by Tamas Dobozy
While my father had been incredibly popular in Hungary— even during the war years and days of house arrest—in Canada he was, by his own estimation, “a zero.” For a while he managed to paint, as he called it, “from spirit,” and I remember watching him in the walk-in closet we’d converted into a studio as he closed his eyes, widened his nostrils, and moved backwards through our history to those times when he’d been allowed to stand, without guard or surveillance, on the edge of the Puszta, or the Tisza, or among the hills of the Kárpáts, and engage with the country in the act of “coexistence” that produced his paintings.
The problem was, though, that apart from a few cultivated émigrés willing to buy the paintings he produced shortly after our arrival, nobody really wanted his stuff. The country that he depicted, and the way he depicted it, said nothing to “the philistines,” as he called them, who frequented the art markets in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. And, so, as his buyers diminished, my brothers and my mother found ourselves working to support the family, when none of us had ever needed to take a job before; and my father found himself in the position of a man who had once supported his entire family in style, and whose efforts had been solely responsible for the social prestige we enjoyed, now reduced to a guilty, blocked artist, surviving on handouts from his wife and children, who spent all day inside a closet in a cloud of turpentine fumes, staring at a canvas that taunted him so much with its blankness that it was not unusual to come home and find him smoking cigarettes amidst a rubble of broken frames and torn fabric.
Yet, it was around this time—1955 or 1956—that he produced his most successful work to date. I remember that a gallery owner, Heinrich Volker, had been coming around for weeks, trying to convince my father to contribute something to a show he was preparing called Parting the Curtain: Immigrant Art from Eastern Europe. The commission caused substantial disquiet in our home, as my father began viewing it as his “last chance” at breaking into the North American art world; and he began to disclose to us his fantasies about New York and Paris and London—in rambling monologues so out of keeping with his infamous reticence. But as the weeks wore on and Volker’s visits became more frequent and insistent, it was clear that my father was getting nowhere with the commission. And we became more and more wary of him, as he now seemed to exist in two states: incessant chatter, or a moody silence that occasionally preceded fits of violence, especially if he was disturbed at work, when he would hurl paint, or a chair, across the room, or bring down a canvas against the edge of a table or door frame. Finally, on the last day possible, with the deadline extended as far as it could go, Volker came to collect the painting. My father was laughing when he walked in, but it was not like any laugh I’d heard, or have heard since, one neither of joy nor delight, but of absolute despair; it was a laughter forced upwards from the pit of the stomach, and so difficult to maintain that it brought tears to my father’s eyes.
Volker sat down at the table, wondering, like the rest of us, what had happened to my father, and then seemed to relax a little when he was presented with a canvas wrapped in brown paper. “May I open it?” he asked. “By all means,” my father replied. But when the paper came off it, Volker only stared up at us. Apart from my father’s signature in the bottom right corner, the canvas seemed, at first sight, completely blank; looking closer, however, we noticed that it wasn’t blank at all, but thick, centimeters thick, with coat upon coat of white paint. Volker looked at my father in complete wonderment. “I call it Landscape with Immigrant’” my father said. Then, abruptly, he strode out of the room and back into his closet.
Well, the painting did, albeit briefly, put György Ferenc on the map. Remember, this was 1956, when you could still play tricks like that and appear profound. The Toronto Star called it “a significant attempt to depict the stalemate resulting from a desire to paint in the midst of an entirely alien subject matter.” Likewise, a columnist for Western Art wrote, “Of all the paintings on display at Parting the Curtain, none stands out more, for originality or statement, than György Ferenc’s Landscape with Immigrant, whose uniform white nonetheless betrays its emphasis on the contextual, as the viewer is treated to different shades of feeling depending on the angle at which he is situated in relation to the painting; indeed, the drama of the painting derives entirely from the viewer’s perspective, which opens onto vague shadows, the barest detail of brushstroke, and which makes him empathize with the inertia of the immigrant, who, like the painting under our gaze, is cut off from culture, from history, from the country itself, and subject to the minutest of inspections by a culture to which he cannot conform.”
