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Magyar nyelvű katalógus:
Margit Anna, the daughter of a Jewish farm manager from the Kiskunság region of Hungary, lived the life of both a Hungarian peasant and a practising Jew. She was familiar with folk art, which she loved: her home would later be filled with folk art objects. Gingerbread horsemen and floral scarves, meadows, and wallpapers are recurring motifs in her paintings. She met Imre Ámos, just as she was embarking on her artistic career, and they married in 1935. This marked the beginning of the happiest period in Margit Anna’s life. For the most part, they lived in poverty, although they managed to travel to Paris to visit Marc Chagall, a painter whom they idolised. The work of Ámos and Margit Anna shows a great many similarities during these years, although after being repeatedly conscripted into forced labour, Ámos’s paintings became increasingly tragic in tone. In the winter of 1944, he died in a German concentration camp. The Holocaust deprived Margit Anna not only of the partner she adored but of her family, too, and this tragedy would define the whole of the rest of her life and art.
And however harsh it sounds, this was the point at which Margit Anna discovered her unmistakeable artistic voice, the voice that distinguishes her from every other artist. The world of her grotesque, disturbing, pitiful puppets; her surreal images of solitude, loneliness, and a past that is impossible to come to terms with; and the bright colours of a trite, simple, folksy kitsch that nevertheless offer some measure of healing. This new exhibition offers the most comprehensive introduction to the art of Margit Anna to date. We are shown paintings by a woman, a Jew, a modern artist, and a Hungarian – every one of them Margit Anna.
When Dolls Speak. Retrospective Exhibition of Margit Anna (1913–1991), Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 9 April – 1 September 2024
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