SoulShapes

The Hungarian Soul Taking Shape

Our exhibition seeks to present Hungarian folk tradition in its wholeness: besides the life’s work of the masters, we wish to show the spirit, soul and inspirations that conceived these objects so nicely fitting in the hand: how they take shape and how the shapes of the soul ennoble into objects. We seek to show Hungarian art, which, drawing on strong roots, is still growing and blossoming as well as the organic way of thinking that helps us survive thanks to the joy of artistic creation. Building on the example of recent decades, characterised by the economical use of materials, measured movements and recycling, we wish to send this message to future generations: it can be done like this, or perhaps… it is worth doing in this way.

Art is a way for people to look for their place in the world, and folk art belongs to communities. The shepherds of Hortobágy have a saying: the center of the world is where I stick my staff in the ground. Despite its ambiguity, this statement is a perfect way to define ourselves. This is me in the world, they are my ancestors going back seven generations, and this is my connection with my environment. Despite what might be suggested, this is not opposing me with him/her, and us with them. On the contrary, me and us cannot be understood in isolation: they assume their quality through establishing a relationship with those living around them, whether at an individual or national level.

A Hungarian peasant would have never expressed it quite like this but in his life he applied the principle, widely known in the 20th century, that any human activity can become art if it draws on creative energies. In Christian culture it is accepted that man was created in the image of the Creator, therefore, he also has creative powers. And those who put their creative skills in shackles, sin against God. It can be seen that every one of us is a creator, everybody is an artist, even if art is the only, albeit definitely the most obvious manifestation of creativity. The forms of this is there to varying degrees in all of us and can be developed consciously or subconsciously.

In the past the development of creative skills was helped by necessity and our yearning for beauty. In our contemporary interpretation, the most talented peasants were the polymaths of their times, equally at home in the natural sciences, the humanities and the arts. They designed and built their houses, they knew the laws of nature as well as horticulture and animal husbandry, while, if needed, they even cured their animals. When they made their tools, household furnishings and items of clothing, they followed millennial traditions, forms and methods but always combined them with individual elements of style, always adapted them to the norms of their community. Hence, they were artists, singers, composers, poets, storytellers (even though they mostly did not write down their stories but remembered them) and applied artists in one. Teaching the following everyday activity from the past, for example, would be a complex task enhancing creativity even today: here is a fallen tree; design and, using an axe, make a chair from it that is aesthetic, comfortable and can be used for generations. Peasants were also excellent teachers and educators naturally passing on knowledge to future generations for centuries, integrating it into everyday life.01

In a properly functioning community everybody is a creative person, a singer, a storyteller and a dancer – i.e. an artist – but at the same time they are also the recipients, the audience and the critics. These roles are not separate: everyone can experience the perfect moment that Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls flow,02 when action and consciousness become one, when space and time operate outside the everyday dimension and the exclusivity of the I ceases. Man engaged in a creative activity never becomes a passive recipient while tapping into the workings of the universe.

The thorough knowledge of the methods required for creative activities will not make people artists. They need to be familiar with the thousand-year-old system of signs, while they must also know the world and how it works to be able to model all these processes with signs accepted by the community. For contemporary recipients of art, the essence of this is very difficult to understand because the ’messages’ are not written in automatic, mechanical signs: they can be decoded and read only by those who, being a part of the whole, can become artists themselves, i.e. make their festive and everyday tools and objects, shaping the forms they inherited to their own souls and embellishing them with motifs springing from their our souls. “The joy of folk art does not come for free. Its language must be mastered: it is a language of forms and system of symbols, and it must be felt in our souls that »amidst the mounds of the Past« we are walking in the garden of our own lives as we are also the children of this nation,” we are reminded by Gábor Lükő.03

Another thought by Gábor Lükő that lives on – perhaps one of the most important ones, which is almost a century old but now increasingly accepted and confirmed by research – is that in its essence Hungarian folk art cannot be divided into spiritual and material culture since the signs embroidered onto a young girl’s handkerchief and what she sings out from her soul convey the same message. These are different shapes of the Hungarian soul, whose essence can of course not be understood by the scientific method of disassembling and breaking everything up into its elements. This essence could only be felt by artists with a needle or chisel in hand, while at the same time singing or relaying their emotions and thoughts in a story, or if possible, in a dance too. “We must become familiar with folk art’s set of symbols as well as its concept of space and time to defeat the prejudices instilled in us through a foreign artistic education and to be able to freely embrace Hungarian forms.” 04

It is true of every organic culture – to quote Hesse – while engaged in the creative process “we see the boundaries between ourselves and nature quiver and dissolve and we become acquainted with the state of mind when we are unable to decide whether the lineaments of our body result from impressions received from outside or from within us. In no other practice is it so simple to discover how creative we are and to what extent our souls participate in the continuous creation of the world. To an even greater extent it is this same indivisible divinity which is active in us and in nature so that if the outer world were destroyed each one of us would be capable of building it up again. For mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature is echoed in us and originates in the soul whose being is eternity and is hidden from us but none the less gives itself to us for the most part in the power of love and creation.” 05

And if the above processes work, we can completely disregard the widespread view claiming that “folk art is no longer living as its natural milieu, the peasantry, is dissolved, so the natural process of knowledge transfer no longer exists and folk culture is now only art-ifically sustained”. Indeed, our exhibition is intent on showing that contemporary artists understand and are native speakers of our millennial tradition, enabling them to recreate the world by making masterpieces imbued with their soul through which they mediate messages to those who use them today.

