Ilka Gedő (26 May 192119 June 1985) was a Hungarian painter and graphic artist. Her work survives decades of persecution and repression, first by the semi-fascist regime of the 1930s and 1940s and then, after a brief interval of relative freedom between 1945 and 1949, by the communist regime of the 1950s to 1989. In the first stage of her career, which came to an end in 1949, she created a huge number of drawingsBased on a digitized oeuvre catalogue, the number of Ilka Gedő’s drawings in the folders exceeds three thousand, and the number of juvenilia drawings is around 1700. The number of drawings produced between 1944 and 1949 is 740, while in the public collections there are 393 drawings (Museum of Fine Art-Hungarian National Gallery: 77; King St. Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvár, Hungary: 8; British Museum: 15; Israel Museum: 6; Hungarian Jewish Museum: 12; The Jewish Museum, New York: 3; Yad Vashem Art Museum: 144; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin: 8; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf: 8; Albertina, Vienna: 15, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH): 20; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo: 3; Metropolitan Museum, New York: 3; Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig (HAUM), Braunschweig, Germany 21; Cleveland Museum of Art: 3; MoMA, New York: 7; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany: 20; US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC: 19 drawings). that can be divided into various series. From 1964 on, she resumed her artistic activities creating oil paintings. "Ilka Gedő is one of the solitary masters of Hungarian art. She is bound to neither the avant-garde nor traditional trends. Her matchless creative method makes it impossible to compare her with other artists."István Hajdu: Half Picture, Half Veil - the Art of Ilka Gedő In: István Hajdu - Dávid Bíró The Art of Ilka Gedő (1921-1985) Oeuvre Catalogue and Documents, Gondolat Kiadó, Budapest, 2003, p. 6
Early life and training
Ilka Gedő (1921–1985) was born from the marriage of Simon Gedő and Elza Weiszkopf on 26 May 1921. Her father was a teacher at the Jewish grammar school, her mother worked as a clerk. Some of the leading Hungarian writers and artists of the times were among the family's circle of friends. Ilka Gedő was raised in a family, where she had every opportunity to become an educated and sensitive artist. She went to a secondary school bearing the name Új Iskola (New School). This school offered an innovative curriculum and teaching methods.Új Iskola, the New School was one of the best known reform schools in Hungary that put into practice the reform aspirations of the reform pedagogy that emerged in Hungary at the turn of the century.
Since her early childhood, Ilka Gedő had been continuously drawing, recording her experiences. The series of juvenilias, completely preserved in the artist's estate, can be put into chronological order, and thus one is confronted with a visual diary.
She was seventeen years old when she spent her holidays in the Bakony hills, to the west of Budapest. During her holidays she spent all her time drawing the scenery. In the fields she followed the scythe-men with sketchbook in hand, so as to see again and again the recurring movement from the same angle, capturing the rhythm with considerable fluency and sophistication. The drawings, watercolours, and folders that have been preserved from the years 1937-1938 reveal that she already had a complete technical mastery of drawing, and this in spite of the fact that she had never received regular tuition until then.
From the late 1930s till the early 1940s Ilka Gedő was taught by three artists of Jewish origin who were killed by the Nazis at the end of the war.Júlia Szabó: Ilka Gedő’s Artistic Activities In: Péter György - Gábor Pataki, Júlia Szabó, István F. Mészáros: The Art of Ilka Gedő (1921-1985), Új Művészet Alapítvány, Budapest, 1997, pp. 48-49 ISSN 1219-4913
In 1939, her final examination year Gedő attended the open school of Tibor Gallé (1896–1944). Gedő's second master was Victor Erdei (1879–1944), a painter and graphic artist of the naturalist-impressionist and Art Nouveau style. Gedő's third teacher was the sculptor István Örkényi Strasser (1911–1944). From Strasser Gedő learnt the firmness of sculpturesque modelling and the representation of mass.
After passing her school-leaving examinations, Ilka Gedő seriously considered starting her artistic studies in Paris, but the war interfered, and due to the Jewish laws she could not go to the Hungarian Academy of Art either. Even had Gedő wished to attend the academy, it is likely that she would have found her way barred. With the increase in influence of the Hungarian Fascists, the Arrow Cross Party, the open disenfranchisement of the Jews began in 1938 with the First Jewish Laws followed by the Second and Third in 1939 and 1941.
During the war, she made a living by doing ceramics, but she never stopped creating her series of graphics. Ilka Gedő often visited the town of Szentendre. A small provincial town on the Danube, some twenty miles from Budapest, it provided between the wars a shelter for numerous artists. From 1938 to 1947 Ilka Gedő made pastel drawings of the town, taking her forms and colours directly from nature. The colours red, vivid yellow, dark brown, blue and green reach a high intensity of colourfulness.
Up until the early 1940s, together with other young artists, Ilka Gedő also visited the studio of Gyula Pap (1899–1982) who was a former disciple of Johannes Itten and a teacher of Bauhaus.Nóra Aradi (ed): Magyar művészet (1919-1945) (Hungarian Art /1919-1985/), Volume I, Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó, p. 398
During these years, up to 1944, Gedő made intimate studies, mainly in pencil of family life. She began a series of self-portraits which were to continue to the end, in 1949, of the first stage of her artistic career.
