Oldal 248 [248]
ANDRÁS VISKY
— also comes up." Purcärete and Sirli also reminisce about the Szőnyi sa¬
lon, attended by every artist who counted, and whose main attraction was
the Szőnyi daughters. Ihe Szőnyi girls, sighs Sirli: they glided through the
assembly like Etruscan goddesses and disappeared behind one of the doors,
leaving deep silence and the discreet sighs of desire behind them. Sándor Mohy
taught him his craft, Dragos continues, and the most important aspects ofthe
entire school year to him: the conversations in the studio. They inhaled the
cultural atmosphere of Europe as students, in Cluj. We chat about the artists
of the Nagybänya [Baia Mare] school, about Ziffer’s blue, and Thorma and
Ferenczy, about this concentration of talent and dialogue that came together
there, and from which Mohy also drew his own amiable-modern post-cubist
world, luxuriating in joyous colors. His cubism struck one as if he had tamed
Georges Braque to the exceedingly sedate Cluj. He was my own father’s draw¬
ing teacher in the Reformed Lyceum” of Szatmar;** my father spoke about
him to us a lot, and Id have been happy to inherit a Mohy canvas from him.
Purcarete looks Ziffer up on his smartphone, then Mohy, and we look at their
paintings all the way to Recas.
Helmut Stürmer“? wanted to become a painter, Andrei Serban and Georges
Banu“ actors; Purcärete is constantly drawing during rehearsals and at home,
here with a pen, there with a fine brush dipped in India ink, and he even paints
on canvas at times. Nothing is left behind by a director, he says, and now that
writing reviews has gone out of fashion, he cannot even count on a detailed
description of his productions: the textual future of the theater has completely
locked down as a possibility, at least for a while. His distress over his oeuvre’s
disappearance in the age of digital archives breaks his heart.
In recent years in Romania, directors, competing against each other, publish
albums one after the other, at times of spectacularly poor quality: unrefined
photos, blaring typographies, print production that washes shades of color
together, crushed and defaced hardcovers — all, of course, for a lot of money.
The directorial album-inflation is striking, but no matter: competition de¬
mands it. In university teaching, unusable or scarcely usable portfolios and ego
trips make their appearance, and these, too, before at most a tightly limited
theatrical public. These publications are more fulfillments of power, indeed,
collaboration between ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians in a part of Romania that
had been Hungary until 1920 is still not something to be taken for granted. In this case, the
ethnic Romanian Buhagiar has cited ethnic Hungarian artists as major influences.
Istvan Sz6nyi (1913-1967): artist, winner of the Romanian People’s Republic State Prize, not
to be confused with Istvan Szönyi, born Schmidt (1894-1960), the artist working in Hungary.
Julieta Ivanca Szényi Gigha (1949-): Romanian film actor.
In Hungarian gimndzium; in German Gimnasium.
Today: Satu Mare, Romania.
Helmut Stiirmer (1942-): ethnically German-Romanian production designer.
Georges Banu (1943-): Romanian theatrologist.
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