Gábor Mezei was born in Budapest on 29 November 1935.
He is an obsessive perfectionist – a man devoted to quality. His family background predestined him for this: his grandfather, Ödön Hauswirth, was a decorative painter and applied artist, a friend and collaborator of Ignác Alpár (the architect who helped define the face of eclectic Budapest), a member of the Steindl Guild of Craftsmanship, and vice president of the National Industrial Association. His mother, Magda Hauswirth, was an excellent caricaturist; his father, Imre Pán – the pen name of Imre Mezei – was a poet and art critic, one of the founders of the artist group Európai Iskola (European School), and later the editor of avant-garde journals in Budapest and Paris.
Mezei is a representative of those cultivated citizens with European culture walking among us, of whom Márai wrote, and also a victim of absurd and terrible historical upheavals. The remnants of his father’s art collection still surround him: Margit Anna’s melancholy puppet looks down from his wall beside Dezső Korniss’s dancing abstract figures and Hugó Scheiber’s powerful portraits; Mezei has added to these Pál Deim’s puppet floating in cosmic space, László Fehér’s solitary boy glowing white in black emptiness, El Kazovszkij’s desert-ship phantom, Péter Földi’s bird with a human face, and István Regős’s strange black-smoked steamboat.
When he entered the University of Applied Arts in 1955, he was probably the only student familiar with the work of the European School and the progressive currents in Hungarian visual art – movements that at the time were under the strictest cultural and political prohibition. He graduated in 1960; his diploma project was a stage design. The modernist–technocratic design principles taught at the college soon struck him as grey and lifeless. For a few years, he struggled within that framework until, as a designer for the state design company SZÖVTERV, he met Imre Makovecz. Their first collaboration, in 1965, was the conversion of the former Trinitarian monastery in Sárospatak into a hotel and restaurant. “After showing the master my first beautiful sketches, he modestly asked: ‘You don’t seriously think you’re going to put this crap into my building, do you?’” – Mezei recalled in a speech at the Hungarian Academy of Arts in November 1995, on Makovecz’s 60th birthday. In his portrait film (Furniture with a Human Soul, MTV, 2007), he remembered Makovecz’s life-changing words: “He said, ‘Design with the same attitude as if you were painting or drawing. It’s not that there’s fine art and then there’s furniture design. They’re not separate but two sides of the same coin.’ From that point on, I gained the courage to handle design much more freely, to realise that one doesn’t have to design according to Bauhaus-based standards, but as if one were painting.” He also wrote: “Since I began working with Imre Makovecz, I’ve had a sense of what needs to be done. One must listen very carefully – outwardly and inwardly alike – and follow one’s inclinations. The greatest of them all, Gaudí, did precisely this.” (Gábor Mezei: Milyen a jó szék? (What Makes a Good Chair?), 1986)
Thus Mezei set out on his own path – as Makovecz’s creative partner and as an independent artist. His main field was furniture design, though in the 1970s he explored an intriguing sideline: he created turned wooden objects – bowls, chalices, and lidded vessels – whose soft, organic forms were intensified by sandblasted wood grain. Working mostly within Makovecz’s buildings, Mezei operated at a level of artistic freedom achieved only through mastery, humility toward the task, reverence for tradition, and an understanding of twentieth-century avant-garde aspirations. In doing so, he brought a new and unexpected quality to Hungarian furniture design. Although many of his chairs were made in small series, they still give the impression of unique, unrepeatable artworks. With his surreal furniture-creatures, Mezei not only furnished but populated and dramatized interiors. The spaces he designed never feel empty, even when uninhabited – his anthropomorphic, human-spirited pieces suggest that we are taking our place among “those already present.” He once said, “I most enjoy designing solitary objects – those that are like living beings.” (What Makes a Good Chair?, 1986)
His furniture is crafted from noble woods, most often larch, the material he revered above all. Every piece is an ode to wood. He never paints it, only stains it, so as not to conceal its natural grain and to preserve its living character. As he wrote:
“The fact that the trees in the park don’t greet us doesn’t mean they don’t speak. So the plane tree keeps silent? And do we know whether it thinks or not? Whether it has a memory or not? I take it as natural that every living being has a soul. After that, it’s not surprising if I say that an object has a soul too.” (What Makes a Good Chair?, 1986)
His intellectual furniture-sculptures are rooted in the historic traditions of craftsmanship, while touching on Art Nouveau, Surrealism, and the absurd. They always contain an ironic, avant-garde gesture – furniture as protest against barrenness, dullness, and pseudo-modernity. They seem like relics of a forgotten or never-existent cult of beauty, each standing as if to echo Ady’s poetic plea: “Guards, keep watch on the ramparts!” As Mezei put it: “An object must always be cultic, elevated.” (What Makes a Good Chair?, 1986)
His pieces are also monuments to a vanishing concept: craftsmanship itself. “I see no point in designing objects that I wouldn’t want to buy in an art gallery.” (Response to Reima Pietilä’s Questions, 1981)
And what did Imre Makovecz say about him?
