Preface
Because he exhibited as frequently as circumstances allowed, critical responses to Miklós Somos appeared regularly in connection with both his solo and group exhibitions; his works represented Hungary abroad on numerous occasions; some dozen of his murals adorn communal spaces; his illustrations enriched several books; and his writings were published both during his lifetime and after his death. At Christmas 1997, the Magyar Posta (Hungarian Post [Hungarian state postal service]) issued postage stamps based on his paintings Szent Család (lit. Holy Family) and Királyok imádása (lit. Adoration of the Kings). His works have also featured at domestic and international auctions.
Any overview of his art must take into account the oeuvre of his wife, Éva Lieber (1932–2005) [Hungarian textile and painter artist], since their shared family life also functioned as a creative and intellectual workshop. The couple’s common life – their studio practice, participation in artists’ colonies, exhibitions, friendships, and study trips – exerted a formative influence on the development of their artistic outlook and modes of expression. It should be emphasised that the members of the Somos–Lieber couple created two autonomous and clearly distinct bodies of work; nevertheless, the spiritual orientation of their art reveals numerous affinities.
Over the six decades of his artistic career, Miklós Somos– who took his vocation as a painter with the utmost seriousness – produced a substantial and weighty oeuvre marked by a distinctive intellectual charge and an archaicising style. His works are held partly in public and private collections and partly in the family-managed estate. In addition to easel paintings and panel works, he also executed numerous frescoes and mosaics, most of which can be seen on the walls of ecclesiastical buildings and churches. He devoted his life entirely to the visual arts, working from morning to evening on weekdays on his solo and group exhibitions and on fulfilling commissions. His artistic ideas were prepared and shaped by his travels and reading. For decades he studied questions of Christian iconography in order to ensure the authenticity of his representations. He organised his life in such a way that he could live exclusively from – and for – the creative practice of painting and support his family through it. He did not undertake teaching. He also appeared as a writer on art: in 1965 he published a monograph on Georges Rouault [French painter, 1871–1958]. His poetry and prose were published posthumously as well.
Career
The artist, who spent his student years in Eger and already showed clear talent at that time, took a decisive step in the formation of his creative career when, in 1951, he was admitted to the Képzőművészeti Főiskola (today Hungarian University of Fine Arts) in Budapest. He joined the class of Géza Fónyi, a master with a strong European outlook who directed his students’ attention towards the values of Italian and French art. From 1955 onwards, Somos took part regularly in exhibitions in Hungary. After graduating in 1957, Miklós Somos settled in Budapest with his wife and, in the same year, was admitted to the Magyar Népköztársaság Művészeti Alapja (lit. Art Fund of the Hungarian People’s Republic), later renamed the Magyar Művészek Országos Egyesülete (lit. National Association of Hungarian Artists). He was subsequently elected a member of the Fiatal Képzőművészek Stúdiója (lit. Studio of Young Artists) and of the Magyar Képző- és Iparművészek Szövetsége (lit. Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists). Membership in these artistic organisations enabled him to participate in the exhibitions they organised.
A condition of membership in the Art Fund was that works be purchased from the artist on a regular basis for the retail network of the Képcsarnok Vállalat [state-run art sales company in socialist Hungary]. Art Fund membership also entitled him to work at artists’ colonies administered by the Fund, such as those in Zsennye, Hódmezővásárhely, or elsewhere.
Between 1960 and 1963 he was awarded the Derkovits Scholarship [state scholarship supporting young artists in socialist Hungary]. During this period, scholarship holders were required to spend a specified length of time studying the work of a productive community. Miklós Somos was assigned to the mining settlement of Egercsehi, where in 1961 he held the first solo exhibition of his life, drawn from his works created there. This was followed, in 1965, by the opportunity to present his art in a large-scale exhibition of 120 works at the prestigious Ernst Museum, Budapest. By then, at the age of thirty-two, he had been working every summer for five years in Hódmezővásárhely, becoming a member of the so-called Vásárhely artists’ group – regarded as an important workshop of the renewing Hungarian figurative painting of the period. At the Ernst Museum, alongside his paintings, Miklós Somos also presented thirteen ceramic works made in Hódmezővásárhely in 1963. The first section of the exhibition featured portraits, about which the painter wrote in the catalogue: “I am not interested in the individual, but in man himself.”
