“The cultivation and preservation of traditions ensure continual nourishment from one’s roots, a pure source, just as a village tower seen from afar points the way in the right direction, towards the place where one finds a home. Regardless of the fact that the peasant community that once created this art no longer exists, I believe that it occupies a place in universal culture no less important than that of any other art. Quite simply because it was brought to maturity by the soul of a community, and thereby made beautiful, sincere, and true.” (László Kovács)
László Kovács was born on 11 December 1956 in Karcag-Botonás, in a farmstead setting. His parents and forebears were farmers and craftsmen, and the formative lesson he carried with him from the family milieu was the conviction that even the humblest inhabitant of a farm can belong to the elite if he meets a moral standard and is able to exert influence through knowledge, personal example, and counsel. The constraints and opportunities of the farmstead way of life constituted a defining experience for him, teaching him much and remaining discernible in his work to this day.
“My forebears were farmers and craftsmen, and among them there was also a Reformed minister. They did not merely get by; they made things. Making – creating – was their constant element, a guiding principle, a musical score for me. To create where we are… One of my mother’s siblings ran a lace workshop; at least twenty people worked there. He was a true master of lace-making… To eat, to sleep, to go in to work and do your job – that does not mean much; it is simply natural. You have to produce something of substance. You have to build a work – that is our foremost task. Everyone in the family worked hard. My godfather was a master wheelwright at the agricultural co-operative; alongside this, as a musician, he also played in orchestras – even a symphony orchestra – and at weddings, together with my grandfather. My grandfather once asked me:
– Well, my boy, what have you done? Have you made anything today?
– I worked.
– That is not what I asked. I asked about the result of your work. It is easy simply to ‘work’, to muddle along, to potter about; many people do just that. But to make something lasting – something useful to your master, to yourself, and to others – that is difficult.”
He began to familiarise himself with the craft of pottery in 1971, in the workshop of Sándor Kántor. From his masters – Sándor Kántor, Mihály F. Szabó Sr and Jr, and István Sz. Nagy – he absorbed not only the stylistic world of pottery in the Middle Tisza region, but also a respect for the tradition of the potter’s heritage; an esteem for the work of the plain-spoken, straight-dealing craftsman who lives by the labour of his hands; and the expectation and honouring of quality that is closely and organically bound up with this ethos. Although his primary-school teachers steered him towards a musical career, his chosen vocation nonetheless became pottery. After completing primary school, he was admitted as a trainee military musician to the Bartók Béla Zeneművészeti Szakközépiskola (Bartók Béla Secondary School of Music) in Budapest, where he studied until 1972. During his secondary-school years he spent the summer holidays in the Kántor workshop, access to which was secured for him by the local master he respected and valued, István Sz. Nagy. After returning permanently from Budapest, he continued his earlier engagement with the craft of pottery. The three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship in effect provided the foundations that still define his professional credo today. At the Kántor workshop he learned one of the most fundamental skills of the trade, wheel-throwing. Professionally, the greatest influence on him there was István Sz. Nagy, with whom he worked side by side. At that time he was not much involved in decoration, since this was the responsibility of Sándor Kántor and his family; from time to time, however, he copied motifs and helped to fill in certain leafy ornament forms in green.
Alongside his daily work, it was also in the Kántor workshop that he began to familiarise himself with the motif traditions of different regions. Naturally, his primary interest lay in the pottery style of Tiszafüred, but he was also drawn to the formal and ornamental repertoire of Upper Hungary and of other centres in the Transtisza region. These traditions had previously been diligently studied by his own master, who subsequently incorporated them into his practice.
