Endre Rozsda: a painter photographer

One of the influential personalities in the international world of fine arts. In 1938 goes to Paris with sculptor Lajos Barta and studies at the School of the Louvre Museum. Meets Picasso, Max Ernst, Giacometti. Returns to Budapest and becomes a member of the “European School”, but his paintings that use reality only as elements of his surrealist, inner visions don’t fit in with the official Stalinist party line of “socialist realism”. Returns to Paris in 1956 as an immigrant. Receives the surrealists’ renowned recognition, the Copley prize, in 1964. The unique style of his paintings brings together past and future as contemporaries; unites elements far removed from each other in time and space. Major exhibitions of his paintings and drawings have been organised in Hungary and overseas.

However, until recently, only his family and close friends were familiar with his photography. After his death, the Hungarian Museum of Photography catalogued his photographic work consisting of over 22000 photos over a two year period and subsequently prepared an exhibition and a book with the material that highlights the relationship between his paintings and photos. In his Will, he stipulated that a retrospective of his paintings and drawings must be held before his photographic oeuvre could be shown. This has indeed been done; it is now time for the world to meet this facet of Rozsda’s work.

We have structured the huge volume of photographic material according to its intrinsic logic.First are the self portraits he took in each period of his life. These reflect his particular vision, his way of seeing. The vast majority of his pictures are in slides form. The different themes, besides the self portraits are his immediate environment, his artist’s studio and its garden and a few streets. Among the portraits are his friends and his partners, often nude. During his travels he took numerous photos including some of Budapest. The detailed, jagged, dissected elements of paintings can also be observed in his photos; the connection between them is clearly observable. This is illustrated by his “sandwich slides” which were not assembled, but superimposed through double exposure. The effects of light and shade particularly interested him and he experimented with them constantly. He left for us comparatively few black and white and colour development on paper; these will be shown in the book.

His best photos demonstrate his creative genius and clearly show that his photographic life work is of equal quality as his painting and graphic work.

The retrospective of his photographic oeuvre takes place at the Mai Mano Haz in Budapest in the autumn of 2004 and is accompanied by this book containing his best photographs as well as studies analysing his work in French and Hungarian.

This book is published as the 34th of the series in the “History of Hungarian Photography” and is expected to generate considerable interest in the international world of fine arts.