The Archeology of Sternaturalism

For the first time, the volume discusses, in the context of the history of ideas and culture, the creative period of Tibor Csernus and his "followers", also called monograph naturalists and magical realists. Chernus was not really a surrealist, nor a naturalist in a stylistic sense, as his aim was actually to develop a modern painting realism, which, however, dramatically plunged into the problem of the parallel use of different artistic traditions and "languages" (realism, naturalism, surrealism). Similar aesthetic and political tensions shaped the vision of Sternaturalism and magical realism in László Lakner, Ákos Szabó, László Gyémánt, Gyula Konkoly, György Korga, Ferenc Kóka and Dóra Maurer. If we interpret these oeuvres from the perspective of Aby Warburg, Michael Baxandall, and Georges Didi-Huberman, or critical iconology, the stylistic features of Sternaturalism can be interpreted as imprints of aesthetic and political conflicts. Under the auspices of cultural hybridity (Mikhail Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha), the seemingly eclectic and chaotic painting can best be understood as a dissonant montage of various aesthetics and policies. I present the intellectual and visual montage of Sternaturalism through the vision of archaeologically sensitive iconology as documents of a rather complex era (from the Stalinist cultural revolution to the Khrushchev meltdown to the Kádár socialist reorganization). In exploring the visual culture of the age, I used Foucault’s archaeological method to do this, as well as historical, epistemological, and aesthetic concepts such as Eigen-Sinn, resilience, parrhesia, dispositive, and spectacle. Overall, the volume not only provides a more complex picture of Hungarian art in the 1950s and 1960s, but also contributes to integrating this extremely exciting era more fully into the European and global histories of aesthetics and politics.