Hidden Gem

                                                Csontvary Kosztka, Tivadar: The Solitary Cedar              1907

      Csontvary was a distracted genius like Van Gogh. They were born in the same year, in 1853, they both started to study painting later in their lives, they both balanced on the border of insanity and they had an uncanny resemblance in their appearance. One of Csontvary’s most recognized paintings is The Solitary Cedar.

      Art historians told everything about this painting already, like that Csontvary is the lonely cedar himself and this is the most honest self-portrait, and so on. As far as I can remember a cedar replica had been hung in my parents living room and it still does today. I did not like it as a child. I always thought the white bough looks like a goose and that the tree trunk’s bottom side is like a sitting giraffe. It is whimsical, not from this earth.

     I was right, because Csontvary was not from this earth. He was a weirdo in the people’s eyes. He said he once heard a divine voice above him saying that he must paint and he will become the greatest “light passage” painter ever, better than Raphael. So Csontvary went to the Vatican to check Raphael’s works and he thought, “Well, Raphael was not so good, so I can be better than him”. He went to study to Paris and Munich when he was more than forty years old.

     I will never forget his face on the picture which was taken in the art school in Munich around 1894: He is standing on the left side, behind his canvas, behind the smiling, much younger classmates. His face, his regard, his whole head, oh god, he looks so pitiful, whacky, and lost. Maybe worried. It is very moving.

                  image:mng

     Picasso once spent an hour at a Csontvary exhibition in Paris, and when he left he remarked, “I did not know there was another great painter in this century besides me.” Csontvary travelled a lot. He visited Lebanon in the Middle East, where he painted many cedar trees, like this lonely one. Airy, ethereal branch-arms are stretching out. They are like a half-sided godhead’s arms, whose one side can reach even the impossible but the other side is already dead.

      My most beloved part is the treetop. It blankets the sky and wants to grow higher and higher but the sky is the limit and even the sky seems to be not enough for it so the treetop becomes distorted and lies low. Poor Csontvary. He would have loved to touch the whole shebang, but he has been ignored and savaged. He has been kept down like his thousands of years old cedar tree.

    But the cedar trees of Lebanon had been plant by the Lord, and they will live for eternity no matter what, as will Csontvary, only not on this heartless world.