The Cronology of Hungarian Printmaking
DEFIED TRADITIONS AND TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS

Challenged by unfavorable political conditions during their decades-long search for an innovative visual language, Hungarian artists defied printmaking traditions as they exploited newfound technologies. They ultimately succeeded in redefining printmaking as an evolving art form open to multimedia interventions. The presented chronology encompasses several pivotal periods of innovative experimentation—screen printing in the 1970s, the Xerox photocopier in the 1980s, electrographics in the 1990s—and examines generational shifts reflected in artists’ attitudes towards societal norms, self-identity, the human psyche, globalization effects and mass culture.

INTRO

Hungary, the first fine art prints appeared around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, in the oeuvre of painters like József Rippl-Rónai, Viktor Olgyai and Károly Ferenczy, who studied in Western Europe. Printmaking as an independent medium began to integrate into the structures of Hungarian fine arts before World War I. The establishment of the printmaking department at the Hungarian Royal Institute of Arts and Crafts in Budapest in 1910 acknowledged the autonomy of the practice, formally separating it from reproductive printing and typography.1 The restructuring of the printmaking department at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts2 in Budapest, headed by Viktor Olgyai, ultimately finalized the medium’s detachment from graphic design in 1921.3

Viktor Olgyai (1870–1929), the first Hungarian professional teacher of fine art printmaking, faced a number of challenges. He was expected to introduce a modern educational program in a country where progressive artists who openly declared their support for social change were forced to emigrate after the formation of Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Many of them left the nation for good, such as László Moholy-Nagy, László Péri and Lajos Ébneth. It was also difficult for Olgyai to develop an autonomous position for a printmaking department at an institution that only acknowledged the practice because of its indispens-ability as a reproductive medium. In addition, Hungarian authorities enforced a political agenda that required printed works to represent the national spirit.4 The tortuous search for the identity of modern Hungarian printmaking lasted on and off before and after World War II, and even beyond 1956.5

During the seven decades of development of modern printmaking in Hungary, only two institutions for art education, both located in Budapest, offered printmaking programs: the Hungarian College of Fine Arts and the Hungarian College of Arts and Crafts. Artists outside of academia had limited opportunities to explore the medium. In 1921, the Hungarian Etching Workshop was established in Budapest, enabling artists to work in intaglio. It was more complicated to practice lithography because presses only existed at industrial printing houses. Although the facilities were available to artists, houses had to stop production in order for them to work on their projects, meaning that artists could only use the space occasionally. In 1955, another printmaking workshop opened in the city of Miskolc. Regarding new intro technologies, the Hungarian College of Fine Arts installed a screen printing facility at the end of the 1960s. The Pécs Graphic Workshop in the city of Pécs and the Pest Workshop in Budapest offered screen printing starting in 1971, and in 1973, painter and sculptor János Fajó opened a screen printing studio in Budapest for artists to practice the technique. The teaching of photo and offset lithography at the College began in 1971.
Practicing artists had the opportunity to explore those two techniques at the Mako Artists’ Colony from 1976, where screen printing started in 1979.6 Screen prints and offset prints were only accepted since 1979 as autonomous fine art prints at the Hungarian National Graphic Biennial in Miskolc, founded in 1961.