“Gábor Mezei is an interior designer whose furniture looks as if it were designed jointly by the most extreme European surrealist and Jenő Rejtő. Every one of his pieces is a mixture of gentle appearances and extreme contents – the finest product of Hungarian super-naturalism. Since Gaudí, I know of no European designer who has condensed so much insight and bitter humour – transcending everyday life – into everyday objects. He lives with the consequences of having sworn allegiance to the highest possible standard.” (Imre Makovecz on Gábor Mezei, audio recording, 1993)
Compared to his merits, the number of Gábor Mezei’s official awards is modest. In 1991 he received the Munkácsy Prize, and in 1995 he was decorated with the Officer's Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit. From 1992 he was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts as a social organization, and from 2011, a full member of the reorganized Academy.
From the turn of the millennium onward, commissions for furniture design became increasingly rare and eventually ceased altogether. In the last decade, he has worked on private commissions, returning to a long-abandoned love – painting.
The series of his major works begins with the furnishings of the
Borostyán Hotel (Amber Hotel, 1965) in the former Trinitarian monastery at Sárospatak. The “enlightenment” prompted by Makovecz produced Mezei’s first high-backed chairs – still of smooth line, already bearing a certain dignity and clearly transcending the modernist canon. These are works of exploration, as is the tragically fated wine cabinet for the
SZÖVOSZ Resort at Balatonszepezd (1966). Its lower section with drawers was joined to an upper part utterly unconventional for its time, its gable adorned with a series of geometric, straight-edged wing motifs. This “flying cabinet” shocked the client so much that, after a short service life, it was sawed apart – the local communist party official explaining that it looked “too much like a confessional.” Yet indeed, the
confessional of the miners’ church at Nagybörzsöny (1968) – warmly thanked for in a letter by parish priest Béla Szappanyos – does bear a certain formal kinship, if it is not irreverent to say so, with that ill-fated wine cabinet. In the Nagybörzsöny church’s confessional and tabernacle cabinet, Mezei still used button-like, turned wooden decorations – elements he later abandoned. In his later works, ornament and structure became one: the supple, living lines themselves are the decoration. Mezei’s first major design breath came with the
Pharmacy Museum in Győr (Széchenyi Pharmacy, 1970), his first mature masterpiece, still fully valid today. One of the hardest tasks in architecture and interior design is to integrate the present into the past so that the two do not clash. Here, Mezei achieved a kind of daring harmony comparable to the “genius disrespect – or perhaps reverence” of the glass pyramid in the Louvre courtyard. The pharmacy, housed in a former Jesuit monastery and once dedicated to “the Redeemer,” had served at various times as a military hospital, barracks, and iron shop. At the turn of the 1960s–70s, as the decaying layers of socialist paint were removed, the beautiful late Baroque ceiling frescoes were uncovered, and the space was reborn as a museum pharmacy. This was made possible through the efforts of preservation architect György Kriszt and József Antall – then director of the Museum of the History of Medicine and later Hungary’s first post-communist prime minister – who fought many battles against ignorance.
