translated by ALAN CAMPBELL

 When the Italian architect and sculptor Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) “invented” the mode of visual representation known as central or linear perspective, he was seeking an answer to the problem of how spatial, i.e. three-dimensional reality can be conveyed on a single plane, a canvas or pa­per sheet carrying an image of the scene, or at least in two dimensions. Of course, even before the discovery of perspec­tive, artists were able – as one of today’s foremost art phi­losophers, the American Arthur C. Danto, puts it – “to convey the spatial representation of objects on the image by means of overlapping, varying dimensions, shadows, colour hues and similar.” But for a Renaissance Man in search of perfec­tion, who day by day faced the many problems of represen­tation on the plane, these solutions were inadequate; what he needed was for the “projected” image on to the canvas to show “depth”, to convey the real, measurable distances among objects and between objects and the viewer. More­over, he had to find a technique for this which was applicable anywhere at any time, based on rules of proportion which could be constructed or reproduced by anyone.

Brunelleschi’s solution to the problem was to designate a sin­gle point on the plane drawing surface in front of him, a point which corresponded to the angle of view of the scene behind the plane, and to paint or draw the picture so that every line which in real space runs perpendicular to the picture plane is represented on the image by a line running towards this “van­ishing point”. The objects thus appear smaller and smaller as in reality they recede from the picture plane to the “distance”, i.e. the vanishing point, in proportion to their actual position between the picture plane and the imaginary “infinity”. In practice this meant they appeared as the human eye perceives three-dimensional space.

It was another Renaissance polymath, whose many fields in­cluded architecture, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who proved mathematically that Brunelleschi’s method was “vi­able”: his book Della pittura (1436) gained recognition for this scientific means of spatial representation, precisely specifying the relationship between the objective (“what it is in reality”) and the subjective (“how I see it on the picture”) which could be perceived by every artist and every viewer. It was named (Renaissance) perspettiva, from the Latin words “per” (fully, thoroughly) and “specto” (I see or look), having hitherto been known as ”prospettiva”, i.e. “looking ahead”.

 Art historians usually regard a 1427 fresco by Masaccio (1401–1428) in the Santa Maria Novella Church in Florence, Holy Trin­ity with the Virgin, St John the Evangelist and Donors, as the first major work produced by the new method. It was probably no coincidence that the young artist received the commis­sion via the good offices of Brunelleschi himself. This was the starting point for the development of painting over the next few hundred years (below we consider why) until Cubism “re­placed” good old linear perspective for a multi-plane, “mov­ing” perspective in which the painter represents objects from several viewpoints, “breaking down” the space, projecting the different viewpoints on to the same plane, reducing the objects into very simple geometric forms. When still an art student, Csaba Szegedi painted the courtyard of his college. The picture, Architektúra, shows three walls of an enclosed space as if looking from a window in the fourth. There is one wall to the left, one opposite, and one on the right. It was a classical exercise in spatial depiction, for which Brunelleschi-type perspective offered the ideal means of solution, and this is what Szegedi used. Just with a slight difference. Although the relationship among the three walls that appear on the picture strictly accords with the rules of Renaissance perspective, the lines perpendicular to the picture plane – the ledges and win­dow frames – run into different vanishing points on the left and right walls. Indeed, one of these vanishing points lies not behind the picture plane, in the direction the viewer is looking, but in front of it, somewhere behind the viewer’s back. So Szegedi in one sense used the classical Renaissance tricks of perspective construction while at the same time, to some extent follow­ing the Cubists’ multi-viewpoint spatial breakdown, he made a break from it. Concurrently, he incorporated in his painting the “pre-perspective” spatial representations mentioned by Danto: overlapping, shadows, hues).

