Istvan Szegedi Szuts - My War
Extraordinary original drawings by Istvan Szegedi Szuts for My War
Istvan Szegedi Szuts [1892-1959] - My War Book. Two Volumes of the Original Pen,
Ink and Wash Drawings (FS18/316) offered in our Two Day Fine Art Sale starting on
24th April 2013 at our salerooms in Exeter, Devon.
Lot 316
in our
picture sale
on 24th April 2013 is an
extraordinary group of poignant and moving pen and ink drawings
by
Istvan Szegedi Szuts (1892-1959)
(FS18/316), which narrate a heartbreaking story about the cruelty of war.
Istvan Szuts served in the First World War and the reader assumes the drawings and
the titles reflect his thoughts and experiences. The pen and ink drawings are breathtakingly
simple with an economy of line reminiscent of Eric Gill and Keith Vaughan.
The published book is a wonderful read and the printed images moving; but the original
drawings are something else altogether! They make the hairs on the neck stand, the
heart race and the eyes moisten.
They are alive. They jump out at you and assault you, your mind explodes with thoughts
and emotions, you are left bruised and disturbed. You have been transported back
to THAT WAR, you have been THAT SOLDIER and maybe you will fight on the side of
peace and compromise forever.
The Drawings
The following page-by-page document sets out all 219 drawings in a convenient and
easy to review fashion.
Drawings by Istvan Szegedi Szuts (Page-by-Page)
Introduction to My War by Ralph Haze Mottram
Below is the forward to the book My War by Ralph Haze Mottram (1883-1971), writer,
novelist and WWI poet.
As I sit down to write this, the admirable male voice choir that performs for the
BBC bursts upon my ear with all those unforgettable things we used to sing- "Tipperary",
which meant nothing at all but the pre-War audience's desire for something woolly
that would mingle with the fumes of bottled stout: "Where are the Lads of the Village
to-night?" which was almost sinister, prophetic of a pompous patriotism that foreshadowed
recruiting propaganda, and the days when it became necessary to cajole, bully and
finally force men who didn't want to go, into the battle: and "Oh, Oh, Oh, it's
a lovely war!" most English of all with its pre-occupation with food and wages that
reflects the mentality of the third year. And with those heartening, if foolish
strains, it all comes back to me, that inescapable, irreparable, unbearable, fatal
thing that happened to come upon our generation and brand it, the thing we call
The War.
Everyone who cares to, knows the literary and pictorial repercussions of the thing,
which may be said to have begun with the "First Hundred Thousand", a novel, and
Bairnsfather's deliberately comic pictures, and have culminated in the War Book
boom: 1929. Yet, even after that, there was a general feeling in many quarters,
that the thing had still escaped full representation, much less definition. Criticisms
of some of the latest works on the subject ran continuously in the vein: "When shall
we get the really great War book?" - "The final total expression of the War is yet
to come", and so forth.
And the longer one ponders upon this, the more one sees it must be so. The thing
itself was so much greater than its component parts - that is, ourselves - that
none of us can get sufficiently far away, sufficiently above it all, either in print
or charcoal, to see it either steadily or whole.
Nor is the case of the well-informed looker-on-whose reminiscences and disquisitions
on the subject must by now be nearly as numerous as the works of fiction dealing
with it - nor that of the renowned academicians who have portrayed it - any better.
They had the dispassionate leisure, but by just that much they fell short of the
whole and complete picture. For they were not combatants and could not feel it as
we did.
Here comes a Hungarian artist whose London exhibition earned him praises that relieve
me of the necessity of trying to place his technical achievement. I have only to
indicate, if I can, in what way he has materially added to the testimony of
witnesses to which subsequent generations must have recourse for their information
(I am often laughed at for supposing they will want to, but I still hope so).
Szuts' book of 206 drawings is called "My War and I think rightly so. Certainly
anyone of our generation, and possibly everyone who tries, can only give the complete
cosmic view of the thing by sticking closely to personal experience. The most universal
pictures that have earned the most cosmopolitan appreciation are not mappemondes,
but subjects painted within the artist's own family or from his own doorway. Thus
the distinctive Hungarian uniforms and landscapes, and the artist's private feelings
soon fade away into scenes that were common to two hemispheres, and emotions that
were shared by millions. His portrayal is firmly rooted in a sufficiently strong
individual view and national, in fact, local consciousness. He begins with a figure
which it is most natural he should begin with-that of the youth without preoccupations,
one of those whose inexperience and virile primitive instinct alone make war possible.
There he is, in his comfortable home, with both parents alive and a sweetheart.
The news of the declaration of war fills him with enthusiasm. The War, of course,
is something in which one shows one's manhood, away over there where the War is
going on. He is going to fight. He is trained to do so, in nice clean parade grounds
reserved for military exercise. That a battlefield is something different, something
that, in civilised Europe at least, cannot be confined to parade grounds, but overflows
into someone's garden, into civilian streets full of women and children, into: ne's
railway station and waterworks, does not dawn on him, and no one tells him of this
aspect of it. He has a uniform to show that he is marked out for the most spectacular
of male avocations, he has weapons to show that he is a real man, as men have ever
been since they lived in caves, he has a horse to ride. What more can a healthy
boy want ? He takes leave of the home he has known, the girl he has loved, and goes.
