Hungarian textile art has developed along a multitude of trajectories, particularly since it began to explore sculptural modes of three-dimensional form several decades ago. For textile art is not merely a matter of the craft of weaving, at least in the case of artists who weave their own tapestries, but equally a matter of surface treatment and pictorial organisation. This expanded mode of expression, shaped by appliqué conceived as a technical ‘marvel’ and by the use of unconventional materials (metal, porcelain, bone, etc.), calls upon creative capacities that extend well beyond manual dexterity.
However, such complexities do not concern Beáta Hauser. Through her textiles, her hand-woven tapestries, she seeks to extend into space by grounding the illusion in a drawing that relates to the world in all its dimensions: history, collective experience, and personal fate. Her interest lies neither in the exact transfer of pictorial reality from painted cartoons, nor in the otherwise venerable conventions of the centuries-old French Gobelin tradition, but in the possibility of reworking a carefully conceived composition (graphic design) during the process itself, ensuring that no invention capable of sustaining creative intensity is lost.
Certain temperamental traits clearly informed this mode of working: an ability to attune oneself to the material, a drive to test formal variations at once, and the inventive play of a spirit able to discipline even the sombre loom. A form of wise obstinacy, more reliable than established knowledge itself, yet unwilling to yield its force even under the pressure of doubt. One might describe this as an experimental disposition, were it not so strongly shaped by conscious intent: a quality that functions, almost throughout, as the foundation of creation, carrying the psalm-like injunction “I trusted in myself from the beginning”.
Her restless personality, perpetually compelled towards expression, or self-realisation, could not remain still for a moment. During her studies at the College of Applied Arts (now: Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design), in the mid to late 1970s, she immersed herself into the vibrant community milieu of the táncház movement [a movement related to ‘casual’ Hungarian folk dance events {as opposed to stage performances}; it is an aspect of the Hungarian roots revival of traditional culture which began in the early 1970s], which at the time functioned almost as a cultural mission and was associated with the musical group Muzsikás. By that time, the diverse forms of folk poetry and folk art had already assumed the role of formative cultural practices, as evidenced by Sándor Csoóri’s two seminal essays, Szántottam gyöpöt (lit. I Have Ploughed the Field) and Egykor elindula tizenkét kőmíves (lit. Once Upon a Time, Twelve Stonemasons Set Forth), or by his essay A magyar apokalipszis (lit. The Hungarian Apocalypse), a reflective reckoning with the catastrophe of the Hungarian Second Army on the River Don during the Second World War, which confronted historical indifference.
The journeys in Transylvania (including táncház events in Sic [Szék] and in the Ghimeș [Gyimes] region) proved highly formative and helped to set the direction for her awakening and increasingly self-aware spirit, while at the same time energised her and offered a model of conduct. Through these experiences, whether consciously or not, the Bartókian model emerged and assumed an almost central position in Hauser Beáta’s autonomous graphic work, signifying not only the ‘pure source’ but also a discipline of conduct and a mode of mutual recognition between individual and community. This framework encompasses not only the coloured-pencil and ink drawings that emphasise an attachment to place and develop a modern graphic network out of interlinked ethnographic motifs (Csíkkarcfalva [Cârța], Parasztház Csíkkarcfalván [Peasant House in Cârța]; as well as Rajzüzenetek [Graphic Messages], Rejtőzködő [In Hiding]), but also those sheets in which the pen, intent on preserving the purity of the soul, calls the domineering power to account on behalf of the community for the degrading acts that debase us all (Üdvözlet a szabadság fővárosából [Greetings From the Capital of Freedom]; Kom-lib-dem [Com–Lib–Dem]).
Even this brief introductory sketch makes it clear that, unlike for most textile artists, graphic art occupies a place in Hauser Beáta’s oeuvre equal in importance and quality to that of textile work. In her body of work, it is neither possible nor particularly appropriate to draw a distinction between these two fields of the visual arts, even though her public profile as a textile artist is far more widely recognised than her work as a graphic artist. No specialist knowledge is required, since the attentive viewer, moving from exhibition to exhibition, encounters a largely figurative world built from fragments of memory, mosaics of events, family-related themes, and numerous details drawn from cultural history, lived experience, and nature. With its sharply distorting edge, which precisely for this reason brings into relief the most characteristic features of the drawn living or inanimate figures, her grotesque way of seeing and mode of representation endow both ‘minor’ and ‘major’ figures with distinct character.
