Margit Anna, Ars Poetica, 1970
oil and mixed media on canvas,
Ferenczy Museum Center, Szentendre

Her Haunting Paintings Outlasted the Holocaust and Communism

In 1937, at the age of twenty-four, Margit Anna and her painter husband Imre Ámos went to Paris and visited Marc Chagall. The two young artists showed the great master their work, which he praised enthusiastically—and when they took their leave Chagall kissed Anna’s hand. Anna would always refer to this as “The kiss of the muse”, and the moment in which her life path crystalised. It was also an exquisite inversion of the age-old stereotype, one of many that Anna would go on to gleefully subvert in her long, genre-defying career. 

Margit Anna was born in 1913 into a secular Jewish family, on a farm two hundred kilometres south of Budapest. Her father was an itinerant bailiff, and growing up Anna shared the cultural heritage and poverty of the other children in the rural village, experiences which would shape her aesthetic vocabulary. Before she turned seventeen, she was taken up to Budapest by an aunt to study art, and shortly afterwards met Ámos (1907-1944), later referred to as “the Hungarian Chagall.” Anna came of age in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, where Hungary had lost two thirds of its territory in the Treaty of Trianon (1920). The desire to reverse this perceived national injustice saw her country allied in lockstep with the Nazis. It was a deeply conservative, antisemitic era, where Naturalism and Realism were favoured, and nationalistic themes rewarded. From the 1920s onwards, Jewish artists were routinely shunned and excluded, and small private art schools were often the only way they could educate themselves. One of the most well-known was the New Art School, run by János Vaszary (1867-1939), a charismatic artist-teacher who disdained academic methodology —he’d been booted out of the Academy for his views. He encouraged his students to work autonomously and think for themselves. He once famously declared to Anna, “My dear, you have paint running in your veins!” 

Self-portraits, especially those in which Anna roleplays, were central to her early work. They were a means through which she could explore the world and search for her voice. Sometimes she was a violinist, ballerina, tight-rope walker or she gave her portrait self- acoutrements othe “important male artist”: laurel wreath, paintbrush, pipe. She was also influenced by her relationship with Ámos. Double portraits, the intimate interior havens of their various makeshift studio-homes, and their joint marginalisation were depicted with a delicate application of paint, and a palate steeped in blues, greens, ochres and carmines. Between 1940 and 1944, Ámos was pressed into forced labour service, also known as “annihilation through work.” With the Nazi occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Anna went into hiding, narrowly avoiding deportation to Auschwitz, but her beloved Ámos never returned from the eternal night of the Ohrdruf concentration camp where he was last seen. 

Anna would mourn Ámos for the rest of her days, but it would take her more than two decades to begin depicting her loss.

“The Painter and her Muse,” 1969, oil on canvas, Budapest History Museum, Municipal Picture Gallery – Kiscell Museum, Budapest

In 1945, eighty percent of Budapest had been bombed, and all seven bridges connecting Buda and Pest obliterated. In this dire setting, a group of survivor artists, among them Margit Anna, banded together to form the European School, which was founded on the postwar promise of a unified, democratic Europe that would bring deliverance from persecution and censorship. Similar schools also emerged in postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia, as did fruitful exchanges between the countries. They embraced a pan-European sensibility, where all modern art movements were celebrated. Archetypal motifs featured strongly in Anna’s art of this period. Stylised, simplified, often genderless heads, with mask-like sombre expressions, darkly outlined in bold Expressionist hues. 

In Anna’s own words the School “…was a spine, a base, security. It brought people closer … The purpose that we all shared was to make brave, new modern art in that time, when we saw what surrounded us.” In 1947 came the hostile Communist takeover, and in 1948 the School was permanently shut down. Anna, along with all artists who refused to toe the Socialist Realism line, were blacklisted and banned from participating in public artistic life for the next two decades.

Through the years of enforced silence, marginalisation and poverty, Anna took commercial painting jobs to support herself and her two sons from her brief, unhappy second marriage, while continuing to paint at night. The cumulation of tragedy which she had experienced both personally through the Holocaust, and professionally at the hands of the fascists and the communists, produced in her an aesthetic of satire and rage. Her figures increasingly resembled puppets, clowns and dolls, which she obsessively collected. They were simultaneously objects of affection and ridicule, defenceless and child-like, with no human agency. Through these ostensibly naïve, hybrid forms she constructed densely layered haunted surreal worlds where power is satirised, and evil is disarmed. Her palette conjured the vividness of folk objects from her childhood, whilst also veering into the more lurid colours of their cheap, touristy imitations. The role-playing portraits from her early years also resurfaced but in new guises. Biblical, mythological and literary characters abounded–but in her work Fortuna, Ophelia, Rebecca and their kin were transformed from ethereal objects of female beauty and virtue into earthbound, clumsy, ambivalent figures. With a deliberate disregard for perspective and proportion, Anna eschewed art world notions of femininity, taste, refinement and beauty, particularly with her portraits of aging women. 

“Creation Series: The Great Work is Done,” 1977, oil on canvas, Ferenczy Museum Center, Szentendre

During the cultural thaw of the late 1960s, in both the USSR and Hungary, Anna’s work was barely tolerated, and mostly slipped past the censors. She began to be exhibited and collected, and her colourful folk motifs and broad-ranging narratives resonated with audiences. The late 1960s was also when the smothering cloak of silence which surrounded the Holocaust began to be pulled back by artists like Anna and Lili Ország (1926-1978), and writers such as the Nobel laureate Imre Kertész who published “Fateless” in 1975. Anna depicted the violence, terror and chaos of war through her proxy dolls and puppets, and a palette ranging from the carnivalesque to the apocalyptic. The Holocaust was a taboo subject in Communist Hungary as the Party sought to recast Hungary’s role as a story of national resistance against fascism, an inversion and whitewashing which continues today.

The western artist with whom Anna is most often compared is Dubuffet, and his Art Brut movement. But what’s interesting is that there is no evidence to suggest that she was aware of his work. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which the modernists of Anna’s era were isolated, both from the officially accepted art of the interwar and postwar regimes, and the wider trends in the art world beyond Hungary’s borders. 

Having survived decades of “cancelling,” in today’s parlance, Margit Anna’s life and career are a stark reminder that although ideologies and governments come and go, artistic truth endures.

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When Dolls Speak: Margit Anna (1913-1991) retrospective

Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, April 10 – September 1, 2024