Introduction to Carved Thoughts (1945)

The Conscription Board of Nature’s Army fixed my birth date for the year 1908 at Kolozsvar, one of the most cultured cities of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. The majestic and beautifully sculptured mountains that surround my native city inspired my imagination with the desire to become a sculptor.  Though the religious environment into which I was born seemed to clash with my calling, later when I discovered that religion and art do not ultimately exclude each other, but go hand in hand, my mind was at peace and I accepted the calling.

 

My first attempt at sculpturing started with carving pieces of rubber that I stole from my school-mates in the primary school – a material which my school friends used for wiping out things instead of creating it into something that remains for ever. This fundamental difference between my friends and myself has remained in the idea that artists will create everlasting values out of matter which is of no value to the general public.

Having failed in most of the subjects I was taught at school, except carving, reciting and singing, there was nothing left for me but to follow the call of the mountains. I ran away from home to a place in which besides a market for cattle, vegetables and fruit, there was also a market for Bible teachers. My  higher appetite, however, was not satisfied.  This dissatisfaction was aggravated by the police who were sent after me and who, instead of terrorizing run-aways trying to follow their true ambition, should help them to attain that vocation.

On my voluntary return home, conflicts between religious, material and social values were the same as before, and temptations were abundant. Wine, women and song, the food of the Gods, were stretching out their hands all around me. The religious mission of carrying home the red wine which a pious bottle-storekeeper used to offer periodically to the priestly office of my Father, was one of my best adventures, for I never missed the opportunity of having a long pull from the bottle.

Women, though I used to follow them for years with a chicken-bone in one hand and a piece of bread in the other, were to me nothing more than distant  Madonnas.  Only later on in life I began to realize that the motive of this much  ridiculed behaviour can only be that woman to an artist is the means to an end, while to others she is an end in herself.

Song, however, cost me more than money could pay. Musical pleasure such as opera displayed on the stage was regarded as profane according to the religious conception of my father, who in spite of his misinterpreted religious dogmas, used to improvise symphonic music as an unconscious protest. To satisfy my spiritual extravagencies, I was prepared to bear corporal and other punishments, which were in store for me on coming home. But for the pleasure of opera, I even paid with my carving tools which I usually gave in lieu of the entrance fee. Exchanging one art for another seemed to me a better barter system than exchanging the poor sound of a golden sovereign for the ethereal sound of Wagner's overture to Lohengrin.

My first serious attempt at modelling started with an indescribable urge. I felt as if I were loaded with rocks to be blasted by the fuse of the inner detonation of the spirit. Because of my parents' disapproval, it was no easy task to find a suitable manoeuvring field in which to let it go.

I had to start a bust three times life-size in the pantry, which measured 2 ft. by 4 ft. There was no space to step backwards - not even the three steps of respect which are paid to art, or for general surveying. To the amazement of my friends I finished it. I forgave the potential art lovers and critics for their flirtation with the artist rather than the art. Hoping to cash in on their fast-cooling enthusiasm for some sort of a bursary, I did not let them get away with their habit of using pictures and artists as a signboard for their good taste and culture, painted with someone else's blood.

The only inspiring reaction I experienced was when I carried the bust out from the pantry into the kitchen - the first stepping-stone towards a prima donna's fame - in order to show it to my Father. While inspecting it I noticed a veil gradually lifting from his eyes - a screen that separated the religious prejudice from the instinctive understanding of the fine arts. He only shook his head in a noncommittal way, not knowing whether to be for or against my career. Thus the pantry, kitchen and studio became not only my favourite domestic environment, but also my holy of holies.

My urge, like the roaring elements, was not satisfied with this expansion from the pantry to the kitchen, and I decided to face everything - family agitation, insecure material prospect, and even the threat of the hard road to fame. I preferred the eternal dilemma between a questionable comfort of life and resignation to simple and more substantial pleasures, rather than to live with those whose idea of a colourful life is to live like a beach-comber, not knowing that a creative vagabond and a money-glorified and useless if not destructive, vagabond are not the same.

So my vagabond career started by going to Budapest, the most beautiful city in the world, the gatepost between the East and the West where the mystical civilization of the sunrise in the East meets the objective culture of the sun setting West.  Since music is the thermometer of a nation's temperament, the Hungarian composers can write a song with the breath-taking finesse of a Frenchman and die for music with the self-denial of the East.