In the 1960s, Miklós Somos travelled to Italy on four occasions. At the invitation of local partners, he held a solo exhibition in Bologna in 1968. In the same year he exhibited at the Collegium Hungaricum in Vienna together with Gyula Hincz [Kossuth Prize–winning Hungarian painter] and Iván Szabó [Hungarian sculptor]. In addition to his solo exhibitions, his works were regularly shown at this time at national group exhibitions held at the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle Budapest), the Ernst Museum, and in cities such as Miskolc, Hódmezővásárhely, Eger, Szeged, and Keszthely.
In the early 1960s, naturalistic painting and expressionism exerted a strong influence on his work; the art historian Géza Perneczky characterised the style of this early period as “lyrical realism”. Until the middle of the decade, he intensified the suggestive power of his works – marked by thick paint application, strong colours, relief-like plasticity, tightly structured compositions, and closed, abstracted forms – after which his paintings came to be defined by a thinner, more glazed manner of painting and a more restrained palette.
In the early 1970s his painting underwent a certain transformation – he began to create cubistic, surrealistic spaces and to paint still lifes, with a palette that became increasingly colourful: “Golden browns, deep greens, muted greys flow into one another in his tightly composed pictures. Plasticity harmonises in a distinctive way with planar flatness. His nuanced colours bring out the subtle relief-like character of his compositions,” wrote György Csapó about his works of this period. [1]
At this time, in 1971, he first presented his exhibition Arcok (lit. Faces) at the Fészek Klub [artists’ club in Budapest], and in the following year he exhibited at the Kunsthalle, Budapest. The art historian and journalist György Horváth offered an intriguing line of argument in his review: [2] “As we walk through the rooms of his exhibition, we must state that, despite an impression seemingly reinforced time and again, this painting is not mystical – indeed, it does not even incline towards mysticism. It is true that there are – and why should there not be? – features and signs that allude to legends and to the traditions of human life. Yet Somos never immerses himself through them in the sterile ‘depths’ of iconographising. On the contrary – not once does he leave his message in obscurity: his symbols and references, in most cases, break through the wall of allusion and become concrete, unambiguous, for the viewer who establishes contact with their roots.”
At the Kunsthalle, Budapest, a work by Somos featured in the exhibition Magyar művészet 1945–1969 (lit. Hungarian Art 1945–1969, 1970), as well as in the 30th Jubilee Exhibition of Fine Arts (1975), Festészet ’77 (lit. Painting ’77, 1977), and the Vásárhelyi retrospektív kiállítás 1954–1978 (lit. Vásárhely Retrospective Exhibition 1954–1978, 1979). In addition to the national group exhibitions held in the capital and in the provinces, his paintings were also shown at exhibitions in Damascus (1971–1972) and Sofia (1976).
In the 1980s his works became more loosely structured. His refined, vision-like paintings were shaped into lyrical forms. He continued to explore the relationships and unity between earthly and supernatural existence; behind his symbolism there is always a reference to the transcendent. His art remained strongly connected to Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance traditions. This strand of his oeuvre is clearly characterised by an inwardness free of sharp colour contrasts and dramatic composition, by harmony, a compositional logic built on restrained colours, and a distinctive sense of intimacy.