Mezei dared to sheath the walls with deep blue, textile-textured, velvety faux leather, arching like vast wings, and to embed within them upward-narrowing rows of drawers, recalling both the multitude of drawers in old pharmacies and the many-drawered blue giantess of Salvador Dalí’s The Burning Giraffe. The ancient circle motif – symbol of the universe – appears above the dispensing counter amid layered arch-wings. And it is here that Mezei’s furniture “angel wings” first take flight in their full beauty. This may pay homage to the fact that from 1860 the pharmacy was known as the “Angel Pharmacy,” but it is also the joyful discovery of a lifelong Mezei motif. The winged angel-head emblem – or perhaps the sign of the healing, reborn human – reappears throughout: on the wall cabinets and the seating furniture alike. The result is a thrilling synthesis of authentic old and newly created forms, a work whose freshness has not aged and which no one in its field has truly surpassed. In the 1970s, Mezei created his first strange, surreal furniture-beings: the long-legged, human-headed
Layered Cabinet (1972), together with its matching chair (both now in the Museum of Applied Arts), the “Black-Legged” Cabinet (1974) with two doors, four drawers, and a many-branched red flame-like headpiece, and the demon-faced, blood-red, laminated
Mirror-Eyed Cabinet (1974), which stands as if it were a robed priest of some forgotten or never-existing cult, a masked participant in a ritual dance. Although these long-legged cabinets do have compartments for storing treasured items, one hesitates to call them simply “cabinets” – they are far too much like personalities. Already here, at the beginning of Mezei’s career, they raise questions – back then they were real questions in Hungary though they ceased to be since then here as everywhere –: Are these for physical or spiritual use? Are they applied art or fine art? Or both? Is there even a boundary between the two? A review in Népszabadság (Lajos Lóska, “Two Exhibitions,” 17 January 1975) found them problematic: “It is a major fault of the exhibition that… many objects seem clearly designed for the gallery rather than for use. In applied art, there is no greater mistake. Mezei Gábor’s layered, red-stained, but scarcely usable chair and cabinet are examples of such misdirection.”
It was at the Kodály Institute in Kecskemét (1974) that Mezei’s triumph began in his most beloved “genre” – the chair. Designed for the building Kerényi József had restored from a former Franciscan monastery, later, in the era of “existing socialism” abused as an office for a state wine company, these were now unmistakably “Mezei” chairs. The smaller-backed armchairs (for students?) have backrests that curve gracefully out of the seats, the headpieces unfolding and branching like the sprouts of a growing plant. The tall-backed, dignified “throne chair” (for teachers or lecturers?) has a five-pointed crest suggesting the pentatonic scale – the five-note foundation of Hungarian folk song – and evokes the image of the respected authority facing eager apprentices, or the artist facing his understanding audience, the initiated facing the initiates. Both chair types evoke the idea of growth, of something natural and beautiful unfolding – fitting, since they belong to the citadel of the world-renowned Kodály method of music education. It is here that Mezei’s mastery of chair design begins to shine. He wrote:
“The chair is the truest human-shaped piece of furniture.
A good armchair is dignified, free, and immensely enduring.
A chair can be light or heavy, even immovable. Comfortable or uncomfortable, cheap or complex and costly. But I love it when it is BEAUTIFUL! When it radiates dignity, when it is intelligent.
Let it be made of wood, like the marvellous Thonet!
Or of tubular metal, like the clever masterpieces of Marcel Breuer!
Yet no less perfect is Saarinen’s plastic-backed chair, which offers comfort without armrests. What harmony!”
