Fragments (1964)

János Major studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts between 1952-1954, where his master was Béla Bán. Major was expelled from the college and worked at the Orion factory from 1954 to 1956. Then Károly Koffán took him back to the Graphic Arts Department. After graduating from the college, he turned with great interest to the technical renewal of etching. This method is considered the equivalent of the so-called "retraction" or "cupping" in the painting of the period, and refers to the technical experiments of the surrealists, especially Max Ernst. He worked on each element of the print separately, even using different techniques, engraving one, scratching or etching another. In creating independent units within the picture, he followed the Pop Art practice of image-making, although in 1960 he could not have been familiar with the work of the great artists of the movement.

His etching, Fragments, is the preparatory work for his major work of 1966, The Memory of Móric Scharf (I-II). He had found the scene that is the motif of his entire oeuvre: the cemetery. The motifs here are difficult to decipher without knowing the later works. For example, the two falling bombs next to the window frame. Or the significance of the window motif itself in Major's art. From the Renaissance onwards, the window functions both as a picture plane and as a frame, and the picture itself 'plays' behind the frame, while the viewer stands in front of the picture plane and the frame. But the window frame can also fulfil the function of a picture frame in another way. Here the artist does not lead the viewer into the far distance, into the landscape of the pictorial world, but in an unusual way towards us, the viewers. A new element in the etching of Fragments is the omission of a phrase, which in its function is very reminiscent of the typical form of textual understanding of the period, the "reading between the lines". In comparison with the later Scharf, it is clear that the blank space before the inscription 'was in love with a writer of the same origin' indicates the absence of a Jewish adjective. Major's work has been associated with the thought of Allen Ginsberg, who was not yet known in Hungary at the time. There are many points of almost astonishing similarity between Allen Ginsberg's poem Kaddis Naomi for Ginsberg and Major Scharf's etching of Móric's Memory by Major.

Dániel Véri: "Did I become a graphic designer by accident?" Reproduced prints by János Major in the 1960s. In Ars Hungarica 2014/2.