Getting Around Lajos Németh : The Myth of „Ordering Unicum” in the Art Historical Discourse of the 1990s

Simon, Bettina (2025) Getting Around Lajos Németh : The Myth of „Ordering Unicum” in the Art Historical Discourse of the 1990s. THEATRON: SZÍNHÁZTUDOMÁNYI PERIODIKA, 19 (4). pp. 53-61. ISSN 1418-9941

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Abstract

In his last book, published in 1992, Lajos Németh wrote that neo-avant-garde art posed an unresolved problem for Hungarian art history. In recent years, when evaluating research on the neo-avant-garde, art historians have recalled the tasks formulated by Németh as ones that have still not been accomplished. Although Lajos Németh assigned this task to the art historians of the future, his statement also conveys a critique of the present at the time, as well as of the period leading up to the political transition. In my study, I compare Lajos Németh’s opinion with the criticism articulated by Éva Forgács in the early 1990s on the neo-avant-garde. I argue that, due to the similarity of their perspectives, the art criticism of the period helps to concretise Lajos Németh’s general statements about the era. In other words, attempts to circumvent Lajos Németh contribute to substantiating his inevitability.

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