1908-1948

DEFINING TRADITION IN HUNGARIAN FINE ART PRINT: 1908–1948

Two distinghuished generations of etchers can be traced in Hungarian modern print history: the students and apprentices of the aformentioned Viktor Olgyai and those taught from 1931 until 1948 by Nandor Lajos Varga, Olgyai’s student and successor at the College. Instructors strived to establish and improve the modern Hungarian graphic language as an ideal synthesis of classical and early modern methods—and later on, emergent avant-garde approaches— by fusing Rembrandt’s treatment of light with the students’ personal approaches. Between 1922 and 1929 of Olgyai’s leadership, a neoclassical printmaking style known as Arkadia Art flourished,7 shaping the work of artists like Vilmos Aba-Novák, Erzsébet Aszódi Weil, Tibor Gallé, Kálmán Istókovits, David Jandi and Karoly Patkó. When Varga headed the printmaking department, students began practicing an eclectic style identified by scholars of the Academy of Hungary in Rome as the Roman School,8 with origins linked to Olgyai’s early teaching activities in illustration and small prints. Varga was committed to developing a clear graphic language in Olgyai’s legacy. From 1934, the human- centered nature of the developed styles—characterized by clarity and heterogenity but touched with Hungarian folk and national traits—fulfilled the expectations of the political hegemonies up until the 1960s, accounting for the regime change from the national socialist to the socialist government in 1948. Nevertheless, aside from the official style, a number of avant-garde Hungarian printmakers began to divert from the ideal of perfectionism in drawing and turn to the principles of early modern art trends by integrating elements of Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and other movements into their works. József Rippl-Rónai, János Mattis-Teutsch, Sándor Bortnyik, Gyula Derkovits, Béla Uitz, Endre Bálint, Dezső Korniss and Gyula Hincz thus defined printmaking as an alternative means of personal expression and developed it into a colorful art form,9 although they faced staunch criticism for working with non-canonized technology.

Illustration, drawing and printmaking have become and remained synonymous in the Hungarian public opinion. Art collectors have maintained the interconnection of the three fields for the past century. Drawing is appreciated for the beauty of lines, clarity of contours, composition, completeness of forms and brilliance of execution; illustration is revered for figurativity based on the principles of nature or ironic drama. The criteria for evaluating prints include the professionalism of technical execution and accuracy of graphic language. Along with illustrators, Hungarian printmakers enjoyed relative freedom of expression throughout the 1960s and 1970s, largely because the socialist government did not consider them a threat. The established definition of the Hungarian printmaking tradition carried on for decades. It stood, however, in a sharp ideological contrast to the wide acceptance of various alternative practices adapted into printmaking: photo-based printing; Xerox and computer printing; combinations of digital, photographic and traditional processes; printing on alternative materials like fabric or cloth; and conceptual approaches. Despite the breadth of experimental tendencies, the unconventional techniques were not accepted as equal to the traditional methods and forms until the end of the 1990s.10

mid-1950s

EFFORTS OF REVIVAL: PRINTMAKING IN THE MID-1950S

The first attempts to revive Hungarian printmaking occurred in the second half of the 1950s,11 affecting the careers of artists of the time as well as those who practiced the medium throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Printmaking education witnessed a change in methodical approach. Károly Raszler (1925–2005), who became the head of the printmaking department at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts in 1953,12 revolutionized the curriculum by introducing a program focused on the support of individual talent and encouragement of independent innovations. Raszler’s principles and values were tested in the crucial year of 1956 when a final art project by then-student Béla Kondor caused a great storm. Carrying the title Scenes of Dózsa’s Life (1953– 1956), the work explored an etching Dózsa Series (1933) by Gyula Derkovits that depicted a peasant revolt. Despite Kondor’s adherence to exercising precise technical skills to communicate the energy of Derkovits’ etching, the chosen subject matter and its interpretation led to conflicting reactions from Raszler’s staff. Some feared political revenge because they deemed the work too deviant for college norms. Béla Kondor (1931–1972) became a leading avant-garde printmaker of the post-war period. He built his own logical structure through traditional forms and systems of lines, combining conventional and modern printmaking methods. The works of Dürer, Schongauer, Rembrandt and William Blake inspired the artist, who took a distance from his era’s socialist realist principles. The tense yet lyrical scenes Kondor created encapsulate an abundance of figurativeness and feature icon-like pictorial forms that emulate historical styles. The messages always seem strong, but the artist conceals his personal opinion in a variety of ways.13

