Lajos Matolcsy, June 17, 1905 - November 2, 1982. An artist dedicated to sharing his art with the world, first and foremost through teaching. His influence on the visual arts and artists in the Oxford Hills, especially through the Western Maine Art Group, established an environment friendly to the arts and supportive of arts and culture, which endures today more than two decades after his death.

Here is a blockprinted Christmas card. A man and a woman, hand in hand, walk a snowy path towards a small house in the distance. The woman’s head is wrapped in a scarf; she carries a bundle, and the man carries a suitcase. Lajos Matolcsy created the card about 1958; the image is of Lajos and Claire Matolcsy, and their move from New York City to Paris, Maine. But there is more here than a simple Christmas greeting. The house is a long walk through the snow. And the two figures carry their possessions, not gifts; the seemingly celebratory image is shadowed with the experiences of Lajos Matolcsy’s life.

We look at a later painting, an image of a scene from Matolcsy’s World War II experiences. Here are Hungarian refugees, urgently bent forward, struggling towards a goal that recedes indistinctly into the distance. They also walk through a snowy landscape, carrying shapeless bundles and bags, the women’s heads swathed in scarves. A child pulls a wagon with a toy horse tied atop his bundle. This figure is echoed by a boy standing with his father in front of a cottage, watching the stream of people, and holding in his left hand a stuffed toy of his own. The boy is painted almost cartoonishly - and his eyes are rough black holes in his face. Look at the joy on the face at the top of the page, then at these somber reminders of the memories Matolcsy brought with him to Maine. One may feel that he can begin to understand what coming finally to the Oxford Hills meant to Lajos Matolcsy.

Lajos was born in Szerencs, Hungary, 200 miles northeast of Budapest, and grew up in the Balaton Lake district, 50 miles southeast of the capital. Balaton is central Europe’s largest lake, with rolling hills and farmland around it. Lajos’s family was prosperous; he described it to one interviewer as of “baronial stock.” The family crest is on the Hungarian Parliament building, and it is possible that the family had a patent of nobility going back at least to the mid-nineteenth century. Lajos’s father was the supervisor of bookkeeping in a bank and an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army; his mother was a teacher. The senior Matolcsy fought in World War I and spent time in a prison camp, foreshadowing the brutal effects of war on Lajos’s own life. The young Lajos showed his passion for art as a child. The earliest work the family has is a portrait of Lajos’s sister Ilona, completed when he was 18, which shows that he was already a competent artist. But an art career was not an easy option - his father was adamant that he study law. After the War, in the early 1920’s, Lajos joined the army himself, to finance his secondary education, a practice common in eastern Europe at that time. Then, bowing to his father’s demands, he attended law school at Pecs, Hungary.

Having satisfied his father’s wishes, Lajos almost immediately entered the Royal Academy in Budapest, a place where tradition still dominated and formed Lajos’s formal art training. It is interesting to look at some near-contemporaries: Picasso and Braque were some 25 years older; Henry Moore and Magritte were born in 1898, Dali in 1904. Much later Matolcsy told an interviewer that he had experimented with impressionism and cubism, but always returned to realistic art. This is not surprising if we look at his extensive academic career, which went from the Royal Academy to scholarship study at the Collegium Hungaricum in Rome and the Julian Academy in Paris.

In 1933 Lajos settled down to teaching, as a Professor of Fine Arts at Gyonk Gymnasium (equivalent to a junior college), then Nagykata High School, then Siofok Gymnasium, an experimental school emphasizing personal attention to the students. In 1940 he became the Director at Siofok, a position he held until 1944. At the same time he worked as Director for the Ministry of Education, supervising fine arts programs for about 80 schools, one of the youngest directors ever appointed. Inevitably, he was also a member of the Hungarian Army, first as a reservist and then on active duty as World War II overwhelmed Europe. He was elected to the Hungarian Art Society (Magyar Kepzomuveszek Egyesultete). He exhibited regularly, including six international shows, winning first prizes for poster art at exhibitions in Switzerland and Belgium. In Hungary he exhibited at the National Art Gallery from 1938 to 1945, and won first prizes for watercolors in the Hungarian National Exhibition. He also held one-man shows.

While his preferred artistic mode was realism, Lajos was an experimenter in any medium that came to hand. He painted murals for Hungarian churches (mostly destroyed during World War II); he loved figure painting, especially nudes; and created landscapes and portraits in oils, watercolor, pen- and-ink and pencil. Later he would work in ceramics and wood as well - “I attempt to bring the proper media to the subject,” he told an interviewer in 1976. Matolcsy was first married during this period; it ended in divorce about 1943, with one daughter, Ildiko, now 68, living in Tarcal. She and her half-siblings in the United States have remained in close contact over the years.