In 1975, after leaving the Kántor workshop, he moved to the joint workshop of Mihály F. Szabó and Mihály F. Szabó Jr, where he found greater scope for realising his own independent ideas. “In 1975 I transferred to the workshop of one of Kántor’s former pupils, the F. Szabó family, where I worked as an assistant until 1983. I learned a great deal from ‘Uncle’ Mihály, who had worked alongside Sándor Kántor for thirty years and had accumulated immense experience. During this period his son, Mihály F. Szabó Jr, revived ceramics from the Ottoman era; through him I saw how a long-vanished ceramic culture, excavated from the ground, could be created anew. His patriotism made a deep impression on me, as did his love of animals, his honest, ‘stubborn’ steadfastness in matters of principle, and his dogged struggle against the distortions of his time. This place was not merely a pottery workshop: it was also one of the venues of urban cultural life at the time, a genuine communal space. In the F. Szabó workshop he continued to work primarily as a thrower, yet even then he showed an interest in professional innovation. At the time Mihály F. Szabó Sr was producing green-glazed wares with incised decoration and applied ornament, while Mihály F. Szabó Jr was engaged in reviving ceramics from the Ottoman period. This milieu also exerted a substantial influence on our master, and it was then that the first (Karcag) phase of his oeuvre began to come to fruition.” (Dr Miklós Nagy Molnár, ethnographer)
“I dreamed of having a workshop of my own. I worked on a piece-rate basis, yet I was still a ‘full’ member of this community; I was not alone. People of many kinds passed through the workshop – from secondary-school teachers to the town’s leading figures, even the party secretary – and many came to know me personally. It was within this milieu that I was shaped, and it was also in this circle that I came to know Tibor Bellon, then director of the Nagykun Museum in Karcag, who at that time was a frequent visitor to Kalocsa. Together with Dr János Bárth and others, he was involved in the writing of the monograph of Kecel.”
“Our potters’ exhibition in Karcag won the approval of István Geri, Chairman of the Kalocsa Town Council. The city leader told Tibor Bellon that he would be prepared to offer everything necessary to a talented potter willing to settle in Kalocsa.”
During the Karcag phase of his career, the first signs of the mature mastery that would later characterise László Kovács’s work are already discernible. His understanding of craftsmanship during these years was shaped by a mode of thinking that he continues to regard as his own: the creation of something new does not necessarily entail the radical adoption of entirely different forms, colours, or decorative schemes that break completely with what came before. In his view, the works of the old masters remain fully viable within modern domestic culture, integrating into it without any rupture of style.
During his years in Karcag, he continued to produce traditional vessel forms and types, and it was already then that he resolved to place particular emphasis on kitchen wares. In realising the objects he envisaged, he consistently sought to preserve and retain historical forms while also taking into account the technical conditions of his own time. He continues to work in accordance with this guiding principle to this day, producing his ‘experimental’ vessels. For such experimentation, however, the establishment of an independent workshop was essential – a possibility that was not available to him in Karcag at the time. (Dr Miklós Nagy Molnár)
The Karcag years exerted a decisive influence on the professional and personal development of the young potter at the outset of his career. He committed himself for life to this branch of folk art, turning towards the craft with his entire personality and with creative curiosity; it was during this period that his visual ‘mother tongue’ took shape. From his masters he learned not only technical skills, but also absorbed the formal, functional, and ornamental richness of the traditional Middle Tisza regional style. Sándor Kántor, Mihály F. Szabó, and István Sz. Nagy alike devoted particular attention to the study of the works and oeuvres of their predecessors, the old masters: they collected, analysed, and made use of their rich repertoire of motifs, while at the same time creating something new of their own by preserving and sustaining tradition through their ideas, experience, acquired knowledge, and cultivated taste.
“Our task is to recognise the values created, gathered, and enriched by our predecessors, and to add to them the spiritual surplus of our own making, thereby setting both direction and purpose for future generations.
Only in this way can human culture endure and fulfil the mission entrusted to it by the Creator”, he later wrote in remembrance of his masters.
When speaking of tradition, that is, of cultural continuity, it may be observed that recurrent repetition constitutes one of the most important mechanisms of culture. There exists a powerful tendency that facilitates the maintenance and reproduction of inherited patterns. Tradition is nothing other than the transmission of a culture’s characteristic patterns and values across generations. According to another definition, tradition functions as the cultural memory of a community: a repository of remembrance that stores the information required for communal self-identification. This information is precisely what enables the reproduction of culture and the formation of identifying patterns. As Edward Shils formulated it, “tradition is the tacit component of rational, moral, and cognitive action in culture”.
After twelve years of training, the young pottery assistant left his place of origin in 1983 and, at the invitation of the city of Kalocsa, opened an independent workshop there. A long-cherished aspiration was thus realised, and within the framework of newly available opportunities he was able to allow his talent to unfold freely. His remit was to revive, recreate, and transmit the spirit of the old Kalocsa pottery tradition, and to comprehend and communicate the identity-sustaining role and significance of culture, tradition, human creativity, and communal values. In practice, however, both the interpretation of these explicitly defined expectations and the manner of their implementation presented unforeseen difficulties for the young potter. He arrived as a young master with an already formed visual worldview, one grounded primarily in the elements of Tiszafüred pottery. This was the technique and the style he knew, had learned, and within which he felt genuinely at home.
