Ferenc Hann, a poet and art writer, museum specialist and extraordinarily versatile artist active in the last third of the 20th century and the first decade of the new millennium, has an extraordinary oeuvre spanning the last third of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. As a 1989 tape-recorded autobiography reveals, Ferenc Hann was a youth boxing champion and a professional pianist - two rather distant activities, both of which are rarely pursued to the same level in the same career. He then worked as a teacher, did literary research and published works on literary history, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s he became an avant-garde poet, and after that his interest turned to the visual arts, 20th century and contemporary Hungarian art. Already during his initial period of work in Salgótarján, his art writings were published in the journal Palócföld, where he also published his poems, and from 1977, when he moved to Szentendre, where he worked for almost three decades as a staff member of the Ferenczy Museum, they became the exclusive focus of his work for a long time. It is interesting that in the last phase of his career, during his period as a university teacher in Szeged, he returned to poetry: he again published poems in anthologies from the town on the Tisza after the turn of the millennium.
Within this “poetic framework”, over the three decades between 1977 and 2010 – divided into two periods by the so-called change of political system – he created his oeuvre as an art writer and art historian, which was bound by exceptionally strong ties to Szentendre and to the so-called art of Szentendre, a school that is difficult to define precisely. As a poet with an avant-garde outlook who sympathised with the circle around the Paris-based Magyar Műhely and also published his poems in this outstanding journal – and who, during his years in Salgótarján, had formed a lifelong friendship with Pál Nagy, one of the founding editors of a journal that was regarded with suspicion in Hungary for many years – it was only natural that he should emerge as a supporter, advocate, analyst and documenter of progressive artistic initiatives in Szentendre. His interest was drawn to young artists and those who challenged official art – and the authorities – above all the artists associated with the Vajda Lajos Studio in Szentendre or working within its orbit. He was in a difficult position: he had to work within the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre, a privileged institution under strict ideological control, and within the organisational framework of the Pest County Directorate of Museums, struggling on a daily basis with managers who generally possessed little professional expertise and served the political and ideological authorities above them, both nationally and locally. He entered countless conflicts and made few compromises. The creation of Hann’s oeuvre was therefore by no means an untroubled success story, and the same is true of the subsequent fate of his intellectual legacy. The Ferenc Hann estate – a collection of books, periodicals, catalogues and perhaps manuscripts – was deposited in the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre, but it is currently a closed collection, inaccessible to the public and unavailable for research.
During his nearly three decades of museum work and art writing in Szentendre, his professional interests centred primarily on exploring the town’s twentieth-century artistic past, the work of the grand old masters of Szentendre art, and the analysis and presentation of the new artistic spirit of younger generations – alongside commissioned studies dealing with artistic phenomena beyond Szentendre’s immediate sphere. As a museum professional, he curated a series of solo and group exhibitions, both historical and contemporary, in the museums and exhibition spaces of the small town, in Budapest and other Hungarian towns and cities, as well as abroad. In his opening addresses for these exhibitions, in introductions to catalogues for which he served as professional editor, and in the reviews and articles accompanying the exhibitions, he presented, analysed and documented artistic phenomena and developments. He wrote numerous portraits of artists, conducted many interviews with them, and undertook several monographic studies: his writings appeared in Szentendre publications, in nationally distributed journals and professional publications, and in independent volumes. Ferenc Hann was not a theoretician by temperament, nor a synthesising or systematising thinker, but an analyst of events that had taken place in the past and of developments as they unfolded in the present: he formulated his aesthetic conclusions and art-historical lessons in connection with individual exhibitions, periods, phases in an artist’s career and entire oeuvres. Precisely observed phenomena, analyses described – to use one of his favourite expressions – with abundant “ammunition”, and assessments and judgements grounded in an unerring sense of quality interlock throughout the sequence of his writings on art. His work is characterised by meticulous language, an expansive style, an individual perspective and a great deal of irony. Naturally, he was not infallible and often experienced uncertainty. In a monologue recorded on tape in 1989, he confessed:
“…what I am doing now, this work as an art historian, is absolutely a substitute activity, and it does not satisfy me at all. It does satisfy me in the sense that I have managed to launch quite a few talented young artists on their careers, to help them and to write about their work, but fundamentally I am simply not this kind of person; it wears me out. Of course, there is a certain peace of mind in the fact that, seen from the perspective of the passing years, events have proved me right. … When I had to write a three-page piece, an art-historical text, I found myself in a kind of reverse horror vacui. It is like a painter standing in front of an empty canvas and compulsively covering it with paint because he cannot bear the empty surface, except that in my case the problem is that I cannot fill the empty surface. I find writing terribly difficult, although once it came automatically. I cannot work through these problems, and it makes me feel utterly miserable. I feel as though I am in a vacuum, and I do not know whether there is any way out of it. …”
A bibliographical survey of Ferenc Hann’s writings – which, because of the difficulties of research, can by no means be regarded as complete – provides an overview of his wide-ranging professional activities as well as his work as a poet. Longer monographic studies, extensive interviews covering entire careers, catalogue introductions, portraits of artists, poems and visual poems together form an overall picture from which the history and phenomena of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art in Szentendre and Hungary emerge, along with their literary connections.
Ferenc Hann’s oeuvre demonstrates that he joined the ranks of those art historians and art writers who came within the orbit of Szentendre and under the spell of its art – Éva Körner, Lenke Haulisch, Lajos Németh, János Frank, Iván Dévényi, Ferenc Bodri, András Mucsi, Vanda M. Várhelyi, Bálint Chikán (and colleagues who remain active today). Like that of so many of his predecessors and former contemporaries, his oeuvre as an art historian is of exceptional importance and outstanding significance, raises new perspectives, and may be considered indispensable to the comprehensive research that lies ahead and to the construction of an objective historical picture. Beyond all this, it would also be important to study his progressive poetic oeuvre, associated primarily with the Paris-based Magyar Műhely circle and the (the old) Mozgó Világ published in Budapest. Since a collected selection of his writings on art is due to appear in the first half of 2014 with the support of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, it would be desirable for his poetry likewise to be preserved for posterity in a similar collection.
[2015]