Ignác Kokas’s painting is rather unusual, and his career was just as irregular. He always existed somewhere in between – beyond and outside categories and groups – so the louder, trend-setting voices of the art world never quite knew what to make of him, and because they did not know, they seldom bothered to pay him much attention. Essentially, he belonged to neither pole. His active years coincided with the great, feverish periods of experimentation in modern Hungarian art. His painting stood apart from the spasms, the depletion, and the repeated “burials” of Hungarian painting – what could the age do with a painter who struggled differently, who never became empty, who remained stubbornly alive despite the artistic catastrophes, judgments, and prophecies of doom surrounding him?
His career began amid militant political orthodoxy and a gentle-lyrical example that was not left in peace: in the early 1950s, as a student of Aurél Bernáth – perhaps the least favourable moment to start. He might have become one of the thematic painters, or political illustrators – and at first glance seemed to head that way – but unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not. Yet by the age of forty he had created a strikingly peculiar world. He tore open the visible, swept traditional representation into a vortex of visions. Yet all this, in the fierce figurative versus non-figurative debates of the 1960s, could not be classified or placed anywhere. What could those debates make of a visionary painter who deliberately, and by his own admission, always started from an experience of nature – whose attachment to the earth could be detected even in his most abstract works? As Kokas and his generation freed themselves from conservative constraints, they began to make up for lost time. Eagerly, almost according to an art-historical schedule: after Cubism came Constructivism, after the surreal-magical came Surrealism, after Informel came Pop Art – mostly in groups, hastily, making up for delays in great leaps. In such a climate of stylistic purism, Kokas’s painting was bewildering: he skipped the usual learning phases, but in an irregular way transformed passionate, expressive experience into surreal, dark depths, then disciplined that agitated world into suddenly hard, constructive compositions. Then came the great break with ideological content. A generation raised under severity – to paint “thematic” works with prescribed or at least heavily suggested social and moral meanings – now renounced every social and ethical bond with painful enthusiasm, more impatiently and rapidly than the classical avant-garde had done decades earlier and more spontaneously. All the more because those who stayed close to the prescriptions – from opportunism, naïveté, or helplessness – produced work that grew ever more depressing and insignificant; their example repelled, even if it was rewarded. Kokas, who early in his career had himself painted carpenters, welders, humble peasants, and machine stations, now returned – with a kind of cosmic fidelity, as if fulfilling an inescapable predestination – to the struggles of man and creator who triumphs through self-destruction.
In the end, Kokas hardly changed. His contemporaries and the next generations were constantly provoked by fifty years of omitted “classicisms” and the erupting, passionate avant-gardes of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The race against time, the obsession with contemporaneity, opened ever new periods even in strong and convincing oeuvres. Yet this painting, having found itself, remained solid and inwardly enriched. It could not be dismissed as repetitive, ossified, or commercialized – the canvases stayed fresh, the compositions taut, the conflicts weighty, and the resolutions scarred yet convincing. You could recognize a Kokas painting from the doorway, even from the third-room wall. You could boldly hang the 1967 Silent House beside a brand-new, still-untitled work, with its sharply constructed cylindrical element and its world that again seemed to recall water, sky, and vegetation – a world into which the former burst and pressed. Even the suspicion of routine could not enter these exhibition halls, where tenderness and strength, openness and concentrated drama, living pathos and tempered solidity perfectly complemented each other.
The set of values of Hungarian artistic life – at least its dominant, opinion-shaping pole – was at that time strongly guided by ethical orientation. During the decades allotted to the master, it always considered a duty to support neglected, especially persecuted artistic achievements, regardless of their timeliness or even their quality. Equally, it felt obliged to demonstratively ignore works and artists who were officially favoured, institutionally honoured, or otherwise supported. This very clear moral framework, although inevitably correlated with the prevailing political and cultural systems, found itself in a peculiar situation after the 1990s – yet its uncertainty regarding Kokas dated not from then but from the very beginning. While his art was still maturing, and while his work was being acknowledged on a generational basis by the cultural authorities, his place among the “blessed” and the “damned” caused no difficulty. However, Kokas quickly moved out of the circle of the privileged and officially supported – as soon as he became a sovereign individual, a serious painter. This happened without his ever becoming neglected or persecuted. Thus his position was once again in-between and disconcerting. Institutions did not deny him – for they had no reason to – the recognition his achievements warranted; nor could those on the opposing pole, for whom it was a matter of principle to question such honours, reasonably contest the legitimacy of his awards or his appointment as a professor at the Academy. As a result, Kokas remained largely absent for a long time from comprehensive overviews of modern Hungarian art. The master, after all, avoided public roles, groups, and manifestos; he worked, taught, and withdrew – and he did not alter this attitude even in the post-1990 years, when the climate favoured declarations, revelations, affiliations, and separations.
Nevertheless, the painter received all the major national prizes and honours. Beyond essays, films, and interviews, two monographs and a smaller study have been devoted to him. His major works are preserved in the national gallery, in domestic and foreign public collections, in retrospectives, and in the most distinguished private collections – safeguarding that extraordinary quality, that incomparable formal world, that once-in-a-lifetime artistic individuality which Ignác Kokas created in the history of modern Hungarian painting.
[2013]