Viola Berki was always regarded as something of an outsider within Hungarian visual art. She was a highly individual and remarkably versatile artist – she painted in oil on canvas, worked in watercolour, pencil and ink, produced etchings, was no stranger to mosaic art, and also illustrated periodicals and children’s storybooks.
Her father also painted and soon recognised his daughter’s talent. As she later recalled, she “began to draw in order to reach in her pictures the world she could not inhabit in reality”. Concealing her landowning family background, she applied to the Képzőművészeti Főiskola (today Hungarian University of Fine Arts), where she was initially regarded as a promising talent. She was later, however, expelled on account of her social origin (her parents had been landowners – a disqualifying background in the early socialist period), and although her abilities secured her readmission a year later, she could not, on this second attempt, adapt to the teaching in the class of Géza Fónyi. Fónyi, who considered Berki “unfit for cultivation”, imagined artistic education in accordance with the realistic representational norms that dominated the 1960s. Yet these expectations did not resonate with a painter who had grown up in a rural, peasant environment (Berki was raised on Kötöny-puszta, on the outskirts of Kiskunhalas), and who had been shaped by the allure of Hungary’s heroic historical past, biblical themes, and the exoticism of Eastern art.
Berki was also connected, through her wider family, to significant figures of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hungarian culture: her distant uncle was Károly Bulcsú [Hungarian journalist and revolutionary], friend of Sándor Petőfi [major nineteenth-century Hungarian poet] and one of the ‘Márciusi ifjak’ [‘Youth of March’, leaders of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution]. Bulcsú fought as a honvéd [soldier of the Hungarian Revolutionary Army] in the War of Independence. She was also a close relative of János Tornyai [Hungarian painter associated with the Nagybánya tradition], who as a young man often visited the Berki household.
“From early youth, as my talent unfolded, I already had a vision of how I wished to work once I had acquired sufficient technical skill. My models in matters of artistic mastery and talent were the creators of the early Renaissance and, later, of Persian miniatures, with their magical colour worlds” – she stated in a 1998 interview. “I wished to approach the great masters and reach their level. But during my academy years I had already had to give up that hope, seeing that the methods of contemporary art education made this impossible,” she continued.
Berki left the Academy in 1958 technically well trained yet uncertain about her future. “The Academy suppressed students’ natural inclination toward self-expression, while failing to teach them the basic principles of image-making and composition.” [1] Around this time she formed a close friendship with Béla Kondor [major figure of post-war Hungarian avant-garde art], whose studio was in the same building as hers. Despite this physical proximity, their work does not betray obvious mutual influence: “Kondor’s oeuvre had a profoundly liberating effect; one gained courage from him. But as for anything else, I do not think I can speak for myself. I always strove to paint what was within me.”
Through the artistic circle that gathered around Kondor, Berki also came into contact with several writers – among them János Pilinszky [Catholic poet of the post-war generation], Imre Sarkadi [novelist and dramatist], and László Nagy [poet], who later wrote a poem for her titled Viola rajzai (lit. Viola’s Drawings). “It was enough for me to see Kondor’s works and to read László Nagy; that meant more than any kind of communal artistic philosophising could have offered. These friends were people of integrity; that is how they lived and worked. I learnt from them an attitude, a mindset, not merely a few workshop tricks.” [2]
At the suggestion of Arnold Gross [Hungarian painter and graphic artist], Berki approached Dezső Korniss [key figure of the Szentendre School], who each summer placed his Szentendre studio at her disposal. These years were devoted to the discovery of her own style, a process that required the study of the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest and of the Szentendre tradition – above all the techniques of Lajos Vajda [avant-garde painter associated with the Szentendre School] and Jenő Barcsay [painter, theorist, and influential teacher]. She spent time in artist colonies in the Soviet Union, where she became acquainted with the icon-painting tradition of Andrei Rublev, whose influence also found its way into her own visual language.
