Unveiling of the Gross Arnold memorial plaque

On Gross Arnold’s birthday we remember the painter and graphic artist who renewed contemporary Hungarian printmaking, born on November 25, 1929 in Turda (Torda), Transylvania. His childhood and early years in Turda and later in Oradea (Nagyvárad) were formative for him; he returned to them many times both in his memories and in his works. His father, the painter Gross Károly, who belonged to the circle of the Nagybánya artists, was his first teacher. His brother Tivadar is also a well-known watercolorist in Transylvania.

In 1947 he fled from Romania to Hungary.
In 1953 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest; his masters were Barcsay Jenő, Hincz Gyula, Kádár György, Konecsni György, and Koffán Károly.
Outstanding milestones of his artistic career: he twice won first prize at the Kraków Print Biennale,
1955, 1967: Munkácsy Prize,
1987: Artist of Merit,
1995: Kossuth Prize, and
in 2014 he also received the honorary title Artist of the Nation.

Alongside his countless exhibitions in Hungary, his inimitable graphic art could also be admired in exhibition halls across the world — in Rome, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Trieste, Helsinki, Brussels, Bergen, London, Hamburg, Cologne, Los Angeles, Athens, and Vienna.

Those are the dry facts — but more exciting still is the question of what the secret of his art is, and why we may count him among the renewers of contemporary Hungarian printmaking.
“instead of dredged-up horror-dreams, the fairy illusions of sweet reverie shine here; we are far from the self-glorifying frenzy of orthodox surrealism… and farther still from the alarming adventures of abstraction”
writes his fellow artist, the author Szentkuthy Miklós, who continues about Gross Arnold’s art:
“precise, clever, purposeful, well-proportioned, carefully wrought, faithfully executed — and something else besides: enchanting”
His early watercolors bear witness to extraordinary talent and to a gift for composition and color. During his academy years he made a close study of the etchings of the old masters — above all Rembrandt and Dürer — at the Museum of Fine Arts, and he himself took up the genre. As a result, his graphic works are marked by unparalleled technical skill, delicate draughtsmanship, tightly knit composition, and clarity of both content and form. In the 1950s he developed his individual style, unmistakable for anyone else’s. His art rests on a complete renewal of the etching. The earlier monotone black-and-white works gave way to pictures glowing in the colors of the rainbow, sweeping in momentum yet radiating calm and harmony. On his etchings not a single square millimeter may remain empty; the sheets are peopled by the towns and inhabitants of his singular fairy world. Out of real elements he creates an unreal world that outgrows even the surreal. Built from real details, his often visionary-seeming world verges on the grotesque, yet there is no trace of twisted or deformed figures in his pictures.
His symbolism is unique; it cannot be deciphered either through medieval readings or with familiar codes. To resolve the enigma there is the work as a whole, before which the viewer is never at a loss. For with Gross everything is what it seems: a tree is a tree, a garden is a garden, an elf is an elf. The apparent crowdedness of the pictures is never disturbing; rather, each sheet recalls a richly decorated Christmas tree — it is no accident that Szentkuthy Miklós called his art a “Christmas-tree opus”. All this is owed to the tightly knit composition and to an exceptional inner coherence that fuses into an almost organic unity. He prints the richly illustrated plates on paper in monochrome or polychrome, then adjusts the coloring by hand. Among the great forerunners, it was William Blake who used this technique.
The landscapes and the trees continue the Rembrandtesque tradition. Yet in the still landscape radiating eternal peace, gossamer fairy figures keep appearing — now in the sky, now in the far distance. Gross’s trees might almost be called meditation pictures. A wisdom beyond time and this world slumbers in the thousand-year-old furrows of their bark. The flowers, in turn, transform into playful girls, and with this the fairy world of his own making begins. The gardens form a transition between the world made by nature and the world tamed by man. They let nature in, but this is already the ordered world of human beings. They carry symbolic value besides — one need only think of the Garden of Eden or of forbidden, secret gardens.
The commemorative sheets hold a very important place in his oeuvre. With these he pays tribute to his loved ones — his mother, for instance, or Kondor Béla — and to the greats of bygone ages: Jan van Eyck, Andersen, and Bach. The choice of these three figures is no accident. As a painter, Van Eyck had a great influence on him. In the backgrounds of Van Eyck’s pictures we discover that minutely wrought, rich world of miniatures which covers Arnold’s pictures in their entirety. Andersen guides us into the world of dreams and fantasy, and Gross’s etchings are similarly fairy-tale-like — yet they speak to us as purely and sublimely as the music of Bach.
(These are the thoughts of his monographer, Sinóros Szabó Katalin, who gives a precise appreciation of Gross Arnold’s art in her encyclopedia entry.)

Arnold lived in the studio apartment on the top floor of this building. Its magnificent panorama took in Rózsadomb and the Buda hills. Stepping into his home was an experience, just as every encounter with him was. Visitors were greeted by finches flying about the apartment and by a multitude of miniature toys: armies of tin soldiers and vehicles of every kind — dearest among them the train sets. “I was always drawn to trains. After I fled to Hungary, for a long time I would gaze after them with longing as they set off toward Oradea (Nagyvárad), where my parents lived. It is only nine or ten kilometers from the border, but I didn’t dare go home — I had no passport, either. And I was afraid of being called to account as a fugitive. Once I traveled to Bulgaria with a group of forty artists; my parents boarded the train at Oradea: after nine years, that was where we met again…” he once recounted.
He was surrounded everywhere by a multitude of objects bearing the joy of sight, the delight of the eye — the captivating microworld of homo ludens. It was at his home that I saw the most beautiful Van Eyck reproductions. These enormous prints, singular inspirations for his art, pervaded the space of the apartment. Our adored Italy was often the subject of our conversations. The films of Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica were also a source of inspiration for his art.
In recent decades he also collected brilliantly colored minerals, which had a great influence on the coloring of his etchings as well. It was an indescribable experience for me when, with pride and enthusiasm, he guided me among his display cases into a world unknown to me. Even in his final years he traveled to mineral fairs. He treasured and loved every little piece of nature, probed its secrets, and could speak of them with the same love.

To be honest, as I prepared for this beautiful commemoration, what I wondered about most was whether Arnold would be pleased that we are unveiling a memorial plaque here in his honor. One could talk with him about so many things, yet when his creative work, his art, came up, he mostly kept a bashful silence. He rarely answered questions, or evaded answering them. He became all the more talkative when the conversation turned to his beloved and respected fellow artists, or to his treasured friends — Kondor Béla and, above all, Szabó Vladimir.
Every square centimeter of his softly glowing watercolors and splendid prints is worked through; on them and within them his fairy figures, visible or invisible, live and bustle. Yet it is as if all this were a kind of fairy-tale curtain behind which the artist can hide, at most peeking out conspiratorially now and then, waving to us with a laugh — perhaps just as the sculptor Czinder Antal has captured him on this memorial plaque.

Thank you for your kind attention:

Budapest, November 25, 2016: Merényi György