In connection with Ernő Fóth’s first exhibition, opened in 1965 at the Mednyánszky Szalon by Sándor Weöres, Rezső Szíj wrote in Alföld: “He is one of those young artists who stand on the boundary between Surrealism and non-figurative art, for whom colour is their element, their sole means of image-making. It is not so much objective reality that interests them as the emotional effect exerted upon the viewer.” This observation remained, more or less, valid throughout the artist’s subsequent career of nearly half a century. One thing is certain: Ernő Fóth adhered consistently to his distinctive formal idiom and handling of colour, and never strayed from the path he had mapped out for himself. Over the years devoted to artistic work, he also produced numerous sgraffiti, mosaics, wood intarsias, and tapestries, alongside his Surrealist and non-figurative paintings.
During the years of dictatorship, Fóth avoided open confrontation with the regime; yet, by his own admission, he did not seek to curry favour with it either. In one interview, he placed himself among the artists tolerated by the system. Accordingly, he did not shape his style to meet an overarching set of expectations but followed his own principles. Even before the political transition, he travelled abroad on scholarship several times. During these periods overseas, he sought to acquaint himself with the art of the countries he visited (France, Italy, India) and to incorporate it into his own work; he expanded his artistic repertoire by introducing materials not customary in easel painting (textile, emfix, wood, and so forth). Nevertheless, his activity can be connected above all to the bloodstream of art in Hungary – if not through his choice of subject matter, then through the atmosphere of his works, their motifs, and his engagement with Hungarian fine-art traditions.
Ernő Fóth is a painter who employs the formal solutions of modern art in a contemporary and sovereign manner. “He builds his oeuvre – sublimates it – upon real experiences, lived events, and given situations. His pictorial world is plastically saturated with emotions, passions and tensions. It is, almost poetically, a symbolic association of images,” wrote a critic in 1979.
Fóth’s style was formed from several genres, often of quite different origins; yet he succeeded in fusing these divergent influences into a unified whole. His painting may be described as fundamentally realist, with the hallmarks of Constructivism also recognisable. Even at the outset of his career, his works could not be neatly assigned to any single stylistic current, although in his early pictures the influence of his teachers is often perceptible – above all that of Jenő Barcsay (“through his colours handled in a monochrome manner and in his method of spatial condensation”) and of Endre Domanovszky. Despite the many parallels, however, he did not become their imitator; rather, his art developed alongside theirs. According to Endre Aszalós, István Nagy is Fóth’s art-historical predecessor – in his monograph, he draws a parallel between the two artists. In his view, their activity and outlook are similar: both are characterised by compactness, seriousness, and laconic restraint, despite the fact that several decades separate them.
Fóth’s visual language is often characterised by the absence of perspective and by content “represented on the foremost plane,” through which “content creates the force of immediate proximity: we become part of his pictorial world, which is always elevated in spirit, almost festive in tone. In terms of content, he does not extract stories, plots, or events from real life; rather, he evokes a concrete or created situation, a phenomenon. He removes his subject from its imaginable, yet in his judgement secondary and superfluous, environment, so that the essential content becomes the sole artistic force,” writes Endre Aszalós.
In his paintings, he developed a methodical, structure-emphasising, formal language in which symbolic motifs play a major role. He drew heavily on the form-building of Synthetic Cubism, which evokes reality through invented abstract elements, and certain works also recall Constructivism. Although he did not consider himself a Constructivist, he regarded the balance of a composition’s structural components as indispensable, and thus concerned himself extensively with the question: “A broader knowledge of the structural possibilities of image-making has, for me, expanded the boundaries of painting; it has often inspired me, shown me the way…” he said in an interview in 1983.
Several elements in Ernő Fóth’s pictures also link him to Western tendencies. His working method was influenced by the automatism of gesture painting, which, through the creator’s spontaneous inner sensitivity and impulses, imbues the artwork with drama.
In connection with his 1965 exhibition, Géza Perneczky perceived in Fóth’s toolkit the “spiritual provision” of Henry Moore and Marino Marini, and, with regard to his handling of surfaces, some have also detected in his works the influence of Jean Fautrier, who worked in the Tachist idiom. Around the turn of the millennium, graffiti art appeared in his pictures entitled Falfirkák (Wall Scribbles). Judit Szeifert, curator of the 2015 memorial exhibition, summarised Ernő Fóth’s art as “lyrical archaism”.
Fóth’s use of colour lends his works a sombre mood; his compositions reflect the ‘greyish’ sense of life characteristic of the period. He works with a limited palette, primarily various shades of brown, as well as black, white, grey, blue and red (as in Repesz [Shrapnel], Metamorfózis [Metamorphosis], Kráter [Crater], and Földmarkolók [Earth Graspers]); vivid, pure colours appear only very rarely in his work. His palette is thus reduced yet subtle and refined; his motifs are shaped with impasto, while his structural construction is of great compositional importance. “One can clearly perceive the artist’s summarising talent – his ability to think on a grand scale and to construct a compositional structure that is lucid and graspable from a single viewpoint. His sense of proportion, evident in inner detailing, articulation, and in his choice of colours, also attests to surprising maturity. Proportionality, the effect of drawing and of patches of colour, the graphic and the painterly character are everywhere organically fused, and are uniformly characteristic of every surface and scene,” writes his monographer, Endre Aszalós.
Figures from Greek mythology (Prometheus, Venus, Orpheus and Eurydice) frequently appear in his pictures, as do sacred elements familiar from Christian iconography. The motif of the corpus is particularly characteristic of his works from the 1980s. The triangular arrangement in his small oil painting Kompozíció figurákkal (Composition with Figures) evokes the Crucifixion.