Although the majority of the profession acknowledged her skill – and she had already attracted considerable attention at the Studio exhibitions of the Ernst Museum, (Budapest) in 1964 with works created in Szentendre (“she received appreciative reviews and was proclaimed one of the promising talents of contemporary Hungarian art, a representative of lyrical constructivism inspired by Szentendre and showing the influence of Lajos Vajda”) [3] – she remained dissatisfied with her choice of subjects and felt that her art was still unformed. By contrast, she was content with the material of her 1969 exhibition in the Derkovits Hall (Budapest), which presented the achievements of the preceding years; from this time onwards, she felt she had found her own artistic voice.
Her graphic work Ballada (lit. Ballad), based on the folk ballad of Anna Molnár – seduced by a soldier yet ultimately returning to her husband – and characterised by a simplified formal vocabulary and a stylised, decorative mode of representation, marked the beginning of a new artistic period.
Berki’s work diverged markedly from the dominant, avant-garde-based ‘progressive’ tendencies of Hungarian visual art. From the second half of the 1960s in particular, her interests increasingly turned toward depicting major figures and events from Hungarian history in a manner evocative of fairy-tale illustration.
From childhood she had been drawn to the art of distant periods and cultures: the Netherlandish Late Gothic and the early Renaissance – especially the works of Piero della Francesca and Pisanello – as well as the millennia-old cultures of the Mediterranean (she visited Italy frequently from the 1980s), Indian art, Persian miniatures, and the reliefs of Assyrian palaces. Traces of all these influences recur in her paintings and graphic works, as does the colour world of the Pre-Raphaelites. In the meticulous detail and minuteness of execution, her prints show affinities with those of Arnold Gross, who had died only recently. Her work often displays features reminiscent of the folk-tinged surrealism of Marc Chagall, and, at times, the visionary quality of paintings by Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka and Lajos Gulácsy can also be felt in her canvases.
Berki’s works are intensely subjective; the recurrent qualities of her romantically toned images include a nostalgia for vanished eras and a longing for classical art. “Her traditional themes, naïve outlook, security of composition, vivid colours, neo-primitive forms, the sincere and charming world of her tales, and their simple beauty simultaneously isolate her and place her on a pedestal among contemporary artistic phenomena.” [4] This artistic path, distancing itself from the avant-garde and drawing on ‘archaic’ and stylised elements, was the result of conscious choice. She made use of folk-art precedents, a practice linked to the traditions of naïve art. According to her monographer, Zita Kovács, “if this outlook is naïve, then it is so chiefly in its good faith. For although she suffered many disappointments, as a Christian she maintained an unbroken faith in humanity and in human goodness.”
Yet in her use of colour, handling of paint and brush, compositional solutions, and overall pictorial construction, she was undeniably professional. In this respect, Berki aligns with artists such as István Pekáry, Jenő Paizs-Goebel, Vladimír Szabó, Ferenc Bolmányi, Margit Anna, Arnold Gross, and Tamás Galambos.
“Throughout my career I was never enthused by the fashionable artistic trends of the moment. I realised that I had no other path than to mine my own inner world and bring to the surface the subjects that needed to be painted, for no one else would do this for me. I am unmoved by today’s so-called “artistic” tendencies, which are almost urged upon us as obligatory. I willingly accept the stigma of being ‘out of date’.” This is how she summarised her artistic creed.
Unfortunately, as a consequence, many within Hungarian art circles simply reduced Viola Berki’s work to decorative art. Despite a career rich in decades of success, her works were omitted from the material of the 1991 exhibition Hatvanas évek (lit. The Sixties) at the Magyar Nemzeti Galéria (Hungarian National Gallery). Her critical standing, however, has since shifted. Her admirer and biographer Károly Szűcs writes of her:
“Many people still love the works of Viola Berki today. Even lay audiences regard these ‘beautiful’ pictures – in the artistic sense of the word – with sympathy; despite her limited recognition, her paintings, etchings and screenprints remain popular. Hers is a compellingly intriguing oeuvre, yet its art-historical context has been undeservedly neglected to this day. Her pictorial world is informally personal, in contrast to the art-historical and critical thinking that operates through formal trends. It is easy to decode, for it works through the re-evocation of surviving memories of history and culture. It is authentic because its creator sought neither to conform to ideological nor professional fashions. And not least, it is a highly accomplished art, incorporating classicising and folk elements, and granting access to a formally elaborated and original visual world that is nonetheless sophisticated and grounded in literary and historical learning.” [5]
From the 1960s onwards she primarily illustrated literary works, and then, in the most personal tone available to her, depicted episodes from the lives of major figures of Hungarian history and rendered portraits of poets. Her compositions come alive before the viewer; their splendid colours and endearing figures linger long in the memory.
