COURAGE

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Sándor Bernáth(y) was a painter, graphic designer, musician, founding member of the Bizottság (Committee) band, and member of the Vajda Lajos Studio. From 1975, he was an active participant of the avant-garde art scene. While he started his career as an autodidact painter, he was also tied to the underground music life from its very beginning: he designed street posters and book and record covers. For example, he was the one who designed the covers for ős-Bikini (ancient Bikini). From 1977, he was a member of the Leninvárosi Kísérleti Műhely (Leninváros Experimental Workshop), and in 1978, he joined Fölöspéldány csoport (Excess group). His first exhibition took place in 1981, at the Studio of the Young Artists’ Association. His paintings feature photographs published in various newspapers, enlarged, reinterpreted, and full of political and social criticism.

In 1980, András Wahorn, István ef Zámbó, and László feLugossy formed the band A.E. Bizottság (Committee), with Bernáth(y) as guitarist. During the initial period he was the one who organized many of the concerts, since he was the one with a telephone and an apartment in Pest, and they often built the equipment that was hard or impossible to acquire. While Bizottság became legendary over time, Bernáth(y) does not like to dwell on the past. As he put it in a 1997 interview: “I like to pay attention to the time I live in, I am interested in what I am doing right now. I do not even understand from where young people hear about Bizottság, and why they are interested in it.” At the time he was against re-releasing the two records as well. As he sees it, there were too many compromises: only a small portion of their repertoire was released, and even that was heavily censored. Meanwhile, Bizottság was more of a “a joke-dadaist artist band,” so their lyrics were not essentially political. Nonetheless, the process meant additional police reports, summons, and hearings. Due to their disagreement over the upcoming albums, after a concert where Bernáth(y) was deliberately playing on a untuned guitar and nobody mentioned a thing, he left the band.

Bernáth(y) was planning to give up his career as a musician altogether, but fate had other plans: shortly after he left Bizottság, he played in the bands Dr. Újhalnal, Matuska Silver Sound, and Szkárosi & Konnektor RT. While Matuska, launched in the middle of the ’80s, was not a particularly popular band, it was very important for Bernáth(y): with two of his friends, they started to make “machine music.” He was always interested in technology, and when he was a kid, he wanted to be mechanic, repairing and making radios. However, neither the public nor the authorities appreciated the music made with computers: for instance, one of the newspapers, Esti Hírlap (Evening Paper), wrote about it as an inhuman and antisocial phenomenon better avoided.

After the transition, Bernáth(y) had an important role in the development of Hungarian electronic music, and as such, he is one of the founding fathers of techno in Hungary. In the ’90s, he was the one who organized a “techno-tent,” Love Barricade, at the Sziget Festival. In 1994, he started a techno live act formation with his son, Zsiga, under the name Bernathy & Son, which is regarded as the first electronic live act in Hungary. They were active up until Bernáth(y)’s death in 2012, and performed at a number of Hungarian and foreign events. He also established the music club Supersonic, and later Vörös Yuk & Kék Yuk (Red Hole and Blue Hole). Around that time, he was the editor and art director of the art magazine Új Hölgyfutár (New Women’s Courier), and in the ’90s, he and his son were producing the art magazine Gépszava (The Machine’s Voice), focusing on techno culture. He also regularly appeared in documentaries about the topic, such as “Az egyén diadala” (The triumph of the individual) by Zsolt Füstös and “Patrik népe” (Patrick’s people) by Gábor Zsigmond Papp. In 2011, he has awarded the Mihály Munkácsy Prize.

