Imre Pán (estate of)
Imre Pán was an artist and a prolific creator of magazines such as IS (1924) and INDEX (1937), as well as literary and artistic journals linked to the Dadaist and Surrealist avant-garde between 1920 and 1930. He contributed to the MA group’s Dada magazine, launched in 1916 by the Hungarian expressionist writer and painter Lajos Kassák (1887-1967). A film, art and literary critic: Pán had several activities: journalist (the artistic director of Színházi Élet, then of the magazine Sztár, with many other collaborations besides), a translator and an exhibition curator. In 1935, he also became the director of a bookshop-gallery – one of the main artistic and intellectual centres of the Hungarian capital until the outbreak of war, and again between 1945 and 1948. In 1947, Pán invited the French painter Jacques Doucet, and later the Dutch painter Corneille, to exhibit in his gallery: the two artists founded the CoBra group in Paris. Pán also wrote several theoretical books, alone or in collaboration with Kassák,¹ as well as many poems and literary texts, some of which were published by Cahiers du Sud in 1948.
The same period also saw the birth of the European School, which he co-founded with several intellectuals and artists, including his older brother, the philosopher and art theorist Árpád Mezei. As hub of exchanges and encounters,The European School embraced the diversity of the early twentieth-century European artistic avant-garde, from abstraction to Surrealism, expressionism to constructivism. It organised major exhibitions, such as the one dedicated to Paul Klee in May 1947, published theoretical writings on art, and engaged in dialogue with all cultural forms and practices, open to the new aesthetic influences that were emerging in post-war Western Europe. In 1948, the movement was forced to disband by the Communist regime because of its Western leanings, and the writing of Imre Pán, who was described as a “Western formalist,” was banned until 1953.
Pán left Budapest in 1957 following the repression of the Hungarian uprising and arrived in Paris to carry out his project of founding a magazine: this was the birth of the emblematic art magazines Signe, Morphèmes, and Mini-Musée. From 1960 until his death in 1972, Imre Pán published 145 original editions in close collaboration with the artists, encompassing a wide range of styles and schools from geometric abstraction to informal art, from post-Surrealist figuration to the New Realists. In his own words, Pán was interested in all “art in the making.” These carefully designed editions consist of texts on loose sheets of vellum, often written by Pán himself, accompanied by one or more original works by artists, either multiples (lithograph, screenprint) or unique pieces. His editorial work, marked by his close relationship with artists, reflects the privileged relationships he forged with those whose work he championed, including Marcelle Cahn and Victor Vasarely. Pán played an active role in the Parisian art scene. Alongside his publishing activities, he organised exhibitions in the galleries with which he collaborated in France and abroad.