1960s / 1970s

PRINTMAKING VALIDATED: THE 1960s AND 1970s

In the 1960s, printmakers who embraced traditions, such as Kálmán Csohány, Arnold Gross, Ferenc Banga, Gyula Líviusz and Csaba Rékassy, were also open to modernizing their technical execution, formal marks and motifs. Numerous artists experimented with plate-processing and aquatint methods before they took on screen printing, including János Major (1934–2008), a defining figure of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde. He created surrealistic copper and iron etchings of horror-fraught atmospheres that he enriched with naturalistic details and infused with exaggerated, explicit imagery to comment on gender norms. Printmaking students yearned to develop their own graphic language by using a systematic analysis of structural and semantic relationships between forms and phenomena. They sought to understand specific features of printmaking to design their images and manifest unique approaches to their practice. The students’ energies engendered a new theoretical and strategic thinking. Towards the end of the 1960s, the pressure to work the surfaces of plates in minuscule detail diminished. Around this time, Ilona Keseru (b. 1933), who learned the technique of iron etching from Major, worked with the form of a double wavy line shaped like a heart-shaped gravestone. By repeating, multiplying, reflecting and fitting her motifs together, along with applying various techniques, she linked the act of art making with structure, referring to the changeable nature of living organisms. Keseru’s work is 1960s/1970s thus interpreted as a facet of reality confronted with a compli-cated context of sensual, intellectual and reflective moments and their energies. Here the prints no longer represent, illustrate or substitute; they validate themselves.

The complex links between the work, the artist and the environment have been subject to continuous research by Dora Maurer (b. 1937). After she completed an experimental period of creating surnaturalistic compositions,14 Maurer exploited drypoint to explore simple geometric forms. She analyzed the relation between the plate and the traces it left on paper, as well as the act of multiplication and printmaking as a process of forming imagery. She examined the direct and indirect possibilities of leaving marks, the physical changes of the plate, the temporality of the printing process and the changes of the printed form ((de)formation series, 1974, Hidden Structures, 1979). In her last systematic series, Printing Till Exhaustion (1979), she documented the mechanical repetition of printmaking until the expiration of the plate. Her conceptual work sheds light on the fact that a print is not a static pictorial form, but part of artistic activity, in which the image’s existential state depends on the environment, along with its invention, creation, appearance and interpretation.

Hungarian printmaking settled among fine art media in the 1970s. During this time, a number of artists began distancing themselves from official art by seeking refuge in subjectivism.15 Some practicing printmakers started to transition towards other creative fields by the end of 1960s. However, neo-avantgarde artists like János Fajó, Imre Bak, Tamás Hencze, István Nádler, András Mengyán, Laszló Lakner, András Baranyay, Pál Deim and Imre Kéri continued to exploit the medium. This generation decisively determined the direction of printmaking for the next two decades. As a result of their efforts to explore and test myriad means of artistic expression, they discovered the new printmaking method of screen printing and deemed it the most suitable technique.

At the end of the decade, many female students began investigating the theme of identity. Among them was femi-nist artist Orsolya Drozdik (b. 1946), who reflected the situation and self-defining attempts of a young woman as an ego-conscious creator seeking a place in society and in the arts, as documented in her photo-based offset prints Individual Mythology Series (1975–1979). Drozdik’s work centers on the body and even extends into performance art. Male artists of her generation like Károly Kelemen, Károly Halász, Tibor Hajas and Peter Gémes were also disposed to expressing themselves through body art and live acts.

1980s

PRINTMAKING RELEASED FROM ETHICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL OBLIGATIONS: THE MID-1980s

The 1980s represent a crucial era in Hungarian printmaking. As the arts transitioned away from the avant-garde and its oppositional principles, a subjective attitude commenced that acted as an impetus for development of rich, heterogeneous styles. Printmakers emphasized the intellectual context of their artwork while embracing a closer connection to traditions and re-evaluating of the determining role of “past” and “place.” Although monochromatic intaglio works prevailed throughout the 1970s, lithography and color printing dominated the 1980s and 1990s. Screen printing, offset printing and photo-based printmaking were also prominent during the 1980s; artists became more inclined to combine techniques, experiment with multicolor media, and print large-sized images. A multitude of well-equipped printmaking workshops in Győr, Vác and Szentendre opened with great exhibition programs. Summer art colonies and printmaking workshops flourished as well.