(Gábor Mezei: What Makes a Good Chair?, 1986)
They say a critic once remarked of one of Mies van der Rohe’s chairs: “It is dedicated more to the spirit of sitting than to the body part that does the sitting.” More than one of Mezei’s chairs could raise the same issue. But why shouldn’t a chair also pay homage to the spirit of sitting? Gábor Mezei’s furniture leaves no one cold; it always stirs strong emotions. You can reject it – or love it. Passionately, even. When Miklós Melocco spoke out in 1973, in ardent tones, to defend György Csete’s housing estate in Paks, the “tulip patterned houses,” he was accused amid the controversy of subjectivity. To which Melocco replied: “Why shouldn’t we be subjective? Partial? Poets, architects, and sculptors?” Mezei could likewise be dubbed: the poet of the chair. Among his major works are the seating for the
Farkasréti temető ravatalozója (Catafalque Hall of Farkasréti Cemetery, 1976). The high-backed rows of chairs nestle on either side in a strange harmony with the great wooden arches – recalling human ribs – of Imre Makovecz’s unconventional, grand architectural idea, which can be read in several ways, even as the protectively lowered wings of a gigantic soul-bird. It is as if the shadows of those no longer here, yet somehow still present, stood watch behind the living mourners. One can feel these head-and-shoulder “soul-furnishings” as a men’s row and a women’s row alike – tighter and more open head forms, bodies that open out or lean together. For the head of the bier, behind the coffin, Mezei originally designed a many-branched wooden sculpture, a work that would be both a cross for church rites and a tree of life for civil funerals. It could have been a peculiar, universal, beautiful symbol in this extraordinary space – if it were used. But it is not. Somewhere it gathers dust in a storeroom, if it even survives. It is a mystery who had and what objection to it. For Makovecz’s much-debated building, the
Sárospataki Művelődési Ház (Sárospatak House of Culture, 1977), he designed a smooth-lined, elegant armchair that echoes the façade’s great undulating curve; the chair motif then rolls on into the
Győri Borsos Miklós Múzeum (Borsos Miklós Museum, Győr, 1978–80) with its solid, noble “sculptor’s chair,” reliable and sturdy, with rounded forms and grain-waves that soften the weighty, handsome silhouette. For the
Baki Faluház (Baki Village House, 1985) came the first fully liberated, painterly, luxuriantly blossoming Mezei chair – a magical shamanic piece. The pierced back rises high; it has an eye, a face, and two peculiar wing-like ears – calling to mind shamanic antler headdresses, or the mysterious little horns of Michelangelo’s Moses. And like fringed cloak-wings, the armrests trail down on both sides: ornate, dignified, mysterious, and yet simple – the interfollowing lines support each other and flow into one another, sometimes startlingly, like the waves of a Bartók piece. Like “Evening with the Székely,” as performed by Bartók. It’s surely no accident that Imre Makovecz chose this chair for himself and sat in it until his death in his room at the Hungarian Academy of Arts on Kecske Street. The chair even resembles him; to me it feels like a spiritual portrait of Makovecz.
The Fekete karosszék (Black Armchair, 1988) has a dark-stained, head-and-shoulder back; above the head a Gothic arch, and on both sides a candle motif; the straight armrests descend at a slant. With its beautiful balance of simple, clean curves and supporting straight lines, the chair – when someone sits in it (as its creator did on the steps of the Kunsthalle) – draws a halo around the sitter’s head with the circular motif of the back. Witty and decidedly avant-garde (which of his pieces isn’t?), and it’s no accident that it is in this very chair that László Fehér painted his striking, characterful, large black-and-white oil portrait of Gábor Mezei.
The Paksi római katolikus templom (Roman Catholic Church, Paks, 1989) is one of Makovecz’s heart-stopping masterworks. One’s breath literally catches on first sight, among Paks’s crouching little cube houses–like a different-species giant among dwarfs, a sudden deep bell tone in the quiet. Designing furniture for such an awesome architectural vision cannot have been easy. With professional humility and sensitivity, Mezei managed it. With flawless stylistic tact he doesn’t copy the architectural motifs; he harmonizes with them. In the smaller Paks chair type one hears – only faintly – the little upper window arch of the bell tower; in the tall-backed one, the elegance of the portal arch. Yet, of course, they are different. The small chair’s back might be a tulip motif, perhaps a closed bud. As they line the nave, they resemble rows of budding tulip fields. The splendid tall-backed chair, with its arched, pierced, budded head, can awaken associations reaching far back in time: the palmette ornaments of sabretache plates, the appliquéd “eagle-claw” patterns of nineteenth-century Zalatna jackets. And the budded back is lifted by legs that curve in perfect arcs with a touch of Secessionist flavor. Many things may come to mind – but every comparison limps. Mezei’s chairs never do.
