Reflections on Lili Ország: Wanderings/ Bolyongások (1926-1978) Kiscell Museum Budapest November 16 2024 – April 6 2025
Early on in a new, spectacular Lili Ország exhibition in Budapest, there is a collage from 1956 called Excavation/ Woman digging in the earth. The protagonist of the image stands over a hole in the ground that she has dug with her bare hands. The woman bears a striking resemblance to the artist herself, with her head of heavy black hair and the air of intense concentration. In the foreground is another woman, head turned away gazing resolutely back, arms thrust heavenward suggesting both ecstasy and flight.
This collage can be read as both a self-portrait and a statement of intent by the artist: through mastery and devotion to her craft, she attained the spiritual transcendence that she yearned for. But in order to ascend to those heights she would need to dig deep into the past.
Ország was raised in a prosperous Jewish family in Ungvár (present day Uzhhorod, Ukraine). At the age of fifteen, her entire life was upended by the Nazi occupation of March 1944.
Her family were forced into the ghetto in the Moskovitz brick factory, and in May they were herded onto the cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. Ország only narrowly avoided the death camp when her family were allowed off the train due to her father’s impeccable WWI service record.
The family obtained false papers, converted to Christianity, and for a time Lili Ország became Éva, a Catholic refugee from Transylvania. She survived the rest of the war in Budapest, eventually enrolling in art school. In 1950 she married child psychologist Dr György Majláth who encouraged her to paint out her wartime traumas. Many of the visually striking paintings from her early Surrealist era (1952-1957) feature the terrifying red brick walls of the ghetto.
In 1956 (the year of the anti-Soviet uprising), Lili Ország travelled to Bulgaria where she visited the ancient Rila Monastery and the churches of Samokov and Plodiv. The eastern Orthodox icons she saw there would forever change the direction of her art. More trips to Bulgaria and Russia in 1957 and 1959 led to paintings inspired by icons and cosmically themed canvases.
Influenced by Paul Klee , her art in this era (roughly 1957-1960) was exquisitely coloured. Other wells of inspiration included her fellow painter Endre Bálint (1914-1986) who was also painting icons in the 1950s, and her lifelong friend the master poet János Pilinszky (1921-1981), a devout Roman Catholic with whom she shared the understanding that work is faith, and faith is work. But a visit to the old Jewish cemetery in Prague in 1960 set Ország on the path to emulating the mastery and devotion she so admired in medieval icon painters.
The oldest tombstones of the Jewish cemetery of Prague date back to 1439. As Jewish law forbids the removal of any graves and space was curtailed by the ghetto walls, the dead were buried in successive layers. The result is an extraordinarily dense forest of gravestones, varying in height and jutting out at astonishing angles.
For Ország the cemetery was a revelation, a physical manifestation of the four dimensions: height, width, depth and time. It led her back to her Jewish roots and was a means of connecting with a heritage unmarked by the trauma of the Shoah. The layering of time she saw in the cemetery would increasingly be mirrored in the dense layering of her canvases, starting with the era of her Townscape paintings (1960-1965).
Ország described her Townscapes like this: “Complete reduction led me to the threshold of the greatest realm: that of history and myth.” The complete reduction was the flattened bird’s eye perspective over the ancient stone towns she created: city walls and gates, streets, alleyways, columns, arches, glyphs, tombstones and the ruins of buildings.
Her techniques enabled her creation. Though she adhered to architectural verisimilitude and sometimes used real place names, her ancient towns were fictitious. Her highly technical manipulation of surface paint allowed Ország to conjure the atmosphere of antiquity. Successive layers of paint were regularly scraped off, scratched, engraved and sculpted to resemble ancient stones. By using a reduced palette of earthy tones – black, grey, ochre, clay and brown – on primed white backgrounds, she created dramatic shadows which emphasised the architectural details. Recurring motifs were stamped directly onto the canvas by using cardboard cutouts, pieces of rubber, and even potatoes.
In a small walled gallery in the centre of the exhibition hangs the seven-part series from 1963 Requiem on Seven Panels in Remembrance of Dead People and Cities. Ország described Requiem with her characteristic clarity: “…I wanted to commemorate, primarily, my own family who died in the Shoah. I have been weighed down by this for years and took it as a moral imperative to make them.”
With her Townscape paintings Ország created a portal to the past where, she “…felt so much more at home than anywhere else I have been.” Why was the past so alluring for her? And what did her present look like in the early 1960s? Her marriage was in turmoil, and she would soon be separated from her husband. She would remain childless and single for the rest of her life. She was working at the State Puppet Theatre as a set and costume designer (her lifelong day job).
