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REPORTRAIT: KOVASZNAI 2010
PAINTER, ANIMATION DIRECTOR:
It's about time that these representatives
of the traditional, classical, but over-materialistic genres
leave behind their departmentalized-to-death roles.
ARTIST: He was one of a few living proofs that
there's a huge unknown area in the hungarian fine arts
that is concealed right in front of us.
ART HISTORIAN: He really worked with the animation of painting,
which is a whole different thing than doing general animation work.
Meanwhile, from his birth and talent, he was primarily a painting talent.
ART HISTORIAN: In fact, he connected three generations.
that is, the great classical modernists with his own generation
and that's when something new started, which nobody understood at the time.
Like a Boris Vian, in France. A kind of literary 'enfant terrible'.
I mean, I could compare them in their strange sensitivity.
or like Cocteau, for example,
Likewise, he was also a very odd dandy, an outsider.
WRITER: He really can slip past all conventions.
He plays himself beneath the so-called "Masters"
There's a very strange, contemptuous, ironic freedom to the whole thing.
ART HISTORIAN: His life's work was heroic,
In the sense that painting was a matter of life and death.
- Believe me, little lady, I'm not a child of today.
ART HISTORIAN: Csontvary had this same kind of
very strong internal expressive power that Kovasznai had.
Effectively seen in his painterly movement and gestures
FREEDOM FIGHTER: For me, Kovásznai was by all means
the most important and most invisible of my teachers.
ANIMATION DIRECTOR: Bubble Bath, which I saw so many times,
and which gave me so very much inspiration...
We wanted to create social animations.
It's just that these kind of animations are very hard to sell… very, very hard.
FILM DIRECTOR: He was popular,
and incomparable to anyone else.
I mean, really just to Hitchcock and Van Gogh.
ART HISTORIAN He wasn't a great painter at home,
because there hadn't been this kind of painting yet here.
Maybe in West Germany they had this kind of painting.
- At the Anncey festival, when they showed a painting film of mine
which won awards at home and in West Germany,
my western colleagues twisted up their faces and asked me:
How did they let me do a film like that out there in the East?
SOCIOLOGIST Whenever I look at Kovásznai,
he brings an extra dimension to his predecessors.
He gives things an action dimension.
When I see his paintings, even though they are framed,
they seem to be moving.
- Often when I listen to dance music for example,
I'm nearly astounded by the simplicity of big city existence,
the poetry of everyday life.
- ... reality, it's not a dream...
He truly prepared the ground for the postmodern movement
and was a parallel presence to it.
COMPOSER: To meet this kind of person in '77
who overflowed with so much freedom!
- And what is this ridiculous, epistemological circus, anyway?
SOCIOLOGIST We were good friends.
He was the most secretive person in the whole studio group.
After 5 or 6 years, I found out that he painted at home
Really in spirit, he was a painter more than an animator.
I was just astounded - "Jesus!"
You could sense it in his films, but his paintings slapped you in the face:
This outwardly quiet and harmonious spirit...
had such storms swirling in his soul!
- We've transmitted
- from spirit ...to spirit.
THE END
The György Kovásznai Retrospective on view May 20 - September 26, 2010
at the Hungarian National Gallery.