Gábor Karátson – painter, writer, teacher, environmental activist, and philosopher, a man who read Chinese literature in the original, a kind of ‘Hungarian Mandarin’. His versatility and art historical erudition were reflected in his artistic work as well, yet his remarkable oeuvre is difficult to situate within the currents of our time.
The development of his painting was supported by artists such as Dóra Maurer, Ilona Keserű, and János Major, while in his early years – by his own account – he was most influenced by the works of Lajos Vajda, Endre Bálint, and Paul Klee. Initially, he painted mainly portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. ‘Meditative in nature, tending toward lyrical expression. His work is characterized by slowness and meticulous care. His paintings glow in the colours of Klee. […] Carpet-like piles of geological and botanical elements, human and animal beings, pebbles, etc., constitute his pictures, all spiced with philosophical associations.’[1] Alongside Klee, he was also familiar with the writings of Rudolf Steiner, Paracelsus, and Jakob Böhme, whose formal ideas he sought to incorporate into his works. He also drew inspiration from Byzantine mosaics, the ancient Buddhist paintings of the Ajanta cave temples in India, as well as the colour theories of Goethe, Runge, and Steiner. In his Faust illustrations, one can also discern the influence of William Blake, Leonardo, Cimabue, and Matthias Grünewald. He usually worked for extended periods – often for several months – on his ‘beautifully coloured pictorial compositions woven from a fantastic mythical world’[2].
Originally, he was more interested in literature; however, in the wake of the revolution, he temporarily turned away from writing: 'It was terrible to return from prison in ’58 and see what had become of Hungary in the meantime. It was deeply oppressive. I was overcome by the dreadful feeling that in Hungarian, one could only lie. And indeed, that was the case. But what was one to do? I had already decided that I would not become a Hungarian poet. What could one write poems about when everyone was lying?’ During this period, he believed that he should turn toward the visual arts: ‘I began to draw and paint, and I completely withdrew from everything else. I resolved that I would not sit on my own grave like a flower, like a chrysanthemum. A new life begins now; I will paint…’[3]
His early works – meticulously painted but characterized by a surrealistic style and a ‘surnaturalist’ approach – were on display at his 1968 ‘self-confessional’ exhibition at the Fényes Adolf Hall. Those were generally portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. The exhibition also included works created in the few years following 1963, which reveal ‘the prominence of lyrical moods, of a distinctive expressive system built from motifs rendered in dimly glowing, dreamlike colours as a principal characteristic.’[4] Subsequently, in his works produced between 1964 and 1967, he approached the question of pictorial form from a new perspective, emphasizing the role of abstraction: ‘Here, the backbone of the compositions – the force that binds the forms together – is provided almost entirely by the colours; their dynamic unites and balances the richly unfolding procession of motifs.’[5] During this period, he discovered the painting technique he would use for decades: painting in tempera and oil on canvas glued to wood.
The Bible played an important role in his art, it had engaged him since childhood. ‘In my youth, and in the years before prison, I read it every day for years’, he recalled in an interview. For him, the Károli Bible [the first Bible printed in Hungarian language in the 16th century] was the inspired source: ‘A vast double mirror that had a huge impact on me. The Bible gives strength amid chaos. Károli's text is like an old tree.’
From the late 1960s, he began painting large-scale biblical scenes in oil and tempera. The events in Prague in 1968 inspired his monumental work entitled Jelenet Nappal, Holddal, csillagokkal, a két megfeszített latorral, virágokkal, állatokkal és egy gyermekeket rémisztgető ollós alakkal (Scene with Sun, Moon, Stars, the Two Crucified Thieves, Flowers, Animals, and a Scissor Figure Frightening Children), which can now be found in the Contemporary Collection of the Hungarian National Gallery. In a later interview, he explained that the painting’s sinister figure embodied the forces that crushed the Prague Spring. He was always deeply opposed to violence, whether aimed at living beings or at nature itself.
Not long afterwards, in the wake of a creative crisis triggered largely by his concern for the Earth’s ecological condition, he began painting ‘newspaper images’, saying that ‘the Bible of our age is the newspaper’. As one critic wrote: ‘Karátson allows the world – the dazzling, noisy exterior – to reach him through the visual fragments of politics, crime, or sport, spheres that generate both the most banal and the most emblematic scenes, namely through newspaper photographs, in their reflection and interpretation.’[6] His method was based on repainting and recontextualizing photographs illustrating daily news articles – a practice also seen in Pop Art. Yet his philosophically driven painting can also be linked to the methods of transavantgarde art. In Karátson’s process, however, the meaning of these – often naturalistic – black-and-white compositions was completely redefined through the act of colouring and transforming them. As Péter Fábri remarked: ‘It feels good to look at these paintings, because through them one can clearly see many things that we have long viewed only from the distance of alienation. The human being – pitiful even in power – moves to the foreground, while the far less valuable event recedes into the background.’
