Győző Szatyor – visual artist, teacher, folk woodworker, and holder of the Master of Folk Art (Népművészet Mestere) title – was born on 18 December 1947 in Bogdása, Baranya County. His father, also named Győző Szatyor, is believed to have had family roots in the Háromszék region of Székely Land before the family moved to the Ormánság along the Drava River – perhaps from the village of Szotyor (Coșeni) near Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfântu Gheorghe). For generations, they made their living through trade, running taverns, and operating shops. His mother, Valéria Speigl, came from a Swabian artisan family that had settled in the region in the eighteenth century. From her cultivated, flower-growing father, he inherited diligence and manual skill; with a gentle, loving presence, she shaped and protected the warmth of the family home.
The Szatyor family, too, was affected by the harsh trials of the twentieth century’s wars and dictatorships. Following the village Party secretary’s denunciation, they were declared ‘alien to the system’ and in need of ‘re-education’; from 1950, they were forced to live and work for 41 months in the labour camp established near Polgár on the Hortobágy at Lenintanya. After their release, they were moved to Pécs, and only in December 1956 were they able to return to Bogdása, to the looted, empty parental house. An uncle on his father’s side was imprisoned for his role in the Revolution.
The childhood years spent in Bogdása proved decisive for the later direction of his creative practice and his worldview. In the early 1950s, the customary order refined over centuries, the village’s social hierarchy, and traditions sustained under communal control were still powerful – as was faith – even as the command structure of a system that sought to centralise everything made its effects felt. This was equally true of the material culture tied to local ways of life, farming and custom: despite ill-considered modernisation, the child Győző Szatyor naturally saw the Ormánság’s timber-framed, thatched-roof houses and farm buildings, and could directly experience the peasant and artisan world of his native village as shaped by tradition. From his early teens, he drew and modelled extensively, with skill, and also drilled and carved; his teachers encouraged him to choose an artistic vocation. Even then, his ability was evident: whether in drawing or in speech, he could make the essential visible with concise formulation. After his secondary-school years in Sellye, he applied to the Teacher Training College of Pécs but was not admitted. He took on manual labour, came to know the world of workers, and gained new experience. Following a second – this time successful – application, he still had to complete his military service before beginning college. In the barracks at Hódmezővásárhely, with the support of one of his commanding officers, he had the opportunity to draw, model and carve. As in every young artist’s life, his years at the teacher-training college were undoubtedly a period of learning and searching for a path. Yet in Szatyor’s case, the most characteristic feature of his artistic work – a symbolic, essentialising mode of expression drawn from folk art – was already strongly present at the beginning of those student years and remained so afterwards. Among his teachers were significant representatives of contemporary painting and graphic art – György Platthy, László Cseh, József Pandur, Sándor Kelle, and others – who shaped his ways of seeing and enriched his technical repertoire, but they could not (and did not wish to) deflect him from the path he had chosen.
In the first half of the 1970s, a dialogue took shape between folk artists and fine and applied artists. The group, later known as the Nomad Generation and the Studio of Young Folk Artists, was formed by its members and entered into contact with Hungarian architects, fine artists, and applied artists. Just as they studied the arts with a view to reworking them, several fine and applied artists – not for the first time in art history – turned back to vernacular modes of representation, most closely associated with peasant culture in Hungary, and to tradition. This reciprocal influence – whether one considers the architecture of György Csete or Imre Makovecz, the ceramics of Éva Kun, or the felt works carried forward from tradition by Mari Nagy and István Vidák – gave Hungarian folk art a fresh impetus and revitalised our fine arts, creating a new current. In a wider European context, only the Scandinavian design movements were able to process traditional forms at a level comparable to that achieved by this generation, which walked through villages and searched through museum collections.
Within this process – this movement – Győző Szatyor played the role of a bridge: from the outside, one might say that he pursued in parallel the careers of a fine artist and a folk artist, yet for him these two strands were one, and he wished to study and understand them as a unity. He received his teaching degree in geography and drawing in 1972 and began teaching. On the recommendation of his writer friend, Tibor Tüskés, he became a member of the Pécs Graphic Workshop, where, alongside the leader János Bizse, he also worked with Ferenc Martyn, Mihály Kolbe, Béla Simon, and Elemér Soltra. He learnt the technique of lithography, which would later become a favourite, from Gábor Bérces and Klára Barakonyi. While ‘apprenticing’ in the Pécs workshop and learning the intricacies of printmaking, he worked in the summers by the Tisza at the Mártély Artists’ Colony near Hódmezővásárhely. Alongside the river and the natural beauty of the floodplains, the world of farmsteads – and the need to convey their decaying beauty – became an important artistic aim. The forms and ornaments observed in Ormánság villages reappeared here in their Great Plain variants, drawing his attention anew. He captured these experiences in ink drawings, linocuts and lithographs. The most significant graphic works of the late 1970s were chiefly inspired by literature: illustrations for the works of János Kodolányi, and presentations of the songs of the Kalevala through drawings and lithographs. While he became increasingly known as a graphic artist, his work in folk art also unfolded: as a woodcarver and folk woodworker, he was awarded the title Young Master of Folk Art (Népművészet Ifjú Mestere) in 1977. In 1979, he joined the Ethnographic Workshop, launched by Bertalan Andrásfalvy and Gábor Tarján in Magyarlukafa. There, he could learn woodcraft techniques, ethnography and art history – and pass on his own practical experience to his students.
