Commissioned Memory

1965 | Narrative

To illustrate a broad historical narrative in line with the antifascist memory politics, the commissioning body identified four major themes:

1. The Hungarian Republic of Councils and the Horthy-era,
2. Fascism in Hungary,
3. The concentration camp (“lager”) in Auschwitz,
4. Terror of the Arrow Cross, Resistance, Liberation.

The distribution of the themes among the artists (Gyula Hincz, János Kass, Béla Kondor, Endre Szász) was made, without taking into account possible thematic preferences, in alphabetical order.

It is striking that, to the best of our knowledge, none of the commissioned artists were of Jewish origin, in contrast to the vast majority of the non-commissioned works, and none of them had any personal experience of the Holocaust. The latter, that the artists were “trying to capture something that they could not fill in with the material of their personal experience,” was also pointed out by the contemporary critic Imre Péter. According to his opinion, the works “cannot, despite all their dramatic nature, transcend the decent framework of exhibition decoration.”

The works disappeared from view for many decades after the closure of the exhibition in 1979. A letter that turned up by chance in 2016 listed the names of the artists who had been commissioned for the Auschwitz exhibition. Following this trail, by tracing each artist's oeuvre, it was possible to find the material in the Szombathely Gallery.

The fate of the collection, which is scarcely documented in written form, can be reconstructed as follows. In 1979, the Museum of Contemporary History, then known as the Labor Movement Museum, which had organized the older exhibition as well as the new one, shipped the works home. They sent them, as second-hand exhibition decorations, to Szombathely, due to the Revolutionary Museum’s affinity with their own collection.

From there, the works were transferred—no longer because of their subject matter but because of their status as works of art—to the newly established Szombathely Gallery, where, not having any information about the details of the commission or the subject matter of the works, they were all cataloged under the uniform title “Panno” (panel painting).

The numerical superiority of Endre Szász’s works in the collection is not due to the commissioners: instead of the five works commissioned (and eventually paid for), the artist produced seven paintings. Of all the commissioned artists, posterity valued Béla Kondor the most, and it is not a coincidence that his Auschwitz works were the only ones that the public could see, albeit only as autonomous Kondor works, without their historical context. The vast majority of the works have never been shown in Hungary.