Since the Middle Ages and until the Second World War, Bethlen was one of the most prominent noble families in Transylvania. Among its members one can find soldiers, politicians, diplomats, and scientists. The Bethlen family shares a centuries-old tradition of supporting the Hungarian culture in Transylvania by erecting churches, funding schools, and financing priests, teachers and students. Two branches of the family are known to scholars. Iktári Bethlens include among their members Gábor/Gabriel Bethlen, prince of Transylvania (1613-29). The other branch of family tree is the Bethlen de Bethlen/Beclean, which includes the Prime Minister of Hungary István Bethlen (1921-31), Béla Bethlen, the last government commissioner of Northern Transylvania under Hungarian administration during the Second World War, and György Bethlen, the president of the Hungarian National Party representing the Hungarian minority in Romania in the interwar period (Ablonczy et al. 2014; Bethlen and Romsics: 1989). Countess Anikó Bethlen, who lives in Târgu Mureș, is a present-day-descendant of this family. She was born in Cluj on 7 October 1938. Her father was Count Gábor Bethlen, an agronomist, and her mother, Éva Ferencz-Mihály, was a paediatrician. Her maternal grandfather, Zsigmond Ferencz-Mihály was legal adviser, while her maternal grandmother, Adrienne Bochkor, was the daughter of judge Mihály Bochkor. Paternal grandparents, Count Bálint Bethlen and Baroness Marianne Bánffy, were the owners of four estates, the former of Criș and Chiraleș, the latter of Ciuguzel and Sărmașu. Her grandmother’s brother, Baron Dániel Bánffy, was the Hungarian minister of agriculture in the period 1940-1944, when Northern Transylvania belonged to Hungary (Máthé 2016). After the Second Vienna Award, her father worked in the Transylvanian Hungarian Economic Association (Demeter and Venczel 1940; Farkas 2004; Hunyadi 2000) as secretary, and played an active role as organizer of public education lectures in villages. The family fled to Budapest in September 1944, when the front line approached Northern Transylvania. Meanwhile, her youngest sister Rózsa got brain inflammation and died at the age of sixteen in a nursing home. In August 1945, they returned home after two weeks spent on train. At this time, Anikó Bethlen got the polio virus that would affect her for lifetime.  Upon their return, the family had no other choice but to live on the estate of Șincai, which had been spared by the 1945 land reform, unlike the paternal grandparent’s estates and properties, which were placed under the CASBI [Casa de Administrare și Supraveghere a Bunurilor Inamice – Agency for Handling Enemy Assets] administration (Vincze 2000) with the apparent goal of keeping them safe. From 1945 to 1949, the seriously ill Anikó remained in Târgu Mureș with her maternal grandparent, while the rest of the family won its subsistence with manual labour on the family estate in Șincai. On 3 March 1949, the family was forcibly relocated to Târgu Mureș, where they had to live under house arrest [domiciliu obligatoriu] for fourteen and a half years. The persecutions against the family also meant professional restrictions and implicit deprivations of the means of subsistence. Anikó’s mother taught health at the local apprentice school, then she worked with the Division of Pediatric Pulmonology, then became a school doctor in the art school and eventually got a position as family doctor in a district. Her father only got a job after the house arrest sentence expired in 1963 in the remote region of Dobrogea, near the lake Razelm, but returned later to Transylvania and worked in the villages nearby Odorheiu Secuiesc (Oláh-Gál 2011). In March 1946, the grandmother enrolled Anikó Bethlen to the Reformed elementary school of Târgu Mureș. After the forcible suppression of confessional schools in 1948, she went to the former Jewish school in today’s Horea street, where she attended compulsory primary education. After seven classes, she was denied the right to continue her studies as the director of the Hungarian-language high-school bluntly stated that until he would be in charge, “a countess Bethlen won’t be allowed to go to school there.” The family decided to move her to a physiotherapy hospital in Sibiu, where she lived among the Saxon and the Romanian communities between 1952 and 1954. The ideological thaw which followed the death of Stalin allowed her to successfully complete her studies in the same high-school in front of a special commission led by the Transylvanian intellectual and left-wing political activist Edgár Balogh, himself just released from prison in this new political context. Following the survival technique which her family developed during the time of persecution – her grandmother Marianne Bánffy used to give private lessons of foreign languages – Anikó Bethlen started teaching French, German and English to the children of the local party leadership. She also taught such lessons to retired and elderly people who wanted to leave the country. Teaching fees were the only source of her subsistence until 1989, although her disability entitled her to a financial support from the communist state, which was nonetheless denied to her on political grounds. During the entire communist period, the intervention of relatives living abroad made it repeatedly possible for her to travel to Switzerland for treatment. It is important to notice that these repeated exit visas granted by the communist authorities were not conditioned by a collaboration with the secret police, as it was customary in Romania. Her file of informative surveillance, which is currently preserved in the Archives of CNSAS, illustrate that she was constantly observed by the Securitate during the 1970s and the 1980s. Countess Bethlen was subjected to operative surveillance, which means that the secret police used informants to collect information about her and her activities, listened her phone calls, retained her private correspondence, and sometimes provoked her with anonymous letters. She was warned twice by the local branch of the Securitate in Târgu Mureș, in 1981 and 1984, for allegedly carrying out a "hostile activity against the regime." owever, the secret police monitored rather her relations abroad than her activity of collecting (ACNSAS I0264646/1-7; I82862/4; R229601/4; R310575/2-4). As for her opinion on the communist regime, Countess Bethlen is rather silent, considering the sufferings she and her family had to endure. Under communism, such attitude was largely adopted by most of those who experienced traumatic events in the family. For them, silence represented an “attitude of defence” to gradually become a “way of life” (Mihăilescu 2006, 170).