In the mid-1980s, printmaking experienced a shift from the emphasis on intellectual self-reflection to the exploitation of its technical and aesthetic potential. New themes emerged that examined the medium as a self-generating process and explored the inexhaustible characteristic of creative work. Lajos Csontó, Gyöngyi Gallusz, Tamás Kótai, Kamilla Szij, Pál Szacsvay and Imre Bukta frequently converted collections of two-dimensional prints into three-dimensional installations. They figured out ways to incorporate old technologies by combining them in novel ways. The ethos of the era rehabilitated the spectacle, altered images’ aesthetic quality and freed the narrative of political ideology. The earlier sharp distinction between figurativity and abstraction lost its meaning, as both themes dissolved into a coherent, decorative pictorial world, which could have also been woven out of anything (e.g. pseudo-primitive, religious and national stories and motifs, as presented in the works of Győző Somogyi). Applied postmodernism became a sophisticated tactic of “retro-fashion”—a cultural “recycling” to recall the past.16

Artists focused on technology and the possibilities it offered for their creative expression. Árpád Szabados (b. 1944) has exploited his interest in the liberation of forms from the control of consciousness since the 1970s. Using a few basic colors, he produced multilayered prints on tracing paper in 1980s graffiti style, occasionally with added inscriptions. Fascinated by the random ordering process of his own iconology and the emanative imagery, Szabados creates prints (Kneeling, 1992, From the South, 1993) and entire series (Attic-Image I–III, 1993) designed as fragments that can be pulled together and then separated into individual parts once again, repurposing their meaning. His newer, large-scale lithographic series is, accordingly, bound in an artist’s book entitled Lithography (2000) with pages that do not attain to individual meaning; if combined, however, they seem like a journal-based narrative of private life. Sándor Rácmolnár (b. 1960) focuses on visual commonplaces, stereotypes and human behavior. In his early Neo-Pop works, he transposed the objective world and everyday visuality of the 1950s into his figurative story-telling language. Racmolnar more recently began communicating in the reduced language of advertisement, posters, Japanese shadow plays, tribal arts, city subcultures and graffiti. From the cinema nostalgia documented in the linocut Be Schwarzenegger! (1991) and on through his ironic, comic-like or emblematic series, he proceeded to further condense his peculiar, figuratively decorative formal language, which has now taken on a symbolic and philosophical charge. While building upon gags and nostalgic effects of kitsch, his message becomes increasingly critical of consumer society. As the artist conceives of topics and transforms them into pictograms, he explores myths in contemporary contexts, the relationship between sexes, heroes, ordinariness, fight, otherness and the notion of everyday man and his position within the world and to himself.

Imre Bukta (b. 1952), a painter, sculptor, and performance artist, also presents concepts by exhibiting prints. His work Landscape Slashed into Strips (1994) becomes a monument of ordinariness that comments on how oddly imbalanced modernization affects the peasant lifestyle. The artist translated the mood of country life by transforming the contexts of materials, tools and landscape into an installation of drypoints and scratched shovel surfaces. Another artist exploring traditional techniques in a contemporary condition is Kamilla Szij (b. 1957), who began her artistic career in the mid-1980s. She applies the basic element of intaglio printmaking—a line incised into the plate—to produce compositions through the mechanic rotation of the engraved matrix or sheets of paper during the printing process. Szij’s installations of prints are also characterized by a postminimalist expression. Her individual images with different combinations of lines are organized into continuous series, aligned as large-scale pictures of interrelating elements. The lines, their shape, thickness and size, carry no inherent significance, but when one looks at the composite whole, there appears an essential form, evoking the throb of life as a multitude of accidental and predestined moments. The artist’s drypoints are based on the repetition and perpetual superposition of identical movements and the minimal difference that entails.

