Despite war, internment, family tragedy and emigration, John Kurz continued to draw, paint and explore new art forms.
By: Megan Sullivan
In the wake of World War II, artist John Kurz and his family left their homeland in Hungary and began a long and arduous path to America. He and his wife, Margit, two children, Peter and Tibor, and mother-in-law, Teréz Szabó, spent four years in the American Occupation Zone of Germany and in displaced persons camps.
Even as a refugee, however, Mr. Kurz still clung to his identity as an artist. He made small drawings and paintings of the villages there and did pencil portraits of American soldiers, which he gave away in exchange for food and other goods. Or, he would capture something as simple as his mother-in-law cooking a meal in the kitchen.
"It seems that he had a compulsion to capture the landscape," says Patricia Fazekas, curator of the Museum of the American Hungarian Foundation in New Brunswick. "He was very prolific and really just cranked out art wherever he went, and it shows that he was really dedicated to his craft."
The museum’s exhibit, From Budapest to Allentown: A Hungarian Artist in America, documents Mr. Kurz’s journey as both an artist and a man, and runs through Sept. 2. "What really captivated me about this saga of Kurz’s life was how he got to America," Ms. Fazekas says. "He spent eight years in Brazil waiting for a visa. The exhibit covers not only the different types of work that he did, but what he did in the various places in which he lived."
A small group of photographs by Ferenc Aszmann accompanies the exhibit, a last-minute addition after Ms. Fazekas drew a connection between the photographer and Mr. Kurz. They were both born in Hungary in 1907 and both immigrated to Rio de Janeiro around the same time. Not only did they know each other, it turns out Mr. Kurz’s eldest son, Peter, took a photography class with Mr. Aszmann in Brazil as a child.
Ms. Fazekas hustled to get the photos re-matted and cleaned up, as the donated works had been sitting in someone’s attic for nearly 30 years. The vintage, silver gelatin prints were taken in Hungary around World War II and printed in Rio. Some capture scenes of Hungarian plains, the countryside and shepherds in their wooly coats. The most famous, however, is "Vision," in which a naked man looks up at a towering figure of a naked women she illuminated with light as his figure is cast in a shadow. It took considerable darkroom technique during that time to superimpose images as he did. The different exhibitions "Vision" traveled to are listed on the back it was shown in 41 locations from Japan to Russia to Boston before the donor acquired it.
Unlike Mr. Aszmann, Mr. Kurz was never able to make a living from his art alone. "To survive, he always had one, two or sometimes three ‘paying jobs,’" says Peter Kurz, who graduated from Princeton University in 1964. "Yet he always, everywhere, drew and sketched and painted."
The Kurz family left Germany for Brazil in 1949 and joined an active group of Hungarian expatriates who lived in Rio de Janeiro. During their long wait for visas, Mr. Kurz worked as a freelance artist, commercial artist and teacher while he held down other jobs to pay the bills and feed his growing family. Three more children were born: Marta, Tim and Tom.
Tragically, Margit died while giving birth to their fifth child. Six months later, the visas came.
Ms. Szabó had died as well, leaving Mr. Kurz alone to care for his five children. He had to leave his youngest child behind, to live temporarily with another family, and the rest of the clan arrived in New York in December of 1957. They eventually settled in Allentown, Pa., where Mr. Kurz lived until his death in 1990.
During his artistic career, Mr. Kurz began with realism and ended in abstraction. Ms. Fazekas wishes the artist were still alive, so she could ask him how moving from place to place may have influenced his artwork. Peter believes the shift wasn’t necessarily deliberate. "He was basically always interested in a great variety of media as well as themes," says Peter, who lives in Maryland. "Even when he was not doing realism, he was working with different topics, subjects and materials that’s a common theme throughout his entire life.
"He was classically trained by some of the great artists of the early 20th century Europe, specifically Hungary," he continues. "After classical training, primarily in figure drawing and painting, he obviously set out to explore and explore in many different ways. Ultimately, in the latter parts of his life, that sort of focused on serigraphs and lithographs."
Born János Antal Kurz in Budapest in 1907, he first became interested in art as an apprentice in his uncle’s woodworking and furniture shop in Belgrade. After graduating from a public gimnázium, he studied painting and the French language in Paris in 1929. Upon his return to Hungary, Mr. Kurz attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Pages from his report booklet also are on display, showing that Mr. Kurz had more than 40 to 50 hours of tutelage each week, including 20 or more hours weekly with Hungarian greats István Csók, Oszkár Glatz, Gyula Rudnay and others. He simultaneously studied French language and literature with Francios Gachot, the future French cultural attaché to Budapest.