The Communist regime, which often dealt so harshly with modernist artists, did not look favourably on religious themes and while her work was mostly tolerated the state offered nothing in the way of support. Paint was difficult to acquire, as was research material and travel permits. She periodically suffered from debilitating anxiety and depression through which she sometimes managed to work, and at other times shut herself off completely from the world.
Wanderings is set in a vast deconsecrated Baroque church that forms part of the Kiscell Museum and fulfills a lifelong ambition of Ország to exhibit her paintings in a temple-like setting. In 1960 she wrote, “I just have to have at the temple walls, you couldn’t get me away from it until I’ve painted the whole thing.”
In order to tame the monumental spaces of the church, exhibition curator/art historian Mária Árvai and set designer Eszter Kálmán, recreated Ország’s apartment. Árvai writes: “The best part of Lili Ország’s work was produced in the tiny studio flat where she lived from the time she graduated until early 1978. Its dimensions stand in stark contrast to her broad intellectual horizon, fantasy and vast inner spaces…” The exhibition opens with a tight, sparsely furnished room dominated by a bed/couch and walls covered in the collages that Ország would often make to plan her paintings. Deep blue carpets cover the old stone floors which are retrofitted with underfloor heating, all adding to the sense of intimacy, especially in the harsh Hungarian winter. Small lamp lit nooks mirror Ország’s minute apartment, each one perfectly positioned to contemplate the breathtaking majesty of her vision in that glorious space.
In 1966 Ország began experimenting with ancient alphabets. According to the Kabbalists in Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, creation itself is built on letters and numbers. In her era of Inscribed Paintings (until roughly 1969), Ország painted fragments and shards of Hebrew, Persian, Coptic and Greek letters. It was a sacred, abstract alphabet as her letters were never intended to coalesce into words. They are reminiscent of something we think we know yet unlike anything we know. Ország only sometimes painted her letters with a brush, mostly she shaped them by scratching and digging into the impasto stone-like surfaces that carried over from her Townscapes, using the end of her paintbrush, a cloth, or her bare hand. Her masterpiece triptych “De Profundis” (a reference to Psalm 130 which begins with the words “Out of the depths I cried”) hangs in the altar space, the majestic culmination of her era of Inscribed Paintings. Vertically dancing letters, heaven bound, a prayer in paint animated by a spirit in search of the time when we all lived closer to Ein Sof, the endless infinite God.
In 1969 Ország embarked on her final era, a monumental series of deeply intricate and interconnected labyrinths. She intended to exhibit them not as individual paintings, but as a wall of labyrinths, interchangeable elements, building blocks of a whole. Ország’s vision has been honoured to spectacular, dramatic affect in this exhibition. The labyrinth, so rich in archetypal symbolism, both secular and religious, universal and psychological, was a deep well of inspiration for her. In 1966 she visited Israel. She said of Jerusalem: “ I walked here two thousand years ago.” Travels to Italy (Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum) fueled further experimentation in her work. The walls to which she was so attached remained, as did the repetition of motifs with the novel inclusion of circuit boards which she cut into various shapes creating anachronistic mini labyrinths within labyrinths. There was also the reintroduction of greater colour and figuration, not seen since the 1950s. The compositions remained densely structured, only now they gave way to the inherent possibilities of the labyrinth.
Ország Lili (1926–1978): Labirintus orans figurával, 1974
The fiery supplication of her Inscribed Paintings acceded to a quieter meditation. Gates, doorways and arches welcomed. Mirrors, ovals and circles invited pause and reflection. Parisian blue conjured the sea and sky, earthy clay tones added warmth, and white spaces suggested purification and rebirth. The stone figures that appeared were sometimes fully rendered or just a suggestion of solidity, both guardians and messengers, spirit beings of the labyrinth.
In March 1978, the state finally granted Ország a request for a larger apartment. She considered it a palace after her cramped quarters of nearly three decades. In September that year, she was admitted to hospital to remove tumours from her stomach, and in October she died from pneumonia. “I feel that my life, everyone’s life, resembles the passages of a labyrinth that we must walk down on,” she once said, “always coming up against walls, gates, having to change direction, losing our way and continuing on towards deep lying secrets.”
Lili Ország had passed through the hot corridors of the labyrinth. She had conjured it, known it, rendered it into paint. The walls which had at once protected her and shut her in were gone. Now all that remained was a broad, soaring flight into seamless peace.
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Nicole Waldner is a writer with a special interest in 20th century Hungarian culture. Her writing has appeared in the FT Life & Arts, Majuscule Lit, Jewish Renaissance and Lilith, among others.
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