1990s

A RADICAL REVIVAL OF HUNGARIAN PRINT: INTO THE 1990s

Towards the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, artists took to experimenting with Xerox photocopiers, fax machines, computers and video technology. Ede Halbauer, Jenő Lévay, Antal Lux, Bálint Szombathy, Ágnes Haász and others approached these devices by playing on their effects to reassess and reinterpret traditional imagery. The consequent electrographics—two-dimensional prints created by using electrical info-communication technologies as drawing tools, palettes, sketchpads, visual data-banks or even autonomous creators—liberated print-making from conventional forms, techniques and graphic materials. The artists’ endeavors re-defined the historic terms of printmaking by subverting the customs of the original print, copy, reproduction, multiplication and matrix. The Arnyékkötők (“Shadow Weavers”) group, the Masters of Graphic Arts international biennial in Gyor, the Society of Hungarian Electrographic Artists (MET in Hungarian), digital technology and the internet all played a significant role in breaking traditional boundaries with electro-graphics.17

One of the earliest electrographic artists Ede Halbauer (b. 1934) employs video camera, Xerox and computer in his artistic practice. Since the 1970s, he has been examining and documenting his own state of mind, recording parts of his face or body in different distorted postures. For Halbauer, a picture is a product of an act of self-examination, which illuminates the psychic, spiritual and physical processes arising from gesture. His ongoing series My Life 1990s different combinations of lines are organized into continuous series, aligned as large-scale pictures of interrelating elements. The lines, their shape, thickness and size, carry no inherent significance, but when one looks at the composite whole, there appears an essential form, evoking the throb of life as a multitude of accidental and predestined moments. The artist’s drypoints are based on the repetition and perpetual superposition of identical movements and the minimal difference that entails. Experiences (from the end of 1970s to present) contains a number of stretched portraits on xerographs turned towards one another. The artist uses multiplication to comment on the ideas of desire and self-inflected torture. Balint Szombathy (b. 1950) created his first electrographic entitled Tele-photograph in 1982 by using a facsimilie telegraph, a device originally designed to transmit newspaper images to distant editorial offices. Preceding the explosion of available information in the digital age, the artist’s work warned that the flow of information must be limited because an overabundance will cause people to become indifferent, undemanding and unable to discern messages. Szombathy furnished white paper with threatening clouds of information, burnt black, bound by strips of never-ending messages that wind as suffocating smoke.

For the young artists at the time, the visual language of mass media and computer usage had already become a natural and unavoidable means of everyday communication. Many of them sought to convey the visual and sensory effects of social correspondence in their creations. Striving for efficiency, they embraced representational strategies of mass culture like internet publica-tions, giant posters, leaflets, fliers, billboards, prospectuses and stickers. Gender-conscious themes and feminist social criticism resurfaced through the works of Hajnal Nemeth, Fatime German, Kriszta Nagy and others. The self-reflective character of art gained traction as the question of contradictions and compatibility of multiplication was examined, leading to a newer phenomenon of body-prints (which sometimes entailed impressing objects upon the corporeal surface, leaving temporary marks, as in Endre Koronczi’s series Body-Prints, 1991). Artists looked at printmaking as a medium as well as a form of interpersonal communication between individuals and society in conjunction with considering how spectators would experience their work. Ágnes Haász (b. 1951) began using Xerox technology and compu-ters in the 1990s. Her works harbor an exceptionally beautiful finish, rich coloring and texture full of light. She investigates the infinite treasures of the visual potential unfolding from the combination of images that convey traditional messages through the tools of modern technology. By excavating the sacral or archaic experience latent in human memory and recording its essence in colors or topoi of form (Iconostasis series, 1997), Haász explores the deeper layers of the human psyche. Her attraction to intellectual and spiritual topics continuously comes out in her work (I Start to Be Transparent, 1997). The artist not only creates protracted, distorted and enlarged forms, but also treats these graphics as materials to dismember and reassemble into her own systems.

