László Beke Archives

The László Beke Archives contains the correspondence of art historian, art writer, and theoretician László Beke (1944–2022) with Hungarian and international (especially Central and Eastern European) (neo-)avantgarde artists over several decades, as well as his documents, art projects, manuscripts, photographs, slides and printed publications.

Of these, the so-called Imagination/Idea project conceived by Beke deserves special mention, along with many aspects of Hungarian conceptual art, mail art, fluxus, land art, happenings, environments, and action art. The László Beke Archives make a valuable contribution towards understanding and processing such initiatives of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde as the Chapel Studio of Balatonboglár, the start of the Iparterv generation, the INDIGO (Hungarian acronym for “Interdisciplinary Thinking”) group, and the work of the Béla Balázs Studio (BBS).

In addition to engaging with traditional art forms, László Beke’s interests also extended to intermedial art, i.e. to the interdisciplinary frontiers of photography and film theory, painting, sculpture, graphics, architecture, experimental film, and video.

László Beke’s manuscripts and essays in the Archives cover the wide range of his interests in aesthetics, philosophy of art, psychology of art, sociology of art, visual anthropology, intermedia, ethnography, structuralism, linguistics, semantics, semiotics, and visual education. His methodological research has explored problematics related to iconography, iconology, story art and sacred/transcendental art. The conceptual scope of the Archives includes the phenomena of the alter ego, the mirror, the image, the metaphor, the icon, and the comic novel, as well as the phenomena of perspective, symmetry, ornamentation, pattern, and mimesis—from the avantgarde to post-contemporary art (PoCo).

/Zsófia Beke/