Arts and Letters

Zoltan Sepeshy was elected to the Institute in 1949. He never came here, in my memory. He lived and worked in Michigan, where he was Resident Artist at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, founded by Carl Milles and Eliel Saarinen. He became Director on the death of Saarinen, in 1947.

Zoltan and I showed our work, in New York, at the same dealer's gallery and occasionally we sent each other greetings, but we met only a few times.

Sepeshy was born in Kassa, Hungary in 1898. When he came here at the age of 23, he had already a Master of Arts degree from the Budapest Academy, toward which he had mixed feelings. The particular character of his Hungarian background had significance for him. He was an articulate artist, and he wrote a piece for the American Magazine of Art, in 1945, about himself, which I will paraphrase. It is called "I Don't Like Labels."

He said, "I suppose that if I were a Freudian I might find that my mistrust of fixed and dogmatic judgment has its roots in my childhood and adolescence. Certainly, everything was securely and neatly labeled for me in my native city of Kassa, then North Hungary. ‘The Austro-Hungarian Empire is the most beautiful place in the world to be born into. The Austro-Hungarian Empire is the most blessed place to be born into. The Austro-Hungarian Empire is… etc., etc.' This liturgy was dinned into my ears at the beginning (and end) of every school session. For, unlike the successful American who always works his way up from a log cabin, I was born into 'land,' money, and assured position. The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the 1900s was indeed the most wonderful of places—for the few who were at the top in its semi-feudal society.

"I feel that my inverted Alger-book youth—from fortune to poverty—rescued me from a smug acceptance of the art traditions into which I was drifting in my post-graduate career. I broke away from the set of labels that might have enmeshed me for good.

"When fortune, the security of tradition, living in the cozy pleasantness of an inherited situation had gone with the wind, and I came home—here—fate afforded me the sweet opportunity for hard work. And I mean hard work. So while 'going through the wringer'—and this is not a point of pride but plain diagnosis—of doing for a few years what were to me such very 'odd' jobs as stacking lumber, whitewashing walls, window trimming, architectural drafting, selling 'popular' booklets and real-estate in Hungarian, German, and Slovak around poor foreign settlements, selling my sketches out of a suitcase to lawyers and doctors in downtown offices, I painted with a vengeance. I painted not floral table set-ups, manicured scenery, happy little people, but railroad bridges, factories, grimy city scenes, and, through the generosity of a good friend, even Indians in New Mexico.

"That was some time ago.

"After eight or ten years of this, I began to exhibit, talk, like, dislike, paint, teach, and even sell in English. Or I should rather say in American. I married a blond American girl. As blond and genuine as a sand dune, and I have two children, as crossed as a field full of flowers. I began to paint the dunes, fishermen, Main Street, the seasons, farms and maidens, the Great Lakes and the insides of industrial plants, murals, private and otherwise. And I painted one way or another. So you see I don't like labels, or the belief that there is only one thing to paint, and only one way to do it and be happy.

"I know a man who sees social significance in everything. He may be absolutely right—he is absolutely boring. I have noticed that his own appetite is excellent. What I feel about him, I also feel about those of my fellow workers who pride themselves upon their one-way consciousness."

There are restrictive labels besides those of subject matter, e.g., the familiar one of "method." Painters tell us that they are abstractionists, expressionists, cubists, realists and surrealists, non-objectivists, and naturalists, etc. Such words are valid enough to describe certain methods, but to select one as the only road to genuine art is the height of fatuity. It is to hypothesize one tool among many.

"Well," says Sepeshy, "I don't want to be too dogmatic about the whole matter, I like paintings of all kinds, American, Hungarian, Slovakian, French, romantic, idealistic. I just don't like the same painting painted over and over again. In my own work there has been constant experimentation."

Zoltan Sepeshy had many awards and honors and his work has been widely collected. I only wish that we, here, could have known him!