After the 1989 revolution, she got a compensatory pension granted to formerly dislocated citizens, and in the 1990s she established the Bethlen Foundation to support disabled people. Following the family tradition, she used her experience and financial resources to help those who suffer from physical disabilities. The foundation also operated a bookbinding workshop in Târgu Mureș. The Countess Bethlen reckons among the property of the foundation all the objects belonging to the collection. 

István Bibó (1911–1979) was a Hungarian civil servant, politician, and political theorist. He came from a Calvinist intellectual background. His father was the director of the university library in Szeged, and he married the daughter of a Reformed Church bishop. In 1934, he received his doctorate from the Faculty of Political and Legal Studies at the University of Szeged. He then pursued studies in Vienna and Geneva. During his student years in Hungary, he wrote several studies on law and freedom; during his studies abroad in Vienna and Geneva, he attended lectures by the legal theorist Hans Kelsen and the philosopher and historian Guglielmo Ferrero.
In 1938, he became a notary at the Budapest Court of Justice. It was at this time that he came into contact with the Márciusi Front (“March Front”), a left-wing association of so-called népi (populist) writers and university students. He became a member of the Philosophical Society, giving his inaugural lecture on “Ethics and Criminal Law,” and in 1940 he began giving lectures at the University of Szeged. From 1942 to 1944 he wrote a lengthy essay “On European Balance and Peace.” It was later influential, but initially unpublished. In this essay, he analyzed post-World War I social development in Europe. In 1944, following the German occupation of Hungary, he drew up “Plans for a Peace Proposal,” which was intended to serve as a framework for postwar domestic arrangements and for the redress of social disharmony. In 1944 and 1945, he handed out exemption papers to hundreds of Jews and other persecuted individuals, and for this he was arrested and forcibly suspended from his post. When he was released, he had to go into hiding.
In 1945, Ferenc Erdei, the Minister of the Interior in the interim national government (himself a sociologist and a peasant-populist [népi] writer), appointed Bibó as head of the ministry’s administration department. In this role, Bibó helped draft the new electoral law, and he wrote a memoir criticizing the expulsion of members of the German-speaking minority from Hungary. In 1946, he was appointed professor of political science at the University of Szeged, and a year later he became an administrator for the Institute for Eastern European Studies. Meanwhile, he published a series of incisive essays on the problems faced in Hungarian and East Central European societies. His essays “A magyar demokrácia válsága” ( “The Crisis of Hungarian Democracy”; 1945) and “Zsidókérdés Magyarországon 1944 után” ( “The Jewish Question in Hungary since 1944”; 1948) and his treatise A kelet-európai kisállamok nyomorúsága ( “The Misery of Small Eastern European States”; 1946) were recognized as cornerstones of modern Hungarian political thinking by the dissident intellectual movements of the 1980s. The communist regime, however, disapproved of Bibó’s ideas and activities, and in 1950, he was asked to retire. In 1951, he took up an independent position as librarian at the Eötvös Loránd University Library in Budapest.
