Who doesn’t know what Campbell’s tomato soup can looks like, or Marilyn Monroe’s pink face and green hair? Andy Warhol engraved them deeply in our memory. Like Roy Lichtenstein, he enlarged his comic book scenes with his characteristic black-yellow-red colors.
However, it is little known that in the pop art world of the 60s and 70s, similarly talented artists worked here as well, several of them employed as advertising graphic designers – showing the wonderful taste of Orient Mocha (István Bakos) or the excellent Biopoint, which even removes the stripes of the tiger, known as a dangerous predator (György Kemény). Then there are the exciting pop art cinema and concert posters created by Lajos Görög, András Máté, and Árpád Darvas during that period.
The list of artists is much longer than this, and the owners of the collection, Badits Marcell, alias Poster Boy, and the Múzeum Antikvárium had plenty to choose from. In the Marczibányi Square Cultural Center The exhibition, open from April 25, i.e. Thursday, offers an insight into the golden age of pop art through the works of the most famous Hungarian artists.
Source: Facebook/Posterboy
“Our aim is not to present all the creators and segments of Hungarian pop art, but rather to focus on posters and poster art. The currently exhibited selection of around 30 pieces also includes advertising, film and concert posters, it is true that all of them are applied graphics, but the artists were given a free hand, the rest were not even included in the advertising posters at the time,” he told Narancs.hu Badits Marcell.
Pop art started in Hungary in the mid-sixties, and from then on, this artistic trend appears in the work of more and more artists.
The exhibited concert posters advertise the mainstream bands of the time: Gemini, Illés, Omega, Hungária. “The strongest is probably that of Gemini, which became very pop art,” says Badits.
Source: Facebook/Poster Boy
Three posters of different sizes can be seen at the exhibition: the Biopon advertisement with the tiger is the largest, which is an 80 by 120 centimeter pillar poster. There will also be two movie posters of this size, “which is very, very rare, as these were usually stuck on, then the next poster was stuck on top of it, and finally it was all taken off and it went to the garbage dump,” says Marcell Badits.
The old concert posters are especially valuable because most of them were destroyed: only a few, 6-700 of them were printed, no more were needed. “It was also very Budapest-centric, an Omega or an Illés concert didn’t have to be advertised in Szeged, because it was in Pest, something like that didn’t reach other cities. But I don’t think it’s likely, for example, that Kemény’s Biopon poster would have been out in the big cities in the countryside.”
From a legacy, from under plaster
Where do these old posters come from? The biopono was found, for example, in the basement of an elementary school: a huge stack of papers was just about to be burned, and it contained it. “It was lucky that the person who received these to light them, because they are paper and burn well, looked inside and saw what was inside. They contacted me, I went to Tokaj and bought the entire collection, as it was”, says Badits, to whom the posters are mostly inherited.
I always look at the pieces in person, so you can see any flaws, but also the advantages of the poster. And when I’m there, the conversation starts, from which we often learn the origin story of the poster.”
It is common for someone to buy or inherit a house, and suddenly a collection of posters emerges from it, or the former collector goes to a nursing home and finds the posters in the closet, among clothes. “But, for example, there was a house with posters under the plaster. Unfortunately, they were already in an irreparably bad condition.”
And who were these former collectors? Mainly people working in cinemas and community centers: cinema mechanics, janitors, community center or cinema managers. They buried these posters more as a memory. They put it in the closet, collected it there, and then when the cinema closed, they took the collection home, packed it here and there, and finally it was left to the heirs or the new house owner. “If people knew what would be valuable, then everyone would put it away. But it is very difficult to know this 30-40 years in advance.”
Source: Facebook/Posterboy
Badits knows about ten or twenty serious poster collectors here. As he says
some are both dealers and collectors, some deal with both paintings and posters, others only collect a certain segment of posters.
There is, for example, a very big collector who specializes in posters dealing with Lake Balaton, others are lovers of pre-war film or commercial posters.
It should be a traveling exhibition
The value of these posters is constantly increasing, as fewer and fewer of them are found, especially in good condition. A lot of posters were destroyed in the Second World War, and the Rákosi era didn’t do them any good either: they didn’t represent any value, and even if they didn’t persecute the person who kept a pre-war poster at home, that person would rather poke them.
Source: Facebook/Poster Boy
Badits Marcell sees that Hungarian poster art is minimally or not at all known abroad. “Since the regime change, no cultural government has devoted even minimal money to this.” According to Badits, a traveling exhibition could introduce the international audience to the special world and artistic value of Hungarian posters.
“In America there are two poster dealers even in a small town, while we have five in the whole country, but they don’t just deal with posters either.
A collector from New York will only come to Hungary to select posters if we take them there first and show them our range.”
Pop Art that lives with us poster exhibition can be seen from April 25 to May 19 at the Marczibányi Tér Cultural Center.
Opening: Thursday, April 25 at 7 p.m
The exhibition will be opened by: Gergely Őrsi, the II. district mayor, art historian Eszter Szőnyeg-Szegvári, curator of the exhibition and graphic artist István Bakos
During the exhibition, on the evening of May 9, from 7:00 p.m., an auction of old posters will be held on site.
The greats of Hungarian pop art
István Bakos he completed his high school studies at the Art High School in Török Pál Street, where his teacher was the legendary László Balás Viski. Under the influence of Viski – just like his classmates Ákos Birkás or Gyula Konkoly – he decided to pursue a career in painting, so he continued his studies in this field at the College of Fine Arts, initially as a student of Bernáth Aurél. At the College, he was able to come into contact for a short time with György Konecsni, who taught there again at the end of his life (1965-1970), who had a significant impact on him and turned his artistic interest decisively towards the poster genre.
In the 1960s, the prominent role of photography was already evident in Bakos, with which he experimented a lot, and the integration of advertising photography became one of the easily identifiable trademarks of his posters. His works created in the spirit of pop art are unmistakable. Most often, on his commercial and movie posters, we can find his unique, bohemian graphics depicting a pop atmosphere, or his works reflecting the clear influence of Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. In 1995, he was awarded the Ferenczy Noémi Award.
György Kemény art historian Eszter Szőnyeg-Szegvári writes about his works: “Biopon, who is also effective on a tiger fur coat, the restless graphic artist of the poster for girls longing for a new bathing suit, designed a bridge made of dogs, a chair made of cans, and a face for Interpress Magazine and Fészek Művészklub. The most defining feature of his character is his eternal curiosity towards the world, from which he communicates his discoveries in an artistic final product matured through experimentation, often based on personal experience.”
The poster shown in our opening image is the work of György Kemény.
Tags: Pop Art Living exhibition movie advertising posters burned retinas
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