I went to both primary and secondary school in the town of my birth, Nagybanya (Baia Mare), then studied painting at the Kolozsvar Academy of Fine Arts in Sandor Mohy’s class, graduating in 1955. Earlier on I had been attracted to sculpture; it was as a student of sculpture that I handed in a painting for the first exhibition I participated in, at the 1953 Nagybanya Regional Exhibition. That painting attracted the favorable attention of my professors, and I was encouraged to continue in that medium.
In 1956, I gained membership in the Romanian Fine Arts Society, and from then until 1990 I was an art teacher. Besides painting, I have been interested in the theory of teaching, artistic pedagogy, and the everlasting question of whether art can be taught or not. Apart from the brush and the canvas, I often resort to the camera to record the extraordinary characters, landscapes and monuments in the neighbourhood.
Being native to Nagybanya has had a fundamental influence on my beliefs. Because of a first-hand knowledge of my predecessors’ art, I have consciously identified with “Nagybanya” and have attempted to apply that spirit and creative method, accommodating and augmenting modern requirements, in the light of later developments in newer painting styles.
In recruiting more and more followers from among my artist colleagues and the public at large, I have sought to pass on this cultural heritage, as director of the Nagybanya Painters’ Colony, established by the Reformed Church in Nagyvarad.
Faithful Keeper of the Colors of Nagybanya
Agoston Veso was born in the picturesque town of Nagybanya. At least this is how later descendants have thought of the unique countryside, where once upon a time, the plains were pitted against the mountains, and playful nature composed them into a harmonic “landscape”. The vista from the Gothic Stephen’s Church is like two textiles bound close together with a number of stitches ‑ the bridges over the Zazar ‑ put there by human will competing with the Creator in creation.
Agoston Veso was born in the year when Sandor Karoly, the Arad journalist could still write:
“This town is like a great palette. The surrounding mountains give a blue hue, the lush vegetation gleams in green; blood‑red roses smile at passers‑by from the gardens, and the yellows, ochres, ultramarines, whites, blacks, and other hues of color do not miss either. Wherever the eyes look, they imbibe newer and newer tints, as though an artist drunk with color created the town in a frenzy of joy.
(Letter from the Hungarian Barbizon. Vasarnap, 1931. no.13.).
The enthralling nature of the town, the meeting with steady‑handed old masters, Ziffer, Mikola, Oszkar Nagy, the “bohemian” Norbert Sztelek – all seemed to lead Agoston Veso towards painting; the young Veso who lived all his life in ‑ ‘nomen est omen’ ‑ Painter Street.
However the vibrant colors and the waving lines of his childhood whirled and streamed in his mind; and his talent had been recognized by his Kolozsvar teachers, Aurel Ciupe and Sandor Mohy, who had known and cherished good memories of Nagybanya from their early youth.
Upon graduating Veso returned to a totally different Nagybanya. He came of age as a painter when the humbleness towards nature, a mark of the generation of Hollbsy and Ferenczy, had been left to oblivion, and the clamorous post‑war art ideology raised the banner of compulsory optimism.
Canvases were produced by the thousands with histrionic shapes of working men towering in the front of factory scenes, without one ever nearing the depths of a Noemi Ferenczy, or an Istvan Desi Huber, whose art was rooted in this landscape. The generation coming after the war tried, almost stealthily, sometimes irresolutely, sometimes by hiding in detail, to salvage something of that genuine sense of art.
They found their calling in upholding and furthering this artistic tradition in Nagybanya, Marosvasarhely or Csikszereda. Veso embodies the kind of artist who stubbornly holds fast to his principles but is inquisitively searching as well.
In his early painting, he reveals a finely drawn world of landscapes and people sensitively following the inspiration received from the Nagybanya naturalist tradition; then his interest turned to the building of an almost architectural structure forcing luminous yellows and reds in rims.
Parallel to discovering the techniques of photography, he unearths deep, archaic layers of memory manifest in timeworn shapes of works of folk‑art, roadside crucifixes and stone crosses.
At other times, he, like a born cubist, peals thin layers off organic natural forms, decomposes the elements of reality and mirrors shapes until they become translucent, whether they be the regular cone of the Kereszthegy (Cross Hill) or the whimsical crystal structures of the town.
The mood, actually, the style of the works often made simultaneously changes according to whether parts of forests, town spaces and houses, silent lives are captured with the softness, the fine shades of pastel or are imputed on with a robust order tousled by brush and plastered over by knife.
