Tableaux
The roots of his painting go back to the post-1945 historical and artistic situation. He started out with “bright breezes”, but because of his intellectual background, he, like his contemporary Ferenc Szalay, was not a member of the movement. His career, however, progressed with them, sometimes incorporating the spirit of the folk-inspired, sometimes transcending it – in search of the more universal possibilities of Hungarian figurative painting.
In the late forties and early fifties, the members of the Gresham Circle formed the backbone of the teaching staff at the Képzőművészeti Főiskola (College of Fine Arts) (István Szőnyi, Aurél Bernáth, Róbert Berény), and they also shared the basic professional and pedagogical concerns of former members of the Roman school (Endre Domanovszky), socialist realist artists who had returned from the Soviet Union and had become teachers for political reasons (Sándor Ék), and even descendants of the former Nyolcak (Eight) (Bertalan Pór). And the pedagogical concept that brought together these teachers from so many different backgrounds was a naturalistic, one might say academic, professional training. They required the student to visualise views and to acquire anatomical knowledge. The curriculum was only seemingly one-sided – on the one hand, the masters never inhibited the artistic inclinations of their students and, on the other hand, they provided a solid foundation for later artists who wanted to break away from naturalistic pictorialism.
László Patay’s painting inherited from István Szőnyi the tempera technique and from Jenő Barcsay the vision based on drawing elements. Whether it was a tableau or a mural, these two components can be identified as dominant in his oeuvre – together with the third element, figurative, formal representation. No wonder then that when, in the early 1960s, some contemporary Hungarian painting moved towards more abstract trends, Patay remained on the traditional trail, as his large-scale tableau Tavasz (Spring, 1962) shows. In it, he not only foreshadows the future direction of his pictorialism, but also marks the limits of his individual style. It is as if, in contrast to the more relaxed, illustrative conception of Diplomamunka (Diploma Thesis, 1956), this tableau is the culmination of the results of the fresco diploma: the combined representation of several plots and timelines, figurality, a tendency towards symbolism.
Ditte, Dorka (1962) is not just a memory either. The camera lens would most probably not have depicted the painter’s daughters in this way: as two standing dolls in front of an empty wall. Obviously, the aim was not a close representation of reality – the blank wall is a wall of memory – for a later time – when the artist no longer remembers her children as little girls. The work could never have been created in such an iconic form if Patay had not learned in the mural class how to transpose elements of reality into a different, artistic reality. Perhaps it is here that the need for monochrome colour that would later appear in the works of his oeuvre first appears.
The philosophical question of Verekedők (Fighters, 1968) is posed by the peaceful landscape in the background and the group of people fighting on the edge of the abyss – indicating that thoughts based on reality can be set aside from the view of the concrete environment on the plane of the artistic worldview. This message will be further elaborated later in the panel entitled Madách emlékére (In Memory of Madách).
Towards the end of the sixties, Patay’s tableau painting was seriously challenged. With the new economic mechanism, it became clear that the increasingly popular non-figurative trends were also claiming a place under the aegis of contemporary domestic art, which in itself would not have been a problem, since it had long been a bipolar situation: figurative and non-figurative pictorial art. However, official art policy still favoured the late socialist, and the public expected a shift in emphasis from the more liberal atmosphere that came with the new mechanism. By this time, however, the figurative side was also demanding a move away from the socialist, and a process was quietly underway, which was to take place at the Vásárhelyi Őszi Tárlatok (Vásárhely Autumn Expositions), which sought to find an answer to the question of what realism was without the socialist prefix. This, given that the Vásárhely school was a typically national artistic formation in the first half of the twentieth century, also lent a national character to the aspirations of the artists who were more closely associated with the exhibitions. There could therefore be no doubt that the Vásárhely circle wanted to develop a kind of “Hungarian” realism instead of “socialist” realism – the first formulator of which was, among others, László Patay. He fought for this goal not only with his works (the group exhibition of six painters) but also with his writings, as a result of which his 1976 exhibition in Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle) was attacked by critics who had become advocates of more abstract tendencies. As he himself mentions in his autobiography, it was enough for him to manage to survive the consequences.
