dátum: 2007.10       címzett: Váli/ZSIDÓ TEMETŐK könyv     
fájl: konyvek/html/2007-zsidokonyv/radnoti-angolul.htm            C.9330-9332 

 Sándor Radnóti

The Jewish cemeteries period 

As we can see in Dezső Váli’s online portfolio (www.deske.hu), he first photographed the Jewish cemetery of Kaposvár in 1974; in 1982, 1983 and 1985, he would focus in his photography on this particular subject. Between 1984 and 1986, he would draw and paint almost nothing but Jewish cemeteries. The result was more than a hundred graphics, and more than eighty paintings (if my reckoning is correct). We could find this adherence to a single subject amazing, did we not know that after the last few cemetery pictures of 1987, Váli made the first painting of a studio, a theme he has remained loyal to for the past twenty years.

This unbending, even obstinate, commitment to a subject he once latched on to begs for an explanation.

In the case of Váli, the subject will hardly allow us to read it as a plot, or use it as a guide to the content. When Caspar David Friedrich painted cemeteries or graves, he was suggesting the same unanswerable existential question, the same melancholic mood, as were those of his figures who brooded in endless landscapes: some sort of sublime horror. When Jacob Ruisdael painted his wonderful Jewish cemetery (even in two versions), the graves, the ruined (Christian) church, the bare and lightning-struck tree, were all (moralizing) tokens of mortality, which spares the created world neither of the Old, nor the New, Testament. When Marc Chagall painted the gate of the Jewish cemetery in Vitebsk, the Cubist architecture of space that he had brought with him from Paris could peacefully coexist with the evocation of the Jewish way of life. When Peter Eisenmann was planning the Berlin Holocaust memorial, his vision was of a cemetery abstracted to the utmost.

But what was it that Dezső Váli saw when he started photographing Jewish cemeteries, first in Romanian, and then in Hungarian, villages? He must have seen what most of us will notice: the beauty of the subject, its picturesqueness. Cemeteries can sometimes be very beautiful, old cemeteries can be even more beautiful, and abandoned cemeteries tend to be the most beautiful. They are where nature meets with the creation of man, the memorial sign. Nature is intent on taking the sign back sooner or later, just as it did the man the sign commemorates. The graves will sink, the stones will crack, vegetation will enwrap them. Religious rules (tombs and plants cannot be removed) and historical causes have made Jewish cemeteries especially exposed to this process. An old Jewish cemetery is not a park, the tombstones are pressed close together. Most of the signs there are comprehensible only to the community – in this volume too, it takes a teacher (rabbi) to explain them. Which is what lends beauty to the letters and the images. As if we were listening to the lilt of an unknown language: we know it has meaning, but it eludes us.

While it is correct to cite “historical causes” with regard to Jewish cemeteries in the country, the wording is still frivolous. And nothing is further from Váli than frivolousness. As a devout Christian, he may have felt – and with justification – that he was expressing his solidarity towards an elder brother when documenting his decaying graves, showing their unknown beauty. Yet, we would be mistaken to believe that this act of goodness is the content of his works – especially of those paintings and graphics that are based on photographs. Because their content is nothing but the beautiful form, and its inexhaustible possibilities.

This becomes most apparent in the various forms of graphic art, the techniques that offer more liberty than painting or photography (though the reasons are different). In the delicate and brilliant drawings, the artistic problem is the rhythm provided by the standing, tilting or lying gravestones, which appear in groups or scattered around; other techniques exploit their spatial balance, or the relationship of vegetable life and stone. Colour also becomes an issue on occasion.

On the other hand, upon comparing the paintings with the photos – which if works of art in their own right, now also serve, in this comparison, as the real-life starting points for the paintings and graphic works –, we are facing massive abstraction. The move is not radical, in that the subject can be identified in each of the paintings. A stone is a stone, a branch is a branch—but it is as if they were there to declare this robust tautology about themselves. The painter continues, as it were, the beauteous abstraction called decay, and further removes the vision he found from its original context; the process is also extended to the most personal, what we can call intimate memories or dreams. All this is created, first and foremost, by the variety of colours, and variety here is not a mere turn of phrase. Seeing these pictures together brings out the many ways in which they are not realistic. Thus the subject is not responsible for the mood of the pictures: the latter itself displays a wide variety, and beside the sombreness, ominousness and tragedy, we can see drama and serenity, even playfulness, innocence, the promise of happiness in the warm bright sunshine – a balance of moods in these—Jewish cemeteries? no! abstract paintings.

This is the artistic rationale behind Dezső Váli’s almost compulsive adherence to subjects – or shall we call it an ascetic practice? This rationale lies in the series itself, the endless variation. Dancing with fettered legs, rearranging elements time and again, continuously changing the colour composition to achieve ever new effects: this is the task Váli chose for himself as a painter – and it was a wise choice.

If I have emphasized that in the subject of the Jewish cemetery the painter found a problem or task that is decidedly painterly, we must not forget (and I have already mentioned this) that present in each picture is the sign that leads us back to the origin of the meaning – the subjects of the photos, if you will –, which connects abstraction and representation. This meaning started to assume lives of its own, in various forms, which had an effect on the works themselves. It facilitated interpretation, and provided for success before a wider public. This too may have spurred Váli to move on after three intensive years.

A few years after the painter changed his subject, the country underwent a political transition, which released thitherto subdued ideas, opinions and passions. In the process, disgraceful ideologies were also allowed to surface, because only dictatorships can subdue such ignominy. Reinvigorating anti-Semitism enhanced the thematic meaning of Váli’s series. The master himself may have felt so, because he was known to have presented a picture each to the headquarters of the liberal and the conservative party – as a gesture, an admonition. The fate of these two works is an exquisite addendum to the history of his reception. The liberals said thank you—and lost it when they moved to a new headquarters. Only the frame and the mounting cardboard had survived, they said. The artist went to see for himself, and found that the picture was there, and was lost only for the uninformed eye, among the blotches of the “mounting board.”  The conservatives – perhaps because they were not really conservative – were embarrassed, and could not bring themselves to display the work. Matters relating to the headquarters were at the time the responsibility of a deputy chairman who was a well-known anti-Semite. Eventually Váli got fed up and was about to take it home, when another deputy chairman intervened, and gave home to the piece in his own office. This excellent man ceased to be a deputy chairman a long time ago, and is now a pro-minority and antidiscrimination activist; he works, among other things, for the preservation of abandoned Jewish cemeteries.

Beside their aesthetic history, pictures can have, it seems, their own, independent political life.