Olympia Auctions
Lot 1
GEORGE MAYER-MARTON (HUNGARIAN 1897-1960) ⊕ GEORGE MAYER-MARTON (HUNGARIAN 1897-1960) EVENING OVER THE FUNFAIR watercolour on paper 39.5 x 57.5cm; 15 1/2 x 22 3/4in unframed Painted in 1951. GEORGE MAYER-MARTON (LOTS 1-8) Introduction HIS APPEARANCE, ACCENT AND MANNER SPOKE OF A LOST AND TO US LARGELY UNKNOWN MITTELEUROPA. Always meticulously dressed in a suit and wearing a hat and polished shoes, he would arrive in the college with his leather briefcase and don his professional white coat. In Their Safe Haven', Hungarian artists in Britain from the 1930s, compiled and edited by Robert Waterhouse, the bleak story of George Mayer-Marton's dispossession is graphically pieced together from the artist's diaries and first hand accounts. Born in Györ, North Hungary, the artist's formative years had largely been spent in Austria and Germany. During the First World War he had served on the front line in the Austrian army, and - leading up to the Anschluss - he lived in Vienna, happily married and, as vice-president of the Hagenbund, he was a leading voice among contemporary artists. But with Hitler's annexation of the country at the end of September 1938 with Grete his wife he fled Vienna for London. Mayer-Marton's diaries evoke with withering honesty the reception he received and his despairing sense of dislocation: 'For the moment, London spells turmoil, noise, rows of double decker buses and a language one doesn't understand... We observe the English art of 'splendid isolation', their culture of bureaucratic niceties, good manners and cold souls; their complete consideration for others out of consideration for their own piece and quiet.' (Waterhouse, p. 74). Eventually the couple set up home and a studio in St John's Wood, only for the premises to be hit by an incendiary bomb in 1940 during the Blitz. In the ensuing fire Mayer-Marton lost the vast majority of the work he had brought with him. At the end of the War he learnt of the murder of his and Grete's parents together with his brother in the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly these horrors took a mental toll: all too much for Grete, she suffered a nervous breakdown and died in a psychiatric hospital in Epsom in 1952. Yet, despite such a succession of tragedies, Mayer-Marton remained resolutely determined. He strove to replace the works lost in the London bombing, not simply with copies but because he felt challenged by the very different light and landscape of the British countryside, his lightness of touch and deftness of colour are abundantly apparent in the present selection of works. He was also appointed a senior lecturer at Liverpool College of Art, a post in which he flourished. His Liverpool students recalled Mayer-Marton's innovative approach to teaching. He introduced weekly 'Socratic method' seminars, challenging students with rhetorical questions ranging from 'Kant's moral imperative to Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory, the scientific ideas of Einstein, concepts of the primitive in art, abstraction, expressionism, the medieval guilds and so on... these seminars were a decade before the history and theory of art were incorporated into art school curricula in the 1960s' (Waterhouse, pp. 212-213). In Liverpool he also introduced new technical know-how, in particular fresco painting and the re-introduction of Byzantine-style mosaic practices. These he deployed in a series of large scale ecclesiastical commissions in the north-west, including the large Crucifixion mural at the former church of the Holy Rosary, Oldham (1955), Pentecost now in Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, and the Crowning of St Clare at St Clare's Church, Blackley. Small dogear upper left corner. There is slight wear to edges of paper. Otherwise this work is in good original condition.