But in the world of tableaux, his direction remains unbroken. His already mentioned figurative, cartoonish and anatomically based pictorialism is extended with a new element. In his huge tableau Asszonyok (Women, 1976), the members of a group of women huddled together under a cloudy sky almost grow out of the ground. They stand bewildered, helpless in the landscape, as if asking: what is the point of all this violence if it makes the earth without men? It is impossible not to notice the surreal element lurking in the framing: the women stand between heaven and earth like visionless satyrs, held within the frame of the image only by the will of the artist. The theme was continued in 1989 with the canvas Mementó (Memento), in which the dead lying side by side covered with red and national-colour shrouds signify that the tragedy of 1956 is a loss for all Hungarians.
Within what framework can we talk about a tableau, and what message can be squeezed into this framework – this was the painter’s question in the seventies. He had to realise that the tableau is not really his world – not only because he had already been on the road to shaping mural painting according to his own style for a long time, but also because his message is not necessarily intended to be a tableau. For Patay the painter is philosophical, and accordingly, he is thinking about how to lift the art form, living within the confines of frame and canvas, out of its traditionally intimate function. Instead, he tries to use the tools of his painting to articulate the processes that lie behind the things of the everyday world, processes that can sometimes only be expressed in conceptual language. Lyricism remains only in the smaller panels, mostly for sale, as the product of an intimate meditation between the creation of canvases laden with grand ideas.
Patay is perhaps the first to bring the current professional issues of art policy to the screen. Why? We are used to thinking that this is a matter for critics, but for our painter, the concept of reality indirectly includes art politics as a defining element of his existence. His paintings express an opinion – and a theoretically grounded opinion at that. A négyzet (The Square), A felület (The Surface), A mélység (The Depth) and A gömb (The Sphere) (1979-1981) are visual manifestos that expand into a series, each piece embodying the fundamental values of figurative picturation: the spectacle, surface and space. The presence of any one of these excludes non-figurative shaping. As regards natural form, he is rather sarcastic: abstract form is as unnatural in painting as a square cut with a lawnmower in a meadow full of flowers. If we think of the philosophical and ideological difference between the two artistic methods – the universal behind the non-figurative and the national behind the figurative – it is unmistakable which Patay is in favour of. It is here that the path of the “bright breezes” and Patay’s path of the same interpretation of “Hungarian” realism finally converge. For example, what Sándor Vecsési embodies in his painted houses, which he elevates to symbolism, Patay articulates with intellectual sensibility in the joy of narrow professional idiosyncrasies.
But it will not stay at that level. In his grandiose canvas, Emlékmű (Monument, 1981), he places the painter in a cage of Mondrian lattices, his 20th-century “thinking room”, and asks him to decide whether he is bound by the representative background behind him, in which almost all the famous works of art from the Venus de Willendorf to the present day are shown together, or whether the entire history of his work up to that point can be put in brackets. In other words: can we continue with art in the traditional sense or, as Duchamp did, can we go beyond it? The tabloid character, the picture in a picture technique, is already reminiscent of the practice of wall paintings, which the artist makes no secret of: the 175x250 centimetre format is indeed beyond the dimensions of a tableau.
Nor can the appearance of the tabloid be a novelty in Patay’s painting, since in the eighties our master had long since completed a series of large-scale commissions for wall paintings, to which his hand and sense of composition were better adapted. He combined a somewhat dry theoreticality with a concrete historicity to create his large-scale painting, Szubjektív tabló (Subjective Tableau, 1979). The subject is apparently simple: to paint the outstanding personalities of Hungarian painting who, coming from the past, are immersed in the present and who, in the depth of the painting, are linked to the emerging young artists. Patay was by this time a senior lecturer at the College’s Department of Anatomy, and so he used two painting tools accordingly: the frame and the canvas to divide the composition, which contains hundreds of figures. Both the canvas in relation to the frame, and the frame in relation to the whole picture, are connected according to the rules of the golden ratio, but they also have a different structuring character: the canvas contains the greats of the past, the frame the greats of the recent past – and around them the painters of the present are seen in exciting movement.
Patay has often been accused of illustration, that is, of using borrowed means from literature to explain or even represent his subject. His canvas Madách emlékére (In Memory of Madách, 1984) is the very antithesis of this. If he had wanted to illustrate the great playwright’s work, he would have stuck closely to the coincidences of content. In his picture, as in Madách’s drama, Adam is about to throw himself over the abyss while Eve holds him back. In this movement, Zichy depicts the ultimate despair, but in Patay’s, Adam is caught between leaping and falling back, so that the scene becomes a snapshot of the dilemma of self-destruction and survival, from which the only logical way out, a human alternative, is family. Perhaps we are not far wrong to say that for Patay, this reassessment of Madach’s idea is the painterly task.
