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 PHD candidate, and graduated as a master of arts at CEU’s History Department in 2010.
We recommended this exhibition to our readers in the previous issue already, however now I will provide some background. I had the chance to attend the exhibition with the curator’s guidance.
János Major (1934–2008), graphic and conceptual artist, was a major figure of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde, 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 present 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, was the Tiszaeszlár blood libel of 1882, a major encounter of assimilationist Hungarian Jewry with Antisemitism. Thus, Major’s art builds upon specifically East-Central-European, Hungarian and Jewish experiences.
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Besides being a neo-avantgarde artist, Major was interested in documentation and worked also in the safeguarding process of the 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 also plenty of photos in the Jewish cemeteries of Hungary, some of them 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 also of the current exhibition lies not merely in the artistic virtue, but in the fact that they help to understand Eastern Europe’s history during Socialism – especially that of the sixties and seventies – better and more deeply.
Agnes Kelemen, Nationalism Studies
With the contribution of Daniel Véri, alumnus, History Department
Photo: János Major: Living Tomb Sculpture, 1973; György Galántai’s photograph taken at his chapel studio in Balatonboglár – Artpool Art Research Center
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