In light of the Budapest-based exhibition on the Hungarian Jewish painter, Nicole Waldner delves deeper into the artist's life and work

Margit Anna was born into a secular Jewish family, on a farm 200km south of Budapest. Growing up she shared the cultural heritage and poverty of the other children in the rural village, experiences that would shape her aesthetic vocabulary. Not yet 17, she went to Hungary's capital to study art and met her future husband Imre Ámos (1907-44), often referred to as the 'Hungarian Chagall'. Anna came of age in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, when the country lost two thirds of its territory in the Treaty of Trianon (1920), and the desire to reverse this perceived national injustice saw them allied in lockstep with the Nazis. It was a deeply antisemitic era where Naturalism and Realism were favoured. From the 1920s on, Jewish artists were routinely excluded from state schools and exhibiting their work.

Role-playing self-portraits were central to Anna’s early work and would remain so throughout her career. They were a means through which to transcend her marginalisation. Between 1940 and 1944, Ámos was pressed into forced labour service, also known as “annihilation through work”. With the Nazi occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Anna went into hiding, narrowly escaping deportation to Auschwitz, but her beloved Ámos never returned from the eternal night of the German Ohrdruf concentration camp.

In 1945, 80 percent of Budapest had been bombed and all seven bridges connecting Buda and Pest obliterated. In this dire setting, a group of survivor artists, among them Anna, banded together to form the European School, which was founded on the post-war promise of a unified, democratic Europe that would bring deliverance from persecution and censorship. Archetypal motifs featured strongly in Anna’s art of this period. Stylised, simplified, often genderless heads, with mask-like sombre expressions, darkly outlined in bold Expressionist hues. In 1947 came the hostile Communist takeover and, in 1948, the School was permanently shut down. Anna, along with all artists who refused to toe the Socialist Realism line were blacklisted and banned from participating in public artistic life for the next two decades.

The cumulation of tragedy that Anna experienced, both personally through the Holocaust and professionally at the hands of the fascists and the communists, produced in her an aesthetic of satire and rage. Her figures increasingly resembled puppets, clowns and dolls. They were simultaneously objects of affection and ridicule, defenceless and child-like, with no human agency. The role-playing portraits from her early years resurfaced in new guises. Biblical, mythological and literary characters abounded, but Fortuna, Ophelia, Rebecca and their kin were transformed from ethereal objects of female beauty and virtue into earthbound, clumsy, ambivalent figures. With a deliberate disregard for perspective and proportion, Anna eschewed art world notions of femininity, taste, refinement and beauty.

In the cultural thaw of the late 1960s, Anna began to exhibit again. Her colourful folk motifs and broad-ranging narratives resonated with audiences. It was also when the smothering cloak of silence surrounding the Holocaust began to lift. With scathing contempt and unsparing imagery, she depicted the terror of the Shoah through her proxy dolls and puppets.

Having survived decades of cancelling, in today’s parlance, Margit Anna’s life and career are a stark reminder that whilst ideologies come and go, artistic truth endures.

By Nicole Waldner

When Dolls Speak: Retrospective Exhibition of Margit Anna (1913–1991) runs until Sunday 1 September. Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. en.mng.hu

A longer version of this story was first published by lilith.org