The way it is presented further pushes the painting away from being categorised as illustration. In the upper part of the work, which can be divided into two tracts, a pair of people stand in front of a cloud of atoms. Surrounding them are all the things that in history we have come to call non-human. The term is accurate in this case: there is much more than inhuman deeds and actions at stake here, the cataclysm of the killing, dying mass of humanity is a tremendous vision in the cosmic background imagined by Madách and Patay. The anatomically complex, multifaceted depiction of the bloody tableau seems to be the only way to give the humanity of the foreground pair of people a philosophically appropriate emphasis. For by human, Patay means the creation embodied in the predella-like lower part. This is an interesting solution – the continuation of the process of divine creation in human creation, but as the figure of Adam indicates, the two are linked by the free will given to them by God, and the painter’s message is wound back to Madách.
Frescoes
Far from the intimate sphere of tableaux is the space that houses the murals of public buildings. The world of sconces and frescoes was first defined by medieval church interiors, which were communal spaces – as are the interiors of buildings that house today’s sacred and profane wall paintings. Architectural definition, shaping to fit the plane of the wall – these are the qualities that Patay had to acquire as a college student to obtain a degree in fresco. And, of course, he also had to be in tune with the spirit of the wall: he had to figure out what kind of wall held what kind of message.
After Diplomamunka (Diploma work, 1956) and the fresco of the Tiszalök Artists’ Centre (1954), which was also destroyed, Patay had to meet the above requirements for the first time with the fresco commission for the Csákvár TB Sanatorium (1964). The theme was given: health, illness and healing, which the painter had to present on two semicircular wall surfaces. There is also a doorway in the wall, which the painting encircles, creating a staggered structure in which events are placed above and below each other. The architectural context thus almost automatically creates a planar composition in the spirit of the wall. In addition, the surface, divided into two tracks, functionally separates the different stages of recovery from their respective visuals, creating a fictional, beating world rather than hospital rooms and nurses, narrating rather than representing the process from illness to recovery to health. The concept is a little abstract, but it helps that it is accompanied by natural forms, which greatly helps the viewer to see the mural from a single perspective.
In Csákvár he is still only a muralist of the future, but in the fresco of the Wedding Hall in Eger (1965) he is already an artist who moves routinely in the world of mural painting. The core idea of the work is the incorporation of the moment of adulthood into the process of human life, since the eternal cycle of life is represented at the level of individual existence by the child becoming a youth and then a parent. Patay believes that the essence of the cycle is the change that can be best captured in the choice of a mate (he also places this in the main place), that is, in love, which in its unresolved but idealised form is the biological and emotional guarantee of our life.
It is striking that only a year had passed since the fresco in Csákvár, but in Eger our master has taken a great step forward in the spirit of the wall. What was then only an architectural possibility of the environment is here a compositional element: objects in front of and behind each other appear deliberately above and below each other, according to the principle of the largest surface. In this way Patay fulfils the historical requirements of flat composition. He also shapes the theme accordingly. He believes that love cannot be appropriated, it belongs to everyone. That is why, by placing his figures in a concrete environment, the work can easily become a vivid image, which is a characteristic of tableaux. There remains the fictitious setting, the terraced terracing of the rock that provides the backdrop, with which the ingenious artistic mind can rotate the figures into a plane. The figurative environment surrounding the main motif is no longer a grouping of life images, but rather a montage of separate images – a conscious use of technique in the image.
It should be noted that formally the wall surface divided into compositional bands by rock terraces is an “invention” of Aurél Bernáth (Munkásállam (Workers’ State)), and not only Patay but also contemporary muralists of the early sixties reach back to this in their compositions. Just as in the decoration of the striped surface of an architectural environment with a scaffold or a pano, the master’s Inotai pano is the standard, where the various figures, turning in space, are practically arranged in rows on the ribbon-like surface. Patay also had such a surface in his fesco-secco for the District Office in Ózd (1971).
But this world is too strict for him. He realises that an over-emphasis on fictional spaces and planes within the wall-work can lead to a staginess, making his work a nerve-wracking experience, lacking not only artistic reality but also himself.
