Erzsebet Schaar: A Brief Reminiscence [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 309-312]

310
THOMAS STRAUSS
seem to defy the laws of life and death-sculptures best expressing this
sculptress's main personality trait-let me digress and offer a telling reminiscence. At the end of the Sixties, visitors from Czechoslovakia were most
welcome guests in the art studios of the Hungarian capital, and, like many
others, I would not pass up any opportunity to visit regularly my Budapest
friends, Erzsebet and Tibor. Once when on a damp and cold fall afternoon
I came over to their house beneath the Buda hill, Erszebet asked me the
obligatory question perhaps no one ever takes seriously-what the weather
was like "outside." When queried whether it was going to rain I simply
shook my head as if to say "no," without giving second thought to present
metereological conditions. After several hours of congenial conversation,
we decided to venture out into the streets of the city, and Erzsebet's
husband was about to take his umbrella when, to my utter astonishment,
Erzsebet lashed out at him with great vehemence, accusing him of premature
senility, for he seemed to have forgotten that I had "clearly" said that
it was not going to rain that day. Even though every critic is bound to
feel proud to inspire so much confidence, particularly among artists, I must
admit that such boundless trust took my breath away.
Unlimited faith in her own imagination, just as in that of her friends,
poets and fellow-dreamers, marked Erzsebet Schaar to a greater extent
than we are accustomed to see even in the introverted world of artistic
thought. She wished to cast doubts on "common-sense" logic and, through
her portraits of people she admired and loved as well as through the "portraits" of secret corers, doors and mirror labyrinths, she sought to elevate
the accidental and the temporary into something ineluctable and eternal.
Her greatest desire, it seems, was to erase the borderline between what is
living and what is dead, between the real and the imaginary. In the halls
and the adjacent rooms of the Municipal Museum in Szekesfehervar, Erzsebet build-after a model of a medieval Prague street, a street of alchemists
from the court of Rudolf II-long corridors lined up on all sides with
windows from which the faces of well-known people greeted the visitors.
Some, to be sure, were statues, but from other windows live people were
gesticulating and giving speeches. Beautiful young women carrying messages
from the netherworld alternated with messengers bringing the latest news
from Budapest. The line separating illusion from everyday reality vanished
in the air. Vision of a dreamworld of ultimate truth swallowed up completely the whole world of familiar banalities.
At the Venice Biennale in 1964 I first became acquainted with the
paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and the aesthetics of pop art. Ten years
later, this appreciation of ordinariness became everywhere part and parcel
of our subconsciousness. As a result, mythological images of dread and
afterlife lost much of their unreality. Halfway through the Seventies, somewhere far from America, in the provincial town of Sz6kesfehervar, it was