In 1942 Ilka Gedő participated in the exhibition, organized by the Group of Socialist Artists and titled Freedom and the People that took place at the Centre of the Metal Workers' Union.Nóra Aradi (ed): Szabadság és a nép (A Szocialista Képzőművészek Csoportjának dokumentumai (Freedom and the People–Documents of the Group of Socialist Artists), Budapest, Corvina Kiadó, 1981, p. 318, p. 287
Drawings made in the Budapest Ghetto
On 19 March 1944, eight German divisions invaded Hungary. The persecution of Hungarian Jewry began in earnest. At unparalleled speed almost all of Hungary's provincial Jews were deported to concentration camps in Poland, where most of them were killed. (The Hungarian Jewish community lost 564,500 lives during the war including 63,000 before the German occupation.Source of these figures: Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, McMillan Publishing House, 1990, Vol. II, p. 702)
Despite protests by church leaders and Miklós Horthy's hesitant attempts to halt the deportations, by the summer of 1944 about 200,000 Jews were herded together in the Budapest ghetto and in specially designated houses. Following the unsuccessful attempt by Horthy to take Hungary out for the war, the Arrow Cross party carried out a military take-over on 15 October 1944. In the ghetto, the worst days of nightmare began. Through sheer luck, Ilka Gedő managed to escape deportation and survived.
In the Budapest Ghetto Ilka Gedő spent most of her time with reading and drawing recording her surroundings, her companions, the old people and children. These drawings are invaluable documents, but they are also allegories of human humiliation and defencelessness. On one of her self-portrait drawings, she presents a frontal view of herself, showing a person who has lost control over her own fate. Accordingly, she has no age, and almost no gender any more.
On the last drawing we see the artist's self-portrait with a drawing-board. The eyes, so it seems, stare into nothingness. The ego looks for support in her own self.
The period between 1945 and 1948
Self-portrait drawings (1945–1949)
On New Year's Eve 1945, Ilka Gedő met Endre Bíró, who studied chemistry at the University of Szeged, and after the war started to work for a research institute headed by the Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian scientist Albert Szent-Györgyi.
Working in a strictly figurative idiom, the artist needed models and, in addition to family and friends, Gedő found the most convenient model in herself.
Ilka Gedő 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. However, doubts were creeping into her efforts to give a faithful and accurate representation of reality: the traditional and composed modelling that had been so typical of her was gradually being replaced by an expressive, eruptive and tense style.Portraits of Ilka Gedő Wikimedia
The drawings of the Fillér utca self-portrait series affect the viewer due to their cruel honesty and authentic artistic power.
The Ganz Factory drawings (1947–1948)
Constantly in search of new subjects, Gedő found in the Ganz Machine Factory, near to her home in Fillér Street, a rich and visually animated environment to draw. Ilka Gedő was granted permission to visit the Ganz Factory with the recommendation of the Free Trade Union of Artists.Elisabeth Kashey (Ed.): Ilka Gedő (1921–1985) Drawings and Pastels, exhibition catalogue, Shepherd Gallery, New York, 1995, p. 19 OCLC 313759285
As in her self-portraits of the same period, her drawings and pastels of the Ganz Factory, showing a number of recurring topics are quick sketches of momentary experience that reveal an intense spiritual concentration and expressive power. Nervous wavering lines reflect the artist's impressions of industrial work. Ika Gedő's decision to draw in a factory was not politically motivated, and there is no trace of idealisation in these drawings. Dramatic panoramic views of vast interior spaces alternate with compassionate studies of exhausted workers. Ilka Gedő's drawings of the Ganz Factory are realistic, but, more importantly, expressive and moving. In these works space and large forms are presented as novelty. Among the planes and the blocks man is reduced to a schematic figure. The objects that appear in space seem to devour the figures.
Table series (1949)
The subject of these drawings, a small and always visible table is prosaic, it is always at hand. The lines on these drawings are never the contour of the closing of an area: they always move, thus liberating mysterious energies.
The period of creative silence (1949–1965)
Apart from her family and a few friends, no one saw Gedő's drawings at the time they were made. During this period from 1945 to 1949, as well as pastel she started to use oil, but Gedő in a fit of depression and seeing no way out of the dilemmas she was experiencing, destroyed most of the oil paintings produced during these years.
After a remarkable period of freedom between 1945 and 1948, the onset of Communist dictatorship influenced Ilka Gedő's life adversely, being one of the reasons why she gave up artistic activities for sixteen years.
In 1949, Ilka Gedő stopped painting and drawing. Her voluntary abandonment lasted until 1965. During these years, apart from a few colour sketches, she took no pencil or brush into her hand, refusing to do so even in play with her children. Her decision must be explained since it happens very rarely that an artist, who has considered art the meaning and purpose of life, stops creating without being forced to do so.