When Mr. Kurz graduated in 1935, he remained for another year of post-graduate study, while he exhibited works in Budapest and Munich. He also had a rich cultural life some of his early school acquaintances included the well-known Hungarian poet Sándor Weores and artist Árpád Illés.
The New Brunswick exhibit starts with a group of Mr. Kurz’s portraits, including a self-portrait that reflects his academic training. "Given the fact that he was a refugee of World War II, it’s amazing that some of these things have survived at all," Ms. Fazekas says of his early portraits. "The fact that there are a few pieces like this remaining probably tells us that they were very important to him."
While he did later shift into abstraction, Mr. Kurz returned to portraiture periodically throughout his life. He often painted his family, and some beautiful examples are on view here, including one of his son Peter as a young boy, that of his first wife, Margit, and two sketches of his second wife, artist Barbara Le Munyan.
In Rio, Mr. Kurz primarily did landscapes, working mostly in oils or pencil or charcoal drawings, capturing the impressive trees and vegetation found in Rio’s parks and gardens. One of his favorite places to sketch was the Jardim Botanico, Rio’s magnificent botanical gardens, and the woods of Tijuca, on the way to Corcovado. Two of the sketches on view depict the razing of Morro do Santo Antonio, a fairly large hill in downtown Rio, and with the resulting dirt, the creation of new beaches and parks.
"Our living area always smelled of oil paints or the liquids used to clean the brushes, a task often delegated to my brother or to me," Peter recalls. Mr. Kurz used to work on different topics for weeks and months at a time, Peter most specifically remembering an entire series of sketches, drawings and small studies in oil of pink flamingos his father did in preparation for a commissioned work. These required many visits to the Jardim Zoologico, where he and his brother would also sketch.
The focal point of the exhibit is a section displaying four oil paintings, one for each place Mr. Kurz and his family lived. "His landscapes have a lot in common," Ms. Fazekas says. "They seem to use the compositional device of a path or a road, going back into space frequently."
In "Rua Propícia, Rio" (1951), people walk along a dirt path in a small town, the architecture much more ornate and brightly colored than that in the less sharply detailed "Tabáni utca, Budapest." In the latter, Ms. Fazekas sees the geometric shapes, the flat rectangles and triangles of the buildings, as a hint of what was to come in the artist’s later works. In "Conestoga Street, Bethlehem," a stone bridge leads over into a small neighborhood, telephone poles and wires signifying a more urbanized setting.
Another section of the exhibit displays Mr. Kurz’s paintings of enigmatic faces and figures, in which the idea of a path often is still present. None of the faces meet the viewer’s gaze, and all wear far off expressions, projecting a sense of emptiness.
In one particular piece, which Mr. Kurz did right before leaving Brazil, a face gazes over his shoulder to look back at a group of naked, abstract figures in the distance. "You kind of wonder whether he’s visually referring to his flight from Hungary and the life that he left behind," Ms. Fazekas muses.
Once established in Allentown, Mr. Kurz taught German language and literature at William Allen High School and earned a master’s degree in education at Kutztown State College while continuing his art. In the 1970s, he taught figure drawing in his home studio. Several of his expressive nudes are on view, some ripped straight from his sketchbooks.
From then on, Mr. Kurz experienced an abstract departure through mixed media works and serigraphs. His collages often employ overlapping geometric shapes in brightly colored, cut or torn paper. Several serigraphs were done as series pieces, exploring a single theme in different ways, such as his more famous series "Redface." Sometimes he would enhance monoprints or serigraphs with oil crayon for added color and texture.
He actively participated in the artistic life of the Lehigh Valley and received a number of local art awards. His work was shown in the exhibitions of the Lehigh Art Alliance, the Doshi Center for Contemporary Art in Harrisburg, the Doylestown Art League and the Allentown Museum, as well as shows in Atlanta and Houston.
While more than 100 of Mr. Kurz’s works are on display, that’s only a small sampling of his art. Peter estimates he possesses nearly 2,000 pieces of his father’s artwork, including sketchbooks, but that is still a small portion of what he created during the 56 years after he completed his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
"Art was an obsession," Peter says. "He used anything and everything available: pen, pencil, ballpoint pen, crayon, chalk, brush. His works were on paper, cardboard, canvas and even pages from old phone books. He was driven an artist in every sense of the word."
From Budapest to Allentown: A Hungarian Artist in America, John Kurz, 1907-1990, is on view at the Museum of the American Hungarian Foundation, 300 Somerset St., New Brunswick, through Sept. 2. Museum hours: Tues.-Sat. 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Sun. 1-4 p.m. Suggested donation: $5. (732) 846-5777.