Structure from the View I Transformations of the landscape and the body in the art of Jenő Barcsay

Jenő Barcsay (1900–1988) was a seminal figure of 20th-century Hungarian visual art, an ‘old-fashioned avant-garde’ with an individual voice, whose oeuvre is characterized by a delicate balance he established between the classical sensibility of form and a modern approach to composition. Over a career of six decades, Barcsay produced a body of work that is wide-ranging and diverse in terms of styles and genres, while adhering to a principle all along with absolute consistency, i.e. the need to re-construct and transform the view—always rooted in the visible world and always generating emotions—in accordance with his own visual order. The need to create order and harmony.

Stylistic categories provide little help for an analysis of Barcsay’s art, as abstract, constructivist or non-figurative fail to grasp the essential features of his outlook; this exhibition therefore concentrates on the long creative journey that started with the examination of the landscape and the human body and led Barcsay to a figurative abstraction that identified or searched for structure in the view.
In Barcsay’s thinking, the body and the land, these perennial subjects of painting never lose their original function and serve as the starting point or original source for the painterly construction of forms. The buildings of towns—mostly the distinctive structures of Szentendre—the ranges of hills and the groups of human figures often follow similar rhythms in his paintings because, in his drive to create order, Barcsay considered it necessary to find analogies between nature and the human form. This order is neither sterile nor objective: it has an internal rhythm and a sensitive facture that deeply involves the viewer in the logic of the image.

The discipline of visual thinking is a distinctive characteristic of Barcsay’s painting. Rather than narrating stories, his works communicate a way of looking at things: the way to reconstruct the world according to the laws of composition, proportions and forms. His famous Anatomy for the Artist—which is also explored in this exhibition—is one of the most emblematic examples of this mentality: it is not only a course book but the document as well of a painter’s system-building mindset.

The exhibition, Structure from the View attempts to show the process in Jenő Barcsay’s work wherein the view becomes a structure, the organic turns geometric, and the contingent transforms into a consciously constructed order.

An event of the Barcsay 125 Anniversary Year.