the West regards us as second-rate artists.

G.S.: I think it is very good that you have raised this. After all, the Iron Curtain divided the art world for years and distorted the way each side perceived the other’s art and culture. It is therefore important that exchange is now taking place and that you, László, and other artists can exhibit within the international circuit. The idea behind art fairs such as Art Market (the conversation took place during Art Market Budapest in 2013) is also to bring together art from East and West. I feel that we are at a point where a great deal is changing. I would also like to emphasise that, for me, the outlined figures are a defining feature of your painting. I find it tremendously exciting to see how you continue to develop this motif—for example, the body is empty, while you render the clothing in great detail and make it almost realistic.

L.F.: That depends on the subject of the painting; it allows you to see a great deal. When I now draw an exposed figure with a simple white outline, it means something different from an outlined figure wearing clothes painted in greater detail. This is why I use distinctive clothing. The figure is subordinated to the content of the painting; it serves the essence of the work.

G.S.: I have also noticed that you often portray children in your work. Children are the most sensitive and vulnerable beings in our society. Is there a reason why you return to them so often?

L.F.: When I began painting children, I asked myself a fundamental question: how would this be understood? Would viewers see it as kitsch? How would it be received? You are right: children are vulnerable and at the mercy of our society. I am interested in children because they are pure and unspoilt. They have the potential to be good or bad. Children are simply themselves; they are absolutely perfect and entirely at one with themselves. For me, children embody humanity’s potential for good. When I began addressing this subject, I knew of no artist who had confronted it. There were, of course, individual portraits of children, but they were painted for reasons entirely different from my enigmatic, ambiguous portraits.

G.S.: That reminds me of a painting I saw today in your studio in Tác: a child wearing red armbands, swimming in oily black water. It reminded me of an oil spill and I had the impression that the child was going to drown. The child’s expression was one of sheer delight, entirely unaware of its surroundings.

L.F.: Yes, you see a happy child, cheerful and, in its innocence, completely oblivious to the danger. And you feel that it will drown at any moment, that something bad is about to happen.

G.S.: I have the impression that through the paintings in which you place people, you wish to portray the condition of our society. The portraits you paint are very diverse in style, but they also move in this direction.

L.F.: The figures are simple and precisely communicate a condition, the moment in which they were created. They do not look back into the past, nor do they create any connection with the future; they exist only in the present, at the moment in which they were created. For me, these are permanently present conditions that will remain valid five hundred years from now. That is why I have followers who are influenced by my paintings and work in the same way.

G.S.: I would like to return to the portraits. I think you have just referred to the small outlined figures, but I meant the ‘close-ups’: portraits of people such as the homeless, or portraits seen from an extreme perspective, when you look down at someone from above. They affect me deeply and I would like to know what inspired these works.

L.F.: In these portraits, my models are always people from my immediate surroundings. They may be relatives or acquaintances, but they are always people with whom I have contact. I also have contact with homeless people; I meet them in the street every day and speak with them. They have therefore become part of my work, just as they are part of my life and our society.

G.S.: I find your self-portraits exciting in the same way. As far as I know, some time passed before you painted your first self-portrait. Why was that?

L.F.: I painted self-portraits in my youth, when I was trying to test my abilities and find my place in society. But I painted my first important portrait rather late, when I was nearly fifty: Önarckép Fülessapkában (Self-Portrait in a Fur Hat) in 2001. It is reproduced in the book Magyar Remekművek (Hungarian Masterpieces), published by the Hungarian National Gallery. The painting naturally has a historical context. I am a representation of that historical context. Everyone’s feelings and reactions to the painting were quite extreme at the time.

G.S.: I am not sure I understand the historical context. The fur hat with earflaps reminds me of the Soviet army—is that right? You have used this motif in many self-portraits, including the tondo (a circular painting—J.M.) that I saw in Tác today.

L.F.: Yes, of course; the ushanka was worn by all Warsaw Pact soldiers. In the painting you have just mentioned, I face the viewer and confront them with everything comical about the hat. The tondo-shaped self-portrait Önarckép ellenfényben (Self-Portrait against the Light) from 2011, with its black face, can be interpreted in the same way. I painted it for a themed exhibition at the Jewish Museum here in Budapest. It could not be shown, however, because at the same time it was included in a major solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Étienne.

G.S.: There is also a new, very powerful self-portrait being shown here at Art Market by Ralf Dellert’s gallery from Munich. In it you sit facing the viewer as a dark form against a light background, while behind you stands a figure holding your ears in its hands.

L.F.: I painted it after an experience in Berlin. We were walking around Berlin on a pleasant afternoon, when I could feel the city breathing. I was fascinated by the entire setting, by the movement of people in the streets. I enjoyed the city and immersed myself in its atmosphere, in everything at once.

At the same time, I could not stop thinking about the conflict-ridden situation in Hungary. I wanted to push these thoughts away. I wanted to immortalise those moments in Berlin, and I sat on a stone imagining someone approaching, placing their hands over my ears and keeping everything away from me. A protective gesture.

G.S.: I would like to return once more to the portraits viewed from an extreme perspective. It is an artistic feat to work with such pronounced foreshortening. Yet these paintings evoke strong emotions in me because, as the viewer, I am placed in an extreme observational position, looking down, for example, at someone below.

L.F.: This also relates to what we have already discussed. You look down from above, like God looking at another person, and that person appears to be a tiny, frail being. Here, of course, the question is whether the artist is a creator or whether the work is the creation of the creator—in other words, of God. What matters to me as an artist is expanding the concept of art and continuing to make it possible to consider works of art from different angles and in new ways.

*László Fehér spoke with Dr Gudrun Szczepanek on 30 November 2013 during Art Market Budapest.

Translated into Polish by Jacek Michalak