Outstanding masters and workshops that define a given area are the focus of each branch of folk handicrafts at our exhibition. They provided the foundation from what has been continuously changing in families and through the students, spanning from objects based on tradition to authentic contemporary art. Visitors can see the stories behind the works made by individual artists and workshops. They can also follow the changes in objects of everyday use from the distant past and how they have become part of our contemporary lives and art, while mediating our ancestors’ messages of wisdom in the purest possible ways.

It is the forms that have been polished for centuries – perhaps millennia – that constitute the gold reserve of a nation worth using, cherishing and passing on for generations. The displayed objects of ’applied folk art’ – in which the Hungarian soul has taken shape – reflect the spirit of usable and sustainable tradition: they are not disposable by nature and should not be disposed of as they have been with us from the beginning and are with us still.

The hall called Inheritance is devoted to the artisan dynasties that preserve and keep alive sets of motifs and work methods, which they have passed on for generations, and indeed, for centuries, in the Carpathian Basin. Besides introducing important families active in various crafts – potters, bladesmiths, felt coat makers, weavers, spinners, Busho mask makers, coopers, blue-dyers, bootmakers, hatters, carvers, furniture painters, felters, blacksmiths –, where even the present generation carries on the trade of their fathers and grandfathers, this hall also presents pupils and their ’trendsetting’ masters, for whom passing on their knowledge is at least as important as their creative activities.

The hall titled Leaves With Pearls (Gyöngyvel leveledzik) endeavours to present artists who made outstanding works in the related arts – fine arts, applied arts, etc. – by revisiting folk tradition, disproving a decades’ long misconception what claims that visual folk arts never had a master on a par with Bartók. Visitors can witness how the same creative thought can be expressed in a painting, sculpture, enamel picture, embroidery, bone carving, folk song or tale.

In the past young people mastered their valuable culture without them knowing: they learnt the essence of its system of signs until the close-knit rural communities dissolved. Then came a time when grandmother’s solid wooden box or chest decorated with tulips were the first objects to be thrown out and replaced by mass-produced furniture. The remainder of folk art was first rediscovered by the urban intellectuals: what used to be treasures came to be studied as artefacts. They later became goods for sale but deprived of their intrinsic value, and were looked down on as peculiar, outdated bric-a-brac. In the past century young people re-engaged with folk art in several waves and at different levels. They were always the ones who – following the teaching of the great masters – went scratching around the rubbish dumps of culture and turned the tarnished pieces into treasured objects.

Displayed in the exhibition hall titled Thirty-three are works by thirty-three young artists in their thirties, representing numerous layers of folk art: young people re-discovering and keeping alive the knowledge of their ancestors. They convey important messages to their contemporaries with their works. They are the artists of the future. They talk about their inspiration and calling in one-minute films screened in this hall.

Economy, the principle of less is more, is a concept of Hungarian folk thinking that is manifest in our object-making. This is reflected by the displayed objects and by the exhibition installation too. The new exhibition of the National Salon of Folk Art is different from previous one: while four years ago the focus was primarily on providing an overview of artists and objects, this year’s concept is defined by creative communities and intellectual workshops as well as by the changes in material culture and our faith vested in the future. The shapes of the Hungarian soul manifest in music can be felt throughout the exhibition: folk music recordings can be heard in every hall. We compiled this ’background music’, which requires some attention but is not distracting, from mosaics of a few minutes in length; the musicians we invited to play are all dedicated to authentic styles.

Perhaps never before was it so timely for Hungarians as now to hear the warnings expressed in Hungarian folk art over many historical periods, to understand the messages formulated by its language of signs, to help its self-healing processes and to strengthen the revival and blossoming of our Hungarian fairy garden by using our creative powers. “A nation is protected and sustained not only by its forces bearing arms but also by its tools that create beauty. The Hungarian soul has always instinctively felt this. This is how the Hungarian soil has become the fairyland of the most inimitable folk art.”06

Mihály Vetró

chief curator of the exhibition

Footnotes:

01 Vetró Mihály: Önazonosságra és leleményre nevelés. A kézművesoktatás szerepe az identitás kialakulásában és a kreativitásfejlesztésben – A nádudvari módszer. [Education in self-identity and creativity. The role of teaching handicrafts in developing identity and improving creativity – the Nádudvar method] In: „Csodatévő szarvasnak ezer ága-boga” Magyar népművészeti egyetem és hagyományátadó falvak. [“A thousand branches of the magic deer’s antler” Hungarian folk-art university and villages where tradition is passed down] Göd, 2022. pp 129–130 o.

02 Csíkszentmihályi Mihály: Flow – Az áramlat. A tökéletes élmény pszichológiája. [Flow. The Psychology of the Perfect Experience] Akadémiai Kiadó, 1997.

03 Lükő Gábor: Kiskunság régi képfaragó és képmetsző művészete. [The Old Picture-carving and -engraving Art of the Kiskunság Region] Bács-Kiskun Megyei Művelődési Központ, Kecskemét, 1982. p 18 o.

04 Lükő Gábor: A magyar lélek formái. [Shapes of the Hungarian Soul] Budapest, 1942. p 6 o

05 Hermann Hesse: Demian. English translation downloaded from https://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Demian-By-Hermann-Hesse.pdf.

06 Csete Balázs: Faluról falura, házról házra… Budapest, 1939. p 140 o.