In September 2014 my father symbolically opened the ARNOLDO gallery café by cutting the golden ribbon. With this gesture, a plan he had cherished for years came true: that one day there would be a place to present, complete, and bring to life the world he had dreamed up and drawn. It became not a dry museum or a dusty memorial room, but a space full of cheer and life, where everyone can feel at home among his pictures. The chirping of finches and friendly chatter fill the room. Sitting at a cozy lace-covered table, as if inside a detail of a colorful Gross picture, you can enjoy a good coffee, Transylvanian zakuszka, a delicious zarabella, or a brownie. It is a great loss for us that shortly after this great plan came true, on January 22, 2015, the angels took him away. Sadly he can no longer be among us, and it is a great task to preserve, lovingly tend, and carry on the intellectual legacy he left us — now without him. Our goal, beyond presenting his life’s work, is also to give a home to programs that fit into this world and carry forward Arnold’s spirit and the atmosphere of his works.
“Gross Arnold was an artist, a great artist — but Gross Arnold was a phenomenon, a singular phenomenon who, in this hectic and frustrated, quarrelsome and tense world and art scene, was always able to break free from the cares of vulgar everyday life, so as to raise at least art into the world of noble, elevated, and pure ideals. And so, Arnold, even if you find our sorrow and pain strange as you stand here among us, looking around with a smile and asking why so many people have gathered around you, we can have only one answer. The exceptional man — which is what you were, Arnold — will, in all his singularity, be sorely missed, even if we may take solace in the wonder-filled universe of your etchings, works, pictures, and drawings, which proclaim the power of love for all time.”
(excerpt from the farewell speech of art writer Feledy Balázs)
We have come through the difficult time of farewell, of processing the loss, of letting go — but we are not lost, for there is someone who keeps showing us the way.
ARNOLDO continues to welcome its guests warmly; we hope everyone will find a picture, a program, or indeed a gastronomic experience to their liking.
/ Gross András
To Die (Meghalni)
A quince-scented, mother-of-pearl gaze,
and a voice like a bell and a distant violin,
and at their ever more numerous, hesitantly thickening steps
the many-horned twin of the void bellows and collapses,
the cold surges through, blue floods everything!
Blue attraction floods in, and lightning-flashing ploughs,
and above burning thorns the storm of the Naked One
folds down in pleats upon the buckling ground;
the wild nest of sweetness, the ornate bowl, quakes,
and soars into the motionlessly spreading light.
Weöres Sándor
Two years ago today, on January 22, Gross Arnold passed away — and 28 years ago, on this very same day, the poet Weöres Sándor died. Arnold was a great admirer of Weöres’s work, and the spiritual kinship between the two is undeniable. It was Weöres who nicknamed Gross the “painter of tiny marvels” (mütyürfestő).