His Sekko in the Belgrade Parliament Hall (1977) already shows signs of the mature muralist. The wall above the room of the President of the Republic undoubtedly requires a different task from his previous works. When he surveys the architectural context and the conglomerate of decorative art that goes with it, he sees that the existing murals date back to the Romantic roots of the last century. It is therefore necessary to adapt to them, while at the same time asserting its own message and style. In the encounter between Tamás Esze and Rákóczi, he has stiffened a kind of historical necessity in the form of a painterly snapshot. He retains the historical character of the surrounding wall paintings, and has the opportunity to work with his usual visual elements in the fictitious landscape background, but on the other hand, by sticking to the prosaic diction of the snapshot, using the historical act as a pretext, he conveys the more general, still relevant message of the encounter.
Patay learns to represent in the House of Representatives. He uses his formidable professional skills to loosen up the rigid wall planes through painterly means, even reintroducing spatial effects alien to the murals. At the same time, the refined draughtsmanship and anatomical precision of the painterly visual elements lend the work a certain decorative quality, which is justified in this place.
In the frescoes of Csákvár and Eger, he uses the same brownish-ochre colouring in his paintings as in his contemporary canvases. This monochromaticism is over in the country-house secco, where the colours shine in the light shades of the egg tempera, and this method of colour treatment is retained in his work.
In the case of the secco for ÉLIM in Nyíregyháza (1982), Salvador Dali’s work with a similar solution is an obvious analogy. But the difference is essential: Dali’s Christ is the Saviour floating on the spiritual horizon of an artificial world, while Patay’s Jesus is the God-Man, who is the culmination of the process of redemption, and who is stretched out on the tapestry of the universe by the consequences of the opposition of matter and spirit. If surrealism is brought up as an analogy, it should be clarified: Patay is not surrealistic, but employs certain surreal elements. For example, the image in the image technique: behind and below the Messiah floating on the cross, figures from his older panel paintings fit in well: the figure of the “Seed Sower”, a woman from “The Tempest”, a group of young people dancing around the hill in the central section of the triptych “Hungarian Landscape”. For Patay, this is the world, embraced by the two arms of the Saviour.
Two parts of the panorama for the Szekszárd Railway Station (1983) is a romp through time, a carefree journey into the past. A stylistic painterly enterprise – with the remark that in these two huge works Patay takes the viewer through the stations of his own life. There is no background, only what we see from the window of the fast train of memory. Overlapping scenes and events that roll with us from birth to adulthood. Ultimately, it is on this train that we arrive at the various stations of Patay’s sacred murals.
In practice, church painting is nothing more than an adaptation to the architectural environment and iconographic prescriptions. The pictorial decoration of the walls of a medieval cathedral is both a liturgical function and a reflection of the fact that for the illiterate faithful, only visual representation can help them to interpret the various passages of the Bible. This dual function also determines, for example, the iconographic order of the altarpiece, which is still mandatory in Catholic churches – and Patay’s is most clearly realised in the large altarpiece of the church in Békéscsaba. However, the regulations resulting from the function should not discourage the artist – before our master, Vilmos Aba-Novák undertook large-scale sacral fresco and secco tasks, and did not always adhere to the canon. However, the situation is different with his contemporaries: the mural painting practice of the Roman School foregoes the perception of the character of the figures due to an idealized system of norms (except for Vilmos Aba-Novák’s secco in Jászszentandrás), but also lacks the representation of the space of man – the figures are either enthroned in the air or stand in the empty plane of the wall, held together only by the decorative composition. This is not the case with Patay, who opens up spaces of infinite distance for his figures and populates them with concrete, modelled figures, in accordance with his anatomical and drawing practice. The best example of this is the interior of the church in Ráckeve. A further difference between the novecento and Patay’s approach is that the former find their forebears in the trecento, while our master finds his in the illusionist mural painting of the Baroque. This is a big difference, since while the members of the Roman school only shine the light of pure faith on their murals, Patay’s paintings are illuminated by the light of Baroque religiosity mixed with the mundane. In doing so, he does not break the religious rules, but brings the representation closer to the people. When an astronaut appears in Patay’s secco, the mundane seems to be outside the religious choice of subject, and as an alien element, it is only philosophically connected to sacred iconography. But this link is so strong that the astronaut is a principle part of the composition – just as he is a principle part of the all-embracing divine providence. This modern understanding of the mundane, which finds a philosophical place for itself in the realm of religion, is Patay’s extraordinary specificity.
