The art of Tihamér Gyarmathy humanizes and renders accessible “the most shocking experience of the past century: the modern scientific worldview. He achieves this by evoking visual impressions of phenomena of which we possess only knowledge or abstract concepts. His artistic program was to create a pictorial system of signs for energies analogous to those of nature. To express the philosophical problems of space, time, material unity, and relativity, he developed a visual system organized from circles, squares, and arcs. These geometric basic units generate a pulsating inner rhythm, almost musical forms, measures, dissonances, and consonances, according to the laws of that indefinable objectivity also known from music.”[1]
A central aim of his art was the representation of space through light. “[…] colour is my most important tool of expression. There is something here akin to music. Like it, I want to affect emotion, not intellect. Through logical reasoning, my paintings can only be distanced from” – he said in one of his interviews.[2] It seems as though he did not paint colours but sources of light. This is also why his art resembles music.
He believed that a painting is better if it does not depict something concretely, but still means something, by making use of the expressive possibilities inherent in colours. This is important because when a composition depicts a clearly identifiable figure, the descriptive representation is too easily mistaken for the essence of the work. Yet a composition is in fact a spiritual projection of its own era.
In his view, the creation of a world by the artist depends not only on poetry but also on mathematics, and within the creative process the construction of an individual structure is of fundamental importance.
Although after 1948 cultural policy made it impossible for Gyarmathy to present his work publicly, during the years of prohibition he did not cease creating, and throughout his long life he consistently remained faithful to his personal conception of art. He experimented with approaches to universal laws – at once intuitive and sensuously tangible – that were confirmed in their own domains by the scientific results of the century.
Albert Kováts saw Gyarmathy’s greatness in his ability to keep pace with the tendencies of the century, and at times even to anticipate them. Time proved him right – he became a point of reference already in his lifetime. Here we must not forget his close friendship with the painter Ernő Kállai, nor that his views were rooted in Kállai’s artistic ideology. Gyarmathy’s abstract conception of “bioromanticism”, developed in the 1940s, emerged in the wake of Kállai’s essay A természet rejtett arca (The Hidden Face of Nature). “[…] from the living unity of nature – indeed, of the whole universe – and of man, it follows that painterly or plastic rhythms springing from the artist’s very blood and innermost soul may become universal in meaning, cosmic visions or symbols – even if they do not depict mountains and valleys, oceans and planets”, writes Kállai in his 1947 work.
Ernő Kállai had earlier worked as the art-theoretical critic of the journal Ma. In the 1920s he was employed at the British Museum and the National Gallery; in Berlin he worked for the Bauhaus journal, then he served as editor for Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. After returning to Hungary in 1935, he joined the staff of Jelenkor, later becoming head of the art section at Pester Lloyd. Between 1946 and 1948 he taught at the College of Applied Arts, but was soon dismissed. Nevertheless, Gyarmathy could always count on the support of this highly erudite critic – committed to the more progressive tendencies in the visual arts – until his death in 1954.
The artist’s early works – created in the early 1930s, before he had yet found his own individual voice – display “powerful, structured drawing combined with a slightly Novecento tone”[3], while his painting Cirkusz (Circus) also reveals the influence of Rouault. In mid-decade works such as Csodavárók (Expecting a Miracle) (1934) and Bányászanya (Miner’s Mother) (1935), the impact of Gyula Derkovits is unmistakable. In his Női arckép (Female Portrait) of 1936 one seems almost to see the alter ego of Pietro Bembo.
From the early 1940s, after returning from his study trip to Switzerland and becoming acquainted with Kállai, he began to develop his distinctive lyrical abstract world, in which structures referring back to nature always retained a privileged role. Already in Italy he had realized the obsolescence of Euclidean spatial perception, and thus broke with what he considered outdated modes of depiction. Instead, he employed intense colours and a dynamic, mobile yet fluid system of geometric forms. Some define this period of his oeuvre as “lyrical constructivism,” based on the barely perceptible dissolution of geometric order. He fused the sensuality of colour with the saturation of lyrical emotion.
Gyarmathy remained untouched by the effects of the Stalinist “cultural propaganda” that surged forward with great force after 1945, which attributed ideological content to form and political stance to style. He understood clearly that artistic vision and artistic conception arise through the practice of the visual arts, and that “masterpieces” do not emerge from contemporary political slogans and prescribed themes.