Isten hozott (Welcome) evokes the world of a formerly existing wall hanging, Utazás (Journey) evokes the elements (motifs) of rural destitution with an almost inventory-like richness, Parasztpár (Peasant Couple) is an exemplary instance of near-photographic austerity, Csoportkép (Group Portrait) depicts schoolchildren and children of kindergarten age of a village around a head-scarved teacher (including a striking red polka-dot ball), and Család (Family) depicts a mother and father framing children with deathlike faces. All of these works draw their inspiration and vitality from an imaginative repertoire shaped by compassion-starved poverty.
Beyond sociographic or photographically grounded modes of evocation, for the terrain of remembrance is often thorny, the work articulates an underlying boundless compassion, woven into the textile as a form of lived truth. For this reason, she has removed the Sun from above the heads of the figures in her images, allowing that the Moon, endowed with visionary force and emerging from the dungeons of happiness or bitter sorrow, may radiate the same light as its equally symbol-laden counterpart, and fan the embers of the night into flames. Without venturing into the already existing, or merely implied, Hauserian mythology, it is worth noting that “early Christian art depicted Christ in the form of Helios, the Sun god”. From here it is but a short step to one of the most recent and perhaps most significant works of her textile oeuvre, Végül (In the End), in which the mundanely crucified body, through the undulating folds that resemble a trembling shroud, may reveal the suffering body of the Sun-god-as-self.
One of the commentators on Hauser’s oeuvre, Tibor Wehner writes of her that she is “a creator of traditional textile wall images, that is, woven tapestries (…), who conceives of composition in terms of an illusionistic pictorial surface representing elements of reality, above all human figures, while in matters of image-making and representation adhering to a markedly different outlook and a conceptual logic distinct from that of her predecessors.” Although the nostalgically inflected compositions, infused with grotesque and ironic overtones, and evoking a vanished world through family photographs, Esküvő (Wedding, 1978), Pár (Couple, 1979), Family (1980), were still created in the spirit of traditional composition, they already display the first signs of a distinctive creative method.
A characteristic formal feature of the early works is what has been termed “undulating weaving: a mode of image construction based on undulating lines and band-like, rasterised surface structures, which on the one hand generate an illusion of movement and, on the other, transpose the depicted motif into a realm of memory permeated by uncertainty.” With the exception of Velemi gobelin (Velem Tapestry, 1980), the compositions produced during this period are characterised by a restrained, almost monochrome palette, as noted by Wehner.
There is no luxuriating in colour here, no reliance on colourful patch effects. As Péter Fitz, one of the most perceptive interpreters of the oeuvre, observes, the blue-brown-white palette, tinged with touches of ochre, often recalls the tonality of yellowed photographs, as though the frequently grotesque evocation of the historical (urban and familial) past were permeated by the bitter, searing pain of remembrance. Her exceptional command of drawing, which in the case of the tapestries is grounded in stripe-based and later dot-based weaving structures, compels even the most meticulously detailed photographic source, inevitably reworked in the process, into its own slightly ironic network of lines. The already mentioned Family and Búsmagyar (Melancholy Hungarian, 1988) are characteristic examples of this mode of transforming the old into something ‘new-old’.
However, the yellow witch of Velem Tapestry, functioning as a chromatic ‘floating island’ and serving a different conception of beauty, stands in marked contrast to these works; and the closed-eyed, remembering figure of Lovag (Knight, 1984), with its organically proliferating, desert-like hair and beard, as well as Mosoly (Smile, 1983), with its white surfaces and its portrait that shocks through its fixed gaze, articulate a sense of time symbolised by wave-like motion, a time that, if one wishes, may be understood as the time that fragments the personality (hence the emphasis on the imitation of movement). Taken together, these elements suggest that the nostalgic phase of remembrance, perhaps precisely through the adoption of a new structural principle, involves a heightened dramatic tension.
