An Exhibition by a CEU Alumnus

[This article was originally published in The CEU Weekly, Issue 32, April 10, 2013. http://ceuweekly.blogspot.hu/2013/04/an-exhibition-by-ceu-alumnus-leading.html)]

On the occasion of The CEU Weekly’s anniversary, I would like to introduce something that the CEU community can be proud of. The curator of a very interesting current exhibition of the city “Leading the Dead” – The World of János Major” is a CEU alumnus, Daniel Véri. He is an art historian, currently a PHD candidate, and graduated as a master of arts at CEU’s History Department in 2010.

János Major (1934–2008), graphic and conceptual artist, was a major figure of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde and a member of the so-called IPARTERV generation that emerged in the sixties. This exhibition is dedicated to one characteristic segment of his oeuvre: works connected to death and demise; the world of tombs and cemeteries. Major’s works presented in the exhibition are organized along the lines of those specific traumatic events that influenced the artist’s oeuvre deeply: the Holocaust (Major’s father belonged to the victims), the revolution of 1956 during which the young artist was touched and artistically inspired by the vision of hanged men on the streets of Budapest. And a third trauma that gave inspiration to a series of Major’s work during his life  (although he did not witness it), the Tiszaeszlár blood libel of 1882, a major encounter for assimilationist Hungarian Jewry with Anti-Semitism. Thus, Major’s art builds upon specifically East-Central-European, Hungarian and Jewish experiences.

Photo: János Major: Living Tomb Sculpture, 1973; György Galántai’s photograph taken at his chapel studio in Balatonboglár – Artpool Art Research Center

Besides being a neo-avant-garde artist, Major was interested in documentation and also worked in projects dedicated to safeguarding  medieval statues found in Buda in the early seventies (his drawings based on the remnants help the visitors to imagine the original state of the statues). He took plenty of photos in the Jewish cemeteries of Hungary, some of which are presented in the exhibition. They do not provide a simple documentation of the past, but – given their titles – sometimes an ironic interpretation as well.

Nevertheless the value of János Major’s art, and of the current exhibition, lies not merely in its artistic virtue, but in the fact that individuals like Major help us to understand Eastern Europe’s history during Socialism – especially the history of the sixties and seventies – better and more deeply.

Agnes Kelemen, Nationalism Studies, 

Hungary

With the contribution of Daniel Véri, alumnus, History Department

The Exhibition is Open until 13 April 2013, at The Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Barcsay Hall,

1062 Budapest, Andrássy street 69–71.