Endre Bálint - The Eighth Temple [antikvár]

Researching the multifarious artistic work of Endre Bálint (1914-1986) was one of the long-awaited challenges for Hungarian art history. Bálint, who was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century art, left behind a significant oeuvre as a graphic artist, painter, writer and poet to an equal degree. Without an in-depth analysis of his significance, the history of Szentendre art, the European School, modern hungarian book illustration and hungarian surrealism could not be written. This monograph by Marianna Kolozsváry presents and interprets Bálint's enormous oeuvre - a great deal of which is still waiting to be explored - through the most personal confessions, diary entries, poems and letters written by the artist. It also renders comprehensible the origins of Bálint's seemingly abstract world of motifs, as well the source and meaning of the continually recurring motifs, which virtually represent a signature quality of his painting. The importance of Bálint's object art - i.e. his works reinterpreting simple everyday objects - is analysed separately. The true value of this book lies in the way it brings alive the oeuvre and personal world of an artist born one hundred years ago, allowing today's reader to feel like one of his contemporaries.