We come now to World War II. If Hungary was in a difficult position during and after World War I, it was doubly so after 1938. The terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, which settled World War I, left Hungary in nearly as bad a state as Germany. The country lost two- thirds of its territory, the size of the army was limited, and armor and an air force were banned. A 1927 treaty with Italy, intended to create an alliance that would help regain lost territory, set the stage for connections with the developing Axis. Between 1938 and 1941 the country was able to regain some territory by diplomatic and military means, and rebuilt its army. Then in 1941 Hitler took advantage of Hungary’s desires by offering back the territory taken in World War I. In return, the German Army was allowed to enter Hungary to prepare for the invasion of Yugoslavia, and the Hungarians mobilized the Hungarian Third Army to assist. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hungary joined the Axis by declaring war against Russia.

We give these political details in order to help us understand Lajos’s situation during this period. He was a successful artist and teacher, with a notable career, in a country that had seemed to be doing well politically and economically. He must have felt that times were good. Then, between 1938 and 1941, it all changed. We know that Lajos was an officer in the reserve, and later served on active duty. We do not kn know many details of this period, but there is a wood block self-portrait that Lajos made about 1940, and a family story that tells of him being lined up for inspection, with his horse - a tragicomic picture when compared with the massively mechanized German forces. The horse stepped on his foot, and Lajos screamed. The inspecting officer lost his temper at this insubordination, and ripped Lajos’s insignia of rank from his uniform then and there. Significantly, Lajos, the artist, responded to this incident with the woodblock image, the instinctively aesthetic reaction of a man for whom visual art was the fundamental medium of expression.

In 1944 Hungary’s situation grew disastrously worse. Sensing the imminent Axis defeat, the government of Hungary sought a peace treaty with the Allies. The Germans immediately ousted the government and replaced them with their own Fascist “Arrow Cross” party. The Holocaust came with the Germans, who transported hundreds of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz and elsewhere, along with Roma (Gypsies) and other victims. The Hungarian Army was effectively destroyed, and Lajos joined the Resistance, fighting now against the occupying forces of his country’s former ally. As the Germans withdrew during 1944 and 1945, the Russian army invaded Hungary in pursuit, and the Resistance shifted its target to the new occupier. By the spring of 1945 the Russians were firmly in control, in spite of the efforts of the dwindling Resistance. The country was devastated, a million Hungarians dead: soldiers on the front, Hungarian Jews in concentration camps and civilians during the Red Army campaign against the Wehrmacht.

The family preserves Lajos’s brief accounts of this period, which are harrowing. A group was bulldozing a bombed-out building; Lajos got separated from the rest, and was buried in the rubble. He lay there for three days, until his searching comrades heard his calls. In battle, he was pinned against a tree by a large truck, which crushed his rib cage. At the same moment, a shell burst nearby, giving him a head wound that left a scar he carried the rest of his life. He was taken to the hospital, where he was put in a body cast. The hospital was bombed. The patients were carried out and laid on the street, Lajos in his cast, now infested with lice. At some time before the Russian invasion, Lajos spent time in a German prison camp; he emerged starved to 90 pounds or so, gums diseased from malnutrition, his teeth removed one by one with a nail or other handy piece of sharp metal. That the artist in him survived this descent into the brutal chaos of guerrilla war, and even thrived afterward, seems nearly miraculous.

Lajos had seen two powerful enemies overwhelm his country, and was now a marked man under the Communist regime, as the secret police began hunting down and killing members of the Resistance and anyone else who might offer opposition. In a bit of grim irony, the secret police set up its headquarters in the very same Budapest building used by the Germans for that purpose. After the fall of the Communists, the building became a museum honoring the Resistance fighters - it is called The House of Terror, and the torture chamber is preserved intact.

So Lajos left, with what possessions he could carry in one trunk, traveling west through Austria into Germany. He had visited Germany before the War, spoke the language, and was familiar with the country. We do not know where he settled, though surviving paintings suggest that it may have been in the southeastern part of the country. Whatever temporary employment may have been necessary for him to get established in Germany, he quickly turned once again to art as his primary source of income. We have evidence of two primary areas of activity during this period. The first is his participation in exhibitions - remember, he had exhibited outside Hungary before the War, and must still have had some reputation. The second part of his work took advantage of his wide-ranging artistic abilities: he began doing commercial graphic work, mostly for a German tourist company. After he came to the United States, we find him doing considerable antique restoration, a set of skills that he may well have begun to develop during his time in Germany.