In his early oil paintings from 1964, Fej (Head) and Figurák (Figures), the influence of Braque and Barcsay remains palpable. Around this time, he also created collages and assemblage-like works. An example of the former is the 1965 Historia Hungarica (Hungarian History), while the latter is represented by his 1967 work Hangszer (Instrument), which is owned by the Ministry of Education and Culture. The 80 × 60 cm composition emerged at the same time as Pop Art, though, according to his monographer, with a different inflexion. “The content of this work was not formulated based on the familiar aims and motives. Although he, too, used fragments of real objects (for example, an instrument, a textile, a painted piece of wooden cornice, etc.), his aim was nevertheless not to shock. The materials he used became part of the statement in the sense of combining painting; his artistic attitude also differs from that of Pop Art. In his composition, we do not sense a protest against an alienating modern society or against anachronistic conservative forms; cynicism and satire are likewise absent. The work was brought into being through the free shaping of forms, the interaction of materials of differing qualities, a reordering of the composition, and an unbound interpretation of the concept of the instrument.”
Another significant work from this period, Earth Graspers, held in the Hungarian National Gallery’s collection, also appeared in Lajos Németh’s book Modern magyar művészet (lit. Modern Hungarian Art), published in 1968. In this work, signs of György Z. Gács’s influence are evident in both colour and form. In the second half of the decade, Fóth experimented with new procedures; it was then that he began producing plastic panel paintings and painted reliefs that pointed towards sculpture. An early example is his Metamorfózis (Metamorphosis). His 1969 work, Termés (Yield), recalls Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases.
In the early 1970s, the construction of Fóth’s works took a new direction, and his interest shifted towards traditional techniques. “The most decisive change at this time is the new mode of composition: instead of an arrangement determined by central-perspective spatial construction, the pictorial elements are situated in an imaginary space,” writes Endre Aszalós. From this perspective, his tapestry for VASITERV (Vas County Council Design Office) in Szombathely “plays a key role at this important turning point in the oeuvre”.
The three-part, large-scale panel cycle Föld és víz (Earth and Water) – also known as Vénusz születése (The Birth of Venus) – for the Margaret Island Thermal Hotel depicts the birth of Venus. The female figure, already familiar from the tapestry cartoon Földanya (Mother Earth), emerges between two oval forms. The image is characterised by a limited colour range: the foreground is brownish-beige, while blue dominates the background. The head of the torso-like female figure is encircled by a red surface. This classicising form is a recurring motif in Fóth’s works – it also appears as a central figure in the New Delhi tapestries. The monographer judges the three-part, relief-like work a perfect hit for the way it blends mythical symbol with presentness, a visual mode of thought that permits modern associations, and a classically inflected colour harmony. In the same year, he produced his 35-square-metre wood intarsia, Háború és béke (War and Peace), which is on display at the Cultural House of the Hungarian Defence Forces.
Some of Fóth’s works are also associated with music. His diploma work, the three-part fresco Zene és Tánc (Music and Dance), decorated the concert hall wall of the Bartók Béla Secondary School of Music – until the school was demolished. In memory of Bartók, for the centenary of the composer’s birth, he painted a piano-evoking composition, followed by a work created in a similar conception, Kodály emlékére (In Memory of Kodály). The yellowish-red surface, divided by a sharp horizontal white band, resembles a damaged organ. Around this time, he produced his 10-square-metre tapestry Orpheus és Eurydike (Orpheus and Eurydice) for the Hungarian State Opera House. The dead figure of Eurydice seems as if it has stepped into the picture from Odilon Redon’s painting Kyklopsz (Cyclops)… In his 1998 painting Requiem, the motif of a fragmented, artefact-like remnant of an instrument rising from the background recurs.
One of his most decisive works is Mementó (Memento), a 1988 composition realised in several versions, depicting human remains lying on the ground. The message of the work – through the personification of death and destruction – is a warning against the senselessness of war. “The damaged, perishing figure appears before us in a plastic presentation, as a modern Pietà. He is the ‘nameless, tragic hero whose life fell victim to senseless violence’. The elimination of spatial depth in the composition, and its reduction to the foremost plane; the differentiated tonal values of dark colours embedded in uncomfortable greys; the plastic features of the accompanying motifs that allude to tragedy; the surface handling, at points torn and fraying – all these together elevate this powerful work into a memento. The motif of the male body doomed to destruction returns in several works across a decade,” writes Endre Aszalós. This readiness to reuse earlier motifs – to perfect or redefine them – runs through his entire oeuvre. Judit Szeifert argues that, beyond the fact that ‘memento’ was repeatedly used as a title for Ernő Fóth’s paintings, it also emblematically encapsulates the characteristic features of his art.
A work of a different kind, yet likewise an extremely important piece within Ernő Fóth’s oeuvre, is the Széchenyi tapestry: “in which every virtue the artist achieved in this genre is present – a striving for a high degree of painterliness; a pierced structurality; a rich deployment of motifs; and a compositional discipline in their arrangement, now brought together in a single, powerfully effective work.” This piece is now housed in the Széchenyi Mansion, Nagycenk.
“In light of this career, we may state that among the various Hungarian movements and endeavours, he is one of the connecting, synthesising artistic personalities who seeks to synthesise realist tendencies, symbolic aspirations, and international Constructivist and Surrealist currents,” we could read in a 2001 issue of Sárvári Hírlap.
One of his last large-scale works, the oil painting 1956. november 4. (4 November 1956), painted in 2006, crowns a long oeuvre of high quality. From the picture plane, painted in shades of grey and brown, there seems to rise a charred, ancient face with eyes clenched shut, upon whose crown glowing fragments explode apart…
[2015]