None of this meant anything to my father. In fact, all it did was confirm his rapidly mounting disdain for Canadian culture. “The painting was a joke!” he yelled, pounding his fist on the kitchen table. “A complete farce!” And despite Volker’s continuous attempts to engage him a second time, my father never again painted anything for an official gallery—at least not willingly.
That doesn’t mean he stopped painting. On the contrary, he seemed to sink more deeply into it, though he was now working in complete isolation from the art world—neither speaking to dealers nor fans nor other painters, nor engaging with the diminishing trickle of letters arriving from former students and peers in Hungary—and growing increasingly mystical, explaining himself through remarks we came to expect even before he spoke them: “There is no longer any distraction between the paint and myself,” or, “To produce without regard for audience is true art.”
And on the weekends he would take us on five- to ten-mile hikes, myself and my two brothers carrying his paints and canvases and easels on our backs while he consulted a surveyor’s map and aimed his compass in the direction of the place—the river, the rocky outcrop, the alpine meadow—that might finally speak to him. We would hike for hours, less out of paternal coercion—I was well into my twenties by this time, and Péter was nineteen, and Ákos was sixteen, all big men compared to my slight and delicate father—than out of concern (especially Ákos), wanting to make sure the old man didn’t fall off a cliff, or break a leg while moving through underbrush, or get mauled by a bear, and because we desperately wanted him to achieve what he was after, to find some reconciliation with a geography he had no choice but to inhabit. If only he could paint it, we thought, our father would return to being the confident, intense person he’d been in Budapest.
But our father became more and more withdrawn into his labours. And on those weekends, the three of us would sit whispering quietly or wander off from where he was working—to pick berries, get a better view, hunt for grouse—trying to keep ourselves occupied until the sun sank so far in the west we had to rush home to avoid being caught in the woods at night. My father painted a lot in those days, though they were not especially good paintings, everywhere displaying an unease, an awkwardness, as if the painter had only a glancing interest in his subject matter, as if neither landscape nor painter was willing to risk intimacy. And so everything he produced had a formal quality, the kind of restraint that marks a dinner party of bureaucrats who, even in their nods and smiles, are still intent on etiquette.
Most disturbing, however, were the names he gave these paintings. We went to Jasper one summer, and he produced several semi-abstractions of the Rockies, which he termed his Kárpát Series. He was referring, of course, to the Carpathian mountain ranges around Hungary, and each painting was dated, numbered, and titled as if each image derived from this other locale, which was about as similar to the Rockies as a pond is to an inland sea. The titles only added a final—a fatal—twist of bewilderment to an already compromised series of paintings. But nobody spoke to my father about it at the time—nobody mentioned the fact that he couldn’t superimpose Hungary over Canada simply by reproducing place names—our silence owing to the fact that he seemed quite happy with what he’d produced (though he only ever showed the works to us), and because we were afraid to bring on another of those ranting fits that always sent his blo
od pressure soaring. We let it go.
We let it go for a while. And, then, one day around 1961, Ákos decided that enough paintings had accumulated in the house, and what our father really needed was “another chance,” as he put it, “at being recognized for the genius he is.” It was then, on that quiet February night when my brothers and myself gathered to have a few beers at a local restaurant (only Ákos was living at home by then), that it occurred to me I was the only one who knew how truly bad the Kárpát Series was, only I who understood that György Ferenc was no longer the painter he’d once been. As it turned out, however, Péter agreed with me, and he argued with Ákos about the merits of my father’s recent efforts, trying to convince him to call up the patrons and galleries who owned work from Hungary, to offer these for a retrospective. But Ákos was certain that Father’s recent landscapes deserved a chance, that we failed to see the “intentional irony” in them, and that they were at least as relevant as the Landscape with Immigrant he’d produced six years earlier.