“There is scarcely an untouched, white area in her drawings. Every detail is precise, yet this precision does not inhibit the imagination; rather, it encourages us to continue and inwardly live through the depicted scene. Just as folk tales do: they present a complete world-view. The colour and black-and-white drawings of Viola Berki evoke our childhood, the moments of wonder-waiting and wonder-making, when anything could still happen and everything lay within tangible reach,” wrote critics in the early 1980s in the pages of Új Tükör.
From childhood onwards, alongside her lyrical illustrations, Viola Berki was drawn to creating large-scale works – as a secondary-school pupil she painted a 2 × 5 metre composition on the wall of an outbuilding at their home in Kiskunhalas, and during her later visits to the Hungarian National Gallery she regularly marvelled at the monumental historical canvases of Gyula Benczúr (nineteenth-century academic painter).
Her first large mural was the decorative glass mosaic evoking the Ottoman period for the Tárnok utcai Általános Iskola (Tárnok Street Primary School) in 1971. Two years later came the ceramic wall for the training school of the Óvónőképző Intézet (Teacher-Training College of Sopron), followed by a series of commissions: in Debrecen, a mosaic wall bringing to life the life of Mihály Csokonai Vitéz (eighteenth-century Hungarian poet); in Győr, two panels for the guesthouse on Káptalan Hill; and in the 1980s, a wall painting for the Heim Pál Children’s Hospital (Budapest) and a panel for the Wedding Hall in Kiskunhalas depicting the story of Árgyélus királyfi és Tündér Ilona (lit. Prince Árgyélus and Fairy Ilona). In the latter, she renders the characters of the folk tale in a Kiskunhalas setting yet within Eden-like surroundings – a beautiful garden with a golden apple tree, flowers and fountains.
In these works Berki seems to fuse Renaissance staffage painting with a form of comic-strip narration – a method she herself defined as ‘képírás’ (‘picture-writing’). This symbolic garden motif accompanies the final stages of her oeuvre; she also produced numerous etchings on this theme.
Even in her depictions of the most solemn or sorrowful moments she introduces playfulness and charm, so that even tragic episodes of Hungarian history appear transfigured. Her works seem like playful reflections of a world parallel to our own – yet kinder, more humane. “I would like what I have always wanted: to develop towards Renaissance painting. I would be delighted if I could paint something at the level of a seemingly insignificant detail in a Renaissance picture. But I want more than that. I want to create a picture in which everything is present. Totality.” [6]
2015
[1] György Csapó: Berki Viola. Ország-Világ, 19 February 1975, no. 8, p. 19.
[2] Tamás Nádor: Berki Viola. In: Múzsák és mesterek. Párbeszéd a művészekkel (lit. Muses and Masters. Conversations with Artists). Ifjúsági Lap- és Könyvkiadó, 1984, p. 26.
[3] Károly Szűcs: Artmagazin 2012/3, pp. 26–32.
[4] Zita Kovács: Berki Viola – Violaszín pecsét alatt. Berki Viola művészete (lit. Viola Berki – Under a Violet-Coloured Seal. The Art of Viola Berki). Thorma János Múzeum – Halasi Múzeum Alapítvány, Kiskunhalas, 2013.
[5] Károly Szűcs: Artmagazin 2012/3, pp. 26–32.
[6] János Frank: Szóra bírt műtermek (lit. Studios Persuaded to Speak). Budapest: Magvető, 1975.