Gheza Vida
Gheza or Géza Vida, also known as Grigore, was a Romanian–Hungarian sculptor, engraver, industrial worker and communist militant, one of the most renowned artists of Maramureș region. The descendant of ethnic Romanian and Slovak miners, he was born in the Hungarian segment of Austria-Hungary. Raised by his mother after his father's death in World War I, he received financial support from local benefactors, who cultivated his artistic skill, particularly as a woodcarver. A citizen of Romania after the union of 1918, he was forced to drop out of school by economic circumstances, and worked for years in various industries and businesses, while also discovering his passion for beekeeping and gardening. He was drawn into far-left politics during the Great Depression, when he came to be influenced by radical artists such as Alexandru Ziffer, Aurel Popp, Vasile Kazar and Iosif Klein, who also introduced him to avant-garde experimentation. Vida was co-opted into the Union of Communist Youth and subsequently the Communist Party, producing propaganda art for both; this activity led to his temporary arrest in 1932 and 1933. A labor organizer, he helped establish the Artists' Trade Union and its branch in Baia Mare.
Having trained as a gunner in the Romanian Land Forces, Vida made repeated attempts at joining the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Though imprisoned and expelled upon illegally crossing the border with Czechoslovakia, he resumed the effort and finally reached Republican Spain in early 1938. He served for a few months under Nicolae Cristea and Valter Roman, before the Brigades were withdrawn from the Battle of the Ebro. Vida survived the retreat into France, surrendering to the National Gendarmerie. Vida moved between French internment camps, finally being sent to Gurs; he also continued to work as a propaganda artist, reaching an international audience. A participant in prisoner revolts before and after the fall of France, he was dispatched as a laborer to Nazi Germany, but eventually made his way to Northern Transylvania.
As a Romanian national in Regency Hungary, Vida was under continuous supervision. His studying at the Hungarian School of Fine Arts was interrupted by stints in a labor battalion, though he managed to escape during the Siege of Budapest. He rejoined the Romanian Army and, by the end of World War II, was stationed in Skalica. Returning to Baia Mare, in his thirties he emerged as a favorite artist of Romania's communist regime and became a deputy in the Great National Assembly, but voiced criticism of the regime's artistic standards. He repeatedly tried to resist the rise of Socialism Realism, and depicted Expressionism as a more authentically revolutionary current.
Vida's views were vindicated in the 1960s, when his synthesis of folk art and Expressionism was more fully assimilated by the communist establishment. He won both controversy and praise for his series of monumental pieces, including his Soldier's Memorial of Carei and his homage to the victims of the. Made a full member of the Communist Party Central Committee in 1971, and a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy three years later, he was awarded numerous distinctions, including the Star of the Socialist Republic of Romania. In his last years, he drifted away from the Expressionist standard to absorb more influences from handicrafts and religious art.
Biography
Origins and early life
In some Communist Party records, Vida was described as having "Magyar ethnicity". However, the artist's paternal ancestors were ethnic Romanians from the Austrian Empire: grandfather Simion Vida was a Greek Catholic from Iapa, working at the hammermill of Nagybánya. His fifth child, Iosif, who worked his entire life as a miner, married a Rozalia Krupiczer of Cavnic. Her father was a Slovak colonist to the region. Gheza was born on February 28, 1913, at Nagybánya, as Baia Mare was then known. The city was at the time in Szatmár County, Kingdom of Hungary. His exact birthplace was the family home, located very near to Valea Roșie Mine. The Hungarian-sounding name "Gheza" was selected to honor a workmate of Iosif Vida's. Rozalia preferred to call him "Victor", since he turned out to be her only surviving child; the couple had had seven other children.Despite being afflicted with lung problems, Iosif was drafted into World War I, and was heavily wounded on the Serbian Front; he died in his home in 1915. This forced Rozalia to seek employment as a housemaid in the home of Teofil Dragoș, a Romanian jurist and politician, where Gheza would spend his early infancy and early childhood. According to biographer Gheorghe I. Bodea, the future sculptor grew up as a socialist by witnessing the miners' strikes and protests during the Aster Revolution and the Soviet experiment; Dragoș's home was located outside Baia Mare prison, where most protesters were interned during the Hungarian–Romanian War. He was nevertheless friends with the prison warden, who took him and other children out on excursions. The warden also gave him detailed accounts of Romanian folklore, with both of them sharing a belief in Fata Pădurii as a creature who lures children into the forest.