At the mention of Kalocsa, most people think not only of paprika but also of folk art. Kalocsa embroidery and painted decoration, with their vividly coloured floral motifs, are known far and wide and have become almost synonymous with Hungarian folk art itself. This artistic tradition is rooted in the traditional peasant culture of the villages that developed on the outskirts of Kalocsa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – Homokmégy, Öregcsertő, Drágszél, Szakmár, Újtelek – together with the nearly two dozen associated farmstead settlements.
The renowned branches of Kalocsa folk art include pottery, woodcarving, painted furniture, decorative wall painting, embroidery, and traditional costume.
The oldest branch of Kalocsa folk art is pottery, which demonstrably has early medieval roots. Typical vessels of early modern Kalocsa pottery include unglazed red jugs and canteens, as well as white-glazed harvest bowls. The jug-makers decorated their unglazed red wares with clay from Paks.
Characteristic decorative techniques and motifs include incised scratching, wavy scroll patterns, lattice designs, impressed ornament, and linear incisions. The bowl-makers fired their vessels using combinations of dark green, green, white, and yellow glazes. On harvest bowls, blue, green, and yellow motifs were applied by decorative slip-trailing (locally known as gurgula). Although these patterns recall the rosemary-sprig, serrated, and dotted ornaments of early embroidery, they nevertheless constitute motifs specific to pottery alone. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the characteristic tulip motifs of woodcarving began to appear on mugs and small jugs.
It cannot be claimed that Kalocsa lacked a rich pottery tradition; yet in style, technique, and motifs it differed radically from the Tiszafüred tradition. While several pottery workshops were active in Karcag and its environs in the 1970s and 1980s, in Kalocsa there was no practising master potter during this period. The few surviving former potters no longer pursued the craft, and the community’s cultural memory had relinquished the tradition of old Kalocsa forms and motifs; in its place, the colourful, ornate Kalocsa style that had taken shape in the 1920s came to dominate. For the young potter, the point of departure lay in the few authentic Kalocsa vessels preserved in the storerooms of the Visky Károly Museum. The characteristic Kalocsa motifs found on jugs and bowls were wholly unfamiliar to him when set against the Karcag motifs and the techniques discussed above. The difficulty he faced was not merely professional: he also acutely missed the familiar home, community, and social circles he had left behind. Yet even amid the challenges of integration he understood that he would need the perseverance, creative force, and capacity for renewal inherited from his forebears and masters. “To create where we are!” – he recalled the old admonition. He wanted not only a workshop in the traditional, narrowly practical sense, and not only to practise the craft at a high level as a worthy successor to his masters, but also a ‘spiritual workshop’: a community-forming new home, a place for the arts, for encounters, conversations, debates, and cultivated recreation. This programme guided the value-creating work that unfolded in Kalocsa. And not in any ordinary way, either: “With understanding hands – with heart and mind – you have succeeded in bringing to life, kneading into one, the finest and most worthy traditions of that hard, stubborn Nagykunság and of this gentler Danube-side region, and beyond that, so much besides!”, wrote the poet Ferenc Buda, recipient of the Kossuth Prize. Through hard, persistent work he reintroduced the forms and motifs of old Kalocsa pottery into his art, and the example of his creative and pedagogical life’s work became an organic, living part of the cultural life of the city of Kalocsa.
“Just as birds are winged beings, we are social beings… The most essential task of human life, therefore, is to form a community that is uplifting both in spirit and in disposition”, says Gyula Illyés. This is no exaggeration: László Kovács has devoted his life to this ideal.
A national heritage built upon local traditions can endure only if, by preserving it, we constantly recreate it. In other words, a tradition-based society rests on the appreciation of local cultural values and on the inner initiative of small communities, thereby renewing again and again the community’s creative vitality. In this way, the sustaining of tradition becomes a source of self-respect and of a healthy local identity, linking past and future through continuity.
Through more than forty years of deliberate, conscious endeavour, a new institution and communal space – a true home of culture in the broadest sense – has taken shape in Kalocsa: the Fazekas Alkotóház (Potters’ Creative House), which was awarded the Hungarian Heritage Prize in 2022.