“We wanted to unite all avant-garde artists of the Danube Valley in an association. This did not come to fruition, as we were unable to establish real contact, to exchange ideas with one another. Yet great things did happen. In 1945 the European School was founded. From this the community of abstract artists separated, because they did not want us to exhibit independently. The Galéria a 4 világtájhoz (Gallery of the Four Points of the Compass) was established. This, together with Kállai’s book A természet rejtett arca, decisively influenced my thinking. A major event was the third Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, in which, under the leadership of Kállai and the sculptor István Beőthy, who was living in Paris, a number of Hungarian artists also took part.”[4]
The formal world, the “presence of an imaginary space of thought” that continued to characterise his style even in his later period, “began to unfold in the paintings of the second half of the 1940s: in his first works, increasingly abstracted from figuration, he depicted successive layers placed behind one another, where foreground, middle ground and background penetrate into one another, and space is shaped through the modulation of colour. At this time, he also embarked on the creation of a series of some 200 sheets of metal foil – produced over a number of years and only completed in the 1960s. The shiny, silver-glittering surface of the foil gleams through the green paint applied upon it, further articulated by the incised motifs. This device evokes infinite space – infinite both in time and in extension – the unbounded, unenclosed cosmos, without beginning or end. This subsequently became the fundamental problem of his entire pictorial world and continues to preoccupy him to this day. At the turn of the decade, he also experimented with small-scale abstract-surrealist paintings (Sors –Fate, 1950) and photograms. During the 1950s, however, he abandoned the surreal elements in his pictures and constructed them purely in a constructive manner.”[5] Already at this stage a compositional type appears that was to become dominant in his oeuvre: he opened up the picture plane, making use of the inward-pulling force of cold colours. His compositions were initially single-centred (Növények és épületek – Plants and Buildings, likewise from 1950), but later became multi-centred. He transformed pictorial space into a divided yet unified spatial structure by means of a horizontal-vertical network system, in which the structuring power of light manifested through colour both divides and unifies, emphasises and subordinates. As he himself put it: “I regard colour as a source of light […], the juxtaposition of light sources […] creates a sense of space.”
Gyarmathy’s best-known creative period, which reached fulfilment in the years following the Revolution, turned gradually outward towards the universe, the cosmos, the world of outer space – as opposed to his earlier pictorial idiom of inward-turning, enclosed forms, suggesting fenced-in, teeming microcosms and biomorphic growths. At the same time, the microcosm as a theme was retained by him at a higher level of meaning. “After 1956 he developed an extremely flexible visual language, capable of shaping countless pictorial ideas, which perfectly suited his method of creation based on the polarity of part and whole. The majority of the works born under this sign are built up from small pictorial elements, like mosaic tesserae, yet these building blocks are not only in static juxtaposition but also in transparent relation and dynamic interpenetration with one another. The painterly units, closely interwoven in pictorial terms, form a structural order that is different in each painting. A special role is played here by the artist’s particular attraction to rhythm, which governs the movement of the pictorial elements with great variety. The result is a fabric-like, vibrating surface, which from both near and far provides an exciting visual experience and a delight to the eye. Colour plays a decisive role in this. Gyarmathy is a born colourist, frequently making use of complementary contrasts. The rich surface promising almost a tactile experience at close range, allows the most varied possibilities of painterly modelling and texture to be displayed in the exhibition. Forms, formal ideas and solutions flow with abundant invention and great intensity, representing a force of striking impact.” (László Fábián) One of the pillars of Gyarmathy’s visual language was his exploration of the capacity of colour to generate a sense of space. “Through his gradually modulated tones, his effects shifting from cold lights to warm radiance, and the expressive connections of shades, he creates structures of multiple meaning, a multidimensional spatial world. Textural solutions also have particular significance. In the process of reception unfolding over time they set in motion new associative processes in the viewer. As a result of individual receptive activity, these spaces of infinite relations – even though on a two-dimensional plane – are set into motion with evocative power and become dynamic”, writes Mária Husz.[6]
“In 1957 something glimmered at the Spring Exhibition. Then once more came the darkness. There were those who viewed matters from a frog’s perspective, serving the powers that be. But very many good artists did not accept collaboration. The saddest fate was that of Ernő Kállai, condemned to silence – he destroyed himself within a few years. Yet those who had the strength continued along their own paths, for it was never merely a question of making abstract art, but of following through an entire sequence of connections. In art, it was always the spiritual content that was decisive. If this intellectual background is lacking, then it is nothing but bluff, sand scattered in the wind. Art, even with the passage of time, is to be revered above all for its spiritual greatness…”[7]
Thus, instead of Socialist Realism, he continued to pursue his own path: “I was concerned with spatial relations that perhaps few others addressed. Painting speaks of these new dimensions, but so too does music, to which I have been drawn since my youth. Indeed, the art of the time was so homogeneous – I mean progressive-spirited art – that artists in different branches, and in different countries, ultimately spoke of the same questions”, he stated in the already mentioned interview conducted by Ernő P. Szabó. His paintings lead us into the world of a creator simultaneously confronting the micro- and macrocosms, reflecting the collective consciousness of humanity. The best examples are his works from the mid-to-late 1960s, composed of countless squares and patches of varying colours and sizes, such as Gazdag lelet (Rich Find), Kompozíciós tér (Compositional Space), Növényi élettér (Plant Habitat), Konszonancia (Consonance), or the large-scale piece Téridő a világképben (Space-Time in the Worldview), which most characteristically sums up Gyarmathy’s aspirations.