The Sevillai Expo Magyar Nemzeti Pavilonja (Hungarian National Pavilion, Seville Expo, 1991) was a single great heartbeat – Makovecz’s literally world-shaking work – with its white-painted giant oak standing over a glass floor that split earth and air, its dark slate-scaled primal-beast roof crowned by the white crescendos of Hungarian village church towers. In the domed restaurant space stood Mezei’s warm red-brown furnishings. The head motif of the “candle-armchair” marched along the room dividers; the tall-backed armchairs bore a Tree of Life within a pointed arch, opening its wings at the top; and the sideboards carried rich tulip coronets – each one an artwork in itself. Where are they now? The Hungarian pavilion, by all accounts, still stands; as for its furniture, there is no news. One can only hope they did not perish – that tasteful Spaniards gave them a home. In Gaudí’s homeland, broadly understood, perhaps that is how it went. In the 1990s, he designed several elegant shop interiors
In the 1990s, Mezei designed several elegant shop interiors. For
Rolland úridivat (Rolland Men’s Fashion, 1992), the “men’s section” was realized in warm reddish-brown tones, while for
Rolland hölgyeknek (Rolland for Ladies), he created white-painted cabinets with pierced triangular gables and humanly simple shelving units. The
Herendi mintabolt (Herend Porcelain Showroom, Budapest, 1994) featured display cabinets adorned with strongly geometric, zigzag, wolf-tooth-like triangular motifs–since inside were the soft-lined, gleaming, fragile, flower-like treasures of Herend porcelain. He also designed a café, the
Újpesti Külvárosi Kávéház (Újpest Suburban Café, 1994), whose interior was dominated by a many-winged, mirrored, curved drinks cabinet that seemed to float in space and multiply it, creating a spectacular focal point. The series of budded, vine-like plant chairs continued with the high-backed, pointed-arch pierced chairs of the
Százhalombattai templom (Church of Százhalombatta, 1995). Makovecz’s awe-inspiring architectural complex, the
Piliscsabai Stephaneum, the Catholic University (1996), is transcendent–rising from the earth, it embodies sacredness itself. The Mezei furniture designed for this space is likewise sacral: magnificent, turned-leg armchairs–so imposing they evoke papal thrones or the dignified seats of church princes. Though intended for corridor seating, a sensitive eye might see them as evocations of ecclesiastical and furniture history. Wings soar atop the chapel tower in Piliscsaba; the heads of the chair backs open like wings; graphic wing-lines glide along the coat-check counters, where – on Mezei furniture for the first time – appears a strange, mask-faced sprite carved into the wood: perhaps the spirit of the trees? The heavy, backrested, two- or three-seater benches designed for student use bear pierced triangular motifs that interlock, above which unfolds a “germ motif” – a symbol, perhaps, of growth and development emerging from solid structure.
The germ motif, or bud motif, lives on in the turned-leg, high-backed chairs of the
Makói Színház (Makó Theater, 1998), the Hagymaház (“Onion House”): their heads evoke onion bulbs or sprouts, echoed by the triple-section upholstered seats of the auditorium. His swan song in furniture design – albeit one can never be sure – came with the
Püspöki Palota, Sümeg (Bishop’s Palace, Sümeg, 2009), for the permanent exhibition of glass artist Márton Horváth. Here again Mezei’s humility and stylistic sensitivity shine: he never sought to compete with the artworks his furniture housed, nor to echo their formal vocabulary even slightly. For Horváth’s fantastic, iridescent, gold-green, gold-red, and blue-gold glass objects–full of curving, breathing, Art Nouveau-like organic forms – Mezei designed geometric vitrines: clean, straight lines, triangular pediments, dark mahogany-red stain, a thin glinting gold stripe along the glass edges of the doors – all of it craftsmanship worthy of the artworks. The visitor’s high-backed armchair is the glorification of the right angle: a geometrically pierced, triple-part backrest joins – wittily – to a matching geometric seat: Mezei’s humane constructivism. And Mezei’s modesty as a creative attitude: he would never “upstage” the artworks with his furniture – only step beside them, gently yet with dignity.