This part of Lajos’s life lasted half a dozen years, until 1951. His time in Germany notwithstanding, he was still an immigrant, a Hungarian, not of German stock like other immigrant groups from Eastern Europe. We do not know why he was expelled, but they must have been related to German policy changes towards these war refugees, who had come from the East in waves after World War II. The family preserves Lajos’s account of the event, when he was awakened at dawn by the German police with no advance warning, and told to pack what he could and leave immediately. It seems clear that Lajos had a career in Germany, and must have felt that he had reached at least some sort of refuge after the horrors he had seen in Hungary. To be driven once again from his home and possessions must surely have been a deep wound, even to a man toughened by war.

But Lajos had been toughened, and by now knew survival as well as he knew art. He packed a single trunk - the family still has it, a symbol of that event in Lajos’s life - and must have traveled north, to Hamburg or another port, where he was able to use the last of the money he carried with him to buy passage to New York. He arrived in the United States, having watched appalled as the ship jettisoned unused leftover food at sea before they docked, unimaginable to a man who had faced starvation. Lajos was delivered to Ellis Island, where he fought indifferent clerks to get his name recorded correctly, a man who might have lost much, but never his pride. He was still, as the Hungarians say, Magyar, proud and independent in his national identity.

Emerging into New York, Lajos was again a refugee, with no money and no contacts. So he became once again, for a while, a guerilla fighter, who knew how to be invisible and how to survive. He settled in Central Park, scavenged food from garbage cans, and watched for an opportunity. It came when he found a Hungarian newspaper in a garbage can. This led him to the Hungarian community in Manhattan, a busy ethnic enclave such as New York has always supported. They greeted him with traditional hospitality, and, one may suggest, with some respect for his role in the War. We do not know exactly what happened next, but we know that Lajos found work quickly and turned the situation to his advantage. We know that he established a restoration business in New York, successful by the time he met his second wife Claire. The family has seen photographs of him on ladders, as though he were working on large buildings, where his artistic skills would be valuable for restoration work. He eventually found a job as a draftsman - again, a position where art skills count - and the family has saved one of his blueprints.

There is a story from this period that sounds typical of Lajos: his artist’s mind could not content itself with simple drafting, and he developed a concept for a somewhat innovative building. This he presented to his employers, who rejected it out of hand as being impractical. This ended the matter, until Lajos passed a building some years later, and realized that it was the one he designed, now finished and operating, built by the people who had so soundly rejected the idea. He seems to have been more pleased and amused than resentful; later, as he renovated and added to the Ryerson Hill farm, he was immensely proud of his design and construction work.

This period carries us another half dozen years, to the late 1950’s. Lajos seems to have had an art studio and restoration business operating successfully by this time, perhaps with a growing reputation. A young woman from Portland, Maine, Claire Couri, had moved to New York after graduating from Cornell, received a master’s degree in international relations from NYU, and was working at the United Nations as Secretary to the Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was like Lajos in that she had subsumed her real love, dance, to more conventional vocations. But both her talent and her commitment were genuine, and she had been able to make her workaday life support study with no less than Martha Graham, and then Jose Limon.

Claire had a friend in Limon’s dance class, a man who was also following his artistic impulses. An actor, he had seen Marcel Marceau’s famous 1956 performance in New York, and recognized his own true vocation as a mime. He went to Paris, studied with Marceau and others, and by the time he met Claire must have been studying dance in order to enhance his physical skills as a performer. His name was Tony Montanaro, a man now most familiar in the Oxford Hills as a migrant to the area like Lajos Matolcsy, the founder in 1972 of the Celebration Barn.

Tony also was friendly with Lajos; how and why we do not know. He encouraged Claire to meet the Hungarian, who was some 20 years her senior. As a teenager, Claire and Lajos’s daughter Aranka once asked her mother if there really was such a thing as love at first sight. She had never believed in it, said Claire - until she first met Lajos. Lajos was perhaps not so susceptible, not surprising considering his history; but the two quickly fell deeply in love and began a devoted relationship that lasted the rest of their lives. They were, eventually, living together, a practice much less accepted in the 1950’s than today. Claire’s family in Cape Elizabeth was well-to-do, her father Dewey Couri a successful car dealer around Portland. Mr.. Couri deeply disapproved of all of it, the dance, the Hungarian artist, the cohabitation, and the possibility of marriage.

Claire’s mother’s family had been from Buckfield, in Oxford County, and Claire soon brought Lajos to Maine to show him the country she loved in the Oxford Hills. Traveling on old Route 26, the couple retraced Claire’s route with her mother, through Paris Hill, over Ryerson Hill towards the cemetery in Buckfield where Claire’s Thayer ancestors were buried. On Ryerson Hill Road there was an old farm, a long-abandoned place that Claire knew well.

On August 4, 1958 Lajos and Claire were married, a simple ceremony in New York City. This was the final straw for Claire’s father, who disowned and disinherited his daughter, and later tried to block her contact with her mother. In April of 1959 their first son, Sandor, was born. The Matolcsys’ marriage and new family got them thinking about leaving the city. The Montanaros were by that time living in Woodstock, New York, an attractive and congenial place when the Matolcsys visited. But in the end it was that old farm in Maine that pulled most strongly, not least because it was abandoned, nearly falling down and could be had for very little.

Claire and Lajos visited the place. Lajos set out to explore the house, over Claire’s objections that it was dangerously unsafe; she chose to be cautious, and stay in the car. Lajos disappeared inside. A few minutes later Claire heard an eerie sound. It was an organ, being played enthusiastically. Claire was struck dumb, convinced now that Lajos had indeed fallen prey to the place, and his ascent to Heaven was being accompanied by music. She ran inside - carefully - and was astonished yet again, to find Lajos in the ancient living room, playing away on an old pump organ that had been built into the wall. It was one of those remarkable incidents that argues that your proposed course of action is the right one.

The Matolcsys submitted an offer for the place, $777.77, surely a lucky bid. It was accepted, and the family got a quitclaim deed for the property along with a $700 mortgage from the bank. Lajos was 54 years old, once again penniless, now in debt, and starting again in a new place, with a house that was barely habitable. This time, however, he had Claire, and the Oxford Hills, which evoked memories of his childhood home in Hungary. That he was barred absolutely from Hungary and his family was a continual pain for Lajos; he would not live to see the end of Communism and free elections in Hungary in 1990.

At this point we may return to Lajos’s Christmas card. It was made before the family moved, in anticipation of the event. And if we look at it again, in the light of the Matolcsys’ hopes, we may see it not only as a shadow of Lajos’s past, but as a symbol of his future. In Christmas iconography we know that house is home, and that Lajos and Claire are walking towards a place that will help join the pieces of their lives with a place that will give them the things that home represents.

The move was made in several trips, with a tent for shelter until it was possible to live in the house. Lajos and Claire unleashed a whirlwind of activity renovating the old place, Claire working beside her husband to transform their derelict shell into a home. For a woman who had grown up affluent and often unhappy, this energetic engagement with the real world may have been a kind of liberating relief. For Lajos the liberation was profound. After twenty years of a life lived in stages, each ended by tragedy, he was now in a place that was his own, one that felt comfortably like Hungary, passionately in love, with an infant son. A second son, Zoltan, was born on May 21, 1961. In the years that followed Lajos displayed an immense energy for art, for teaching, and for his life on Ryerson Hill.

Once the house was livable, the farm acquired a garage, a barn, an el that connected the garage and house together, a sun porch and a studio. Almost all of it was built with materials salvaged from abandoned barns and other buildings in the area - Lajos never lost the habits he had learned from the chaos of World War II. Even nails were straightened and reused. Lajos enjoyed carpentry and building as much as he did his art. He proudly laid up fieldstone for parts of the barn wall, and pointed out clever bits of design and carpentry to visitors.

The final arrangement was very much like the traditional connected farm that Lajos saw in the neighborhood, an arrangement strange to a European, but one whose utility he must quickly have seen. The studio building benefited from another New England tradition, moving buildings intact. A hunting camp across the road was transported to the Matolcsy property; then a building on the Cooper farm, down the road, was moved intact, hauled by a tractor as helpers, mostly local boys, inserted and replaced round logs to keep the structure moving continuously on rollers. Eventually the barn was filled with animals, and the yard with fruit trees. Lajos remembered how to make fruit wine and hard cider, which produced some potent beverages. His talent with plants was as great as his skill with the inanimate world, so that the sun porch was filled with greenery, as was the greenhouse he built from salvaged windows.

