Endre Bálint [antikvár]

SUBJECT AND OBJECT Bálint's writings inform us that, during his impoverished few months in Paris in 1934, he even bent down in the street to pick up discarded cigarette ends. And once, in the act of retrieving someone else's litter, he noticed a shop window displaying reproductions of Modigliani, Braque and other painters. At that moment, this young man, who had been planning a career as an advertising designer, experienced sudden enlightenment He decided to become a painter. Bálint probably never realized that the degrading action of scavenging for cigarette butts would culminate in this defining artistic experience. Bending over for the most worthless of things, to receive in exchange the most precious. The paintings of Endre Bálint constitute perhaps the most personal ouvre in modem Hungarian art Behind every line, evety figure and every motif lies the mark of personal experience. Experiences which left a profound imprint on him from earliest childhood, images of the village, the city, and the fairground attractions; memories of the orphanage, poverty and humiliation, Paris and Szentendre, friends - Lajos Vajda above all - and of course the horrifying visions of illness he carried around for five decades. All this personal experience is intensified and interpreted by the works of the poet and writer Endre Bálint His prose and poetry are confessions of his life and of the direct influence life events had on his art His writings are neither dissertations on the philosophy of art nor Narcissistic diaries, but mercilessly honest impressions of his internal life, his inner turmoil and mostly his fears. The true Subject of his art is he himself. Every line of his pen, every stroke of his brush, reveals the artist in all his sensitivity as he struggles with the even/day experience of death. Yet the art of Bálint is not self-centred. It is not self-sen/ing. It is neither exhibitionist art, nor art that glories in its own beauty and pain. Beyond its confessional power it also contains some elegant serious, reticent sprightliness and humour. And the secret to this is to be found in the artist's relationship with objects. The subjective character of Bálint's art is counterbalanced by its objective content. Bálint approached objects with love, respect and humility. It is perhaps for this reason that even the most abstract of his works of art retain something of the charm and fallibility of the everyday world. It is perhaps for this reason that we can sense that Bálint's momentous discovery of the great works of modern art required not only Paris and Modigiiani, but also the discarded cigarette end. And it would appear that Bálint was grateful his whole life through for that cigarette end. After all, whenever he felt that white paper and clean canvas were insufficient means for the breath of life to pervade his works, he bent down to pick up parquet flooring, cage doors, shabby picture frames, chains and lumps of metal; indeed, he was particularly inspired by thin, one-and-a-half metre long wooden boards and metal girders. This relationship gave birth to his objects, that is. the specific objets d'art wrought from ordinary materials. What is the magic of Bálint's objects? In them, the banality of the everyday object generates a unique tension with the work of the artist replete with thought and emotion. It is Surrealism, finding its home not in the realm of dreams and imagination, but in the most trivial ordinariness. This dualistic art rooted in the subject of the artist's life yet sensitively reinterpreting the objective world, is now deconstructed, with an unprecedented wealth of reproductions and previously unpublished extracts from correspondence, poems and documents, by Ivlarianna Kolozsváry. The author perceptively observed that the key to the art of Endre Bálint can be discovered in his biography and in the artist's confessions. Bálint's words and sentences are interwoven among the analytical ideas of the art historian, and this brings us ever closer to a master artist who is so dear to our hearts, yet who seems at times almost inapproachable. The subject of the volume in your hands is an artist who was born a hundred years ago. The artist is a century old, yet is much more our contemporary than we might imagine. After all, at the centre of his art lie the two things which ought to be of utmost importance: incessant analytical self-examination; and love and respect for simple, commonplace things - the Subject and the Object. Dr László Baán General Director Museum of Fine Arts - Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest