In this first retrospective of Vajda’s work in western Europe, the exhibition includes about 70 paintings, drawings and photo montages as well as some of the artist’s personal belongings. In the Footsteps of Bartok: Lajos Vajda and Hungarian Surrealism aims to highlight the work of an artist little known outside his home country.

“It is striking that the work of artists who participated in a very personal way in the creation of a new avant-garde visual language in 1920s Europe remains so little known in the rest of the continent,” comments Paul Huvenne, the museum’s director, in the book accompanying the exhibition.

This lack of recognition can partly be explained by the conditions in post-Second World War eastern Europe, subjugated to a Stalinist regime that imposed a strict cultural policy. It was almost impossible to exhibit anything abroad other than socialist realist Hungarian art, according to museum archivist Greta Van Broeckhoven. “As a consequence, it is easily forgotten that between 1930 and 1940, and indeed after the war, the Hungarian avant-garde was a highly active movement,” she says.

I was struck by Vajda’s subdued colours, be it the Constructivist-style pictures from his student days at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, the photo collages he made during his three-and-a-half years in Paris, the works he created in the Hungarian town and artists’ colony of Szentendre or the large drawings in ink and charcoal from his later years.

Many of the works are black and white, and when there is colour it tends to be sombre shades of green, blue, brown and red. This darkness is perhaps not surprising given that his short life – he died of tuberculosis in 1941 at the age of 33 – was one preoccupied with death. His childhood was marked by the First World War, his adulthood by the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Vajda’s works are a product of his time in more ways than one, with the artistic movements prevalent in the interwar period clearly influencing his work. Reminders of Paul Klee, Marc Chagall and Max Ernst are all present as are the Constructivists and Byzantine culture.

In fact, Vajda saw Hungarian art as a bridge between what he considered the two extremes of east and west, Russian Constructivism and Western European Surrealism. In his view, “it was up to the visual artist to distil personal narratives and ideals from all the historical materials available from these two sources,” explains Van Broeckhoven.

Vajda’s own personal narrative included Serbian and Russian cultural traditions, having lived in Serbia for much of his childhood. His series of icon-like works, characterised by heads with thick black outlines set against a brighter background, clearly show the influence of the Russian Orthodox iconic style.

The works he created in Szentendre from the mid-1930s were probably the most directly inspired by Hungarian folk motifs. He drew local houses and windows, crucifixes and tombstones and then worked these elements into larger compositions. His idea was to look to the past and then create something new by rediscovering and reinterpreting that heritage.

Among my favourites were two examples of this period, “Houses of Szentendre with a Crucifix” and “Floating Houses”. Both are in dark colour tones and superimpose images. Vajda took the triangular pediments, small attic vents and simple window frames that he would have seen on his walks around Szentendre, a riverside town near Budapest, and used them to create a logical composition, as if his mind was creating order from his memories.

Vajda superimposed images in many different ways – for example in “Friends”, a charcoal drawing of two entwined heads, the artist’s and his friend Endre Balint’s; or in “Icon Self-Portrait Pointing Upward”, in which layers and shadows slowly emerge to unsettle the central portrait. It was also a key feature of his photo collages such as “Panther and Lily” (pictured), a dark and disturbing work in which a panther bearing its teeth is juxtaposed with a wrinkled hand reaching out of the montage, a woman with a missing leg diving downwards and a skull half-concealed by lilies. It is this image that the museum chose for its publicity posters and the one that will therefore greet you at the entrance.

Until 17 January

Museum of Fine Arts

Leopold De Waelplaats

Antwerp

www. kmska.be