In his 50’s now, Lajos was not tall, but was solidly built and very strong. His friend Charles Berg told about Lajos carrying large rocks for the stone walls of the barn, too heavy for any of the other workers. And one might expect that an artist’s hands would naturally show the delicacy needed for painting; but Lajos’s were the calloused hands of a worker. His daughter Aranka remembers walking with him as a small child, holding just his pinky finger, feeling as though it were as large as a whole hand.

Behind the joy of settling in Maine, however, there remained the sadness of Hungary, and Lajos’s family there. The Communist government’s control permitted family correspondence, but the letters from Hungary brought waves of despair to Lajos, who could fold up into himself and retreat to his studio for a day or more. Lajos’s daughter Ildiko, by his first marriage, was now grown and married, but her father could not escape feelings of guilt as he read her letters and looked around at his new family. There was no solution in sight. The 1956 Revolution in Hungary had been put down viciously, and a letter from the family in Hungary warned him bluntly about his fate if he dared to go home: “They’ll take you into the hospital and you’ll never come out.” A consolation was Leonie Cooper, a neighbor up the road who had escaped from Germany during the War with her two sisters and her brother. She and Lajos shared experiences, and Lajos, not yet fluent in English, appreciated the chance to speak German with Leonie.

As soon as possible, Lajos and Claire set about creating an income. The upstairs became the dance studio and the art studio alternately, both eventually to be transferred to the schoolhouse on Main Street in Norway that became the Lajos Matolcsy Art Center. Lajos was as energetic in his art as in building his home. With the pieces of a good life in place, his creativity was released, and spread in all directions. One of his children calls it “an unbounded desire to get his hands on everything.” He had always worked in whatever medium attracted him at the time, and now he produced oil paintings, watercolors, pen and ink drawings and pencil and charcoal sketches; wood block prints and silk screens; ceramics and sculptures; wood carvings; and even some weaving.

He exhibited constantly, at local schools and facilities, in Portland and Boston, at galleries in Portland and elsewhere. Claire was an important part of this active exhibition and sales effort. Perhaps as a bit of heritage from her automobile dealer father, she worked tirelessly to promote Lajos’s work and sell his art. There were sales constantly, but Lajos never saw sale prices comparable with those of more eminent and popular artists. We may speculate that this is in part because Lajos never specialized in the way that most well-known artists do, so as to make one or two readily identifiable products that could be sold easily. The need to make money notwithstanding, Lajos retained a keen contempt for Philistines. The woman who came looking for a picture to match her couch did not get a friendly reception.

What grew most explosively was his teaching, which fairly quickly outgrew the Ryerson Hill house and eventually expanded to studios in Lewiston, Portland and Casco as well as the location in Norway. He spent roughly a day a week at each location. By 1962 he was staging exhibitions of his students’ work. In December of that year the Lewiston Evening Journal reported on an exhibit of some 200 paintings by 36 of his students, which was scheduled to be shown in Lewiston, then Portland and South Paris. “In age they range from 14 years to 85,” reports the paper. “They are housewives, business and professional men, a doctor or two, bank employees, and even a warehouse worker.”

In the Norway area a small group of students decided to form an organization. The Western Maine Art Group was established in 1962, with Lajos as President. The founders included Lajos, Lee Bean, Anne Beyer, Ellie Viles, and Marion Stewart. As the organization grew to 100 or so members from the area, Matolcsy guided them in holding exhibits and other events. They exchanged exhibits with the Nashua, New Hampshire Artists Association. And they mounted an exhibit loaned by the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine. By 1966 the group had grown to the point that it began to think of establishing a permanent home, a facility where its varied activities could take place year round. Contacts with the Maine Humanities Council produced encouragement but no funds. About that time the Town of Norway reached a point where the old one-room schoolhouses were vacant, and could be disposed of. The Art Group came forward, and after some negotiation, and with the help of the Town, was able to purchase the school on upper Main Street, which they renovated into the present Art Center.

Both Claire and Lajos were active participants in the new Center, Lajos with his art classes upstairs, and Claire with a dance studio downstairs, where she shared the space with periodic art exhibits. Claire and her old friend from New York days Judy Berg were partners in the dance studio, where they taught together for 20 years. For their work this was a good time for the Matolcsys; but for the family it became the worst of times. Lee Bean, the wife of a local doctor, was a talented artist who had become a painter of real quality under Lajos’s tutelage. She was also a very active organizer and promoter of the Art Group, a real working partner for Lajos. The families were close friends, and Lee and Lajos were inevitably brought even closer to each other by their mutual dedication to art and their work promoting local art and culture. At the end of January 1967 Sandor and Zoltan Matolcsy were visiting the Beans, sliding with the Bean children, when Sandor slipped into a cesspool hidden under the snow, and drowned. He was 7 years old. The loss devastated the family - the child had surely been a symbol of the passion of Lajos and Claire for each other, and of the new life that Lajos had found in his marriage and his home in Maine.