From here, the path leads towards the almost single-line graphic audacity of Kilenc firka (Nine Scribbles, 1986), Üzenet (Message), and Bábu (Puppet, both 1987), then towards the strangely compelling yet non-figurative Himnusz (Hymn, 1996), and ultimately towards a major work, In the End, conceived as a work of reflective synthesis. However, it should be noted that by the late 1980s the artist’s attention had already turned towards simplified forms and towards the line understood as an autonomous system of signs. Through her graphic inventiveness, she created a powerful world that remains compelling in its complexity, at times arising from a near-void, with meaning carried by an amorphous form.
The bitter or grotesque figures of the tapestries almost inevitably point towards the pictorial world of Hymn, which departs significantly from earlier modes of representation. Through its multitude of abstract forms, abandoning figurative representation, the textile artist moves beyond the modes of depiction characteristic of her earlier tapestries. While in the case of Tollon (On a Feather, 1990), a work impressive for its nearly two-metre height, she created a simultaneously moving and subtly self-ironic example of organic density and beauty (suggestive, perhaps, of a bird’s wing, or of freedom), then in her work that translates the national anthem into textile form it is an array of non-figurative forms, functioning less as narrative than as a constellation of affective forces, that comes to dominate.
For Hymn encompasses history, homeland, familiar landscape, suffering, and freedom, it has the most affecting or most elevated repository of symbols; at the same time, with no lesser force, Hymn is a record of our supplication and entreaty, a multitude of barely nameable fragments and moments of life that out of perennial chaos strive towards consolation. Although some of them evoke the Hungarian Reform Era [1825–1848], the amorphous forms that are depicted across the twenty-five vertical rectangle (puppet, helmet, wreath, bird, aeroplane, stage, breastplate, etc.) relinquish concrete reference and, in their very rough-hewn materiality, suggest a sense of harmony. In its ‘wordlessness’, this can still be understood as a celebration: a celebration of the weary and the wounded, who nevertheless remain trusting and hopeful.
The image of the village in Journey (2002), which may also be understood as a farewell of universal scope, offers a graphic, and in its motifs deeply unsettling, inventory of the collapse of the peasant way of life and of old age as a final existential condition: an old woman leaning on a stick, a flying garden gate, a discarded bucket, strands of yarn drying on a line, an unsupported ladder that once led somewhere (perhaps to the sky), a harness strap thrown onto the ground, and so forth. However, Journey does not articulate this condition more dramatically than the grid of being articulated in Hymn, consisting of similarly disquieting amorphous forms.
Both can be regarded as emblematic of Beáta Hauser’s oeuvre.
Her personal signature is consistently recognisable across both the woven tapestries and the individual drawings. She never seeks to embellish the world; rather, she is consistently drawn to the human being in struggle, whether encountered in its monstrous aspect (cf. Mihály Vörösmarty’s line: “he plots an even viler crime: from dragon's teeth will spring his budding grain”) or in its bittersweet felicity. Since from the combination of half-weft and horizontal weaving, a new mode of representation emerged that proved highly formative for both her mode of thinking and her method of weaving (as she notes in a personal statement: “this technique is by no means new; it was already used by the Copts”), it is within this drawing-driven mode of presentation, which renders the entire surface dynamic, that she gives full expression to her inclination towards textile form-making (textile artistry). Replanning in the course of work, for drawing and weaving are not the same, repeatedly provides her with new ideas, as was the case with Hymn, and this abundance of invention brings her closer to a perfection that can never be fully attained.
Naturally, the gently undulating, hovering organic nuptial dance of the motifs in Füvek (Grasses), blue within blue, differs from the archaically modern radiance of the 1999 Petőfi-portré (Petőfi Portrait). In this work, the figure transferred from the well-known daguerreotype truly comes to life against a halo-like field of light. Likewise, the beguiling, unconventional charm of Romantika (Romanticism, 1983) operates in a different register from the spatial experiment of Angyali üdvözlet (Annunciation, 1983), which draws less on biblical tradition than on profane sources rooted more in ethnography than in Scripture. Despite their equal aesthetic value, these works remain far removed from the profoundly unsettling judgement of In the End, which, alongside a Christ-like wisdom of acceptance, reflects the immeasurable pain of withdrawal from life.
