The Endre Tót Archives
The Endre Tót Archives preserve art and historical documents of outstanding significance and value. When Endre Tót defected to West Berlin, his belongings were transferred to his brother. Later and at the artist’s request, the material was placed in the storage facility of the Contemporary Collection of the Hungarian National Gallery. It was gifted to the Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History and it is now officially part of the ADK Collection. The Endre Tót Archives have preserved in a time capsule-like fashion the documents that served as the foundations for—and starting point of—the artist’s later career on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
In the 1960s and 1970s and in a manner typical of the period, Endre Tót’s artistic undertakings—like those of many of his peers’—completely merged the mental and physical spaces of his private daily life and his work in the studio. In connection to this, written correspondence served as the specific, personally controlled form of communication, with the post office serving as the official/institutional protocol around it. This material—which could be classified as both documents and artefacts (mostly written in English, with a significant part in German and Hungarian, and a minor part in French)—makes up around eighty percent of the archive. It reflects internal connections and records of personal interests, career-advancing acquaintances, projects, and the related points of connection and chronologies, while also following changes of emphasis within the given period: the appearance of new people and directions, the extension of geographical scope, or even changes in geographical direction.
The material from the late ’50s to the late ’60s and early ’70s can be viewed as a “classic” artist’s archive. It includes documents reflecting an increasing integration of professional (e.g. Iparterv, neo-avantgarde peers) and official correspondence (relating to studies, schools, work, scholarship applications) into a personal (family, acquaintances, friends) social network. The material can be broken down into the following subgroups:
- written correspondence (personal, professional, friendly),
- books, catalogues (building professional knowledge, direct or indirect involvement),
- reviews, essays, texts of exhibition opening speeches (building professional knowledge, direct or indirect involvement),
- personal objects,
- objects and tools (e.g. seal collection) related to written correspondence,
- material documents relating to professional life (e.g. awards, prizes).
This is followed by documents of mail correspondence with artist peers from the early 1970s to the late 1970s, supplemented by a small number of items from the early 1980s. The sources are largely comprised of correspondence with friends and professional contacts, project and exhibition plans, brochures (silkscreened, printed, and xeroxed), publications (magazines and books), personal gifts and items received through the mail, as well as dedicated objects and artworks, and are dated between 1971 and 1978, with the endpoint being Endre Tót’s emigration to West Berlin and the start of his DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship.
/László Százados/