User:Hungarian David Biro/sandbox


 * works = in museums:Houston Museum of Fine Art

The Albertina, Vienna

The Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

The Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem

The British Museum

Ilka Gedő (26 May 1921 — 19 June 1985) was a Hungarian painter and graphic artist.Her work survives decades of persecution and repression, first by the semi-fascist regime of the 1930’s and 1940’s and then, after a brief interval of relative freedom between 1945 and 1949, by the communist regime of the 1950’s to 1989. In the first stage of her career that came to an end in 1949 she created a huge number of drawings that can be divided into various series. From 1964 on, she resumed her artistic activities creating oil paintings. Ilka Gedő is one of the solitary masters of Hungarian art. She is bound to neither the avant-garde nor traditional trends. Her matchless creative method makes it impossible to compare her with other artists.

Early life and training
Ilka Gedő (1921-1985) was born from the marriage of Simon Gedő and Elza Weiszkop on 26 May 1921. Her father taught at the Jewish grammar school of Budapest, while her mother was an office clerk with unfulfilled literary ambitions. Some of the leading Hungarian writers and artists of the times were among the family’s circle of friends. Ilka Gedő was raised in a family, where she had every opportunity to become an educated and sensitive artist. She went to a secondary school bearing the name Új Iskola (New School) that adopted the modern pedagogical methods of group work and project-based teaching.

Ilka Gedő started drawing on her own without the help of a teacher and by the time of late adolescence she had become a graphic artist with routine and capable of expressing her talent. Since her early childhood, she had been continuously drawing recording her experiences continuously in a visual diary in which dates and the scenes were always carefully registered. Her juvenilia sketchbooks have been completely preserved.

At the age of 17, she travelled to a mountain village called Bakonybél. She spent a few weeks at the house of the elementary school teacher of the local school. In 1939 she passed the final examinations of grammar-school. By age 19, Ilka Gedő who remained focused on figuration in her drawings and who was regarded a drawing child prodigy, had become an artist with a refined mastery of graphic art. She seriously considered starting her artistic studies in Paris, but the war interfered, and due to the Jewish laws she could not go to the Hungarian Academy of Art.

During the war, she made a living by doing ceramics, but she never stopped creating her series of graphics. From the late 30’s till the early 40’s Ilka Gedő was taught by three artists of Jewish origin who were killed by the Nazis at the end of the war. First she visited the drawing school of Tibor Gallé (1896-1944) follwing which she went to Szentendre a small town on the banks of the river Danube in the vicinity of Budapest. She worked under the guidance of Viktor Erdei (1879-1944). The artist created hundred works on paper in pencil and pastel which is remarkable because of their lively and strong colour world. During 1942-1943 she studied at the private school of István Örkényi Strasser (1911-1944). Through his school and exhibitions he was connected with the OMIKE (Hungarian Jewish Educational Association).