To the Royal Academy to view the exhibition Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century.
Central London on a Sunday morning always presents a strangely serene spectacle by comparison with the flurry of traffic and pedestrians, and the beggars and the chuggers, of the working week. The sun broke through the clouds as I sat with a coffee and a cigarette and a newspaper in the courtyard of the RA in company with a garlanded Sir Joshua Reynolds, overlooked by the memorial to the Rainbow Division that has found a temporary resting place here.
Whether it’s London in the ‘Swinging Sixties’ or Paris in the 20s, there is a curious and occasional phenomenon in human affairs whereby there is a sudden and intense blooming of one or more of the arts at a particular place in time. Oddly enough it was Hunter S Thompson who described this best, in the most profound, least pantomimic, paragraph of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
In this case, whatever it was that was in the water in newly independent Hungary produced a clutch of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century: Brassai, Capa, Kertesz, Moholy-Nagy, Munkacsi. The exhibition follows their careers at home and abroad for they all abandoned the authoritarianism of Admiral Horthy’s regime for more conducive climes in Germany and France and, subsequently, Britain and America.
Whether it truly is what it purports to be, between Capa’s image Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death and the memorial in the courtyard I thought of Orwell’s verses from Homage to Catalonia.
The Italian Militiaman
The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold—
Oh! who ever would have thought it?
Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?
For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.
Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold—
Oh! who ever would have thought it?
Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?
For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.
Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