In his exhibition opening speech, the art historian Gheorghe Vida cleary pointed out the dual nature of Veso’s art: “Bursting with creative energy, Agoston Veso is an artist blessed with Protean variability, who in spite of the changes of tone in his modes of representation has held on to the results of his earlier way of seeing: thus can the rich coloration of Nagybanya landscape painting be associated with a constructive order ‑ with allusions suggestive of Kmetty and Feininger, an asceticism mirroring a truly spiritual absorption.” (Cultural Centre of Hungary, Bucharest, January 2001.)
Parallel to his painting that increased in perfection as time passed, his personal “free school” also increased in size; there were many to visit his studio to learn the craft of drawing and painting from him, others were drawn to the little town by the never-wearying guide of the Maramaros scenery and the Nagybanya countryside.
The artist never expected any reward, but he has received his pay in kind: being at the birth of many a successful works by his puplis, having the creative company of artist friends, the passionate debates over art ‑ little reward for many, a rich prize for an artist.
In seeing the paintings lining up before us, we gradually come to realize, that the artist in mediating an infinite variety of artistic motifs, is continually adding a new chapter to the Nagybanya story that has so often been thought to be the final one.
Interviews at the Centenary of the Nagybanya Artists’ Colony
On Predecessors
“A whole series of factors contributed to the significance and success of the Nagybanya Colony. It was first of all completely different from any of the schools of the day. Marking themselves off both the Julian Academy of Paris and the Munich Academy, the founders acted upon a prophetic creed, they were steadfast priests of art. They had a fundamental love of nature, in seeking to find a connection between man and nature.
And there were certain extraordinary conditions: the initiative had a respected “leader” in the person of Simon Hollosy and had full support from the town council of the time; furthermore the public received the artists into the town, soon taking it as natural to have all the artists working everywhere and that paintings found their way into not only middle‑class but also working class homes!
The artist became a member of the family… And lastly, though I should have said this first, the “genius loci”, the landscape, which is particularly captivating and special… (Balazs Feledy, 1996)
On Starting Out as an Artist
“The requirements were to a certain extent the same: you could not feel the difference in demand between Nagybanya and the Kolozsvar Academy of Fine Arts.
Teachers at Kolozsvar were familiar with Nagybanya and some even recalled Simon Hollosy, like Sandor Mohy who had visited Nagybanya and incorporated some of the teachings of Hollosy in his pedagogical method.
There were however great differences in teaching between Bucharest and Kolozsvar. Bucharest had a French‑like school, a French‑like idea of training; there it was always the artistic element that was stressed, while at Kolozsvar it was craftsmanship.
It might have been better to fuse the two, because acquiring the skills was important, but you needed the freedom of the individual, as well, which was given more scope in Bucharest.
Let me give an example. A great greyness, restrained and contained colurs were characteristic of Kolozsvar.
Now, I was in my fourth year and I entered and was accepted for a regional exhibition with my college teachers. In spite of being a sculptor 1 submitted a painting. On that piece, the far more modern Nagybanya influence was clearly felt; my colleagues liked the painting for its being more colorful than those of the Kolozsvar people.
Somehow I had this in my veins; it is no virtue of my own because I grew up in Nagybanya; this is what I always saw; this ruddiness has somehow become my blood.” (Gyorgy Szucs, 1995)
Tradition and Renewal
“For all its advantages, the Nagybanya heritage is burdensome for us because many people ‑ especially foreigners ‑expect us to work in the style of our great predecessors. But to demand such is nonsense, because time never stops, everything develops and is brought up to date, even the way an artist thinks and sees, and therefore even his expression changes.
Let me note that members of the second generation of the Colony, after having acquainted themselves with the new schools of modern painting, worked in a far more modern style than the founders had. It is only natural that we,later descendants, should also try to make use of the achievements in painting, which had enriched progressive modes of artistic expression in the past century.
From this point‑of‑view, the Nagybanya Colony is also quite heterogeneous. Its members stood for various “isms”, from realism to abstraction.
On only one hand, I can count the number of painters who love nature with an almost religious awe and work in the good old way, peeping on its every budge from behind the easel; who have no respect for fashionable currents and dare paint whatever their hearts and minds prompt them to paint. Well, these are the vanishing Nagybanya artists who hold on to tradition.” (Lajos David, 1996)