Although Lajos Szalay was still unable to speak at the age of three, he was already trying to communicate through drawing. He was a frail, solitary child who read a great deal. His artistic development was influenced more by his literature teacher, Gyula Szikra, than by his drawing teacher. “Szalay’s artistic calling was of a literary nature. For him, from the very beginning, the fine arts did not mean technical skill or the brilliant imitation of the appearances of reality. On the contrary, he always regarded his principal means of expression – drawing – as a kind of poetic language, something he never actually learned but, as he said, always simply possessed”, writes Lajos Végvári in his 1990 monograph.
Szalay studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under the direction of Ágost Benkhard. Benkhard, endowed with an excellent sense of pedagogy, dealt with his students with care – he did not consider it necessary to impose the forms of any particular movement upon them, but rather sought to impart the ability to recognize beauty. In 1930, Szalay travelled to Paris with twenty pengős (the currency of Hungary at that time) and spent nearly a year there. After seeing Picasso’s drawings, he decided that he too wanted to devote himself to graphic art. Otherwise, the city had little impact on him: “The fact that I lived in Paris was never reflected in my art or my thinking. I went there in the belief that I would learn, but I realized that wherever I go, I carry so much of myself with me that no external influence can affect me... Nowhere, under any circumstances, do I ever change, for from the shell I have built around myself, neither hardship, nor joy, nor good fortune, nor misfortune can ever entice me out.”
Although Szalay began as a painter, during his years at the Academy he drew more and more (primarily with the “irrevocable” pen and ink), while painting gradually receded into the background. At that time, he looked up to Gyula Hincz as a role model and regarded Vladimir Szabó, who was only a few years older, as the greatest graphic artist of the century. The source of his drawing Népszónok (The Orator of the People) was a painting by Mednyánszky. During his stay in Paris, he was able to see Goya’s works in the Louvre: “My great ideal in art, my true ideal... is not Picasso, but Goya... That kind of suffering which cannot be expressed in words – the inexpressible – would be the true domain of Art.”
He continued to read extensively. His first major work was a series of illustrations for Sándor Szatmári’s anti-utopian novel Kazohínia (Kazohinia), executed with a “classicizing line”, yet in a naturalistic manner. However, Don Quixote and The Brothers Karamazov had the greatest influence on him. His drawings for the latter were published in Új Idők, edited by the tragically fated painter István Farkas. Around this time, a collection of his drawings for twelve poems by Lőrinc Szabó was also published, introduced by the poet himself, who wrote: “I am familiar with many of his works; I have felt their suggestive power, the austere, harsh, or weighty lyricism of his lines and patches – the bitter and stubborn disgust with reality, and the aching restlessness that lives in the dreamlike raw logic, or illogic, of impressions.”
By the 1940s, the most prominent critics of the time were already writing about his work. For a collection of sixty drawings published by the Bolyai Academy – still showing the influence of Derkovits – Lajos Kassák wrote the foreword: “His lines are almost sensitively supple, his enclosed forms monumental, and their effect is painfully ironic or strikingly aggressive. He is not the kind of artist one can regard with indifference; one must take a stand before him, just as he himself appears before us with the nakedness of the soul.” The cover of the volume featured his drawing A pihenő zsákhordó (The Resting Sack Carrier). After the war, Ernő Kállai wrote the preface to his graphic album entitled Szalay rajzai (Szalay’s Drawings): “The great value of his art lies in its sensitivity to the problems of the age; it reveals the gnawing wounds. He always stands on the side of the poor, and his compassion for the humiliated and broken makes him akin to Dostoevsky’s vision of reality”, states the introduction to the album, which contains illustrations inspired by Villon, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Coleridge, Faust, Steinbeck, and Ferenc Herczeg. “His works are confessional in nature. […] His actions are followed by emotions and reflections... With a tart, critical edge, he reports on his optical experiences and the lessons of social coexistence, endowing his figures with a tragicomic touch, and receives the scenes and actors of reality’s everyday drama with profoundly painful irony.”[1]
During the years he spent in Argentina, Szalay shifted from imitating nature to what he called “drawing that conveys ideas.” It was during this period that he created his illustrations for A romlás virágai (The Flowers of Evil). He also made many attempts to illustrate Don Quixote, as he perceived a parallel between the knight and his own personality – though he believed that Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Cervantes’ novel were unsurpassable.
In connection with Szalay’s drawings, it is often remarked that he lacks a distinctive, “consistently developed” style; his works often appear as improvisations. On closer examination, however, his art shows affinities with Expressionism, while his 1957 piece Vonat (Train), for instance, displays features of Futurism. “When studying his works, one is struck by the chameleon-like nature of his artistic personality; the formal characteristics of his drawings often contradict one another: at times he strives for almost fresco-like monumentality, while at others his lightly drawn lines ripple across the paper. And even if we cannot define the style of his works, one thing we nevertheless perceive stands out amid his many and varied drawn worlds: the greatest expressive contrasts were created by a highly distinctive artistic personality…”[2]
In 1954, under the auspices of the University of Tucumán, Szalay published his own album titled Dibujos – Drawings. The volume presents drawings that explore the themes of art, love, family, woman, man’s life, death, war, and faith. His 1958 collection contains expressive illustrations for the works of Dostoevsky, Don Quixote, and Baudelaire. The significance of these latter works lies in the fact that they “provided Szalay with a greater opportunity to articulate his worldview and way of thinking than his earlier subjects had. The series is a lyrical manifestation that, while built upon his earlier, more objective works, is far more subjective in character, and is newer and freer in style. In these drawings – though traces of his earlier naturalistic style still linger – through the means of distortion and deformation he expresses the dislocations of the soul, the upheaval of the worldview, and the inextricable web of moral conflicts.”[3]
At this time, Szalay received highly favorable reviews – not only in South America. The Berlin-based journal Gebrauchsgraphik published a lengthy article on him, in which the author called him “a magician of drawing”: “One seldom encounters an artist who reigns over the art of drawing with such princely assurance as Lajos Szalay. His works evoke the earthly and the spiritual world with breathtaking power”, wrote Anton Sailer.
