42. Julius Komjati
(1894-1978)
Willows

(click on image to print)
Komjati, Willows

Willows

Etching, 1925, 248 x 187 mm. Fine impression on heavy wove paper with small margins; traces of an inexplicably erased pencil signature, over which the date 1925 has been written. Komjati was a Hungarian artist who served as a soldier in World War I and became a prisoner of war under the most horrible conditions, an experience that tended to permeate most of his art from then on. Some time after the war (1927), he was able to go to England where he later became one of the very few continental artists to be elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers. Malcolm Salaman wrote a sympathetic account of his work in The Print Collector’ Quarterly (Vol. 20, No. 3, July, 1933). Today, he is all but forgotten – unjustly so. Willows is simply a landscape, a row of trees, rutted ground, a single figure walking with a stick. There is no clue to where it is. And yet there is something about the print that says, to many of us, that this is unfamiliar territory. The land is somehow ravaged, behind the willows it drops off to nothingness. Why are the dead trees in the foreground cut off at that odd height? And is that single figure an ex-POW, making his way slowly homeward? Reading in, of course, but the scene is strangely, perhaps inexplicably, moving.