István Vidák, felt artist, ethnographic collector and educator, Master of Folk Art, was born in Budapest on 11 September 1947. At an early age, his affinity for the arts and his desire to create became evident. He applied twice to study film directing, but owing to his family background and because he did not demonstrate sufficient commitment to the cultural politics of the period, he was not admitted to the Filmművészeti Főiskola (College of Theatre and Film Arts). The beginning of his twenties was a time of searching for direction. While enrolling at the Gépipari Automatizálási Műszaki Főiskola (College of Mechanical Automation Engineering) in order to obtain a formal qualification, he familiarised himself with contemporary Hungarian fine and applied arts, as well as with the intellectual climate that, from the late 1960s onwards, in the dictatorship gradually loosening after the revolution, allowed artists and intellectuals to work and think within a newly emerging atmosphere.
At an exhibition held at the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle), he met Mari Nagy, who became his wife a year later, and with whom he has since continued to think together about family, art and creation. In 1971, the couple moved to Gödöllő. As a kind of withdrawal, abandoning bourgeois professions, they began a new life and immersed themselves in the exploration of folk culture and the transmission of knowledge through courses.
The spirit of the Gödöllő Art Nouveau artists’ colony was already present, as the principles of the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, following the English model and represented by the painter Sándor Nagy and his colleagues in fine and applied arts, were entirely consonant with the outlook of István Vidák, who practised several branches of craftsmanship and in the early 1970s was primarily engaged in basket weaving. According to this view, craftsmanship and traditional object-making have a rightful place within the arts, and the artist’s development is served by becoming acquainted with them from their original sources. The creative work carried out in the Gödöllő workshop constituted a kind of enclave, and for István Vidák it provided extraordinary impetus to realise that, independently of one another, similar enclaves existed in different regions and artistic fields. He truly became aware of this in 1972, when he and his wife travelled to the summer folk art creative camp organised in Fadd-Dombori, then still under the auspices of the Magyar Kommunista Ifjúsági Szövetség (Hungarian Young Communist League). Listening to Sándor Csoóri, Júlia Marosi and György Csete, and seeing young people carving, throwing pots, weaving and spinning, he realised that there existed a group who, like himself, longed to learn the old traditions, to pass them on and to preserve them. It was in this camp that the Studio of Young Folk Artists was founded, of which he became one of the founders and, throughout its existence, one of its most active members. Alongside the spirit of the Studio and the dialogue among its members, the ethnographic collecting that was becoming increasingly continuous at that time also exerted a motivating influence on him. Travelling through villages, he recorded and learned the still-existing elements of peasant culture, thereby carrying out important scholarly collecting work, while at the same time laying the foundations of his later artistic principles by beginning to ‘speak’ the language of Hungarian folk art. In Magyarlukafa, in a renovated stilt house, at a creative camp organised by Bertalan Andrásfalvy and Gábor Tarján, István Vidák became acquainted with felt. By the end of the 1970s, the knowledge of felt-making had almost completely disappeared in Hungary; only a few hat-makers and makers of traditional footwear were still familiar with this form of processing wool and other animal fibres. Time was pressing: collecting had to begin within the country’s borders, among Hungarians beyond them, and, following the exploration of historical contexts, increasingly in all directions, from the Middle East through Northern Europe to the Balkan regions.
The first phase of his career came to a close around 1982, when he and his wife moved to Kecskemét. The works of this initial period – whether basketry, other forms of processing willow, or the first felt pieces – are characterised by his striving to perfect the forms and techniques learned from old masters. He produced refined utilitarian objects that consciously did not seek to follow the models of the many craftsmen then working within cooperative frameworks, producing mainly furniture from peeled and painted willow. Those craftsmen essentially continued the forms of woven furniture manufacture that had developed at the beginning of the twentieth century and already catered to the bourgeoisie, but this was not the path István Vidák wished to follow. He sought instead to record and process far older folk material. With felt, the situation was somewhat different, as there were no alternative paths: what could be learned from the last masters was the making of the last items of dress, which themselves were almost entirely rooted in historical material, whether one considers headgear, footwear or individual garments. Alongside the tangible beauty of felt, this fact, too, attracted the artist.
