László Lakner: Seamstresses Listen to Hitler's Speech (1960)

The Museum of Fine Arts is holding a special showcase exhibition to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of the Hungarian art world's "classicist of the avant-garde", long-term Berlin resident László Lakner: his early masterpiece Seamstresses Listen to Hitler's Speech (1960) - unseen for many decades, and only recently dramatically brought to light - is finally going on public display for the very first time. It would have been impossible to display such a work in Budapest in 1960. Hungarian society under the regime of János Kádár was yet to face up to the repressed trauma of the Holocaust. This artist - very young at the time - defied the collective amnesia, and his provocative painting posed uncomfortable questions and urged reflection on the past, challenging the responsibility of the individual - it touched on issues that had been swept under the carpet of public social discourse. Hungary has still not dealt fully with these suppressed traumas, and the potential threatening consequences of this have an effect even on today's society. This makes Lakner's work all the more relevant, being not merely a depiction of the age of the Holocaust, but also a graphic representation of the way people must live in totalitarian societies and the mechanisms of power that dictatorships employ: the mass psychosis of the frenzied, propaganda-manipulated crowd, and the menacing atmosphere generated by this schizophrenic state of mind.
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