And I think Szuts is quite right to supply a secondary hero, in drawings 20
to 31, a middle-aged peasant with a wife and family, to give stiffening to the romantic
"little hussar." And with him come in those other involuntary participants, the
swift knowing horses that man has so much over-sensitised by association with himself,
until, like Miss Sewell, we are inclined to credit them with all the best of human
perceptions, or even, like Swift, to picture their kingdom as infinitely superior
to that which we humans occupy. So men and dumb creatures go forward into the thing
that is to envelop them. The two stories, running parallel, have here of course
to be shown in detached sections, but the titles relating to them make the treatment
clear.
Then, at Number 56, the Little Hussar and Isikos, the Breadwinner, representing,
if you like, the ornamental and the useful sides of life, suddenly come upon the
thing which they have heard of as the distant, all-important, exhilarating War,
that made all fatigues and privations worth while, and even justified the terrific
sergeant-major here shown. How quickly all that brightly-coloured parade fades before
the reality that M Szuts' methods seem to me to depict so vividly. Isikos is
wounded, the Little Hussar decorated, and celebrates it. The War atmosphere has
completely enveloped both. This is what their differing fate alike betoken, the
incapacitation of the breadwinner, and for the lucky young hussar the awful length
of active service, no getting away from it, and its mockeries of Church Parade.
Then he too is wounded and after excruciating nightmares goes to hospital. There
he has the full enlightenment as to what War is, in the letter from his sweetheart
telling of the fate of his home, of her fate and of the desperate bravery with which
she has made the poor best that can be made of such things. Szuts keeps before us
in a masterly way the fact that the enemy who commit these atrocities are,
of course, only doing exactly what the Little Hussar and Isikos have themselves
done, directly or by implication.
The Hussar comes out of hospital to an even clearer realisation of what has happened.
He sees bread queues, a population of starving women and children, hordes of
prisoners, and, turning from these to the music-hall, he sees what salvage his sweetheart
has made of herself. But not for him. Nor is he more fortunate in his visit to the
ruins of his home. So he goes back to the battle which alone has remained steadfast.
That, as some of us remember, was the one thing that did not change. And about Drawing
174, we come to the part about which we, in England, know only a little, not
very much. The little Hussar tries to stop the thing that has got hold of him and
all the others. "Stop killing," he cries to his comrades, then he comes up against
the full force of the calamity. There are too many interests involved for this sort
of talk to be permitted. He is arrested, tried, condemned and shot. To this the
paths of glory lead.
Such is the story as the artist tells it. A good many of us may shrink from it,
some because we don't wish to believe it, some because we know it to be all too
true. More of us would shrink if the sheer ability of the drawings did not provide
so engrossing an entertainment. That, of course, is the first business of any work
of art. It must attach the attention of a public, however small, however select.
Possibly the smaller the public, the greater the staying power of its reputation.
In fact, the worst of so much commercial art is that it gets no further than providing
an entertainment. Certainly Szuts has done more than that. He has stated honestly,
and I think not unfairly, though very probably too strongly for some people, his
view of a piece of contemporary history. From the point of view of the student of
human nature this is a great service. These drawings have to be compared with the
sort of contemporary presentation made by witnesses of previous world wars. Then
we see how much the view of War has changed.
There follows for those who are really interested the investigation of this changing
mentality. In early days all men fought. No public authority existed that could
by other means decide man's endless differences. But the business of getting together
those old tribal or feudal armies was so cumbersome that experts invented the professional
army enlisted for life; this was all part of the long inevitable tendency towards
specialisation that marked the rise of religious orders, the segregation of trades
in various streets or markets. The professional army has long been an anachronism
and anomaly in the highly complicated modern state professing Christianity. But
the War of 1914-1918 went much further. It exemplified for the first time the methods
of mechanical mass production applied to War, as distinct from the old handicraft
of fighting individually with side arms. The Hussar in Szuts' drawings has no quarrel
with the enemy any more than a factory operative in Lancashire has a personal affection
for some one who buys his product on the other side of the earth. Impersonality
has overtaken us in all these matters. That is why, besides catching the eye, stirring
the emotions, awakening memories, I think there must be a future for Szuts' point
of view. He is, in his degree, one of the chroniclers of a fundamental change in
human nature.
Fine Art Knowledge
Istvan Szegedi Szuts (1892-1959)
- Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood
- Fine Art Auctioneers
- Istvan Szegedi Szuts (1892-1959)
- Ralph Haze Mottram (1883-1971)
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About the Author
 | Daniel Goddard PicturesDaniel Goddard is a Director of Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood. He is also Head of the Picture Department. Daniel Goddard was educated at The Kings Grammar School, Ottery St Mary and The Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He was commissioned in 1982 serving in Northern Ireland, The Falklands and Canada and in the 1990s completed an Open University degree in Art History and Humanities. In 1988, he worked in Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand and attended The Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea. On his return to East Devon, Daniel joined Lawrences in Crewkerne as a saleroom porter and progressed to valuation and rostrum work. In 1996, Daniel joined Bearne's in Torquay to head the Works of Art Department and transferred to Head of the Picture Department in 2000. He continues to run this busy department in the merged firm of Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood. Daniel Goddard has been a director of the firm since 1999 and is an experienced valuer and auctioneer with a good broad range of knowledge and specialist expertise in paintings. He was responsible for the organisation and cataloguing of the two major sales of paintings by Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002), which raised in excess of £3 million.
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Istvan Szegedi Szuts - My War was written on Tuesday, 19th March 2013.