In Kecskemét, Pál Bánszky founded the Szórakaténusz Toy Museum and Workshop, and invited István Vidák and his wife to take on its professional leadership. The success of this unique initiative lay in the fact that, building on the experiences of the Gödöllő years, they viewed the creative process in its entirety, did not separate folk art from applied art, and supported students in rethinking the crafts. Felt-making had been almost entirely forgotten by the modern world. It is a rare occurrence that we can identify the date of a genre’s rebirth and know the event that provided the venue for its rediscovery. That date was 1984, and the location was Kecskemét. Here gathered those artists and craftspeople whom the Vidák–Nagy couple had invited individually during a collecting and networking tour that encompassed the Soviet Union, Northern Europe, the Benelux countries and West Germany. The first World Meeting of Felt Artists was a symposium and an exchange of ideas, but also a social and cultural-political event. István Vidák also took part in organising the subsequent world meetings; the later gatherings in Sweden, Switzerland and Finland followed the Hungarian model and built upon its foundations.
He researched the body of knowledge surrounding felting along several lines. There was an interest in techniques – how wool can be processed so that it becomes at one time a blanket, at another a shoulder bag, or occasionally a wall piece. Some of these methods emerged during ethnographic collecting, while others he discovered through experimentation. There was also a freer, more aestheticising line of research, which progressed primarily through experimentation: how the material, texture, colours and spatial appearances of felt can be employed in artistic creation in the service of meaning. What suits felt?
Since the 1970s, he has taught continuously, and thus continued to learn how to convey the possibilities of a material in courses and camps, to children and adults alike. The ethnographic collections, the items of dress and utilitarian objects produced in the workshop, and later the felt tents, also contributed to refining the body of knowledge concerning Hungarian prehistory. The archaeological school associated with the name of Professor Gyula László, which foregrounded interdisciplinary research, already built upon the knowledge of contemporary craftspeople; practitioners of experimental archaeology were able to confirm or refute hypotheses through the modern reconstruction of objects. István Vidák’s collections carried out in the former settlement areas of the Hungarian tribes, and his contemporary research into Eastern textile and felt cultures, contributed to a more precise understanding within Hungarian archaeology of lifestyles in the periods before and after the Conquest. Alongside field collecting, he also reprocessed material relics found in museum collections from a new perspective – unfortunately, documentation, dated and attributed descriptive photographs and notes were generally incomplete in many collections of the Carpathian Basin, so in numerous cases it was István Vidák who identified these objects.
In his publications appearing from the mid-1990s, and in the accompanying bibliographies and lists of illustrations, we find references to an increasing number of disciplines and foreign authors – whether concerning felting techniques as such, their ethnographic contexts, or the pedagogical methods of teaching craftsmanship. The language of these studies is also more assured, as they synthesise a far greater body of knowledge. This more mature language is likewise perceptible in works of explicitly scholarly popularisation and in serial publications presenting craft techniques, which otherwise employ little text. The possibility of this deeper international engagement was provided partly by the cross-border network of the Kecskemét felting school, and partly by study trips to Turkmenistan, Turkey, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and the Balkan regions. Alongside historical and ethnographic material, familiarity with modern movements (in Northern Europe, the German-speaking regions, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere) revealed, on another plane, the possibilities inherent in the same material.
In István Vidák’s art it is difficult to delineate clear period boundaries. As with fine artists and applied artists alike, new elements appear that are later frequently cited, yet his creative phases resemble more closely those of artisan masters: even within a single period he can shift from one object type to another. Fundamentally, he experiments with technique rather than function; in this respect his art is certainly more closely tied to folk art than to modern art. This, however, does not preclude the discovery and adoption of new functions. Traditionally, felt is generally produced and decorated in a planar manner; rugs, blankets and tent coverings are ornamented in two dimensions. In the early 1980s István Vidák still largely followed this method, but increasingly works appeared (toys, puppets and the like) that crossed into three-dimensional representation – perhaps reflecting, in part, his earlier experience as a basket weaver, where object-making is inherently spatial. His smaller pieces are designed to be turned in the hand, while his larger works require circumambulation. In recent years, he has returned again to planar representation, while in the case of garments one may speak of a combination of dimensions, since flat patterns become spatial through wear. In every craft practice the problem of material-inappropriate solutions arises. This issue requires particular attention when dealing with a rediscovered material that, moreover, acquires ever new functions not solely bound to tradition. One of the great merits of the Nomadic Generation as a whole is that its members, regardless of genre – from architecture to the carving of the smallest horn objects – demonstrated through their own work that every material has its limits, and that crossing these limits does not lead to the creation of new values, but to imbalance and flawed solutions.
