Remembrance is a wondrous thing. Now, as we stand before Gross Arnold’s coffin, we can still see him glancing up at us from his slightly stooped posture and, with the smile that was always on his face – sometimes bitter, sometimes cheerful – asking us mourners, here and now: “What are you so sad about?” We answer him sorrowfully: “But Arnold, you have gone; we are mourning you.” To which he – I know it for certain – would reply, still smiling: “Do not grieve. It had to happen this way, but if you truly love me, I will remain with you all the same.” Well, Arnold, that is the magic word. For indeed: we have known, and know, many great artists. But there are few people, few artists, we can truly love, and few artists who wish to create work about love. Yet in 1967 you said this to Frank János: “I am not at all sure of my things. I am only experimenting. Seriously. What I am experimenting with is proclaiming love…” It is no coincidence that the death announcement, too, cites the First Letter to the Corinthians, the passage “The greatest of these gifts is love.” And it was not only that he proclaimed love: his personality and – let it now be said – his art too was lovable; indeed, one had to love it. The cataclysm-filled Hungarian life of the second half of the twentieth century created an art to match. To stay with printmaking alone: heightened drama, the ballad-like treatment of tragedies, and the monotonous uniformity of everyday life produced an art that placed intensified drama at the center of its values, coupled, of course, with an always high level of technical mastery. And then came Gross Arnold, who, after taking his diploma in 1953, gradually rose out of the current of recording his landscape experiences, concentrated his technique more and more on etching, and then populated his landscapes – often steeped in nostalgia, landscapes in which the Transylvanian memories of his youth would flare up: his native town of Turda (Torda) or Sighișoara (Segesvár) – with ever more figures and animals, and the landscape often became a city or, of course, a garden. His figures, amid flora and fauna, forever meditated on the beauties of life in some dreamlike medium. Gross Arnold did not steer his vision toward the grotesque or the morbid, nor did humor become the focus of his interest; rather, he was able to create an entirely individual ironic way of seeing, one that of course never lacked gentle teasing, subtle eroticism, nostalgia, or visionary quality. The motif-crowded world of his prints, however, did not lead the viewer into a microworld, but into vast spaces expanded almost to infinity. He was guided, too, by a singularly renewed sense of space, and he spread this wide-horizoned completeness of the world out before us.
Gross Arnold, especially once he had created his world of colored etchings, became an absolute rarity in contemporary Hungarian printmaking, which of course was appreciated abroad as well: his successes came in Kraków in 1966, then in Ljubljana, São Paulo, Lugano, and New Delhi. He could do everything in etching that can be done – as his friends put it. He received the Munkácsy Prize for the first time at 26, and for the second time at 38. Popular success followed as well. In Rome, his works attracted attention in 1965.
What is also quite exceptional and unique about the phenomenon of Gross Arnold, almost without precedent, is that while the profession and his fellow artists always held him in esteem, he was at the same time always surrounded by the public’s affection. He was capable of what few are: works of indisputable artistic value came from his hand, works that at the same time continually won the public’s favor. How can this be achieved? Here, too, let me quote the man himself. “My aim is to give joy. My aim is that whoever looks at my picture should be happy. I will let you in on a secret: the full inner title of my etching The Garden of Artists is: The garden of artists on the highway of making friends.” Artists always loved him, and for a long time so did the art historians. Rózsa Gyula wrote in 1970: “This art is more than entertainment; it is far more, even, than soothing art that makes one forget one’s cares.” Solymár István, in his book published in 1972, set down these lines: “Gross Arnold’s etchings are alloys of masterful execution and naive, childlike imagination.” “Gross Arnold’s colored etchings are gifts and consolations.” Kovalovszky Márta put it this way in 1974: “Gross’s compositions do not end on the paper, nor do they begin there. The frame cuts only a small surface out of the endless lacework drawing, but beyond it the web continues just as richly.” In the same year, Körner Éva opened her essay thus: “Grotesque and poetic, fantastic and real, hovering above time and space yet bound to the earth, ‘weekdays and wonders’ unfold in Gross Arnold’s etchings.” Horváth György, in a review that same year, put it as follows:
“Gross Arnold dreams up a paradise and, through the magic of his craft, makes it visible. And in this process, from conception to realization, there is naturally no trace of undisciplined make-believe. The soaring freedom of Gross’s etchings is the result of the strictest artistic and craftsmanly discipline.”
