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ANDRÁS VISKY — also comes up." Purcärete and Sirli also reminisce about the Szőnyi salon, 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 drawing 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 demands 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. 41 42 43 44 45 + 246 +