Imre Makovecz’s prophetic 1993 remark about Mezei – “He bears the consequences of having sworn allegiance to the highest quality”–became reality by the turn of the millennium. In the final Makovecz buildings, clients no longer required – or could no longer afford – Gábor Mezei’s furniture. Yet the rebirth of his oeuvre occurred nonetheless: from the furniture-creatures emerged free creatures, awakening to independent life, migrating onto canvas. Gábor Mezei began to paint. It was a kind of da capo, for that is how he had begun: we know a self-portrait – an oil painting – from the 1960s, and later strange sprites disguised as furniture sketches, following his design work like restless, flickering presences – first only on paper, as coloured and uncoloured drawings. The true breakthrough came in the early 2000s; from then on there was no pretense – no cover name. Not furniture designs, but independent oil paintings were born.
Many of these depict furniture-spirits: winged armchair-creatures dancing, lion-faced beings – sometimes with women’s bodies – gazing at us. The lion mask, or the sad, wise lion face, returns repeatedly. Horn-beaked birds play eerie chess games with devil-horned masks on tilting tables. Candles burn; the sun and moon blaze over strange billiard games – the game itself a recurring motif. Who will win? In Mezei’s dance of masks, one might recall Baudelaire’s lines:
“Man passes through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.”
Whether they gaze as friends is uncertain in Mezei’s paintings – sometimes they seem projections of frightening dreams, yet they are not hostile. There is more fairy-tale strangeness than horror in them; they proliferate abundantly, ever more numerous. Milán Füst once wrote on a slip of paper about the very young Gábor Mezei’s poems: “Whether anything might become out of this, I don’t know…” Of Mezei’s paintings, it can already be said – they are something. Mezei paints out, speaks out his own sprites, the demons that lurk in every human being. He dances with them, revels in them, for they mostly appear to be cheerful devils – or so it seems. Or does he rather fear them?
They appear largely without kin, though one suspects that they would be welcome among Árpád Illés’s one-eyed masks and multicoloured guests from the unknown, among Ferenc Martyn’s blue-haired Irish king in coloured triangles, Dezső Mokry Mészáros’s swaying mushroom-beings, even Dezső Korniss’s dancing beetle-masks. With his paintings, Mezei walks their meadows – but along his own paths.
If we look at the “main course” of his life’s work – his furniture design – we still sense, within its disciplined constraints, that he was in essence a completely free man. His cheerful intelligence and self-irony always lifted him off the ground. He could fly. More than one critic has called him – rightly – the master interior designer of organic architecture. Yet he himself wrote:
“I don’t believe in universals. Neither organic nor non-organic architecture is omnipotent. I wouldn’t even dare to say for certain that I believe in organic architecture. It’s simply that I believe in Makovecz’s architecture, and I gladly worked with him, owing him almost everything professionally – as both a master and a colleague. But truth requires that I add: I am far less a follower of his followers. So it’s not stylistic sympathy that guides me.”
(Gábor Mezei: Answer to Imre Makovecz’s Questions, 1984)
His furniture design was likely watched approvingly – from above – by the masters of the Gödöllő Artists’ Colony, especially Ede Thoroczkai Wigand. Yet Mezei also wrote:
“I don’t believe in the conscious imitation of either international architecture or Hungarian folk art. I listen inward.”
(Gábor Mezei: Answer to Reima Pietilä’s Questions, 1981)
I suspect that Count Tivadar Andrássy would gladly have invited him to furnish the dining room of his Buda palace in 1898 – the one that caused such a scandal with its outrageously avant-garde design – to sit among Rippl-Rónai’s stemless glasses. Gábor Mezei’s furniture relates, if we must seek a tradition, to that branch of Art Nouveau that prized flexibility and beauty of line – one he greatly admired. Yet his furniture design connects most closely, I think, to surrealism. He seems the sole representative of the late-20th-century surrealist current in Hungarian furniture art – if such a current exists. The number of works he designed but could not realize far exceeds those that were built. A pity for them.
[2012]