Ferenc Daday  (20th)

Muckenthaler Gallery Opening Talk
Gallery Talk for “A View of the Historic West:
Romantic Legacy of the Pioneers”.
Muckenthaler Cultural Center
Fullerton, April 22, 2007
(abbrvtd)

Ferenc Daday’s Vision of the Mythic American West
By
Michael Steiner
California State University, Fullerton

I’m deeply honored to say a few a words about 93 year old Ferenc Daday and his artistic vision of the American West, the American frontier, and pioneer life.
In his distinctive way, Ferenc Daday is part of this tradition of creative Hungarians flowering in America. The roomful of paintings stands as a tribute to Ferenc’s adopted second homeland, and it also serves as a key to what America has meant to people throughout the world. These paintings illuminate vivid myths and images about America that have drawn people there from the very beginning. They capture the ongoing power and appeal of visions of the American West and frontier life, of the beckoning open spaces that promise new beginnings of what F. Scot Fitzgerald called “the fresh green breast of the New World” and visions of heroic people encountering a rugged land, of intrepid pioneers fulfilling their destiny in untrod wilderness.
The wide-open West, free of history and full of promise is a mythic landscape that people yearn for throughout the world. Ferenc Daday’s paintings reflect this heroic, westward moving ideal at the same time that they tap a more humble and spiritual vision of struggling folk attempting to renew themselves in a rugged unforgiving land.
And this is the mythic purifying landscape that Ferenc Daday poignantly captures in the paintings around us. His paintings narrate the hopes and struggles of ordinary folk within this awe-inspiring land, and as you view these canvases I’d like you to keep a couple of quotations in mind. I’d like you to consider what the American West has meant to war weary, history bent people both then and now; I’d like you to imagine what the wide-open West might have meant to Ferenc himself as a newly arrived refuge from an oppressed and aggrieved society.
The American West and its pioneers is all of these things and more for Ference Daday. Tracing the legacy of the pioneers from hopeful departure to hard won settlement, Ferenc’s western paintings are the result of more than 25 years of almost epic effort, and they illuminate (with echoes of his native village and land) the essence of the frontier story and its beckoning landscape. This series of paintings, he tells me, are a tribute to humble folk in two places: poor peasants in rural native Hungary and pioneers who came to the American West; and the spiritual qualities they share. Ferenc’s luminous landscapes with their panoramic backdrops and meticulous foregrounds, with their ability to tell a simple story, and their depiction of the hard won joys and stark tragedies of encountering a new land.

Michael Steiner American Studies Department California State University, Fullerton

Mr F. Daday
Please forward my private notes to Mr Daday.
Our address is:
Andrew Moring 24 Hilltop Rd
Mashpee, MA 02649

Balatonszarszo mural
My husband and I were visiting our home town on the Balaton and saw Mr Dadays beautiful mural at our church, that he painted for the town as a gift, this spring.
Both our families known Mr Daday and his family.
The mural is astonishing. It brings joy to the people of Szarszo.
My husband and I would like to thank Mr Daday for this nobel gesture of his.
We do not have his address or telephone number, so I'm doing it this way.
It would be our plesure, if he would get in touch with us.
Eva Bekefi Moring