Neglected Important Artists, No. 28

Self-Portrait by Ilka Gedő (1948)

Ilka Gedő was born on May 26,1921, in Budapest. Her father taught at the Jewish grammar school of Budapest, and some of the leading Hungarian writers and artists of the times were among the family’s circle of friends. She started her artistic career in the late 1930s visiting private art schools.

The anti-Jewish measures and the upheaval of the war came, but Gedő carried on creating a significant body of graphic works. As a Jew, in 1944 Gedő was imprisoned in the Budapest ghetto and she drew a remarkable series of ghetto drawings. She avoided the horror, instead representing isolated people of puzzlement, uncertainty and despair in her drawings.

After the war Gedő gained admission to the Budapest Academy of Arts but she decided to leave the Academy and until 1949 when she stopped artistic work and also had created a huge body of drawings that can be divided into series.

She created self-portraits which, through their sheer honesty and self-exploration, claim the viewer’s attention. These works are drawn in a way that evokes straightforward physical reality and emotional sensitivity at the same time. Another series, Tables,is devoted to drawing a delicate, small table with an abundant variety of lines and shades, exploring the endless possibilities of representing the visual world.

Self-Portrait (1947)

The third series resulted from repeated visits to the Ganz Factory in Budapest. The Ganz Factory, situated at the Margit körút in Budapest, was a large enterprise producing elements for electrical engineering in one plant, and metal parts for machines and tools in another plant. In the late 1940’s, after the war, it offered an educational program, organized by a liberally minded engineer. Ilka Gedő was welcome on the premises to sit and draw, even if the result did not correspond to the official image of the worker. A combination of silver and gold with pastel crayons transposes the factory rooms into almost mythical spaces.

An interval of 15 years devoted to bringing up a family divides the oeuvre of this artist. Ilka Gedő presented her drawings in 1964 in her own studio. This exhibition gave her the impetus to resume work. In the 1960s, Gedő started to paint in oil. Her creative method follows the call of the instincts but does not forget the discipline of the intellect. Art critics have been quick to point out evidence of her nostalgia for Art Nouveau and Jugendstil. However, Gedő’s real nostalgia is for a lost mythology, and in this she is similar to her fin-de-siècle predecessors. She found this mythology, albeit a personal one, in art which is capable of evoking and cherishing the memories of an endangered world.

Self-Portrait

She made “two-step” paintings. She first drew a sketch of her composition, prepared a mock-up and wrote the name of the appropriate colors into the various fields. She prepared a collection of color samples, and she wrote where the color would go in the places where they were ultimately applied. She never improvised on her paintings; instead she enlarged the original plan. On her paintings the strength of cold and warm colors appears to be equal. She created her paintings slowly, amidst speculations, recording the steps of the creative process in diaries so that the making of all the paintings can be traced.

Gedő died on June 19,1985, at the age of 64, a few months before her discovery abroad. The scene of the breakthrough was Glasgow where the Compass Gallery presented her paintings and drawings in 1985. Since then, many of her works passed into public hands, In addition to the St. Stephen’s Museum (Székesfehérvár) in Hungary and the Hungarian National Gallery, many foreign collections acquired them like The Jewish Museum (New York), the Yad Vashem Art Museum, the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), the Department of Prints of the British Museum, the Museum Kunstpalast of Düsseldorf, the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings), the Graphic Arts Collection of the Albertina and the Metropolitan Museum.