Many contemporary creators forget this unwritten golden rule of folk art, which is why hybrid solutions often appear weak – the drawing motifs of pastoral carvings applied to ceramics are as misguided as felted Kalocsa flowers. On their collecting journeys, the creators of the Vidák workshop encountered folk art that had developed under communal control, summarising centuries of experiential knowledge, and thus approach change with sound judgement: they do not transpose the motif systems of other genres onto felt, but process existing forms and ornaments that employ and emphasise the properties of the material, in accordance with their conceptual intentions.
As a creator deeply familiar with the layered nature of folk decorative art, he has not broken away from symbols and their systems, nor could he. Their application is also periodic: in early works, in the exploratory felt pieces of the 1980s, this line may be somewhat more pronounced, but it frequently intensifies even in the more mature works of the 1990s – trees of life and the inhabitants of a multi-layered world, totem animals, symbols of masculinity and femininity. Some significant works bear speaking titles: Az örök körforgás (The Eternal Cycle), A Nap kapuja (The Gate of the Sun), Menyegző (Wedding), among others. Semiotics is the science of symbols, but it also reveals much about the psyche of the person who paints, felts, carves, draws with wax or stamps ornaments. Perhaps the greatest value of István Vidák’s artistic work lies in his ability, before his decorated felts become inflated and thus inauthentically “folk-like”, to weave them into the contemporary. This requires knowledge of the psyche. The felts of the Kecskemét workshop introduced the genre into Hungarian museums and exhibition spaces: they have hung on the walls of the Hungarian National Gallery, the Museum of Applied Arts, the Ethnographic Museum, the Museum of Folk Applied Arts, the Vigadó Gallery and the Kunsthalle, just as they have appeared in the exhibition rooms of the smallest local heritage houses.
Among international exhibitions, only the most important venues are mentioned here: Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and the UNESCO Palace in Paris. One of the most important outcomes of the teaching begun in the 1970s is that numerous young people chose a branch of craftsmanship as their life path. Several of them received the title Young Master of Folk Art, became folk applied artists, or continued their creative activity within the field of applied arts. There were workshop participants and camp attendees who, influenced by lectures on felting in Kecskemét, chose ethnography as their university discipline. Beyond the training and inspiration of craftspeople, it is of exceptional importance that within teacher education he conveyed to students a cultural outlook whose integration into today’s curricula would be crucial at every level of schooling. Alongside this outlook, he transmitted knowledge that they would in all likelihood not otherwise have encountered: the body of knowledge of folk culture. Within the Vidák family, the value of creative work has likewise been realised. Annamária Vidák and István Vidák Jr. have both chosen felt-making as their vocation. Under the influence of their parents, yet also feeding back upon them with their own new perspectives, they pursue their artistic paths. Following the conclusion of work at Szórakaténusz (1997), and in the years after the turn of the millennium, innovation once again became the guiding principle. He developed methods for reinforcing and/or decorating felt with leather. Under the influence of increasingly frequent study trips to India, Eastern textiles, cotton fabrics and above all silk came to the fore; their combination with felt likewise constitutes an event of international significance within textile art. Experimentation with the production of dyes was continuous, using almost exclusively plant-based materials. The batiking of felt reinvents this ancient material just as the combination of European blue-dyeing traditions with felt, in garments, bags and blankets, opens up an entire series of new possibilities.
In 1974, István Vidák was awarded the title Young Master of Folk Art as a basket weaver. It should be added that the title was conferred not only on account of the quality of his tangible works, but also because the spirit underpinning them was found exemplary by the members of the jury. This important award was followed by a gold distinction at the 1976 National Folk Art Exhibition, and thereafter the major recognitions were directed at the felt artist: the Pomegranate Prize in 1996, the Zsiga Király Prize in 2003, another Pomegranate Prize and the title Master of Folk Art in 2010, and in 2012 his election as a full member of the Folk Art Section of the Hungarian Academy of Arts. For the transmission of knowledge and his work in public culture, he received the Kecskemét Prize for Public Culture in 1996, and a year later became a member of the Order of the Toy Knight. In 2004 he was awarded the Heritage Preservation Prize of the Association of Folk Art Associations. Beyond official awards and distinctions, continuous recognition is provided by invitations to exhibitions and lectures, commissions, and the popularity of the camps he organises. One who seeks to carry forward the values of folk culture need not necessarily choose only the Hungarian path; there are undoubtedly different responses to the transmission of these values in the twenty-first century. Yet it is certain that the Hungarian method – one of whose most demanding paths was forged by István Vidák – works. At the end of the process of research, creation and teaching that he considers appropriate, felt has once again become our shared treasure, today (again) an integral part of textile production and textile art, used alike by industrial designers and by participants in playhouses or kindergarten activities.
[2016]