Ferenc Martyn, master of abstract surrealism

At the dawn of the 20th century, three young artists spread their wings from the vicinity of József Rippl-Rónai: among them Sándor Galimberti, the pioneer of Hungarian cubism; Aurél Bernáth, who was a cubo-expressionist and later post-impressionist painter in his early period; and Ferenc Martyn (1899-1986), one of the most important representatives of abstract surrealism in Hungary. In our latest article, we take a look at his art.

Martyn's parents were knight Martyn Arthur and Alojzia Gizella Piatsek. He spent his childhood in the Villa Róma (Rippl-Ronai's mansion). Initially he was a painter's apprentice at Rippl-Ronai: he was tasked to wash brushes and scrape the palette. In 1917, he graduated the Gymnasium of Cistercian Order of the Louis the Great, and was then drafted to the front. At the Academy of Fine Arts he was again a pupil of Rippl-Rónai from 1918, and then of István Réti from 1923. Between 1926 and 1940 he worked in Paris, where he became a devotee of the abstract movement after 1930. The sanguine drawings of this period show a system of pulsating, undulating rhythms and 'running' lines. From 1933 onwards, he produced a series of watercolours composed in pure colours and more recent chalk drawings, which are the direct predecessors of his later large-scale abstract paintings.

Ernő Kállai Kállai, in his 1946 essay, describes the creative characteristics of Ferenc Martyn as follows: 'Ferenc Martyn is a master of pure painterly composition. There are works of his which radiate merely the intellectual pleasure of abstract shaping and constructive order and the sensuous joy of colour: the calm, serene harmony of existence. It is in these images that Ferenc Martyn is closest to the French artists. But the painter's imagination is often driven by deeper motives than this intellectually exuberant sensuality: passionate, sometimes wild impulses of temperament, distant memories of the soul, mysterious visions of the unconscious and fantastic, bizarre associations of images.... The origins of these memories and associations, cast in abstract pictorial forms, are not difficult to determine, at least in one direction and for the whole series of visions, knowing that Francis Martyn is descended on his father's side from Irish sailors.’

By the mid-1934-35 he had matured, and his formal composition, which first strongly linked to Cubist style and colours changed, as his art had become liberated and more informal. His motives are built up from interwoven curved forms that swing in a dynamic rhythm. His oil paintings from 1936 to 1939 clearly follow the conception of the aquarelle paintings and pastels of the preceding years, or are versions of them transferred to oil painting. Martyn's work was influenced by his association with the 'Abstraction-Création' movement, such an identity being primarily the artistic fastidiousness that characterises the surface artistry of his paintings and the beauty of their facture.

By 1939, his painterly world had been transformed, his purity, order and interplay of colours refined. With World War II approaching, he returned home in 1940. He then continued his series of large-scale, colourful compositions in Paris. During the war years he protested against violence with his series of drawings entitled "Monsters of Fascism".

He has created illustrations for many literary texts, as well as drawings to accompany the author's ideas. These not only depict an episode, but also give an authentic portrayal of the characters. Among the most notable are the illustrations of Cervantes' novel Don Quixote, G. Flaubert's Madame Bovary, J. Joyce's Ulysses, or the scenes drawned with deep empathy of Dániel Berzsenyi's everyday life. In his oeuvre, abstraction and realism can not be entirely separated.

He retained the distinctive character of his art and the style of his abstract paintings despite the dogmatic cultural policies of the 1950s and 1960s, but he did not make any public appearances until 1969. Natural, material and human references are still present in the hidden world of his paintings. In his works, various symbols of the desire for freedom appear, such as birds, boats, and fighting - on the other hand, elements of Hungarian folklore and ancient mythology. In his work, music played a decisive role. He experienced the sounds of music in lines and colours, for him music meant rhythm and harmony. As a result of his outstanding achievements and his influence, Pécs became a centre of modern art in the 20th century.

G. L.

Sources:

Martyn Ferenc szócikk

Martyn Ferenc

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