During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Bibó acted as the Minister of State for Imre Nagy’s second government. When the Soviets invaded on November 4 and then crushed the revolution, he was the last minister left at his post in the Hungarian parliament building. Rather than flee, he remained in the building for another two days and wrote his famous proclamation, “For Freedom and Truth,” as he awaited arrest. Later, he also prepared a proposal for “a compromise to solve the Hungarian question,” which he intended to pass to the Soviet leaders through the mediation services of the Indian embassy and President Nehru. When he was arrested in May 1957, he was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, but he was released in 1963 according to an amnesty. However, hundreds of his fellow-prisoners, mostly young 1956-ers, students, and workers sentenced to life in prison were not released under the allegedly “general” amnesty under the pretext that they were simple criminals and not political prisoners. For many years, Bibó tried to help them regain their liberty by sending letters of complaint to the High Court of Hungary and Party-Secretary János Kádár himself, and even by trying to persuade, through clandestine channels, his Western contacts to launch public solidarity campaigns for the liberation of revolutionaries who were still being held in prison. He put himself at great personal risk by doing this, but not with much success: most of the people in question were released no earlier than the early 1970s.
After having spent six years in prison, Bibó took a job in the Library of the Central Office of Statistics, and he lived a quiet family life. He remained under the close watch of the communist secret police for the rest of his life, and he was not permitted to publish his works in Hungary. However, a few years before he died, he managed finally to publish a book in England “illegally,” i.e. without the approval of the Hungarian censors: The Paralysis of International Institutions and the Remedies. The book was published by Harvester Press, Hassocks in 1976. Bibó was not permitted to travel to the West, though the University of Geneva, of which Bibó as a student was a grantee, offered him a research fellowship; his request for a passport was repeatedly rejected according to the standard formula: “Your travel would offend the public interests of the Hungarian People’s Republic.”
In the last years of his life, Bibó took a certain satisfaction in seeing that his earlier political studies were becoming more and more popular among some young historians and dissident intellectuals in Hungary. His friends and followers intended to publish a book in celebration of his 70th birthday. Preparations were well underway when, in May 1979, Bibó died of a heart attack, six weeks after his wife died.

Painter. Studied at the University of Fine Arts, in Géza Fónyi’s class (1959-1965). Later, taught at the Secondary School of Visual Arts (1966-1984). In the early years of his career, he painted portraits, but he later rejected these pictures.

Around the end of the 1960s, he came under the influence of existentialist philosophy. In the 1970s, he was interested in French structuralism. In his art, this led him first to paint hyperrealist pictures and later to make conceptually motivated paintings.

In the middle of the 1970, orienting himself toward the underground scene, he gave up painting and turned toward the medium of photography. He became concerned with the picture as object and role. He was interested in three subjects: the situation of the picture (its relationship to the wall, the frame and, to viewer), the relationship between image and text, and the portrait.

He performed his famous lecture at the Rabinec sttudio at the beginning of the 1980s (Who is the victim? Who is the culprit? and What is to be done?), in which he declared that “avantgarde is dead,” and “we can rethink a lot of things.”

He started to paint again and integrated into the trend of New Painting, framed by “new sensitivity” theoretized and managed by Lóránd Hegyi. He painted gesture-based landscapes at first and then large-scale ellipses, positioned on divided panels.

At the end of the 1990s, he returned to realist painting. In these new pictures, he reflected on the “vital, communicative, amazingly rich, and very problematic photo-based world of images” (amateur, press, commercial, video, television, etc.).

His works are featured in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, MUMOK, Vienna, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Neue Galerie, Linz, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Kiscelli Museum and the Hungarian National Gallery.