From the end of the 1990s, some artists, such as Laszló 2 Hegedűs, István Damó and Csaba Pál, have experimented with photo-based printmaking to combine photomechanic, electric and digital techniques with traditional methods. They also apply environmentally friendly printing technologies. Their efforts lead to a more frequent fusion of printmaking techniques and other media.

2000s

PRINTMAKING’S CONTEMPORARY SITUATION: THE END OF THE 2000s

Today, the significance of printmaking in Hungary has almost entered into a vacuum. Numerous printmaking workshops, artists’ colonies and biennials have either totally closed or been forced to vegetate, and the new venues are unable to replace them. The National Colorprint Biennial has been interrupted, the Miskolc Graphic Biennial has become a triennial, and since the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the international printmaking exhibitions have nearly ceased. Professionals have fewer venues to keep up with the contemporary developments in printmaking.18

Despite the unstable situation, artists still produce outstanding prints, evidencing the growing popularity of the new phenomena that appeared or spread in the 1990s. The current climate for Hungarian printmaking focuses on installation, drawing, multimedia and digital image processing. Today’s state of image-making computer software offers artists incredible avenues to render increasingly faster responses to stimuli through direct, spontaneous expression. Printmakers continue to innovate their graphic language and intellectual endeavors as they mix media and blend the discipline’s techniques. The numerous trials to turn the directness of their digital exploitations and personal experiences into simulacra—along with merging forms of images, imagery and meaning—have increased. It is typical that artists, especially of the young generation, address particular topics in projects and figure out strategic plans to portray the subject matter, rather than mainly focusing on creating works. Crossing traditional and digital technology to generate images or fitting digital effects into works made by a traditional printmaking method are common artistic strategies taken to redefine the borders between the print and its reception by the public. Paul Richard Mészáros intensified the effect of traditional figurativism in his Emptiness Series (2012) by highlighting human subjects’ sexuality or incorporating tactile elements. The themes of Fatime German’s prints (Madame Agnes, 2002, Suzanne in the Bath, 2005) radically reverse the artificial hierarchy between the sexes in a cunning way. As seen in prints like Stick w Dajevu (2005), György Csaba Borgó works with layering the viewpoints, meanings and elements of language; he sometimes crams the phenomena into a narrative image. Alexandra Magócsi is concerned about traditional graphic values losing importance in today’s visual culture. She acted out such notions in Wallternatives (2013) by appropriating an outdoor roadside billboard emblazoned with commonplace advertising images as a giant slate to post traditional lithograph prints.

Bálint Bolygó (b. 1976) sensitively reflects on scientific advancements and the rampant spread of technological development. He designs kinetic machines that draw over large surfaces of paper through a constant, monotonous motion. The works, such as Poly-Cycle Drawing (2010), present drawing machines based on features of physical phenomena and laws; the mechanisms’ continuous motions and their consequent marks resemble the passage of time. Bolygo’s devices are bodiless constructions that render circles—traces of existence of a new civilization that never stops despite its constituents’ fragile appearance. The drawing machines are controlled by the most entertaining toys of the artist’s childhood: small motors, wires and cogwells. These futuristic, industrious metal creatures, combined with various objects—such as globes, heads made of plaster and smooth walls create by repeating the same movements. However, the resultant drawings are never alike. The confronted dissimilarity between the envisioned image and the actualized one causes viewers to reflect upon the incalculable consequences of our overtechnicized world with ambivalent emotions. The machine’s composition shows graphic features and the essence of their formation, yet the programing assumes the role of the matrix by guaranteeing the identity of the drawing that will entail. Poly- Cycle Drawing represents an infinitely witty paraphrase of our time, satirizing the function of printmaking and today’s state of imagery.