As György Csapó formulates it: “From his paintings, composed of few objects and figures, a quiet suggestiveness radiates. It would be difficult to say what its source is, where their inner glow originates. They seem like old acquaintances, yet – or perhaps precisely for that reason – we rediscover them with pleasure again and again. There is something in them that never grows tiresome and that invites contemplation. In their visual presence they are rich in content, reticent, and full of suggestion. Their lyricism addresses our intellect, yet in their abstraction they do not detach themselves from matter; indeed, they presuppose its weight, form, and substance. In short, they carry within themselves both the communal and the individual. From the ‘body’ of the pictures the soul speaks – perhaps this is why the transfigured objects appearing in the subtle, muted colour-weave of Miklós Somos seem like very old acquaintances. They speak of what binds us all together. They profess and assume human solidarity, and they convey this to us unmistakably, continuously, and simply.” [3]
In 1981 he held a solo exhibition at the Dorottya Street Gallery, followed in 1983 by a solo show at the Csepeli Iskola Gallery; in the same year he also exhibited together with his wife in Budakeszi. In 1988 his paintings were shown at the Csontváry Hall. In the 1980s, alongside national group exhibitions in Hungary, his works were exhibited in Košice, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, and Oslo. During these years he produced ten frescoes, one mosaic, and one painted textile work for various Roman Catholic ecclesiastical institutions, churches, and chapels in Hungary.
Evaluation of his art
From the mid-1950s onwards, Miklós Somos took part in national exhibitions; his individual style, related to constructive painting, had taken shape by the early 1960s. His powerful easel paintings are characterised by relief-like, strong plasticity, tightly controlled structure, closed and simplified forms, and a reduced use of colour. In his depictions of labour, landscapes, nudes, and portraits he transcends the singular features of observable reality. At the beginning of the 1970s his painting was renewed. In place of sombre scenes, he painted cubo-surrealist spaces and still lifes with an increasingly colourful palette; by the 1980s his works had become even more relaxed in structure.
For decades Miklós Somos painted suggestive, fictive portraits that bear the lessons of Trecento painting, icon painting, and Cubist–expressive schools, as if they were variations on particular physiognomic types. His art explores the interconnections of the world; his painting is enriched with transcendent elements and allegories. In his compositions of surreal effect, events often unfold on different planes; at times frames, billowing canvases, or veils separate scenes and spatial layers from one another. He frequently places his figures in biblical situations, yet they bear the features of contemporary people, whether they appear as shepherds watching for signs or as adoring kings. His refined palette – at times dominated by cobalt blue, at others by greenish or greyish hues – lends his paintings a vision-like, enigmatic, lyrical atmosphere. In his works of serious intellectual content, elements of landscape, figures, and objects appear within a strict and coherent system.
Alongside his activity as a painter, he also engaged in journalistic writing, and he was a founding member of the Keresztény Értelmiségiek Szövetsége (lit. Association of Christian Intellectuals). In the 1960s, as a member of the Belvárosi Kör [Budapest-based literary circle], he participated in literary life together with Sándor Weöres, László Nagy, and Sándor Csoóri [major Hungarian poets and writers of the post-war period]. He wrote poetry and also worked as a literary translator.
Somos’s restrained modesty, his inward-looking, humanist life devoted to the search for artistic and spiritual values, and the thematic choices of his painting did not allow his art to gain wider popularity before 1989 [the end of the socialist period in Hungary]. Apart from his contemporaries and close circle of friends, his work has been known primarily to specialists who have studied Hungarian art of the past half-century in depth; the significance of his oeuvre, however, is attested by several prestigious awards – including the Munkácsy Prize – and his works are held in leading national public collections, among them the Magyar Nemzeti Galéria (Hungarian National Gallery).
[2013]
[1] György Csapó, Művészek, műhelyek: harmincnégy beszélgetés képzőművészetről (lit. Artists, Workshops: Thirty-Four Conversations on the Visual Arts), Budapest, Népművelési Propaganda Iroda, 1979, 169.
[2] György Horváth, Somos Miklós képei a Műcsarnokban (lit. The Paintings of Miklós Somos at the Kunsthalle), Magyar Nemzet, 22 February 1972.
[3] György Csapó, Közelképek (lit. Close-Ups), Budapest, Képzőművészeti, 1983, 162.