Gedo and Garbo reflect the pain and pleasure of a changing time

Garbo, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; New

Contemporaries, ICA, London.

THE Hungarian artist Ilka Gedo, lived and died in obscurity during the

tragic Iron Curtain years. She was also completely unknown in the West

until Glasgow's 1985 Hungarian arts season when her small exhibition at

the Compass Gallery received national acclaim. Now Third Eye director

Chris Carrell, who originally discovered Gedo in her tiny apartment

jammed floor to ceiling with drawings, sketch books, and paintings, has

organised a major retrospective 1932-85 which is at Third Eye Centre

before going on a world tour.

Gedo's artistic and emotional sensibility was exactly right to record

the grim isolation of the Budapest ghetto and stark post-war dreariness

of working life in Eastern Europe. Acutely intelligent, independent, and

fearlessly honest, both with herself and others, she quietly and

compassionately documented Hungary's throes of tumultuous change over 50

years.

The tensions that Gedo experienced throughout her life, despite a

devoted husband and two sons, are manifest in the densely-wrought

nervous surfaces of her numerous intense self-portraits, their wavering

lines reminiscent of Giacometti and sometimes Munch.

Her dilemma was a double insecurity, both physical and intellectual.

Having survived the war incarcerated in the hellish Jewish ghetto of

Budapest where she drew children and old people, their heads in their

hands as they huddled in dark, stuffy rooms, her marriage in 1946 to the

biochemist and literary translator Endre Biro introduced her to a circle

of intellectuals around the

philosopher Lajos Szabo.

Unfortunately this terminated Gedo's happy state of innocent,

intuitive creation for their aesthetic doctrines and theory maintained

that art was a religious issue and abstraction took precedence over

representation. In addition they questioned a woman's ability to be a

''real'' artist, following the age-old Jewish tradition that women be

excluded from religious and intellectual activity.

Unable to deal with this conflict and crushed by the Stalinist period,

after a time sketching at the Ganz machine factory Gedo stopped painting

for 15 long years. She destroyed much of her work in a fit of depression

and resorted to theoretical studies and art history, making endless

obsessive notes on Goethe's

theory of colour and Schopenhauer's Sights and Colours.

In 1964 she again started drawing but only in 1970 did she begin to

develop the many colour patterns of the 1950s into remarkable, delicate

semi-abstract flower gardens of enchanting magic and mystery. These

works have a sense of nostalgia which hark back to the countryside

sketches of her childhood when, as a precocious teenager she recorded

rural life in Szentendre; hens, goats, farmyards, carts, cottages.

I found this exhibition very moving. Gedo bares her soul to us, not in

a self-indulgent way but with searing courage. A truly honest artist is

rare indeed.

Willi Baumeister at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket, born in Germany 30-odd

years before Gedo, also suffered from Nazi rule. In 1933 he was

dismissed from his professorship at Frankfurt Art School and banned from

exhibiting. His work was shown in ''Degenerate Art'' 1937. His imagery

reflects this oppression. Myths and dreams peopled by demons which

inhabit the unconscious replaced the early constructivist geometrics of

his Wall Pictures and semi-figurative 1920s Sport Pictures where tennis,

hockey and football players are simplified into the dynamics of

movement.

Also intellectual in character, Baumeister then adopted a new,

inward-looking approach where large series of intensely-worked

low-relief monochromatic freizes recall prehistoric emblems and

Asiatic calligraphy, both with surrealist overtones.

Baumeister, a friend of Schlemmer, Lejer, and Ozenfant, painted

clandestinely until 1946 when he was reinstated at Stuttgart

Academy where he remained until his death in 1955. Edinburgh is the

only British venue for this comprehensive show which is organised by the

Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, and tours to Berne.

The recent war in Afghanistan has introduced new imagery into a few

prayer rugs and textiles but on the whole Afghan Arts, a selling

exhibition at Kelvingrove of tribal kilims, donkey bags, hats, tent door

hangings, cushions, copperware and jewellery is traditional in every

aspect. It's an enlarged version of displays already seen in Edinburgh

and at the Gatehouse Gallery with the advantage of space to show a

splendid full-size Turkoman Yurt tent. Till January 14.

From the exotic to the sophisticated. The Man Who Shot Garbo at the

Scottish National Portrait Gallery is a breathtakingly glamorous

array of superb Hollywood studio portraits by Clarence Sinclair Bull,

head of MGM stills department 1924-61. The catalogue is excellent too;

full of famous film stars from

Elinor Glyn in 1920, via Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh to

Grace Kelly and Shirley MacLaine (1959). Of course the hypnotic Greta

Garbo outshines them all. The show ends on January 8. Miss it at your

peril.

For 40 years New Contemporaries provided a major platform for the

shape of things to come, discovering young talent such as Hockney,

Auerbach, Kitaj, Aitchison, Hoyland, Huxley, and Hodgkin. Things went

downhill in the 1980s and only now after a three year absence does the

show make a welcome return to London's ICA. Eighty works by 43 artists

chosen from 1500 entries nationwide include sculpture, painting,

photography, and video, mostly of a clean, cool, clinical minimalist

slant.

Inevitably, as with all

student works, influences are obvious: Tim Head, Donald Judd, Cindy

Sherman, lots of Lisson-type sculpture with Richard Deacon screws and

rivets. The overall impression is professional, even slick, but much is

arid and very 1970s deja vu.

Among the best, Mike Turner (Ruskin) concocts rise and fall poetry

from greaseproof paper and a vacuum cleaner; Brighid Lowe (Reading and

the Slade) makes her point with copper and steel; John Howard

(Birmingham) offers realist relief with splendid etchings of foundaries,

Nick Cass (Newcastle) and Darren Lajo (Chelsea) make interesting wall

sculpture, while Tom Benson (Royal College) sticks to subtle

sophisticated oil paint.

Julian Lee (also Royal College) exhibits an excellent series of black

and white photographs. Memorable are Maud Sulter's seductive

cibachromes. She has a long list of exhibitions to her name, and, news

to me until I looked up the index, trained at Glasgow on the MA

Photography course.

Will they make it into the real world? asked critics

Edward Lucie-Smith and William Packer at the preview. Sulter, Lowe,

and Howard may well. New Contemporaries tours to Manchester, Bracknell,

Halifax and Kendal. Hopefully next year someone will invite it to come

to Scotland.