Ernest Klausz 1896-1970

Born in 1896 in Eger, Hungary, Ernest Klausz began his studies at the Polytechnic School of Budapest before, encouraged by the painter József Rippl-Rónai, he pursued painting alongside, seeking to closely combine art and technique. Mobilized at the outbreak of the First World War, he was taken prisoner on the Russian front and deported to Siberia. Returning from captivity in 1922, he fled the authoritarian regime established in Hungary since 1920 by Admiral Miklós Horthy and went to Berlin, where a significant community of exiled Hungarian artists had already settled. Among them, the pianist Alexander László, through his research on the relationship between music and color, appears to have had a decisive influence on Klausz.

Klausz resumed his music studies at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Conservatory and trained in theatrical set design in the four state theaters of the city. He was likely also nourished by the aesthetic and visual experiments of the Bauhaus, then disseminated in Berlin through film projections of moving colored forms set to specially composed music. Regularly attending performances on the Berlin stage, Klausz contributed illustrations for lyrical and dramatic chronicles in specialized journals. Facing the rise of Nazism, he left Germany to settle in Paris in 1931, where he quickly met the painter Henry Valensi and the director of the Opera, Jacques Rouché.

In 1932, Klausz joined Charles Blanc-Gatti, Gustave Bourgogne, and Vito Stracquadaini within the newly founded “group of musicalist painters” established by Valensi. According to their theories, music, being science, rhythm, and dynamism, is the art most capable of expressing the nuances and subtleties of the human soul. Just as sound is a vibration of matter, color is a vibration of material; the musicalist painter is the one who uses his artistic medium (color, line, and form) to create a subjective “music” of color on his canvas.

Our large pastel on paper relates to one of Ernest Klausz’s most important musicalist achievements: the set design for La Damnation de Faust, performed at the Opera on 22 March 1933 in Berlioz’s exact version. Seeking stage innovations, Jacques Rouché called on the Hungarian painter to visually translate the work without betraying the musical poem. Klausz succeeded in convincing Rouché to use projected images for certain sets. Having been impressed a few years earlier by the spectacular light projections at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, the Opera director agreed to introduce cinema into the Palais Garnier. The projections, providing the dreamlike element necessary for the scenery, allowed phantasmagoria to merge with theatrical illusion.

Just as in certain gouache plates preserved at the Opera’s library-museum (fig. 1), our model demonstrates all that Klausz owed to his German experience. Beyond a certain Expressionism, the overall effect evokes the aesthetics of Berlin stage productions of the 1920s as well as the films of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. However, although particularly innovative, this visual conception received a mixed reception, partly, according to Klausz, because Rouché wished to retain, unlike the exclusive use of projections in German theaters, the traditional stage apparatus: a frame draped with black curtains and two levels on which the characters of this dramatic legend moved.