In an interconnected world manipulated by digital technology, artists such as Tibor Somorjai-Kiss and Laszlo 2 Hegedus are concerned about the disappearance of established points of orientation. Some worry about canons or credit fading from our consciousness; others fear that present-day existence is falling into empty patterns (Rozalia Dauner-Nagy, Planking, 2013). Contemporary artists examine the dissolution of individual societies in the global space, intensification of our visual sensitivity by emotional stimuli, nostalgia for a perceived warmth of erstwhile times (Gabor Gyorgy Nagy, Spilled Petals 3, 2005) and social projections of traumas in private life (Eva Mayer, A Private Area on the Border of Egopolis, 2014). Bianka Dobo’s Studio Drum (2008) from the Studio series offers outstanding commentary about the overabundance of motifs. The work, which includes lithographs illuminated with LED lights along with drawings engraved in Plexiglass, exemplifies the concept-centric state of Hungarian contemporary printmaking as a locus of infinite varieties and visions. Today’s artists inventively exploit and combine myriad tools and materials to communicate their ideas about accessible information and graphic reproducibility.

NOTES

1. Eszter Földi, “Fa- és linóleummetszés Magyarországon 1904-től 1911-ig” [Wood and linocut in Hungary from 1904 to 1911], in A modern magyar fa- és linöleummetszés (1890–1950) [The modern Hungarian wood and linocut (1890–1950)], ed. Enikő Róka (Miskolc: Miskolci Galéria, 2005), 30–31.
2. The Hungarian College of Fine Arts was officially renamed Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2001.
3. Eszter Földi, A képzőművészet mostohagyermeke: A magyar művészgrafika kezdetei 1890–1914 [The stepchild of fine art: The beginnings of Hungarian fine art printmaking 1890–1914] (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2013), 118–123.
4. Sándor Kontha, “Bevezetés: I; Művészetünk a két világháború között” [Introduction: I; Our art between the World Wars I–II], in vol. 1 of Magyar művészet 1919–1945 [Hungarian Art 1919–1945], ed. Sándor Kontha (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1985), 15–22.
5. In 1956 Hungary, there occurred an unsuccessful national uprising to remove the Soviet occupiers and establish the country as a sovereign state.
6. Judit Mazányi, “Párhuzamos történetek I: Rátekintés kívülről; A szitanyomás térhódítása Magyarországon és a Szentendrei Grafikai Műhely” [Parallel histories I: Look from outside; Expansion of screen printing and the printmaking workshop in Szentendre], in Minden szitanyomat [Everything is screen print], exh.cat. (Szentendre: PMMI Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósaga, Ferenczy Museum, 2012).
7. Ferenc Zsákovics, A rézkarcoló nemzedék 1921–1929 [The etching generation 1921–1929] (Miskolc: Miskolci Galéria, 2001).
8. Ottó Mezei, “Művészetoktatás” [Art education], in vol. 1 of Magyar művészet 1919–1945 [Hungarian art 1919–1945], ed. Sándor Kontha (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1985), 40; Julianna P. Szűcs, “A római iskola” [The Roman School], in Magyar művészet 1919–1945, 412–442.
9. Krisztina Passuth, Magyar művészek az európai avantgárdban [Hungarian artists in the European avant-garde] (Budapest: Corvina, 1974); Katalin Bakos, Enikő Róka and Ulrike Gauss, eds., Modernism: Drawing and Print in Europe 1900–1930, exh.cat. (Budapest: Museum of Fine Arts, 2004).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10. Ildikó Hajdu, “A Miskolci Grafikai Biennálék fél évszázada, 1961–2011” [Half century of graphic biennials in Miskolc, 1961– 2011], Zempléni Múzsa 42, no. 2 (2016).