Thus when, at the age of 25, by which time his work had already displayed a sensitivity to space and the spatial/planar relation­ship, he came as a graduate student to New York, he found in the Big Apple – or as Péter Esterházy once put it, the “heart of the world” – the perfect 3D. Streets intersecting at right angles, with building-edges reaching up to the sky were for the young artist so many axes of a gigantic coordinate system, a spatial struc­ture in which buildings in the form of regular shapes – rectangles, columns, pyramids, wedges – take up a configuration which is the city itself. Like so many visitors, Szegedi was fascinated by New York and the spectacle it presents. For some of the pictures he was to paint under the inspiration of the sights and experi­ences of the city (New York Street, Manhattan 03), he drew on Brunelleschi-type representation to such an extent that he left on the picture the guidelines running towards the vanishing point; these are “structures” which do not exist in reality, and together with the lines of real buildings and streets and the pre­cisely-constructed areas of shadow give these pictures their vivid, vibrant spectacle (even though the pictures “omit” the bustling life of the New York streets, usually showing no vehicles, people or advertisements; pure architecture). Nonetheless, a closer look at these pictures, which often incorporate, together with the “or­dinary” view, the engineering-like formal simplifications of an architectural drawing, reveals that in some of them Szegedi is subtly “cheating”: the vanishing point is not necessarily a singu­lar entity (sometimes the lines do not converge to a single clas­sical point – a geometric form without spatial extension – but go “in that kind of way” in about the same direction into the dis­tance), and in others – especially those from the “high camera position” – the planes in one direction relative to the viewpoint are indeed constructed according to the rules of perspective, but those in another coordinate direction are not. So the artist here, as in his painting of the college courtyard, was “playing” with the potential of perspective representation: he did not rigidly adhere to faithful representation of forms but rather apparently wanted to share his subjective experience of space with the viewers.

After just one week in New York, Szegedi returned to college with the experience still alive in his mind. He produ ced a series of “New York pictures” based on photographs, sketches and, of course, memories, until his teacher, Pál Gerzson (who he was very devoted to) said that enough was enough, he should be getting on with something else. The pupil, of course, took due heed and turned to other things, but was left with the feeling that subject still held much to be painted.For three years after gaining his master’s degree, Szegedi taught drawing in the Preparatory Institute of the Hungar­ian College of Applied Arts, and then for a year he moved to Germany as a guest artist of the Atelierhaus Worpswede with a scholarship from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdi­enst and the Lower Saxony Ministry of Arts and Science. His stay, through the addition of three years living and working in Munich, stretched out to four years (during which he pro­duced mainly large abstract pictures based on amorphous areas of colour) and after returning home he became a lec­turer at the University of Applied Arts and at the same time a DLA student. And what was the topic of Szegedi’s doctoral art research? None other than Spatial Vision and Spatial Representation. His work as an artist and his academic inves­tigations into art – which naturally included constant teach­ing as well as postgraduate study; in addition to teaching at what is now the Moholy-Nagy University of Art, he was guest professor at the Schwäbisch-Gmünd Hochschule für Gestal­tung in 2005 – thus ran concurrently, complementing and reinforcing each other.

In 2006, Szegedi, at the invitation of the Griffis Art Center in New London (Connecticut), supported by a six-month scholarship from the HAESF Foundation and a grant from the Hungarian National Cultural Fund, he was able to return to the subject on which he had artistically never got to “say what he had to say,” the USA. “New York’s skyscrapers feature among my long-held desires, as do the highways, turnpikes, overpasses and other ‘anti-painting’ topics,” he wrote at that time, but he admitted, “the cityscape is only a ‘pretext’ for setting up exciting composi­tions.” As to the how, he said, “I make drawings and mostly paint large canvases of urban landscapes,” and on the much more important why, he said , “I study space, the ways of rep­resenting space, and investigate its relationship and conflicts with the image as a plane surface. I am fascinated by the trans­formation of real space, forms, colours and light into image shapes, rhythms and contrasts, and their transmutation into a pictorial composition.”

This book covers the American outcomes of that “fascination”. Szegedi, on this second sojourn in America and after his return home – unconstrained by teachers in his choice of topics – finally got to “say what he had to say”, to bring out everything that had been bottled up inside him since his trip to New York.He may of course have been fortunate in the duality of his stay. The dizzying shock of that single week twenty years before, his first encounter with the “heart of the world”, was obvious­ly well behind him, and although still fascinated by the place, both its essence and the artistic potential it presented, he was now returning as something of a familiar. He no longer had to stare in awe at every soaring skyscraper, but perhaps could remember which street caught the light so as to best bring out the angles of view. Nonetheless, he still worked as he had done the first time: he made countless photographs in the city (and of course in other cities and regions as he moved around), his sketchbooks filled up with outlines, notes and a few very strik­ing on-the-spot impressions. Then in the studio there, and for a good while back in Hungary after the end of the six months, he produced drawings, ink paintings and paintings. These may all be seen on the following pages.

“Painting,” – claims Szegedi, and he cannot really mean by this the actual application of paint on canvas to produce certain visual impressions, but something which might be approxi­mated as some kind of “painting way of life” – “is a process such that the more successful a picture the higher the level of abstraction it attains from reality, and the more it obeys the laws of pictorial reality. The optimal condition in the process of abstraction crystallizes during successive reworkings.”

