An Aesthetic of Satire and Rage

Margit Anna was born in 1913 into a secular Jewish family, on a farm two hundred kilometers 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, anti-semitic era, where Naturalism and Realism were favored, and nationalistic themes rewarded. From the 1920s, Jewish artists were routinely shunned and exclusive small private art schools were often the only way they could educate themselves.

Through the years of enforced silence, marginalization 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, defenseless and child-like, with no human agency. Through these ostensibly naïve, hybrid forms she constructed densely layered, haunted, surreal worlds where power is satirized, and evil is disarmed. Her palette conjured the vividness of folk objects from her childhood, whilst also veering into the more lurid colors 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, Particularly with her portraits of aging women, Anna eschewed art world notions of femininity, taste, refinement and beauty.

Lilith Online, July 2024, read the full piece here.