Mihály Schéner

Mihály Schéner, in addition to his paintings that “preserve the naïve charm of children’s drawings”, experimented with several branches and movements as a kind of polymath within the visual arts, but he generally defined himself as an expressive surrealist: “his art is both modern and traditional, sensitive and masculine, refined and rustic in its craftsmanship; it keeps pace with universal art, yet is also a specifically Hungarian trend of its own”. [1]

He began as a pupil of Gyula Rudnay, later painted in the spirit of Aurél Bernáth’s post-impressionism, and until the early 1960s worked in Endre Domanovszky’s post-expressionist approach. Yet he was likely disappointed in the traditions imposed upon him, [2] and thus, in terms of his figures, moved increasingly towards surrealism, while in his compositions he progressed in a constructive direction in which folk art gradually gained more and more space.

Regarding his first exhibition, held in 1962 at the Csók Gallery, part of the profession spoke of it disparagingly; fortunately, however, an English art collector purchased almost all of his works, which allowed him to travel in Western Europe.

Decades later he himself admitted that seeing his works hanging in the Csók Gallery gave him a bad feeling: “At my first exhibition, where about fifty of my pictures were placed next to one another, I realised one of my great mistakes. When they were created individually, it didn’t strike me, but displayed together it was as if I had dipped the world in blue. Like a novice housewife putting too much bluing into the rinse water for white linens… I was very frightened, for this world is so much more beautiful, so much more colourful – how could I have depicted it as so cold? Do I feel cold inside it?” he recalled.

The failure, however, did not discourage him from the visual arts – quite the opposite: “an artist must renew himself. It is not only the artist’s duty to realise his ideas, but to be able, when necessary, to transcend them”, he said in an interview. In the 1960s, instead of colour, he became increasingly preoccupied with the laws governing the creation of form; appliqués began to appear on his panel paintings, and traces of peeled-off layers emerged, motif-less primal forms and archetypal images surfaced in his works. Following his expressive “blue” period, he strove to create clearly constructed compositions, and his palette became strongly reduced. “I deprived myself of colourfulness, although my earlier works had been characterised by a riot of colours. I felt that forms, in their sheer manifestation, were sufficient to evoke emotions.” [3]

Through his visit to France, his artistic outlook was re-evaluated: “In Paris my three-branched creative tree of life took shape. One branch consists of my textural and expressive endeavours, another of my geometric and structural experiments – the classical tradition of the Bauhaus – and the third of my organic, biological forms, including human forms.” Here he became more closely acquainted with abstract visual art – he encountered the abstract rooftops of Nicolas de Staël, the ultramarine imprints of Yves Klein, and the emigré Simon Hantai (with whom he had lived in Budapest in the 1940s). He also saw Fontana’s slashed canvases, Dubuffet’s naïve textural works, Zoltán Kemény’s plastic images made on bronze plates, Miklós Schöffer’s mobiles, and Ervin Pátkai’s city sculptures made of Styrofoam.

Lucio Fontana’s slashed paintings especially made him reflect. Schéner interpreted the works of the Italian–Argentinian artist as the breaking open of the picture plane – painting’s step into the third dimension. Similar ambiguities occur in Schéner’s own works, where it is not always clear whether one is looking at a painting incorporating sculptural elements or a relief. “I am a painter, but I feel that painting must move out of the plane. I realised that painting, however hard it tries, cannot depict all three dimensions. It cannot show the rear, hidden side of things. Sculpture, however, can do this – and more: it is able to create spatial situations.” [4] His formation of shapes – particularly after his trips to Italy – was greatly influenced by Marino Marini, Giacomo Manzu, and the sculpture of Pompeii.

He also began to engage more deeply with the motifs of Hungarian folk art in the French capital, blending them in his works with modern tendencies such as pop art. From then on, the cultivation of tradition and the preservation of Hungarian “folklore” became one of the aims of his art: “[…] what Béla Bartók represents in the musical culture of the twentieth century, the same is represented by Mihály Schéner in contemporary visual art. He is the preserver and saviour of Hungarian folk culture, naturally using the tools of contemporary art.” [5]

Nevertheless – as he said – it was not only the artworks in museums that influenced him in Paris, but the street itself, the infinite richness and diversity of lifestyles. It was here that he realised that Hungarians lived far too isolated; exchange and comparison were needed, for only in this way could one create one’s own values. After his Parisian period he spent a few months in Stockholm, where the folkish horse-cult especially captured his imagination. Returning from his travels abroad, he shifted from expressivity to a structural mode of expression. His 1969 exhibition – again held at the Csók Gallery – was curated by Miklós Erdély.