In the 1960s, the means of transforming theory into sensuous vision became a new system of signs, lapidary in its simplicity, making use of geometric elements, which by the end of the decade crystallised into the most important component of his individual style. With this system, this pictorial language, a world-model was created, both in philosophical and visual terms. The painter, labouring to break the visual hegemony of Renaissance perspective based on Euclidean geometry and of the Kantian space of intuition, and guided by Kállai’s theory of bioromanticism, also kept in view “the hidden face of nature.” The dual character of his painting reflects this polarity. The atectonic forms that evoke organic associations are not merely psychic imprints of metaphysical anxiety, but counterpoints to the spiritual space, ordered in a grid structure and permeated with magnetic forces.
His horizontal-vertical grid system is akin to Vasarely’s, yet altogether different: whereas Vasarely presents homogeneous surfaces and thus depicts space through juxtaposed colours calculated by machines, producing an abstract, objectless and most often enclosed world, Gyarmathy always adhered to the ancient procedure of painting. As a result, his colour-squares are never completely identical, and this variety individualises them; his space is not enclosed, but infinitely extendable, though by virtue of his method always determined, just as a segment of a circle determines the entire circle. With this system he presents and opens ever new spaces suffused with light, and thus attempts to bring before us the secrets of the cosmos. His multi-centred compositions unfold through the structures of colour and form set in tension with one another. The variations are abundant: at times he halves the squares and arranges them one beneath the other along a vertical line – thereby producing the sensation that space is swelling outward (Struktúrák sugárzásban – Structures in Radiation, 1980; Tükröződés – Reflection, 1981); at other times, small squares encircle circular segments arranged around a circular central core, this then surrounded horizontally by larger squares, the composition finally closed by a series of concentric squares (Centrális sugárzású kompozíció – Composition with Central Radiation, 1980). Likewise in his graphic works he was preoccupied with the dialectical representation of relative spatial positions, adapting himself to the possibilities of the chosen technique: here he developed a wide range of variations, from thin, calligraphic rendering to surface formation built upon thick patches, relying on the effect of black-and-white and its variations.
In the works of Tihamér Gyarmathy, countless fragments of the infinite space surrounding us come to light, revealing the rich variety of spatial structures. While retaining the traditional tools of the visual arts – the panel painting and the brush – he constructed his own world in the manner of the masters of the classical avant-garde, aptly characterised by the saying: “the whole ocean is contained within a single drop.” The dynamism of his paintings, the radiant richness of his colours, and the variety of his formal order render his works unique.
For, as the painter once remarked, “In the mirror of art, eras are preserved, and through them the spiritual nature and standard of the age may be discerned. Human capacities are expressed in spiritual creations, projecting their value. The totality of these values is the image of the era for the posterity.” He added: “I work with the technique of glazing, thus the painting will surely endure for several centuries.”
[2015]
[1] http://kormendigaleria.hu/kiallitas/466.html
[2] Az euklidészi tér nem az egyetlen térrendszer – Látogatóban Gyarmathy Tihamér festőművésznél. (Euclidean space is not the only spatial system - Visiting Tihamér Gyarmathy, painter.) Interview by Ernő P. Szabó, Új Magyarország Magazin, 15 February 1992.
[3] http://artportal.hu/lexikon/muveszek/gyarmathy-tihamer-94
[4] Az euklidészi tér nem az egyetlen térrendszer – Látogatóban Gyarmathy Tihamér festőművésznél. Interview by Ernő P. Szabó, Új Magyarország Magazin, 15 February 1992.
[5] Sándor Láncz: Képzőművészeti krónika. Jelenkor, 1983/10
[6] Mária Husz: Téridő. Exhibition catalogue, Pécs Gallery, 1983
[7] E Az euklidészi tér nem az egyetlen térrendszer – Látogatóban Gyarmathy Tihamér festőművésznél. Interview by Ernő P. Szabó, Új Magyarország Magazin, 15 February 1992.
[8] Tihamér Gyarmathy, 1964