Vance Kirkland Catalog of the Budapest Art Gallery

"The world is full of good artists. There are those whose value is recognized everywhere in the world, sometimes it only becomes well-known later, and sometimes it never comes. None of this changes the quality of art. The process by which the same qualities, no matter where they are born, receive the same recognition is extremely complicated. It is so complicated that it almost never happens. As a Hungarian, I know this quite well, because the art of small nations rarely gets the opportunity, perspective and insight that art born in larger, richer cultures has. And it is also not a question of quality. Lajos Tihanyi's cubist portrait of a man hangs next to Picasso in the Brooklyn Museum, obviously not by chance, but the international recognition of his values cannot be compared to Picasso's. An excellent Rippl-Rónai also hangs in the same room, whose identity is known only to a few specialists outside of Hungarians. Something similar happened with the art of Vance Kirkland. He spent most of his life in the Midwest. He spent. His vegetative-ornamental surrealist watercolors in the forties represent the same quality as Max Ernst. But he did not live in Europe, when he should have done so. At a time when the significance and importance of American art was not yet comparable to that of the post-war period. At a time when significant artistic events took place in Paris. The case is very much parallel to what happened repeatedly to Hungarian artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. After World War II, a brighter era of American painting than ever before occurred. Abstract expressionism was the point from which American art became independent, distinctly distinguishable, and decisive in terms of universal art alongside European art. A relatively straight path led from surrealism to "gesture painting", to "action painting". Marcel Duchamp lived in America from 1915, Tanguy and Matta arrived in 1939, but the art of André Masson, Miro and, of course, Picasso also had a strong influence. The best-known example is that of Jackson Pollock, who sought to isolate and eliminate concrete experiences and create his subconscious images in such a way that they would not be influenced by memory images. This approach, very similar to that of the surrealists - the subconscious as a well of symbolic analogies - led to a very different result: the representation of preconscious perceptions. This changed the relationship between the painter and the canvas, of which Pollock's legendary painting practice is perhaps the best-known example. The unstretched canvas spread on the floor, the use of a wide variety of tools, the dripping of liquid paint, the scattering of "paint-alien" materials (sand, broken glass) on the canvas, the working of the picture surface from all sides, the "entering the picture" were not some superficial prank, but a very far-reaching, radical change in perspective. The impact of this radiated throughout American and universal art, "It radically transformed the rules and conditions that had previously prevailed, both in the self-evaluation of American art and in general terms."