My first contact with the Budapest Art Academy was full of anxiety, not because of the strictness of it's Selecting Committee, but mainly because I could not attend all the eight days of the Talent examination, on account of my singing which paid my way. Though the judgement of the four professors for the academy was in my favour, I was bewildered at the numerous requirements for becoming an artist. Nevertheless I took them in with a feverish thirst for knowledge that still remains unquenched today.

Vienna, the first milestone in the Western civilization, and the lid on the boiling pot of the Balkans, impressed me with her happy-go-lucky way of living in spite of having to face the constant danger of being swamped by her over-boiling pot. She waltzed her worries away through a carefree life, which can only be afforded by people to whom having a good time means making a living, unlike those to whom the pleasure of life means making a living.

Professor Hanak, my teacher, and many other fine artists, were supplied with studios built in a corner of the Vienna Woods, by an  encouraging government. Walking every day to work accompanied by a whistling symphony of the birds, the inspiring studio of many a great composer, urged me to meditate, and greatly helped me in the process of crystallization.

Stimulated by this atmosphere, the shapeless rocks of art smouldering in my heart and mind began to grind against each other they reached the refinement of the weightless dust called art.

Berlin, the hot-point in the manufacture of political, scientific, cultural and artistic events, appeared to me like a patient on the day of a medical examination. While finding her national temperature far beyond normal, it was impossible to diagnose whether the flushed complexion was the fever of sickness or the glow of health.

Berliners look at life through precision field-glasses enabling them to see the panorama from its protoplasmic beginning to the decadence of the Homo Sapiens (in contrast to the Viennese outlook on life and art). Berlin with her rustic left-handed helplessness and heavy-booted clumsiness was trying to tip-toe her way up to the Pantheon of the Frenchman, the only nation that managed to do away with the clumsiness of matter, and to convert it into the spirit of a Rodin, Degas, Renoir, Debussy, Hugo, Balzac, etc.

Paris, the nerve-centre of the art world, made my heart beat in a tempo that echoes the heart-beat of every artist all over the world.  Paris, the only broadcast house where the Muses sing love songs of art to which every decent singing person form every corner of the world listens in, which jams all interference of political, financial and power-grabbing intrigues. Paris, the living university of life and art., the only authority to bestow degrees,  gave me the understanding  of the meaning of art, namely the transfiguration of a figure from Nature’s self-preservation scheme to the higher purpose art, the reflection of the spirit of each epoch as seen through the eyes of the artist. Paris, with its open-air theatre of world-breaking dramas and diaphragm-bursting comedies, not acted, but lived by every Frenchman as Shakespeare meant it for the stage, taught me that art must be lived.

London, the Queen of the Imperial beehive, possesses a natural temperature that cannot be measured with the same thermometer as that applied to other European nations. As in the life of bees, her emotional life is subjected to the Queen in order to maintain the complicated channel system of her Empire. She, therefore, cannot afford to exhibit her sentimental life. This may give the impression that love-making is to the British simply doing a job like any other job. Yet, beneath her channels the waters run deep unlike other nations that have no channels to serve as an outlet, and which, therefore, over-sentimentalise each other, while Britain keeps cool.

In the year 1931-32, London's awakening to modern art consciousness appeared like a whirlwind and swept away her conservative tradition with a vigour that cleansed the art studios and turned them into a worthy place fit for any representative of modern sculpture, such as Epstein the symbolist, Henry Moore the formalist, and Frank Dobson the dynamical. Indeed, these representatives embody the whole scale of the emotional complex of humanity. They prove that personal and national temperament are not measured by the wobbling of our anatomy to the tune of the boogey-woogey, but by the inward forces, the vibration of which, tears our anatomy without moving a muscle. In other words, here I realized that to express the most dramatic ecstasy with the least movement is the unwritten law of modern art.

South Africa, God's virgin country, and unspoiled by civilization, has a very talented urge for culture. The culture that was the twilight of European decay, is now becoming the daylight of South Africa’s awakening.  Not being afraid of the dangers of a crumbling civilization in the world, is the sign of her daring  youth.  By emerging from Bushman's art and by leaving behind the heritage of Europe, she enters now the broadness of her sunlit landscapes and of other cultural expressions.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, my vagabond life was interrupted. The shocking news of the cold-blooded murder of my co-vagabond poet, induced me to sign the dotted line, and I became an active member of the South African army. This meant no more curved lines for the duration. Having had no chance to carve stones, I overcame the boredom of the evenings in Camp with thoughts about life, which resulted in the creation of "Carved Thoughts".