Over the course of his career he created drawings, collages, sculptures, puppets, and various stage designs, in which he made use of mythological, biblical, natural, and diverse folk-derived motifs, blending the folklore and the motifs of traditional crafts he had seen in childhood with the symbols of European culture. In this way, classical modernism in his work often merges with the ancient and the archaic. His folk-inspired puppet and gingerbread figures, his hussars, and his Saint Stephens that also evoke the world of naïve art blend in the most natural way with the outlook and formal tools of twentieth-century modernity. [6] His structures and wooden puppets – radiating naïveté and cheerfulness, yet often grotesque – are at once artworks, puppets, and fairground children’s toys.

He also created new types of beings, strange fairy-tale figures (such as the rooster-hussar, the seahorse-hussar, or the Pigula – a creature with a pig’s body and a human head, etc.), and he established the genre of the textile sculpture. His textile plastics are made with the same “automatic, expressive-surrealist method” as his paintings.

The materials he employed ranged across an extremely wide scale – he could use practically anything that came to hand (oil paint, acrylic, pen, paper, wood, textile, metal, clay, glass, or even gingerbread), and he would paint, draw, carve, knead, glue, etc. His creative method is neither realist nor abstract. It does not mirror or depict, nor does it directly refer to history, yet it cannot be called sterilely abstract. The mythical archetypes and primordial images of his “expressive-surrealist” (as he called himself) works evoke a world that the human being of the twenty-first century has almost forgotten. Yet the forms emerging from the depths of time, shaped by the forces of nature, recall a kind of intact wholeness in which the intensity, ecstasy, and density of human existence are still present, [7] alongside childlike playfulness. “I have always needed play in order to be able to live” – he confessed. Folk art, moreover, contains many playful elements – passage between reality and unreality is free.

The artist lived for twenty years in a rural peasant environment, so this world was very close to him. “All the same, folk art is only raw material for me, from which I wish to reach today’s European formal culture – with folk-inspired figures and play-archetypes I want to reach a modern form of expression, and this is what I wish to offer to the public – and not least to children,” he said.

In Schéner’s view, folk art does not belong in a museum but remains a fresh and inspiring source material even today, standing in reciprocal interaction with modern visual art. Thus, for example, “in pop, folk temperament is also expressed; figuration is reborn in it, even if it sometimes goes as far as fairground aggressiveness.” [8] Yet art must be varied and diverse. He was convinced that it is harmful to the development of the visual arts if a single main trend “rules over” the others. “I cannot accept art in any other way than in its diversity. A one-winged bird cannot fly. Let the movements live side by side on equal terms, whether they are labelled conservative or avant-garde,” he said in an interview.

Alongside his visual art, his writings also deserve mention. As a senior contributor to the journal Új Auróra, he not only published on the results of his own work but also wrote, among others, about György Kohán, Jenő Barcsay, and Pál Deim, and in Élet és Irodalom he wrote several times about Ilona Kiss.

He is one of our greatest painters – the profession is aware of this and, what is rare in the twentieth century, so is the broader public interested in the arts.

[2016]

[1] János Frank, Szóra bírt műtermek (Artists' studios), Budapest, Magvető, 1975.

[2] P. Szűcs, Julianna P., A művész kézjegye nyomában, Schéner Mihály kiállítása a Tihanyi Múzeumban (In the Footsteps of the Artist's Signature, Mihály Schéner's Exhibition in the Tihany Museum), Népszabadság 8 August 1979.

[3] János Frank, Artists' studios, Budapest, Magvető, 1975.

[4] János Frank, Artists' studios, Budapest, Magvető, 1975.

[5] István Bajnai, „A közöttesben születik az új" ("The new is born in the in-between"), Tiszatáj, 2004/12,

[6] Sándor Olasz, Schéner Mihály megtartó-megváltó művészete (Mihály Schéner's art of saving and redeeming), Tiszatáj, 2004 (12).

[7] Sándor Olasz, Sándor Schéner Mihály's art of saving and redeeming, Tiszatáj, 2004.

[8] János Frank, Artists' studios, Budapest, Magvető, 1975.