Even within object-making folk art, one may speak of style and periods. These are not typically tied to ideological currents or outstanding individual makers, as is often the case in fine art; rather, new formal, ornamental and technical variants arise through a far slower process of innovation, filtered across generations. When we look at Győző Szatyor’s carved works, we can say that although he knows and at times employs the richly decorative mode of the ‘flowering’ Hungarian folk art associated with the second half of the nineteenth century – on a chair, a mirror frame, or a salt-holder – he feels more at home with the solutions of the older style, grounded in function: its simple, linear, geometric ornaments. The Ormánság szökröny – a chest made from adzed, grooved and drawknife-shaped boards, drilled with a ‘Gypsy drill’, assembled with mortise-and-tenon joints and wooden pegs, pre-drawn with a compass and incised with a grooving tool – has endured for centuries as proof that with two hands and a few very simple tools one can create an object that is perfect in both function and aesthetics. This object is free of all over-explanation: its material, proportions, ornaments and symbolism served as a model for Győző Szatyor.
Beyond making furniture and everyday implements, from the late 1970s, he produced large-scale public works: playground structures and substantial wooden sculptures. In that period, a playground typically meant a space squeezed between housing blocks, scattered with welded games made from steel pipes and sheet metal. Among panel buildings, these merged into the visual background, thereby ruining otherwise fine spaces. Szatyor approached the playground as a genre from the perspectives of folk play and vernacular (landscape) architecture. He used a natural material – wood – which, in itself, transformed both appearance and sensation. In the static, rotating, rocking, and swinging mechanisms of playground structures, characteristic forms and joining techniques from earlier timber-framed buildings and porches reappear – forms that could be used and re-functionalised for children’s play equipment carved from large oak trunks. In designing these structures, he took into account the surroundings: traditional architectural elements characteristic of the landscape and settlement, as well as existing or planned planting. The premises of his large public sculptures are similar: vernacular-inspired forms; structural solutions that exploit the possibilities of natural materials; figures that, in places, are emphasised with finer carving, and elsewhere carved totem-like from a single mass, rising from the earth in the colours of wood and soil. At the centre of his sculptural compositions, we find strong, often sacral symbols: the Sun, the Moon, the Tree of Life, mythic deer, and – naturally – the cross and crucifix.
The art historian Pál Bánszky writes of him: Győző Szatyor is a consistent creative figure of the ‘nomad generation’ that emerged in the 1970s. His intellectual programme received rich impetus from his diverse native Baranya. For him, nature is alive; matter has spirit and vital force. His work is characterised by monumental simplicity. A foundational principle of his creative programme was the use of natural materials and traditional structures. For thirty years, he carried out an intellectual programme, steadfastly embodying a human and creative attitude. He realises Zoltán Kodály’s dictum: “Culture cannot be inherited; the culture of our predecessors evaporates in no time if each generation does not acquire it anew, again and again.” (2007)
In the 1980s and 1990s, he continued to work steadily as an exhibiting and illustrating graphic artist and as a woodworker-sculptor. Since 1983, he has been both a member of the Pécs Graphic Workshop and its artistic director. A continuous organiser in the artistic sphere and an active figure in public life, he has been, for decades and still today, a defining presence in the cultural life of Pécs and Baranya County. Nationally, he became known for his toys, playgrounds, gates, and wooden crosses, recognised by folk-applied-art juries; he also experimented with various wooden musical instruments. In 1993, he was a founding member of the Ormánság Arts Centre Foundation and a founding chief organiser of the Ormánság International Painters’ and Wood Sculptors’ Artists’ Colony in Sellye.
The Kalevala, which he had processed early on, and, more generally, the various creation narratives and versions of peoples’ origins continued to occupy him. He sought to work through the universal meanings of these world-explanations and the symbols appearing in texts and songs, in his drawings, lithographs and sculptures alike. During trips to Finland – while exhibiting and giving lectures – he studied Finnish design. He regarded the modern Northern European craft culture, close to nature and permeated by every branch of tradition – from folk music to the elements of everyday life – as exemplary for its organisation and its embeddedness in society.