The vital force animating this home is the spirit- and soul-uplifting artistic, community-building, and community-sustaining activity of master potter László Kovács. The children’s and adult creative camps, exhibitions, and demonstrations organised regularly each year have enhanced the reputation and standing of Hungarian pottery not only within the country’s borders but throughout Europe. As a result of the potters’ gatherings he initiated in 1987, a professional community came into being which, in cooperation with the town of Kecel and the Bács-Kiskun County Institute of Culture, has since organised the nationally renowned annual pottery competition and exhibition. Participation in the Kecel competition is by invitation, bringing together distinguished practitioners from across the country. In the evaluation of the submitted works, alongside a civic jury, leading representatives of the pottery profession have played – and continue to play – a significant role. The primary aim of the competition is to encourage, through experimental approaches, the creation of works that, while respecting tradition and employing new materials and technologies introduced by industry, clearly bear the stylistic features by which they can be recognised as Hungarian pottery. At the same time, these works are expected to meet the functional and aesthetic needs of contemporary life. A distinctive offshoot of the national pottery competition and exhibition is the Mesterek Tiszteletére-díj (lit. In Honour of the Masters Prize), awarded to potter-artists who have demonstrated sustained and outstanding achievement in the preservation, development, and transmission of the values of national pottery culture, and thereby in the ennoblement of both public and private moral life. The founder and initiator, László Kovács, determined that the prize should be conferred by secret ballot of the participating potters themselves, upon a peer deemed worthy of this distinction.
One becomes a master only through determination, expertise, creativity, and, not least, the requisite passion. In Karcag and later in Kalocsa, he learned that a life’s work can be complete only if the knowledge acquired does not perish with the individual mortal life; he therefore felt it his duty to organise the conscious transmission of that knowledge. Over the course of thirty-four years, seventeen young people trained in his workshop, many of whom have gone on – and continue – to choose pottery as their vocation. Among them, Helga Madár stands out, a Young Master of Folk Art and a scholarship holder of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, as does Márton Sánta, who, ‘in civilian life’, is an electrical engineer. He reflects on the professional and personal importance of his relationship with the master as follows: “We first met thirteen years ago at a pottery camp. From László Kovács I learned not only the potter’s craft in the narrow sense, but also, by living and working together in the workshop, I sought to absorb the worldview of a true master: precision, concentration, attentiveness, humility towards clay and its working, and many other qualities essential to successful work. A new world opened up almost at once; ever since, I have been thinking about having a workshop of my own, a place of my own where I can work freely and devote more time to this vocation. This is how I received it – selflessly and without charge – and this is how I, too, would like to pass it on one day.”
This path has not yet reached its end.
Recognitions and honours:
1983 – Young Master of Folk Art
1983 – Title of Folk Applied Artist
1992 – Title of Master of Folk Art
1992 – Pomegranate Prize
1998 – Pécsiné Ács Sarolta Prize, Kalocsa
1996 – Bács-Kiskun County Art Prize, Kecskemét
2009 – Pilinszky Prize, for his work in community culture, Kecskemét
2012 – Bács-Kiskun County Art Prize, Kecskemét
2012 – Decoration for the Development of the Town of Kecel
1985 – Member of the Danube–Tisza Interfluve Folk Art Association
2000 – At the Festival of Crafts, received the Master of the Year distinction
2014 – Presidential Certificate of Commendation of the Bács-Kiskun County Chamber of Commerce and Industry
2015 – 13th Great Plain Potters’ Triennial: Kántor Sándor Prize, Karcag (for artistically executed ceramics faithfully preserving the spirit of Sándor Kántor)
2016 – Certificate: Most Beautiful Traditional Tent at the Fair, including demonstration, Jarmark Jagielloński Festival, Lublin (Poland)
2016 – 14th Kecel National Pottery Competition and Exhibition: Professional Prize, Kecel
2016 – Commemorative Certificate from the Municipality of Kalocsa, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, and in recognition of his outstanding oeuvre, the safeguarding of Kalocsa pottery, the transmission of the craft, and his civic community-building work
2017 – Certificate on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Danube–Tisza Interfluve Folk Art Association, in recognition of his outstanding, high-quality creative work for the community since the Association’s foundation
2018 – Honorary Citizen of the City of Kalocsa
2018 – Public-body member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts
2018 – Included in the Bács-Kiskun County Repository of Values: the national value entitled “traditionalist artistic and community activity”, in the cultural heritage category
2022 – Hungarian Heritage Prize (Potters’ Creative House)
2022 – Mária Kresz Prize, Budapest, for devoted and effective work in the fields of pottery, folk art, the transmission of tradition, and education
2023 – Corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts
[2024]