“Well, okay, even if you are right,” said Péter, “how are you going to convince him to put the paintings on exhibit? You know how stubborn he is. And, remember, he hated Landscape with Immigrant. It was a joke to him.”
“I won’t tell him,” said Ákos, “I’ll just put on the show, and when it’s a success, then I’ll tell him. He loves those paintings. I know he does.”
That afternoon, as my brothers drove off, I thought of Ákos differently from before, as if his plan had opened holes in my memory, the places of the past that I hadn’t, for some reason, noticed him inhabiting, probably because they were so tied in with my father and the arc of his diminishing glory. But I remembered how Ákos had always stayed close to my father when he went trekking after landscapes, always at his elbow—like a familiar, a cherub, a tiny muse—nodding and smiling when the old man’s eyes sliced down at his son for approval. And, then, farther back, I remembered the year we spent in the Austrian refugee camp, before Canadian immigration decided to take us, when we would go out for similarly long walks in the countryside; and Ákos, still a child then, had to be picked up whenever we came across a rough patch of ground, or a swamp, or when he was just worn out from the miles we’d gone. And I realized, too, that we had done the same thing in Hungary, near Debrecen, on the Puszta, along the banks of the Tisza, with Ákos sitting on my father’s shoulders.
I saw them there now, though my mind was suddenly refocused on my younger brother, wondering if some part of Ákos hadn’t been left behind in the paintings my father hid under the floor of the converted chicken coop, or lost in the salons of people who’d turned on György Ferenc at the urgings of the new regime, happy to have his paintings but not his friendship; and it seemed to me that Ákos wanted nothing more than to be holding my father by the hand again, moving through the frame, back into those landscapes, because he was the one still living at home, the one forced to watch the old man degenerate by the day, until my father was utterly lost, unable to remember—as he once had with a skill that astonished us all—the funny, corkscrewed branch, the dead snag at the head of the lake, the patch of chanterelle mushrooms, all those markers that spoke to him, providing instructions on how to return home.
Emigration had been fool’s gold for both of them. And it had not occurred to me before, perhaps because Ákos had been so small at the time, that someone other than my father had forever lost an important relationship in the flight to Canada. But while the old man had only lost his footing, my little brother had lost his father, and that was to be deprived of what had been, for as long as he could remember, his only magnetic north.
So it was Ákos now, always Ákos, who had to find my father when he became lost; and it was Ákos who would suffer, later, when the old man became so remote, so distant, so disoriented by the twists and turns he’d taken, that Ákos would be unable to get to him, would be left stalled in the midst of an impassable terrain, not close enough to reach our father but close enough to hear him calling for help.
The exhibit took place on May 12, 1962, at Volker’s art gallery, named the Volkerplatz, in Toronto. It was an exclusive show, including almost all of my father’s work in Canada—certainly all of the recent landscapes he’d painted on trips to the British Columbia interior, the Kárpát Series, the Hortobágy Memories, the Orség triptych—and Volker had signed a contract with Ákos guaranteeing that the show would stay on—good reviews or bad—for at least one full month.
These reviews were not long in coming. Luckily, Ákos knew that my father would not read the papers, that he had sworn off all news printed in English as being biased and British and totally removed from the realm of truth. The reviews were positive. And, again, this was the early 1960s, when irony was coming into its own as the dominant aesthetic, when norms and institutions, especially those of the nation-state, were being challenged, when it was only too fitting to produce a series of canvases that highlighted the disparity, the unbridgeable gap, between the physical geography of a place and the consciousness we impose on it through the act of naming—with all the patriotic bias and blindness this entails. My father’s work, according to The Globe and Mail, “expresse[d] the arbitrary nature of naming, and critique[d], in particular, the notion of an immanent geography; throughout, [his] canvases address[ed] the hazards of solipsism, the idea of an essential ‘country’ that somehow exists outside of, and thus objectively informs, the person perceiving it. It [was] also, with the imposition of Hungarian place names over top of what are obviously Canadian geographical formations, very tongue-in-cheek.” The other reviews were similarly positive, drawing attention to the work’s statement on how we impose meaning on landscape, and the extreme comedy that results. It was exactly the kind of thing we did not want my father to read.
