Lajos Vajda (Vajda Lajos in Hungarian name order) was a leading artist in the twentieth century Hungarian avante-garde. Here are just a few images of his later works.
I saw a large and powerful exhibition of his entire oeuvre at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2009. His early and extensive photomontage work ran parallel to that of Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann and others of the European Dada movement in the 1930’s.
In the mid-’30’s his work shifted from collage to paint, pushing figurative representation into a dark and highly personal icon and mask imagery. At the same time he developed an experimental approach to observational drawing; with a linear layering of transparent drawings, he essentially created drawn montages.
Vajda’s last works were gripping – reflecting his own singular expression of the apocalyptic times. Impoverished, suffering from tuberculosis yet conscripted into the Hungarian government’s forced Jewish labor service in 1940, he was soon discharged, dying within a year at the age of 33.
click on any work below to view large images in sequence.
Diane Sophrin 