The first painting executed in this manner was titled Recovering the Body [7], which depicted a Boston murder: in the picture we see a group reminiscent of a biblical composition gathered around a bloody corpse. During this period, he painted numerous crowded group scenes. One such example is A tizenkétéves Jézus a templomban a Doktorok között (The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple among the Doctors), in which the 'Doctors' take the recognizable forms of Laozi, Saint Peter, Jakob Böhme, and Karl Marx. Other works include Turisták Etiópiában (Tourists in Ethiopia), as well as later, from the 1980s, Cicciolina kampánykörúton, csodálói között (Cicciolina on the Campaign Trail among Admirers) and Nádpálcát suhogtató rendőrök tüntetőkkel (Policemen Brandishing Batons against Demonstrators). As art historian János Frank observed: ‘He paints crowd scenes, but with him even a portrait is a crowd scene, a set of separate yet cohesive mosaics of colour.’
In the late reduced-form works of this period, the facial features of the figures are often indistinguishable, and their shapes are only recognisable thanks to their strong contours. Some of the compositions tend towards the abstract. Accordingly, there is a lack of spatial representation in the pictures. Karátson ‘sums up all the news of the day, the flood of information that hits him and all of us, and in a way trivialises its significance. I could say that he treats them ironically, sees them grotesquely, and his figures are perhaps – one might say – puppet figures. I put it in this conditional way because these figures are not so definitely elaborated. The painterly bravura is there in Karátson's art, he paints very beautifully, creating very beautiful images, yet their content is far from beautiful.’ – Iván Bojár said about his pictures in the programme Láttuk, hallottuk… (Seen and Heard…) of the Kossuth Radio in 1979.
His paintings from the late 1970s and early 1980s are rich in colour, yet also demonstrate a high graphic quality, ‘following the colour harmonies of the Flemish, Master M.S., and Paul Klee’[8]. In his later works, however, ‘the drawing-based composition was replaced by an unusual mosaic-like fragmentation, yet held together as a whole.’ Karátson’s pictures, resplendent in dreamy colours and shimmering through a pearly veil, were based on the grey photographs of the world press; [...] as András Székely writes, they express ‘something like the idea that ordinary newspaper photographs can also contain as much poetry, intellectual excitement, and grotesqueness as the details of living nature so often chosen as models.’
Karátson continued his ‘series of newspaper pictures’ until 1996. In the last years his formal style again moved towards the abstract.[9]
Afterwards, he turned more toward the Far East and began studying Chinese culture. He devoted much attention to Taoism, Confucianism, and Chinese Buddhism. By his own account, translating Chinese texts brought him closer to the Bible. ‘Chinese writing is a combination of concepts and images, and it is read differently than texts written in Latin letters. […] I realized that what was missing for me in the Bible was precisely this union of images and concepts. That is what I need to break free from alienation. The Vizsoly Bible [i.e. the Károli Bible] offered an incredible experience of liberation.’ He found numerous inner parallels between one of the sacred Confucian texts, the Book of Changes, and the Bible: ‘These are not different things, but speak of the same: God, the God of wisdom, the love of humanity, human errors, and human wisdom.’
After a long break, he resumed painting biblical themes in 1992, usually in watercolours, creating them using the Chinese method of kneeling. 'I lay a very thin white paper on the bed, I read the Vizsoly Bible and draw what comes out by itself. I stick to the text. On the exhibition, I indicate in alphabetical order which book each scene is for, for example, "Szent Ianosnac mennyei jelenésekről való könyve" (St. John's Book of Heavenly Apparitions). The many pencil lines and the many changes are striking in all the works. I draw and paint at the same time, and when I'm done, I iron the thin sheet, iron it again and again so the picture acquires a special texture.'
In the last decade of his life he mostly worked on biblical watercolours, which he exhibited in 2004 at his exhibition entitled 'Szent János írása szerint való evangélium' (The Gospel According to the Writings of St. John) in Badacsony and at the Parti Galéria in Pécs.
With his passing, Hungarian culture lost one of its most versatile representatives, a polymath whose every expression was a manifestation of a striving towards the good.
[2016]
[1] Géza Perneczky: A líraiság és a konstruktivizmus új útjai a magyar festészetben. Képzőművészeti Almanach 1. Corvina, 1969
[2] Géza Perneczky: Ellenpólusok. Élet és Irodalom, 1969
[3] Beszélő hetilap, Issue 6, Volume 6, Number 7
[4] Magyar Nemzet, 16 March 1968
[5] Magyar Nemzet, 16 March 1968
[6] István Hajdu: Két kiállítás – Kontempláció a zajban. Beszélő, 21 December 1991
[7] A holttest megtalálása
[8] István Hajdu: Két kiállítás – Kontempláció a zajban. Beszélő, 21 December 1991
[9] Karátson Gábor író, festőművész önéletrajza http://www.keresztenymuzeum.hu/content/karatsononeletrajz.pdf