From a young age, Győző Szatyor expressed his Hungarian heritage and his faith in many ways, even during periods when an entire system still stood opposed to those who thought in such terms. In his work and outlook – and in his writing and speech as well – his commitment to Hungarian culture, his faith in God, and the influence of the Bible and of sacral experience are decisive. He is also strongly attached, within Hungarian literature, to those who wrote of their native land with responsibility and commitment: János Kodolányi, Tibor Tüskés, and Géza Kiss, who presented the Ormánság landscape in comprehensive form, and Tibor Szenti, who researched the world of the Vásárhely farmsteads; in Transylvania, the polymath Károly Kós; and Gyula Illyés, Sándor Csoóri, and László Nagy, all of whom he reads daily. Alongside these named authors, of course, stands unnamed literature: folk poetry – songs and ballads, legends, and folktales.
Tibor Tüskés praises him in these terms: “With full knowledge of his life path and oeuvre, I say that if János Kodolányi raised his spiritual native land into literature – that is, as a writer he bound himself to the Ormánság, and in his stories, dramas, and social and historical novels preserved the ‘meaning’ of the landscape, its past, and the lives of its people – if Géza Kiss bent over his papers within the walls of the Kákics parsonage and gifted Hungarian ethnography with his collecting work, his dialect dictionary, and his book Ormányság – then Győző Szatyor, in the ‘language’ of the visual arts, across its various branches and tools, confessed the defining experience of his life: his vision and his native land.”
In the spirit of passing on craft knowledge, he published specialist books on woodwork, as well as albums of his work as an arts organiser. In his 2007 volume Az Ormánság vonzásában (lit. In the Orbit of the Ormánság), he writes in an auto-confessional mode about the story of his career. Alongside books, he also collaborated on scripts for ethnographic educational films and appeared in them on several occasions. In his native village, while working at the woodwork enterprise he had founded, he was elected mayor in 2002 and held the office until 2010. He took on a public role within the Baranya County Assembly, becoming a member in 2006 and serving as chair of the Committee for Culture, Minorities, Youth and Sport. From 2013, he became head of the Baranya County Value Repository, continuing his heritage-preservation work in that capacity as well.
Alongside the appreciation of exhibition visitors, viewers of his public sculptures, and children who use the playgrounds, Győző Szatyor has received several important awards and honours over recent decades. He received the title of folk applied artist in 1988. In 1994, he was awarded the Kós Károly Prize for his work in the protection and development of settlements in Hungary. In 2001, for his efforts to uphold Hungarian national ideals and safeguard Hungarian culture, he was admitted to the Order of Saint George and, soon afterwards, recognised with the Knight’s Cross and Officer’s Cross decorations. He received the title Master of Folk Art for his woodwork in 2003. For improving the quality of life in Baranya settlements, he was awarded the Pro Humanitate Baranya Prize in 2006, and in 2008, the Baranya County organisation of the Hungarian Association of Community Cultural Workers honoured him with the Lemle Géza Prize.
The Folk Arts Section of the Hungarian Academy of Arts elected him a corresponding member in 2013 and a full member in 2014.
Among his foreign recognitions, the most significant are the diploma and membership of the Helsinki Kalevala Society, and – for fostering Hungarian–Finnish relations and promoting Finnish culture – an honour from the President of the Republic of Finland: the Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Lion of Finland.
In 2013, the General Assembly of the Municipality of the City of Pécs, with County Rights, awarded him the City of Pécs prize for fine and applied arts in recognition of his outstanding creative achievement.
Drawing on the craft knowledge of joiners, wheelwrights, carpenters, Romani trough-makers, and village handymen, building with elements of Hungarian folklore, and roofing it with his own worldview and talent – this is how Győző Szatyor founded and completed his artistic career. His wide-ranging practice – his applied, folk-applied, and fine-art works rooted in Hungarian folk tradition, and his writings – helps a person searching for identity find their place in the present, much as a village church tower once helped the traveller set out in the right direction.
In an auto-confessional text, he puts it this way: “I took tools in my hands – as my ancestors did – so that I too might carve from trees that have stood for centuries. I locked my soul into my objects, my sculptures. I taught what I learnt so that, later on, there would still be someone to learn from, with hope for the future. I worked – and I still work – for the glory of God, for my own and my companions’ edification. All this I did and do on the soil of my homeland, with love for my native land, under the protection of my house, among my good family. The trees I planted already bear fruit. My faith grows ever more in the temple of my soul. My strength is slowly waning, but I hope it will still hold for further work. I still have dreams, and it would be good if I could still tell them, write them down, draw them, carve them into wood, and shape spoken words into melody.”
[2016]