Unusually, the artist was able to give free rein to her graphic inventiveness even in the tapestries; yet it is in the drawings executed with pen and finely sharpened pencil, with the patience and diligence of a miniaturist, that her exceptional command of drawing truly manifests itself (with a hundredfold intensity, one might say). Beáta Hauser is not an adherent of single-line drawing. Her dense network of lines consists of countless strokes and innumerable ‘elongated’ points. Even in works whose structure conforms more closely to traditional models (Somogyi tanyaház [Farmhouse in Somogy], Peasant House in Cârța, Jobbágytelek [Serf Holding]), she employs this distinctive technique, thereby producing a powerful sensory experience. The density of the drawing and the gradations of light and shade are generated by a triangular grid composed of tiny lines, which may also be described as emotional discharges, as can be seen in the haunting 2012 portrait of an old woman (Csak az a baj, hogy meg kell halni [The Only Problem Is That You Will Die]) or in the radiant Tekintet (gyimesi arc) [lit. Gaze {A Face From Ghimeș}]). The work Nagyi (Granny) also deserves mention for the expressive power of her drawing.
From the abstract figure-based compositions of Hymn, such as Alak (Figure) and Koponya (Skull), through the likewise abstract Marskő férfi (Mars Stone Man) and Marskő nő (Mars Stone Woman), a wide range of non-representational works (Lapok a naplóból [Pages From a Diary]), as well as figurative or semi-figurative bodies whose plasticity emerges through the density of lines, Forradalmár (Revolutionary), Átmosás (Rinsing), Baljós üzenetek (Ominous Messages), Libegős (Flutter), testify to the effectiveness of this graphic method (of expression). The face that emerges from behind horizontal and vertical bands of lines In Hiding is just as well suited to translation into tapestry as In the End, whose enigmatic spatial grid sets the graphic plane into undulating motion.
Inspiration rooted in folktale imagery, or inspiration which elevates the swirl of signs and masks into a driving expressive force (see Tótágas [Upside Down], Sárkányfi [Dragon Boy], as well as certain faces in Sors [Fate] that almost take on the appearance of disguises), sometimes, through a distinctive constellation of signs, lays bare the ‘events’ taking place behind the grotesque grid of being to such an extent that Beáta Hauser’s graphic field transcends in every respect both the ‘credible’ and the ‘incredible’. The visionary quality of this mode of thought becomes particularly compelling when the play of facial expressions and gestures reminiscent of commedia dell’arte carries within it socially embedded truths that lie beneath the surface and are anything but reassuring, intentionally or inadvertently intimating these truths to the viewer. (as in Egyszer csak lehullanak az álarcok [Suddenly the Masks Fall]).
The drawings executed on Jacquard machine punch cards once used for mechanical pianos (such as Rajzfolyam [Drawing Sequence]) are particularly striking, above all because of their printed background. In these drawings, hovering, floating figures (a dragon, a snail-like figure engaged in a trampling motion, or a swimming figure), convey the surreal message of this visual world. Such substitutes for happiness are necessary, since the threat posed by raw reality demands sincerity from an artist of remarkable graphic sensitivity (Erőszak I–II [Violence I–II], Ominous Messages, Húsba vágó [lit. It Cuts to the Flesh]).
It demands sincerity and a protest against every form of terror. For on 23 October 2006, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, life was marred by abuses of power and political arrogance, requiring a response from any conscientious artist. Alongside their bold, poster-like character, asserting integrity and moral rectitude, Beáta Hauser’s drawings also possess genuine depth. In addition to her major works already mentioned, Rések a demokrácián – 2006. október 23. (Cracks in Democracy – 23 October 2006) belongs to this line of work as well.
[2015]