Re-grounding Judit Reigl as a Child of the Cold War
- Grace Miskovsky
- Jan 7
- 4 min read
“Guano-Round,” made within the years 1958-1964 in Paris by Hungarian painter Judit Reigl, was part of a larger series of paintings, all titled “Guano.” The series utilized identical technical aspects yet varying pictorial results. As the artist painted a tangential series, “Centers of Dominance,” she covered the floors of her studio with drop cloth to protect the wood underneath. Years of paint splatters and “waste” accumulated onto the cloth she painted on, which scholars see as a diaristic record of her movement within her confined space over many years. Of those who contribute to the niche discussion of Judit’s life and work, many commonly view the “Guano” series as mimicking her passage, or movement, from Hungary into France at the age of eighteen. Eventually, in recognizing “Guano” as visually similar to the brutal and primordial materiality of Jean Dubuffet while marveling at their geological qualities, Judit simplified emerging forms, added finishing touches, and presented the paintings stretched and upright. In the case of “Guano-Round,” a “lunar” form emerged, allowing her to “escape through the surface” of the painting, mirroring her escape from the grips of the Iron Curtain. Judit Reigl’s top critic, Marcelin Pleynet, emphasizes her crossing through a “no-man’s land” from the East to the West as implicit in “Guano,” as it is in a similarly ambiguous state between abstraction and figuration, or “lunar” form. Critic Lillian Davies also compares the brutality of her materiality and texturization in “Guano” as analogous to her “psychological persistence and physical endurance.” Hungarian-American gallerist Janos Gat asserts that Reigl, in leaving Hungary, left Hungarian art behind, echoing the sentiments of Eugene Kolb who stated, “The one trait all Hungarian artists share is the lack of common ground.” In positing Judit Reigl as “stateless,” “timeless,” and conceptually mirroring her violent and dangerous border crossing within her work, these critics fail to seriously and academically ground her in the social and political histories of postwar Hungary and its inevitable influence on “Guano-Round.”
In order to assert a more confident reading of “Guano-Round,” one which accounts for Hungary’s history as a Nazi-occupied country and a sponsor of state totalitarianism, I propose applying Zoe Strother’s research methodology outlined in her article“Gabama a Gingungu and the Secret History of Twentieth Century Art” to Judit Reigl’s practice. The dangers of positing an artist, work of art, or group of artists as timeless, or, in writing about an artist in a “lucid,” “passionate,” and poetic fashion, is outlined in Strother’s essay. While Strother’s main concern is re-attaching names to African artists who have remained nameless within the “ethnographic present” and its subsequent “effacement” of individual artists, I would apply this concern in scholarship about Reigl not to the effacement of her name or artist-hood, but the cultural context from which she emerged. For Strother, the way out of statelessness or self-effacement is a re-grounding of the individual in the cultural and economic situation of their land. A country of origin, then, becomes an important facet of an artist’s oeuvre, which, in the case of Judit Reigl, is time and time again intentionally side-barred within Pleynet and Gat’s scholarship. To ground Judit Reigl as a child of the Cold War, it must be imperative to disprove Eugene Kolb’s claim about the un-groundedness of Hungarian art history, examine the specific impacts of Nazi occupation and Soviet leadership in Reigl’s early life, and connect these closely to “Guano-Round.”
Through a further examination of art censorship laws under Hitler, which created an obviously hostile environment for avant-garde artists, it is necessary to examine the stage that was set for Judit as a young student and how it provides a more productive framework for analyzing her work than contemporary scholar’s ideas of transnationalism. For example, in the years immediately following the second World War, Judit staged an improvized retrospective of the work of a disgraced Hungarian painter, whose modernist paintings were hidden due to Nazi censorship and rolled up in a flooded basement at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest where she studied. The damaged and tethered works of Csontváry, with dirt and water accumulating on the canvases over time and imbued with their temporal and geographic placement within war and occupation, are visually and historically more confident grounding presences for “Guano-Round” than the tale of her border crossing. Further, one must also note Judit’s contentious relationship with the Communist Party before her departure, and its impacts on her later work made in France. She was commissioned thrice by prominent figures within the Communist Party, including the Ministry of Defence and Josef Stalin himself, and thrice she created works for the Party which were questioned and rejected. In one work, titled “Workers and Peasants, Unite!,” made in 1948, she depicted “coy” looking, muscular men in a homoerotic embrace, which she later confessed to be an adjecent depiction of her and her female lover, Betty Anderson. In positing “Guano-Round” as mirroring spatio-temporal passage, in Judit Reigl’s studio and in her border-crossing, and her ill-defined oeuvre as comparable to the “no-man’s land” she crossed as a teenager, current scholarship misses an opportunity to seriously ground itself in the socio-political relationships of post-war Soviet Hungary, in which Reigl came of age in.
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