Yet it is beyond doubt that for all of us, perhaps the most important opening speech, one whose force reaches down to this day, is the one whose author began his words like this:
“Let me try to say a few words before Arnold’s new exhibition is opened to traffic. He has, after all, been my friend for 20 years.”
I have always envied this cheerful bazaar of fairy tales, which seems the complete and sorrowful mirror image of something that slowly took shape before my very eyes. For there is far less peace in me – how good it would be if there were more. And less hopefulness than in Arnold. That is also why I so enjoyed each new yet familiar-seeming work of his; they cured my dark moods at once.”
Well, this mentality, this dark mood, was no accident. The man who spoke these words died just two years later, while Arnold lived on for nearly four and a half decades more. The opening – as is well known – was delivered by Kondor Béla. And after his speech, a miniature railway was set in motion in the Dürer Hall, with yellow and red cars running in a circle, and inside that circle stood Gross Arnold’s cube construction, its faces showing impressions of the artist’s work Flower and Toy Train (Virág és játékvonat), each in a different color…
But it cannot be denied: Gross Arnold, amid his toy trains and his mineral collection, in the universe he himself had created, grew lonely with his art. “There is no harm in something being beautiful,” he maintained, but he reacted with indignation when the ugly became dominant. His artistic ideals and the practice of contemporary art drifted apart, and this induced tensions in him as well. He continued to regard the art of Rembrandt, Dürer, and van Eyck as the gold standard; among his late academy masters he held Hincz Gyula, Koffán Károly, Konecsni György, and Barcsay Jenő in high esteem, and among his older contemporaries he valued Szabó Vladimír most highly, all the while feeling that art was changing in the wrong direction. Many loved and admired his person and his art, from Mándy Iván to Szentkuthy Miklós, yet he still felt he was being unjustly pushed out of artistic life, even though interest in his work never waned. His exhibition in Szeged, his exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts, and the exhibition mounted for his 80th birthday at the Hungarian Natural History Museum were seen by tens of thousands – something entirely unparalleled in the world of contemporary art. He did not have many friends, for all his many admirers, but he was glad that he and Gajzágó Sándor mounted many joint exhibitions, always to great interest. This was balm, but in the meantime ill-flavored reviews also saw the light of day. He considered his Kossuth Prize (1995) late in coming, though his age of 66 shows, for instance, that he received this high honor considerably younger than several of his colleagues. And the recent conferral of the title Artist of the Nation was good news for him, though sadly it came a little late (true, it “could not” have come earlier)…
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, was always able to break free of the cares of coarse 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 sadness and our pain strange as you stand here among us, looking around with a smile and asking why all these people have gathered around you, we can give only one answer. The exceptional man – which is what you were, Arnold – will, in his singularity, be sorely missed by us, even if we may take consolation in the wonder-filled universe of your etchings, your works, your pictures, your drawings, which will proclaim the power of love for all time.
With sorrow we bid you farewell on behalf of the Hungarian artistic community, the Ministry of Human Capacities, the Széchenyi István Academy of Arts, the Hungarian Academy of Arts, the National Association of Hungarian Artists, and all those who loved and respected you.
Farkasrét Cemetery, February 13, 2015
Feledy Balázs
Gross Arnold 1929 – 2015
The Kossuth and Munkácsy Prize-winning graphic artist, Artist of the Nation, after a brief illness borne with patience, returned home to his redeeming Lord, accompanied by angels, on January 22, 2015, in the 86th year of his life. We took our final leave of our beloved departed on February 13 of this year at 2:30 p.m., according to the Roman Catholic funeral rite, in the Makovecz Hall of Farkasrét Cemetery (1124 Budapest XII, Németvölgyi út 99).
A farewell address was also delivered at the ceremony by Schäffer Erzsébet.
Szűcs József’s recording of Gross Arnold’s funeral:
