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When Dolls Speak
Retrospective Exhibition of Margit Anna (1913–1991)
Main building, temporary exhibition area - 10 April – 1 September 2024
The Hungarian National Gallery pays tribute to Margit Anna, one of the foremost artists of twentieth-century Hungarian painting. The large-scale presentation of her oeuvre comprises two hundred and twenty works – paintings and graphic pieces – and provides an unprecedentedly comprehensive portrayal of an artist who lived through the most turbulent periods of the twentieth century. The exhibition, organised as part of the Bartók Spring International Art Weeks, is the first presentation of Margit Anna’s oeuvre.
Margit Anna was a founding member and prominent artist of the European School, a group of Hungarian artists operating between 1945 and 1948. Her works cannot be strictly confined to a single art trend but a significant part of her oeuvre can be best described in the context of surrealism and expressionism. Indeed, she created a unique language of form, which elevated her among the most notable figures of Hungarian painting.
Margit Anna and her husband, Imre Ámos, visited Marc Chagall in Paris together in 1937. Although Chagall encouraged them to stay in Paris, they returned to Hungary despite the hardships awaiting them there. They regularly spent their summers in Szentendre from 1938 onwards, and Margit Anna’s lyrical painting gradually found its fullest expression. After 1940, her husband was called up for labour service on several occasions, and the couple last saw each other in autumn 1944; he died in the concentration camp in Ohrdruf. After her husband’s tragic death, Margit Anna’s painting underwent significant change. In her works, painted within the framework of the European School, she depicted her puppets – who spoke on her behalf and were representations of suffering inexpressible on a human scale – in a childlike manner, with huge heads.
During the 1950s and 1960s, absurd humour and mockery were assigned an increasingly important role in her pictures. The elements of folk and provincial art emerged in her work at that time: she distanced herself from grief by resorting to folklore and kitsch, interweaving tragedy with comedy and laughter. In her later pictures, her puppets evoked Old Testament scenes imbued with the sadness and irony of remembrance.
Margit Anna started collecting folk objects, dolls, and other things of a unique style, often kitsch, that served as a veritable source of inspiration in her painting. These objects are displayed for the first time side by side with the paintings they inspired. The inclusion of cheap and gaudy objects in her painting brings pop art to mind. Our exhibition highlights that Margit Anna can actually be regarded as one of the first representatives of pop art in Hungary. In addition to pictures by Margit Anna, the exhibition includes works by her contemporaries who influenced her art in some shape or form. One of them, first and foremost, was her husband, Imre Ámos, while others include Lajos Vajda and István Farkas.
Sensuousness and unforgiving sincerity appeared together in the painting of Margit Anna. She blended elegance and decorativeness with delving into the soul. “If you take a closer look at my paintings, you may notice that this is a bitter biography. No one is bitter by birth, but you become bitter if fate ordered you such a hard life that is equal to a war to pass through,” she said.
Our exhibition, organised almost fifty years after the artist’s last show, presents her oeuvre in new contexts, exploring the relationship between self-portraits and masks; the unique interpretation of femininity through the new female roles formulated under the influence of the Bible, mythology, and mass culture; the trauma of the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust; the experiences of the Revolution of 1956; the inspiration of folklore, kitsch and pop art; and the eternal questions of man suffering and surviving in a myriad of ways.
The curator of the exhibition: Marianna Kolozsváry, art historian
The exhibition is accompanied by a 480-page representative catalogue raisonné both in Hungarian and in English.
Highlights, curiosities
Hanged Puppet, 1956
The revelatory impact of the events of 1956 can be discerned in the painting Hanged Puppet (1956). The same stylised figure still appears as in the paintings of her early period, but the puppet existence acquires a concrete meaning. A hanged figure sways on a rope from the branch of a tree as a stuffed rag doll, which is thin and weak, yet it does not break – in other words, the figure that symbolises the human being simply has no weight. Nor does it have a real face or personality: the figure swaying to and fro in the wind can be ignored, set aside – at least from the perspective of the totalitarian authority it is up against, which regards people as weightless puppets. In this work, the puppet figure becomes not only the instrument of self-reflection but at the same time also the visualisation of the frail human creature confronted with the impersonal machinery of dictatorship.
Gerda Széplaky
Tin Christ
Whereas Lajos Vajda, in his Szigetmonostor tin Christs, drawn in 1936, still depicted the Saviour mediating between God and man in a traditional, albeit reimaged way, this image – unlike the work of Lajos Vajda – is a harbinger of pain, not of tradition. The cry and distorted gesture of the puppet, painted with a strong contour line in front of a monochromatic background, originates from a lifeless world, but still evokes more authentically than any real face the suffering, rejection, emptiness and death that the painter had to experience during the war on account of her Jewish origin, her husband Imre Ámos’s suffering in the labour service and subsequent disappearance in a death camp, and the killing of her father in Auschwitz. This puppet, which is also related to icons and the culture of peasant and so-called primitive peoples, is the painter's self-portrait, but in a much more general and philosophical way than her specific here-and-now appearance.
Muse, 1938
In 1939, Imre Ámos wrote, “in these terrible times ... we try not to despair or panic, even if we have every reason to do so …”. During this period, a stylistic change also occurred in Margit Anna’s works. Instead of her earlier, full figures depicted with blurred colours in interior settings, she focused more on the face and more often painted busts in strong colours. In this work, too, the almost indistinguishable face, which is left white, stands out from the dark background, while features painted in black distort the facial expression. There is a laurel wreath atop the muse’s painfully turned head, but blood drips from her empty eyes, and she cannot see or feel anything. Her mouth is closed. As Cicero put it: “inter arma silent musae”, that is “in times of war the muses fall silent”.
When Dolls Speak
Retrospective Exhibition of Margit Anna (1913–1991)
10 April – 1 September 2024
Online ticket purchase