Margit Kovács [antikvár]

Humanism, a delight in beauty and craftsmanship, a reverence for the nature of her chosen medium and virtuosity of technique—these are the traits which characterize the works of Margit Kovács. István Gádor, Géza Gorka and Margit Kovács can be y said to have created the art of modem Hungarian vJ!> ' pottery. This frail woman—the youngest of the " group—was relentless in her determination, worked with equal success in the round and in reliefs, in designing pictures to be engraved on clay tiles and in using the potter's wheel to make ornamental ceramics, and she had a rare gift for mixing glazes of delicate shades. In all her work Margit Kovács's vision was centred on the life of man. Her themes are many and varied, for her work includes portraits in a realistic tone, serious biblical compositions, brilliantly characterized grotesque figures and conversation pieces, scenes of men at work, vivid illustrations of folk songs, and richly decorated pitchers and dishes. Her art has a uniquely individual tone, yet it is rooted in Hungarian traditions, and it is also universal in its humanism. Her idiom of forms and her artistic creed can be traced to art nouveau (Sezession), the style which dominated the years around 1900, terminating one epoch and ushering in the next. Margit Kovács was born in 1902, at Győr, a small Trans-danubian town richly endowed with historical associations. The years of her childhood corresponded with the end of the Francis Joseph period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Already during the last decades of the nineteenth century Hungary was developing as a nation and progress was especially evident in the rapidly growing capital city of Budapest. The bourgeoisie, having acquired power, quickly made up for the lost time in developing a capitalist social system; they created a liberal and cosmopolitan atmosphere in which economic and intellectual developments took place simultaneously. In Hungary the closing years of the century were characterized by confusion. It was a time of profound contradictions and the new country was the scene of many trends. It was possible to discern the first warning signs of a scien-tific-technical revolution, while the rapid development of industry was followed by radical changes in the class structure of society. The old, existing framework of life was disrupted by the growth of large towns with their much faster rhythm of life. Liberalism proclaimed the unbounded freedom of the individual: "The individual demands liberty to create the new art which satisfies the age and the people among whom it takes shape The new trend of art, which was spreading through Europe, now reached Hungary too. The whole of cultural life was imbued with the ideas of the an nouveau: every aspect of every branch of art was affected as well as attitudes to art. The fight between progress and bigotry dominated contem-fj! porary taste and the development of the arts. It was only World War I which brought to a halt this tremendous effort to evolve a universal, all-embracing new style representing the age. In an epoch when style was of such concern to everyone associated with the applied mean for Central Europe, and for Hungary in particular? Some explanation has been given by the art historian Lajos Németh who says, " besides the search for grand art, the grand style, the aim was to bring forth against the radiant background of the Millennium a mainly ornamental style of strongly national character which, while conceived in a cosmopolitan spirit, left room for the decoration and construction of the Székely gates of Transylvania, for erotic romanticism, a longing for death and a love of mysticism; art nouveau was to be applied to goods produced commercially, there was to be a place for a nostalgic style using the mystical colouring of the great masters of opposing styles, an opportunity to formulate an aesthetics of industry that would capture unerringly the style of socialist reality; there was to be a reflection of the writings of Ruskin and Oscar Wilde on art, a place for Nietzsche as well as the underground railway, the buildings of Ödön Lechner, the Museum of Applied Arts, the edifice of the Post Office Savings Bank, Zsolnay majolica, and Álmos Jaschik."^ What, if anything, could Margit Kovács perceive of all this in the sleepy Transdanubian provincial town where she grew up? What she in fact saw were the everyday pleasures and cares of ordinary people, especially their industry and their hard struggle to survive in difficult conditions. Her father, a teacher, died when she was still a child, her mother became head-mistress of a boys' boarding-school and the young girl soon learnt how difficult it was to make both ends meet. Margit Kovács's artistic talent soon became apparent. She responded sensitively to her surroundings. She stored in her memory images of villagers as they moved to and fro, peasant women carrying heavy bundles, the brightly coloured forms of carts transporting animals, the lively bustle of the market, the bright vegetable stalls, the apple-women and the fishwives; cherished throughout her childhood, these memories would all be recalled later as symbols of the perpetual motion of life and depicted one day in her works. Drawing was her medium, and it was in lines that she tried to express her experiences. In the street where she lived as a child there was a stove builder who