Following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Szalay created forty-eight drawings that brought him great success; however, due to personal attacks, he was eventually forced to leave Argentina. Upon arriving in New York, he produced numerous drawings on biblical subjects – Káin és Ábel (Cain and Abel), Az angyal (The Angel), Mózes (Moses) – and historical themes – Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc), Szent György (Saint George), Zrínyi, etc., as well as mythological compositions – Ikarusz (Icarus), Pegazus (Pegasus). Pegazus is undoubtedly one of his major works, in which, “despite the elimination of perspectival illusion, he manages to achieve a three-dimensional effect”.
In 1962, already in the United States, he created a series of drawings for the sixtieth birthday of Gyula Illyés. Around this time, he also produced several paintings, among them Izsák feláldozása (The Sacrifice of Isaac). Végvári regards this painting – shaped by the exciting rhythm of deep red and brown tones – as Szalay’s finest work, “a rare synthesis in which the temporally and spatially distant worlds of the mannerist El Greco and the expressionist Rouault are brought into unity”. In 1964, he produced a socially conscious series depicting people on the margins of society – Fekete család (Black Family), Nyomortanya (Slum Dwelling).
His principal work, the 1966 album Genezis (Genesis), consisting of 124 expressive drawings, was published by the Madison Avenue Church Press. This monumental volume represents a grand summation of his art, containing such drawings as Teremtés (Creation), A bűnbeesés (The Fall), A kiűzetés (The Expulsion), Ábrahám és Izsák (Abraham and Isaac), Özönvíz (The Flood), and Bábel tornya (The Tower of Babel). His expressive, asymmetrical compositions are characterized by a subjective conception of space. “Szalay’s drawings are not illustrations, but ensembles of symbols and allegories employing the entire arsenal of art history – visual poems…”[4], wrote Norman Kent in American Artist. Nevertheless, the album went largely unnoticed in the United States – undoubtedly due in part to Szalay’s complete illiteracy in matters of marketing and management. The volume was later published in Hungary by Magyar Helikon and achieved immediate success. “Strength, meditation, mercy: the world-creating strength, the great yearning for mercy of the downtrodden, the meditation of those who carry the world within themselves – who strain the universe through their heavy and somber hearts, let it pour through their stubborn minds, transfuse it through their fluttering and barren lives – this meditation blossoms in the works of Lajos Szalay: hardness, struggle, precision, an ancient, biblical fertility and awareness of being, the power, tranquility, faith, and fervor of the Books of Creation”[5], wrote Ferenc Juhász at the time about Lajos Szalay’s graphics.
In the mid-1970s, Szalay received a commission to create illustrations for the Ómagyar Mária-siralom (Old Hungarian Lamentations of Mary). According to Gyula László, in this work he “created the tormented line”. This was followed by an erotic series of drawings illustrating Babits’s collection of love poems Erato, and then by sketches for Énekek éneke (The Song of Songs). At the request of György Somlyó, Szalay also illustrated the collection of Franz Kafka’s short stories published to mark the 100th anniversary of the writer’s birth. By his own admission, he was able to identify with the “little man” in Kafka’s works, and therefore approached the task with great enthusiasm. His subsequent projects – Énekek éneke (The Song of Songs) and an illustrated autobiography – remained unfinished.
Lajos Szalay was a difficult, temperamental man. If he was dissatisfied with a work, he destroyed it. Thus perished the images of his youthful love, the altarpiece of the Virgin Mary he painted for the church in Tarnabod, and even the portrait of György Faludy – who took offense and refused to write an article about the artist as a result. László Cs. Szabó met Szalay in Paris and described him as “a man who, even over a cup of cooling black coffee, was animated by a purifying anger at the baseness of people – and immediately afterward by compassion for their unspeakable suffering”. This also reveals that Szalay was “a man capable of conveying to posterity the crises of twentieth-century humanity and society – an age more wicked, more soulless, more desperate, and yet more heroic than any other in history. […] His life’s work is the mirror image of a deformed humanity, a desperate cry flowing from passion and born of hopelessness”, wrote Lajos Végvári about the artist.
[2015]
[1] Gábor Pogány Ö.: A magyar festészet forradalmárai
[2] Lajos Végvári, Lajos Szalay. Municipal Council, Ottó Herman Museum, Miskolc, 8.
[3] Végvári, ibid., 49.
[4] Norman Kent: The Inspired Drawings of Lajos Szalay, American Artist, 1969/12.
[5] Ferenc Juhász about Lajos Szalay in Új Írás, 1971/11.