Following the region's union with Romania, Vida was sent to the new Romanian school of Baia Sprie. Headmaster Alexandru Mouje, who was a passionate woodcarver, channeled the boy's creativity, encouraging him to create statuettes of animals. Gheza also enjoyed traveling into the Gutâi Mountains, which he much later described as a "fairy-tale land". Around 1920, he for a while with his grandparents in Dealul Crucii area. He took up rock collecting, and on one occasion was nearly killed after sliding into a mine shaft to pick up a more unusual stone. In 1923, he created his first complex works in wood, depicting peasants at their wedding and funeral ceremonies. He had by then become encouraged by the artistic boom of his native city: the Baia Mare School was experiencing its peak moment and, Vida recalled, "easels and working painters were on every street corner."
Dragoș was impressed by Vida's skills, and, wanting him to succeed in life, sponsored his full tuition at Gheorghe Șincai High School. However, Rozalia fell ill in 1928, when Gheza was in his terminal year; this prompted him to drop out of school and begin training as an apprentice gardener in Satu Mare. He returned to Baia Mare after only a few months, and began working as a beekeeper and gardener for a friend by the name of Lakatos. This venture ended abruptly when Lakatos, a member of the outlawed Romanian Communist Party, was arrested, then jailed; Vida moved on to do contingent work at Phoenix Factory, before taking and a job as a lumberjack, then a minor position for the Romanian Railways. He reportedly worked briefly as a nightwatchman and as a gold miner in Baia Sprie. According to a later record by his friend Mihai Florescu, throughout the 1930s Vida was still primarily a beekeeper.
Communist beginnings
While he could no longer pursue training in art, Vida still drew, sculpted and carved, also taking advice from vacationing artists such as Petre Abrudan, Alexandru Ciucurencu and Jenő Szervánszky. He befriended the local artist Géza Kádár and his piano-teaching wife Elisabeta. Both fostered his artistic education, and put him into contact with artist Béni Ferenczy. He appears to have been heavily influenced by Gyula Derkovits, transposing into reliefs what Derkovits had achieved with engravings. Vida's new sculptures included the first of his "peasant-and-scythe" pieces, which alluded to his artistic incorporation of social protest. Abrudan also made Vida a member of his Greco-Roman wrestling team, which doubled as a PCdR recruitment cell; Vida's contribution there also included an engraving of wrestlers, reused by Abrudan as the core design for his club's advertising posters.As Romania's mining industry was heavily hit in the Great Depression, in 1929–1932 Baia Mare became the center of a growing protest movement and an electoral pool for the PCdR's Peasant Workers' Bloc. While not yet a PCdR member, Vida recalled being a full participant in the strike movement at Phoenix. A fellow artist, Iosif Klein, took him into his communist art club and began influencing him politically; Vida turned to more explicitly revolutionary themes, including his first-ever portraits of peasant rebels such as Horea and Pintea. Through Klein's influence, his work accommodated echoes from the European avant-garde, as well as from African sculpture; this blend appeared in his primitivist carvings of "monkey-men".
In 1932, Vida joined the Union of Communist Youth, being directly supervised by the more senior communist Ileana Wolf. That year, he produced UTC propaganda art, alongside Ioan Décsey. He was arrested in a Siguranța roundup and held in custody for a week, during which he was reportedly beaten; he never agreed to cooperate with the authorities, and, upon release, remained under surveillance. Klein having moved to Bucharest, Alexandru Ziffer took charge of the communist artists in Baia Mare, whose contribution included correcting Vida's drawings and offering him more artistic input. Vida himself referred to this new art movement as "giving form to the aspirations of the people, to its fight for freedom", singling out Vasile Kazar as its leading exponent. Still engaged in political agitation, he was tasked with unionizing the charcoal burners of Ulmoasa. As he recalled, the experience put him into contact with extreme poverty, and also opened him up to their folklore, which was the peasants' sole entertainment.
Following the Grivița strike and a countrywide clampdown in February 1933, Vida was again in Siguranța custody, under a preemptive lock-down. He and his colleagues were released in short while for lack of evidence. Occasional arrests still occurred in 1933. In early 1934, Vida attended the clandestine UTC meeting in Cluj, where he presented a report on the issue. His engravings were being used in protest art for the PCdR, with proceedings going to the International Red Aid. In November, he received what is probably the first of his artistic reviews. Published in Bányai Lapok, it praised Vida as a "man of the future" and enemy of all things kitsch, noting the interest that art collectors were taking in his sculptures. In 1935, Ziffer obtained that Vida be formally admitted into the Baia Mare art colony.