In Memoriam: Judit Reigl
Randall Griffey, curator, and Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art, August 14, 2020
Today we commemorate the exceptional life of Judit Reigl, who passed away on August 7, 2020. A key figure in the history of European art after World War II, Reigl served as bridge between the Surrealists and a younger generation of painters associated with lyrical abstraction. Reigl was born in Kapuvár, Hungary, in 1923. In 1942, she enrolled in the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where she studied with István Szönyi until 1945. She spent two very formative years abroad in Italy before returning to Hungary in 1948, just in time to see Eastern Europe cleaved off from the West. After several unsuccessful attempts, she was able to cross the Iron Curtain, eventually landing in Paris in 1950. She would remain there through 1963, later settling in a suburb outside the city.
A few years after arriving in France, Reigl was introduced to André Breton, one of the founders of Surrealism, by fellow Hungarian Simon Hantaï. Bréton would become an important supporter of her work, but their relationship would prove short-lived. During this period, Reigl experimented with a wide variety of materials and techniques, some but not all influenced by Surrealism. Her collages of cut and pasted paper clipped from magazines represent fantastic, otherworldly scenes, while her abstract ink drawings, all of them filled with frenetic energy, rely on automatism and spontaneity. In 1956, Reigl broke with Breton. Painting became her primary medium, and to achieve the effects she sought she utilized unconventional tools. For the artist, the process of painting was indivisible from her own body, from its proportions and movements.
The Met is home to an extraordinary group of paintings, drawings, and collages by Reigl, including examples from one of her most important series, the Outbursts, in which paint is alternately thrown and scraped, added and subtracted. Together, The Met's collection of works narrates the evolution of her career over of a very concentrated period of time, arguably her most consequential, and provides new insight into important dimensions of international large-scale abstract painting at mid-century.
One of the key paintings in The Met's holdings, Guano (Menhir) is showcased in the special collection installation "Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera." Part of an ambitious series of process- and time-based paintings, the work confronts the viewer with an imposing and ambiguous mound centrally positioned against a dark backdrop. The form's hard, stony appearance, evoking compressed natural strata, is a result of the painter's innovative technique, a radical departure from her earlier, Surrealist-inspired methods. To protect a new studio floor, she had covered it with several layers of rejected canvases, which became saturated with pictorial matter and were trampled underfoot. In her words, "As time went by, these excremental rags slowly became stratified layers, like the guano [bird dung] that comes from the isles of Latin America." She then performed an excavation of sorts, finding her composition by using a homemade tool to scrape through the years of serendipitous accumulation. In the wake of her recent passing, Guano (Menhir) appears as a fitting testament to Reigl's rigorous intellect, ceaseless invention, and committed exploration of the very medium of painting.
Judir Reigl, (French (born Hungary), 1923–2020) Guano (Menhir), 1959–64. Oil on canvas. 72 13/16 × 83 7/16 in. (185 × 212 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Gift of The A.L. Levine Family Foundation, by exchange, 2015. (1992.343)