And the pictures were selling, even with the overinflated prices Volker was asking (“The more you charge, the more they think they’re worth,” he told us.) I remember Ákos gleefully calling us up with each day’s profit, and talking about how he was going to take our parents on a trip, how he was going to buy the three of them a new house, how he was going to get my father a library’s worth of movies showing every square inch of Hungary.
In the end, it was a phone call that did it. Ákos had instructed Mother to keep our father away from the phone, which was easy enough, given that most of the callers were English and that he was increasingly unwilling to speak the language (my mother would have to find out who the caller was, and whether or not he or she spoke Hungarian, before my father would come anywhere near the receiver). She objected to Ákos’s plan at first—having seen the effect the Volker exhibit had had on my father—but relented when Ákos reminded her of the money that my father’s pictures would fetch, pointing out to her the dimensions of the home they were living in and comparing them to the places we’d once had, back in the days when György Ferenc was still a bankable name in the European art world. It was easy, of course, what with my father’s histrionics and depression to forget what the move had done to my mother, and Ákos was well enough aware— still being at home—that she’d been carrying on her own guerilla warfare against the old man, hoping he might come around, might change his attitude toward the sale of his paintings, and relieve her from the decades she’d already put in scrubbing the floors and toilets of other people’s homes.
It would be easy to blame her for complicity in what happened next, and to wish she’d played some part in mitigating my father’s reaction toward the exhibit and Ákos, but what could she have done that we couldn’t do? Nothing. And while the rest of us were by now free and on our own, she had to continue living with the old man, leaving him in the morning to clean other people’s places, and then returning at night to his rage and silences and refusal to do a single thing other than sit impotently in his studio. Though she never said anything, I think that part of her must have been relieved when Ákos finally left, and she had only one fanatic in the household. I don’t blame her for hoping there was something more she cou
ld get, not only out of my father, but also out of their life in Canada.
The problem was that when Art in America called to do a sidebar, my mother was out buying groceries, and I can imagine how disconcerted my father must have been when he was asked how it felt to have finally achieved recognition in North America, to have been hailed by many of the eminent art critics as one of the first expatriate painters to “attack the illusion of the nation-state and a national culture.”
We were at the gallery that day, the four of us, mother included, when my father walked in just as Ákos was delivering a lecture on the Hungarian painters who had influenced György Ferenc, the effect emigration had had on the painting, and his decision to “aesthetically embrace deterritorialization.” I remember turning toward the door when I heard the bells jingling, and having to do a double take between the poster showing an outsized photo of my father’s face on the wall and my actual father, who was alternating between a scowl and a look of dismay as he moved back and forth between the reporters and the paintings on the wall.
My father was not an especially strong man, though he had a certain force common to obsessive-compulsives; that is to say, when he wanted something, or when there was a goal to achieve, he had an unlimited energy. And that’s how it was that day when he tore through the crowd to where Ákos stood and put his hand over the microphone. There was a momentary hush when we saw my brother’s shocked expression, and then, before anyone could intervene, my father swung the back of his hand across Ákos’s face, striking him much harder than I’d ever seen him strike anyone (and he had never been one for physical punishment, always preferring the threat of a spanking to the actual task of carrying it out). I was close enough by then, along with Péter, to be able to grab my father and pull him away, and to hear his whisper directed at Ákos, delivered in a Hungarian so thick with hurt that each word was heavy, layered, outlined in black: “From this day you are silent to me, nameless; you do not breathe; you are invisible.” And with that, my father shrugged off our hands and walked out of the Volkerplatz.