Now, this idea of “successive reworkings” could be interpret­ed in two ways. Firstly, it could mean the process by which a painter superimposes one picture several times, scratching off and starting again, constantly making corrections and “adjust­ments” (in the sense of making “just”, i.e. aligning with reality) so that with each successive layer, the picture gradually “crystalliz­es”. It could also refer to more than one painting, a whole subject, a painting problem reworked again and again on several pic­tures, even several series of pictures, a route by which the artist progresses step by step, picture by picture, composition by com­position, until he feels… yes, that was what he was looking for.

Szegedi’s New York and American pictures fall into just such a series. The first, “primary” pictures (not counting the photo­graphs and field sketches) are tightly linked to the view: the actual streets, buildings and corners are clearly identifiable by anyone familiar with them, in fact the real spaces (Midtown East, Haarlem, New York Street, Sunlight in Manhattan, Mor­gan Stanley Building, Bush Tower, Flatiron Building 3) could, via the rules of perspective, even be “rebuilt” out of the picture plane (or at least approximately – Szegedi does not rigidly adhere to the classic Brunelleschi rules even in these pictures)

These primary pictures include drawings of small towns, sub­urbs, highways and overpasses, among whose geometric forms (and these are severely geometrical, again bearing a resemblance to some engineering drawings) a car, truck or traffic light makes an occasional appearance, as part of real­ity. They convey three-dimensional space, even if the artist “keeps the viewer at a distance” from it by subtle displacement of some line directions and spatial relationships. In the next phase, he “let go” of the real view and increasingly made the image into a “dance” of lines and geometrical shapes. Despite the heightening abstraction, however, the pictures still car­ry “reality” within them; we still perceive the New York street in its full length, the architectural structure of the buildings rising on each side, the rows of windows and ledges, even though the specific view is no longer visible (Citicorp Building 1., 2., City Canyon, MoMA, Manhattan 10).

Then comes the third level, the complete break with the original view: on these pictures, now abstract par excellence, the original three-dimensional space has completely “smoothed out” into the plane, the plane of the canvas, and although the “distant buildings” (by the rules of perspective) are still “smaller” than those nearby, a viewer unfamiliar with the art­ist’s former paintings would not realise he was looking at a New York street. And he would be right: there is no New York street, only parallel or intersecting lines constructed accord­ing to certain rules, and the well-arranged geometrical fields of colour bounded by these lines (Manhattan 1, 2, 4-9). This “abstraction curve” can of course also be clearly made out in the graphics, from the recognisable view of reality to the pure “line structures”. A peculiar “side-branch” of this flow of artistic representation is the series of New York pictures made by the ink-and-wash technique. Here, the only colours left are black and white, with the occasional transitional grey to convey perspective like the hues do elsewhere. Classical representation of space had been completely left behind.

“The discovery of perspective (..) permitted to see directly (on a picture – GM), as in reality, how far objects are from the viewer and each other,” wrote Danto of Brunelleschi’s invention, already quoted in the introduction. On his American pictures, Csaba Szegedi, who has a deep commitment to spatial representation, in a sense follows the route of that old Italian master, but the other way round: he gradually “flattens” the three-dimension­al spaces of New York into two-dimensional areas of colour. As he puts it himself: “Abstraction permits the painting (basically coloured paint applied to the image surface under a certain system) to take shape in accordance with the creative process and its own laws. When the image as image takes form, the free associations and impressive and expressive effects it generates are rooted in the structure of the composition.” Szegedi is there­fore not interested in an ever-more-perfect rendition of the real view (although he could certainly paint that too), but in the “image as image”, the “structure of the composition”, i.e. in art.And more specifically? “What most preoccupies me in art,” he has written, “is change, transformation, process. Painting is metamorphosis, in more than one sense. Something becomes something else, while the fundamental essence remains the same. The morph changes, the arche stays the same. Experi­ences, emotional and intellectual motivations change into forms, rhythms, colour effects and find expression in pictorial constellations of these. Then these visual meanings are rein­carnated in the viewer as associations, mental and emotional reflections (ultimately cathartic understanding). The image is a medium linking up intellects and psyches sometimes distantly separated in space and time.”

In this book, for example, it mediates between Csaba Szegedi and the Reader. Between the artist and the viewer who, see­ing the images, hopefully appreciates the great number of per­spectives faced by art and the artist (every artist, but here and now particularly the subject of this book). In both the concrete and abstract senses.

Monography in the album "New York, New London" written by Gábor Martos PhD