In the history of post-1945 Hungarian painting, there was a long pause following the mural painting of the Roman school. It was not that the Church did not fulfil its patronage obligations – the political situation made it so. However, Patay’s secco works for the Németvárosi Church in Gyula (1985) and the Church of the Assumption in Budapest (1987) were created in a relatively more permissive artistic-political context. Nevertheless, he was aware of the weight of the task. The total surface area of the walls that he has to decorate with seccos is 470 square metres, and he has to do a large part of it on a dome vault, i.e. on a curved surface. There is also a problem with the interior environment, where the Baroque tectonics under the secco clearly indicate where the world of architecture begins and where the world of painting begins. So he has to adapt, but in this case adaptation is not necessarily a disadvantage: the supporting arches of the dome vault divide the ceiling into several tracts, so he can try out the illusionist painting tools he inherited from the Baroque – Patay style. In the scenes he sneaks in, for example, the execution of the martyrs of Oradea and the fire of Gyula, though the side walls strictly tell the stories of Hungarian saints.
The 500-square-metre sacristy of the Church of the Heart of Jesus in Erzsébethely, Békéscsaba (Jamina) (1993) is undoubtedly the artist’s most unified work in this direction. On the one hand, because the entire wall surface is covered by his paintings, and on the other hand, because he produces a spiritual unity in the murals that is identical to the sacral unity of the church. The images of the Calvary at the bottom of the side walls, and above them scenes from the life of Jesus, creep up to the roof of the tabernacle like two huge hands clasped in prayer. And the altarpiece closes the space as soothingly as an answered prayer to a troubled soul: painting and poetry are for a moment placed on a common platform in the church.
The altarpiece is worth a special mention. The triangular composition follows the line of the sanctuary. At its highest point stands Christ, but not in the usual pantocrator’s image of Christ. Here too he is Lord of the world, and everything seems to be subordinate to him – everything that Patay holds sacred. The Christ of love, through whose heart rays of light scan the world and unite the world’s troubles, our everyday lives. Patay presents all this with the well-tried picture-in-picture technique, by applying his own works. It is also striking here how many profane elements the painter accumulates in the altarpiece – apart from the figure of Jesus, virtually all the figures are ordinary people. Perhaps it is because the history of the Patay family, part Protestant and part Catholic, forges in the painter a firm conviction that the church is first and foremost a congregation of believers, and only then of priests.
If we said that the Békéscsaba secco is the most uniform of the wall paintings, then the Ráckeve Parish Church is probably the most demanding in terms of painting (1994). Although the architectural setting is also Baroque, Patay is fortunate that the surfaces to be decorated with the wall paintings give him free rein and opportunity – the ceiling in particular. It is a simple flat slab, which Patay gives a painted depth using illusions, making it look like a mirrored vault. With a little exaggeration, he constructs a dome on the flat ceiling.
In the Ráckeve ceiling illusion, the system of the secco is grouped around two central scenes: one is Jacob’s struggle with the angel, the other is the hand of Christ in the Last Judgement, which both raises the good and plunges the wicked into the abyss. The ceiling is surrounded on both sides longitudinally by a twisting braid of people, which, sliding up from the side walls, connects the figural composition to the central scenes.
Although the fresco of the church in Békéscsaba completely covers every corner of the square, in Ráckeve Patay has to adapt to the Baroque antecedents, though in the latter case we have no shortage of ideas. Architecture and painting are transformed into a single vision for the viewer who takes in the space – a poignant vision.
The crowning achievement of his work was the decoration of the side walls and the dome of Szeged Cathedral (1980-2000). The two sides of the transept must of course adapt to the figures and neo-Romanesque decorative elements painted by Ferenc Márton at the beginning of the century, but the closure of the transepts leaves him just enough surface to compose in his own style (Szeged Flood). And the secco of the dome is one of the finest achievements in contemporary mural painting.
The elements of László Patay’s individual style: drawing definition, anatomical correctness, figurality, tempera technique – the combination of which he used with purpose from the beginning of his career until his death. In his tableaux he also raises intellectual questions of Hungarian painting as an abstract but defining form of reality. In his frescoes, surpassing Vilmos Aba-Novák in terms of the size of the painted surface, he can claim a unique achievement in the 20th century. Going back to Baroque illusionistic fresco painting, his anatomically correct compositions renewed Hungarian church painting. In the art-political battles of his time, he advocated figurative picturation – both in his paintings and in his writings. As a leading teacher in the anatomy department of the college, he educated countless generations. His life’s work is indispensable to contemporary domestic painting.
[2017]