ART : ‘Art of Hungary’ Offers a Few Fresh Visions

I walked into “New Art of Hungary: Four Artists” at the Modern Museum of Art expecting to see just about anything. No museum I know of has exhibited contemporary Hungarian art recently, and I don’t recall ever reading anything about it. What are young artists doing over there, anyway? Knocking off tired imitations of passe Western styles? or finding fresh ways of expressing national themes in this time of sweeping political change?

As it turns out, the figurative mixed media paintings by Aron Gabor are derivative and forgettable. Silhouetted figures of human beings and animals are caught in hyperkinetic environments full of flash and dazzle, signifying little.

Janos Szirtes cranks out busy patterns that (as the catalogue says) fill the surface like a carpet. His energy level is high, but the work is too diffuse to make a lasting impression.

Geza Samu’s wood sculptures, on the other hand, are sprightly hybrids of craft and art. He grafts small, precise cuts of wood to simulate leafless, bark-stripped trees and dense clusters of tree branches that almost dance with vitality. The pieces serve as metaphors for the rhythmic pulse of nature and the elemental link between landscape and humanity.

Most impressive are the paintings and sculptures of Imre Bukta, in which he combines a deep affection for the rural life of his homeland with jabs at the lumbering ways of agriculture under Communist rule.

The exhibit catalogue, organized by Katlin Neray, director of the Palace of Exhibitions, and Laszlo Beke, chief curator of the Hungarian National Gallery, contains an essay by Beke in which he spells out the major dilemma of modern Hungarian artists: to either make “international” art and risk losing their distinctive Hungarian quality, or to make “national” art and be “suffocated by provincialism.”

Bukta manages to be at once a provincial and an international artist, addressing himself to local themes in an ironic, understated way. Another catalogue description of his work, from a show at the Ernst Museum in Budapest, tells of some of his drolly eccentric performances. In one piece, he stood in the snow in his underwear, tending a cow and carrying a shabby briefcase. The briefcase represents the new class of people that came into being during the early years of Hungary’s Communist government, more beholden to bureaucratic systems than to the land or one another.

In his “Beret and Briefcase” sculpture in the exhibition--a sagging wooden black beret hung above an intricately carved wooden briefcase with anarchic little holes--there seems to be an implied tension between the peasant or craftsman and the bureaucratic hack.

Hungary’s rich farmland long provided the country with half its income and nearly all its domestic food needs, but the monolithic Socialist Workers Party--which ruled from the end of World War II to this past October--squeezed the spirit out of farmers. Twice during the regime, peasants were forced to abandon their private farms and join cooperatives; today, state-owned and cooperative farms vastly outnumber private plots.

Opposition to the Socialists comes mainly from younger urban intellectuals who want to institute a Western-style liberal democracy. There is also a conservative group that represents rural, strongly nationalistic citizens. This split between the urban intellectual and the rural populist leadership has historically been a key motif in Hungarian politics.

Bukta’s subject matter and approach suggest a meeting of the minds. His painting style is deceptively childlike--unencumbered with perspective and filled with soft yellows, roses, grays and greens. Clusters of fine lines read as raindrops or blades of grass. In such paintings as “The Pigs are Vomiting,” “Pig Pastor” and “Man With Plum Tree Branch,” he evokes a verdant land in which animals roam free.

Why the pigs are sick--they regurgitate bright orange liquid into the troughs--may well have to do with the red Communist star in the road in the upper right corner of the painting. The “pig pastor” and the man holding out the branch are featureless, ghostly human figures, forgotten men who eke out their lives in a colorful dreamy idyll that is as distant as possible from the regulations of Communist farming systems.

Bukta’s sculptures merge craft traditions with sociological commentary. “Agricultural Machine in the Service of Public Sanitation” was pieced together from nails, string, intricately carved wood and an old cheese grater.

In an autobiographical statement in the Ernst Museum catalogue, Bukta gives some insight into a maverick young artist’s life in Hungary. He was born in a small village in northeast Hungary in 1952. He finished his formal schooling at 18 with an exam in metal cutting for skilled workers. He has been a soldier, and he has worked on a state farm, in a chemical plant, and in a building materials store. He joined artists’ colonies at various times, and he once worked in a “collective studio” but had to leave because “somebody denounced me.”

It’s a pity we can’t see more of Bukta’s range--his photographs, performance videos and installations made with materials such as hay and fur. Perhaps some enterprising American museum will bring us these other pieces, along with appropriate commentary on the national dilemmas and hopes the works embody.

At the Modern Museum, such information is lacking. It’s frustrating that the catalogue doesn’t even mention the organizing institutions or contain a checklist of the works in the show. More importantly, viewers who want to be brought up to date, even in the most general way, about the political, social and cultural situations in Hungary will have to look elsewhere.

The Modern Museum did not organize this exhibit, but if it really is a museum and not just a dumping ground for shows packaged elsewhere, it needs to be able to draw upon curatorial and educational resources. We need to see what kinds of art people in the rest of the world are making, but we can’t be expected to put it in context all by ourselves.

“New Art of Hungary: Four Artists” continues through Feb. 18 at the Modern Museum of Art, Griffin Towers, 5 Hutton Centre Drive, Santa Ana. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Admission: free. Information: (714) 754-4111.