Ernest KLAUSZ

KLAUSZ ERNŐ (1894-1970)

After completing his studies in Eger and Budapest, Ernszt Klausz was driven to Berlin through his livelihood hassle in the early 1920s. When he held his first exhibition there, critics emphasized: ’He brought painting closer to music”. Indeed, the lives and work of few painters were influenced by music as much as his. When graduating with a degree in chemical engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and meanwhile studying painting, he attended the Music Academy and then studied music in Berlin too. In the German capital, he worked mainly in theaters where he painted expressive portraits of the great actors of the age, many of which are still preserved in Berlin’s art institutions. He was a stage designer for eight years at the all four state theaters in Berlin. The aim was to achieve the ’Gesamtkunstwerk’: to harmonize music, painting, dance and poetry. He fled Nazism to France, appearing at the Grand Opera of Paris with the plan to realize Berlioz’s famous dramatic legend with projected stage sets. In Paris, he was a member of so-called musicalist group around Henry Valensi. Just before the Germans marched into Paris, he handed over the ballet ’The Birth of Colors’ to the Grand Opera. Beyond the intrinsic artistic value, the stage’s set scenes are almost invaluable because they can be easily copied and thus presented with the scenery of the world’s best directors and stage designers. The relationship of music to colors and forms, the interplay of these two kinds of art, gave birth to the images in which he worked in the last years of his life. He called them ’Symphonies’ and one of his last pieces entitled ’Symphony X. (My Life)’ he donated to the Hungarian National Gallery. Klausz’s non-figurative images live and move in almost a fourth dimension: their message flows in time  whether it’s just music, poetry or dance.