11. Erzsébet Tatai, “A kockátol az aktig: Művészképzés az 1960-as években” [From the cube until the nude: Artists’ training in the 1960s], Ars Hungarica 37, no. 3 (2011): 77–96; Katalin Blaskóné Majkó, Katalin Szőke and Annamária Szőke, eds., From the School of Model Drawing until the University of Fine Arts (Budapest: Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem, 2002), chap. 6.
12. Balázs Feledy, “Raszler Károly búcsúztatása” [Farewell of Károly Raszler], in Grafikai Műtermek [Graphic artifacts] 4, (2004–2005): 37–39.
13. Sándor Hornyik, Forradalmár, proféta, munkás: Kondor Béla művészetéről [Revolutionary, prophet, worker: The art of Béla Kondor], exh.cat. (Debrecen: MODEM, 2012).
14. Sándor Hornyik, “Aesthetics in the shadow of politics: Surnaturalism and magical socialist realism in Hungary in the early Sixties,” Acta Historiae Artium 56, no. 1 (2015): 323–332, doi: 10.1556/170.2015.55.1.25. Surnaturalism is a term that describes the work of some young Hungarian artists after 1956 who reflected on Western Pop Art, photorealism and magical realism. By depicting traditional realistic forms and naturalistic details within a surrealistic athmosphere full of unique illusions, artists subtly expressed their secret criticism of socialist realism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15. József Mélyi, “Decadence and progress: The boundaries of official Hungarian art in 1968,” Acta Historiae Artium 56, no. 1 (2015): NOTES 243–254, doi: 10.1556/170.2015.55.1.17; László Beke, “Tűrni, tiltani, támogatni: A hetvenes évek avantgárdja” [To promote, to permit, to prohibit: The 1970s avant-garde], in A második nyilvánosság: XX. századi magyar művészet [The second public sphere: Hungarian art of 20th century], ed. Julia Jolsvai (Budapest: Enciklopédia Kiadó, 2002), 228–247. The trend of so-called “negative utopia” refers to an attitude of Hungarian artists who distanced themselves from official art after the Prague Spring in 1968 Czechoslovakia. The Hungarian government reinstated its notorious “three Ps” censorship policies, which allowed authorities to decide whether to promote, permit or prohibit artists based on the content of their work. To many, the socialist future looked grim.
16. Csilla Markója, ed., Gyönyörű ez a mai nap: A nyolcvanas és a kilencvenes évek művészete; Történet es elmélet [The present day is a beautiful day: Art of 1980s and 1990s; History and theory] (Budapest: Magyar Alkotóművészek Országos Egyesülete, 2003); Júlia Szabó, “Grafika 1945–1995” [Printmaking 1945–1995], chap. 8 in vol. 3 of Magyarország a XX. században [Hungary in the 20th century], ed. István Kolléga Tarsoly (Szekszárd: Babits Kiadó, 1996–2000), 13–31.
17. Bálint Szombathy, ed., Kerekedő történetiség: A Magyar elektrográfia története 1985–2000 [Story is becoming round: The history of the Hungarian electrographics 1985–2005] (Budapest: Magyar Elektrográfiai Társaság, 2008); Zsuzsa Dárdai, ed., Shadow Weavers: Copy art, fax art, computer art (1989–2004) (Budapest: Árnyékkötők Alapítvány, 2005).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
18. The international print exhibitions cannot be replaced by the inventory of selected prints at the art market in Budapest or a search for new prints on internet portals. For more information on the negative effects of globalization, refer to Ondrej Michalek, “Eastern European Printmaking Trends,” The California Printmaker (October 2000): 13.

 

Megjelent: Celebrating Print Magazine of Fine Art Print and Printmaking in Central and Aestern Europe (New York, USA), Volume 2, Nr. 2, 2016. October, fol. 4 és 22-41 (Címlapon: Germán Fatima Ágnes asszony c. műve, 2002 és a 4. oldalon: Nagy Gábor György Spilled Petals 3. című műve, 2005)