Lexicon entries will leave posterity with the understanding that Magdolna Supka, born in 1914 and awarded a doctorate from Pázmány Péter University, Budapest, in 1938, pursued an extraordinarily active career spanning nearly seven decades. She contributed as a museologist, researcher, senior scientific officer, curator of exhibitions of art-historical significance, author of books, studies, and catalogues, and as a discoverer of overlooked or marginalised oeuvres. Moreover, she was a dedicated defender of artistic values. Professional consensus holds that Supka’s work played a pivotal role in the emergence and consolidation of modern Hungarian graphic art in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet as early as 1938, she had published a monograph on a seemingly peripheral artistic phenomenon –Hungarian gentlemanly embroidery [a form of needlework fashionable among the upper classes during the 17th and 18th centuries, characterised by the integration of Renaissance and Ottoman decorative motifs] – and she herself regarded, from a scholarly perspective, her most significant contributions to be the 1959 study Szempontok a képzőművészeti alkotótevékenység vizsgálatához (lit. Aspects of the Study of Visual Artistic Activity) and the 1964 essay A drámai groteszk szerepe festészetünkben a művészetpszichológia szemszögéből (lit. The Role of the Dramatic Grotesque in Our Painting from the Perspective of Art Psychology).
Little known is the biographical fact that Supka first qualified as a goldsmith-jeweller before undertaking her art-historical studies, and that her interest in modern art was inspired by the Bewegungskunst and Dadaist literary initiatives of the late 1920s. After producing a series of lesser-known theoretical works, from the latter half of the 1960s onwards she dedicated her energies to the discovery and documentation of unknown and suppressed oeuvres. Inevitably, this brought her into confrontation with the discredited ideals of the regime and the prevailing principles of art policy. Her professional struggles are evidenced by a succession of books and studies: in her workshop, the first comprehensive study of painter Vilmos Aba-Novák was produced – she campaigned relentlessly, even after the regime change, for the proper presentation of the artist’s Székesfehérvár panels – and later undertook extensive monographic treatments of György Kohán and Menyhért Tóth.
Among contemporary artists, she devoted particular attention to graphic artists, producing substantial studies and small monographs on the work of Lajos Szalay, Béla Kondor, Vladimir Szabó, Kálmán Csohány, and Csaba Rékassy. These artists were not creators of the manipulative canon of Socialist Realism but progressive figures operating beyond conventional boundaries. Simultaneously, Supka maintained a keen interest in young and emerging talents: she attended exhibitions, consistently engaged in jury deliberations, and argued passionately in professional debates to ensure the recognition of her principles.
From the 1980s onwards, Supka’s closest students – those with whom she maintained almost collaborative relationships and a personal as well as professional connection – were a constant presence. These were artists whose work she monitored, whose exhibitions she inaugurated with incisively witty improvisations, and whose catalogues she prefaced with studies of extraordinary depth. She could subtly critique them with a murmured remark, exalt them to the highest praise, or consign them to profound doubt. This cadre of contemporary artists reflects, indirectly, Supka’s vision of art history: the indispensable and irreplaceable nature of a work, authenticated by profound experience, and sustained by the beauty of form.
The diversity and richness of her honorary Supka students – graphic artists Margit Ágotha, Ádám Lévai, István Püspöky, Eszter Rékassy, András Miklós Sáros, Gabriella Sulyok; painters Péter Földi, József Gaál, Tamás Kárpáti, Péter Kovács, Éva Krajcsovics, István András Kurucz, Judit Makó, Ákos Muzsnay, József Szentgyörgyi, László Tenk; and sculptors Pál Kő and Tamás Szabó – demonstrates that Supka was a wide-ranging, highly knowledgeable professional with acute attention to the developments of modern art. She was not beholden to any single aesthetic doctrine or narrow stylistic circle – though abstract art, what she termed “neo-blah-blah,” superficiality, empty sensationalism, and professional overstatement were naturally alien to her – she respected all genuine artistic quality and achievement.
Supka articulated her art-historical ars poetica in the late 1980s: “My entire career has been shaped in opposition to the neglect and non-recognition of value: on one hand, by uncovering hitherto unexplored phenomena in our art traditions; on the other, by recording, in writing and exhibition, the enduring values of contemporary art from 1960 to the present. This constitutes my art-historical profile, the strand running behind the earlier Socialist Realism and today’s ‘avant-gardes.’” Her career and professional conduct bear testimony to the validity of this guiding principle. It should also be noted that her treatises, studies, articles, and catalogue introductions were always written in exquisitely precise Hungarian, often poetically inspired, and invariably accessible.
Supka was strict, exacting, and consistent: she was profoundly disconcerted by lack of talent and never compromised with inferior work. She moved swiftly past weak creations yet defended significant works of major artists to the utmost. For instance, she wrote a meticulous early analysis of Nándor Wagner’s dramatic full-figure József Attila [Hungarian poet, 1905-1937] sculpture, modelled in Budapest before the artist emigrated to Sweden and later Japan in 1956. Although the sculpture could not then be realised in permanent form, it was later cast in bronze after the artist’s death, at the turn of the millennium, and was unveiled in 2005 in the garden of the Petőfi Literary Museum, prior to the sculpture’s installation in Nagyvárad (Oradea, Romania). Supka was present at the belated inauguration, reading aloud her 1950s analysis; as with the masterfully executed sculpture, the text remained weighty, precise, and indisputable.
[2015]