Aktuális időszaki kiállítások

In the wake of the Second World War, the so-called "people's democracies", established as they were on the model of the Soviet Union, carried out a compulsory and accelerated-pace remoulding of their economies and societies. In Romania, too, the communization of land, real estate, factories, etc., mostly concerned the wealthy, but the limits of this were broadly interpreted by the authorities: smallholders or medium landowners, the "kulak", were deemed just as guilty as factory owners or members of the historical aristocracy. From 1949, many thousands of people were deported, and forcibly allocated in various quarters. The worst befell those interned in Dobrudzha, the delta of the Danube, most of whom were committed to forced labour on the Danube-Black Sea Canal, the "cemetery of the Romanian bourgeoisie", as it was styled at the time. A close relative of the former Hungarian prime-minister, Pál Teleki, Count Ernő Teleki (1902-1980) was taken to Măcin, a village on the bank of the original river bed east of Brăila. According to the recollections of the family, he drew the series of his grotesque, caricature-like drawings scattered with surrealistic elements in the evenings by paraffin light, and continued to make them in Kolozsvár in the 1960s.

After his school years in Kolozsvár, Ernő Teleki studied economics in Budapest, and then, in 1926, after graduating and the death of his father, he returned to Transylvania to manage his Paszmos farm. The extreme hardships of a suddenly degraded mode of life broke the spirits of this infinitely refined, scrupulously and perfectly elegant, yet conspicuously withdrawn aristocrat - but probably also induced him to draw. Between 1953 and 1970, he pencilled his "visual diary", and then pasted the smaller or larger drawings in albums, adding inscriptions to some. He was no trained artist, like Count Miklós Bánffy, who had made a name with his caricatures, or Count Gyula Batthyány, who had viewed the life of the aristocracy from a critical angle. Nevertheless, his drawings reveal a light-handed and highly imaginative man, who was well-versed in the arts. He even befriended artists, László Darkó, Tibor Erdős, Artúr Vetró, who fortunately portrayed his features. At first sight, his drawings, made with a pin-sharp pencil, seem humorous, but, in spite of their witty inscriptions and subscriptions, they provide a glimpse into the spiritual depths of an exceptionally disciplined man who never gave vent to his feelings publicly, and who continually wrestled with inner and outer demons and kept re-evoking his disintegrated world in pictorial visions. First, one is stunned by the sheer quantity of the drawings - they might originally have numbered several thousands - but also by the sense of discovering the characteristic types of our times in his depictions of heads, figures or absurd situations. Perpetual social exclusion, which only added to his voluntary isolation, brought about in him the will to produce, after his early, perhaps only pastime scribbling, consciously self-therapeutic drawings, which demanded of him a daily work routine, and which later became a secret, pictorial novel, a "comic" of sorts, containing recurrent figures, real and imaginary scenes, as well as human, animal, vegetable and geometric forms converting into one another and bearing names.

By the 1970s, due to the articular disease he had contracted during the deportation, Ernő Teleki could hardly move, the "draughtsman's contract" expired: he spent the last years of his life confined to his bed or armchair. His hand no longer obeyed his will; the newer visions, distorted images and fantastic beings remained captive to his imagination.

György Szűcs art historian