Csontvary, Mihaly Tivadar Kosztka known as

Kisszeben (Hungary), 1853-Budapest, 1919

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Csontvary studied pharmacy in Hungary and then painting in Germany and Paris.

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He crossed the world, driven by a doctrine of salvation through art and artistic expression, and chose Lebanon as one of his sites. He did several voyages to the Middle East, the first in 1903, and always painted on , as in 1905 – Baalbek (a canvas of 32 square meters) – and, from 1907 to 1908, cedar trees, as in Le cèdre solitaire (The Lonely Cedar) and Pélerinage au cèdre (Pilgrimage to the Cedar). 

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He went straight for these fundamental symbols of a country with a sense of drama and of scene setting, and his acuity became evident.

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Csontvary illuminated his large compositions with a mystical Fauvism so that his symbolic backgrounds were sometimes difficult to understand, though the atmosphere of strangeness emanating from them catches the viewer’s attention.

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A metaphysical and hallucinated pharmacist with the soul of an apothecary, from Hungary rather than the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he responded to the mysterious alchemy of mystical interrogation throug painting. 

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In his eyes, Lebanon was the symbol and incarnation of elements, signs, landscapes and omens of an internal world. 

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Czontvary occupies one of the principal seats in this history of Lebanese painting as the absent genius. He was so strongly penetrated by a place that he saw and embodied it better than all those who lived there or painted it. Baalbek was no longer considered a temple transposed on to the canvas, but a canvas transposed into a temple.

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Czontvary painted, but in truth he lived the two fundamental locations in Lebanon. He brought them to life, painted them better than anyone else. His naivety was only apparent, as a means of making the subject come to him. How could he have approached it otherwise? The Cedars were the principal location and Baalbek the second. 

The tradition of the Orientalist painting or voyage made the sketch, line and rendering tense to the point where only resemblance could be inspired in it. 

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Czontvary carried another key and another meaning that had at least two explanations – that of an internal and symbolic mental world that he projected on to Baalbek and the Cedars ; or a hallucinated explanation to which he found an application only in these places.

 

It is even possible that found a primary documentation in a doctrinal book, from which he delivered himself his own vision. 

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It was certainly Czontvary’s vision that was important, because of the poetic force it conveyed and of the manner in which he set the unreal within reality. He painted Baalbek, the village and the houses around the temple. But it was a place that he would enliven even more with his vision. It was enough to see sketches and preparatory drawings of the Ceremony at Baalbek and the Cedars to understand that for him, painting was a definitive place of realisation. 

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He was the only visionary painter of Lebanon. Gibran navigated between Rodin and Carrière in a careful angelism. His vision was a blurring of the rendering, while Czontvary’s Cedars bear the trace of the mystical experience of a pictorial Lebanon, even if he used photography to paint the village for a montage of Lebanon as a synthesising and aesthetic experience. 

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Czontvary broadened the limits of the perception of the canvas, what he represented and literally described was the visible of his imagination. He put in place the elements and genius of the locations, the mysterious god of local cults. It was not so much the paganism that was called back, but the experience of painting. The genius of the place was the painting itself. 

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The deliria of interpretation of the first data of paranoid psychosis are not the necessary conditions for creating a work of art. But these data accompanied a real gift of realisation and a sufficiently articulated internal logic, from which to create a Symbolist work that defined the expression of the genius of a country, through uniquely pictorial means. 

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It was still necessary for the paranoiac deliria to be authentic for an expressive practice. 

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Czontvary summoned neither Prinzhorn nor Brutalist art, but the intelligent use of the internal scene, of the voice that he heard and that repeated to him, “You will be the greatest painter.” 

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And this happened at the two most mystical places in Lebanon. It was about trying to make the interest of the delirium perceptible when it was not pretence, and to try to make the articulation of the delirium appear in a pictorial practice that made sense and did not screen it. 

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Czontvary brought consistency to a closed world which visual transmission, such as the white storks on the branches of the Cedars, did not carry babies, but meaning, the green light and the symbolism of colors. 

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His religiosity, and that of his delirium, led him to the grounds of the possible, not as an invitation to imitate it but to look at the way in which the projected representation of the imaginary answers to painting, the mute goddess, and not the chattering incident of the anecdote that never stops talking. 

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The association of paranoid and esoteric dimensions in his painting were all the more obvious that the symbolism remained legible in the landscape and in its interpretation, beyond the general signification of the scene.