The couple survived, and Lajos called once again on his determination to persevere. The birth of a daughter, Aranka, July 1, 1968, gave new life to the family, though Lajos was now 63 years old and Claire, at 42, quite old to bear a child by the standards of that time. His concentration on his art seems to have continued and increased. The children remember him as constantly drawing or painting, using anything that came to hand, as though his hands had a will of their own to make art. He might sketch on the back of an envelope when that was all that was handy. He might take the children fishing; but he would use the time for sketching them and the scene.

At home, the children found him loving and demonstratively affectionate, but always drawn back to his studio. His first child, Ildiko, remembers that before World War II, when she was with him in Hungary, he often played the guitar for her (yes, Lajos also something of a musician, playing the piano, guitar and string bass, the latter always with a bow), and had her join him at his side while he painted. Certainly Lajos loved his work and felt no particular need for respite from it; one feels that he worked also to escape from some of his lingering unhappinesses, including the death of Sandor.

By this time many of his art students had been with him for years, and had great respect and affection for him - he was always “Professor” to them, although Lajos had really lost the title when he left Hungary. The local classes tended to be dominated by women, who had time for the lessons and time to pursue the hobby. Lajos, always charming and engaging, appreciated women and enjoyed his students. Annual trips to Swan’s Island, on the Maine Coast, to paint with students, were the closest he came to a vacation. In 1972 the Art Group began running the Sidewalk Art Sale in Norway. It continues to be an annual event, though its organization has passed back and forth to the Art Group and through other hands. This was a community-oriented program, typical of the Art Group and Lajos’s interest in encouraging art and culture.

It was also in 1972 that Lajos and Claire’s old friend Tony Montanaro, who had visited the Matolcsys and performed under the auspices of the Art Group, began looking for a place to raise his growing family and experiment with new directions in his performances. The Matolcsys found a house and barn in South Paris, a place nearly as decrepit as their own had been. The Montanaros came to Maine, where Tony founded the Celebration Barn, now an important setting for learning and practicing physical performance arts of all kinds.

As Lajos approached 70 the stresses of his difficult life began to show. He carried shrapnel in his body, which shifted and caused problems. He developed diabetes, and lost part of his left leg as a result of circulatory complications. He continued to smoke, which aggravated cardiac problems. The children remember their father’s later years as a time of continual illness, though Lajos fought back, remained active, and continued to paint and teach. He had heart problems, and received an early bypass operation in Boston.

If there was a tangible symbol of his contribution to the Oxford Hills, it was the Art Center building on Norway’s Main Street. He had guided its creation, out of his and Claire’s wish to bring art to the community; and had helped to navigate it through rocky patches when funding and volunteer help were scarce. In June 1980 the Art Group renamed its old schoolhouse the Lajos Matolcsy Art Center. Lajos, in a wheelchair, arrived without knowing the honor that had been done him until he stepped from the car and saw the new sign. It was a dramatic - and deeply emotional - moment for a man whose life had been marked by so much destruction, and who had so often been an anonymous victim of uncontrollable historical forces.

Lajos died two years later, in November of 1982. He painted until shortly before his death. Near the end he seems to have known that it was time, that he needed to do what he could to order his life for his family. Working from his wheelchair, he spent hours in his studio, organizing papers, drawings and memorabilia. His old habits never changed - nothing was thrown out if he could avoid it, and he used what was at hand to do the job. Portfolios are held together with rubber bands cut from bicycle tubes. File folders are made of scrap paper and cardboard. But it is all there, bits from Hungary, travel passes from the German police to go to exhibits, posters he did for the German tourist company he worked for. There are more than 100 pictures left, prized now by the children.

Claire was diagnosed with cancer soon after Lajos’s death; she survived until 1989. Lajos and Claire are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Auburn, Maine, with Sandor.

We end with two quotes from Lajos’s children, for whom the memory of their father is alive and vivid, that perhaps illuminate Lajos’s character a little:

Aranka Matolcsy: “His death - it was as though he had paid his dues - that he was able to die in peace, in his own home, on his terms.”

Zoltan Matolcsy: “When we pass on, the only thing you will miss is our being. Our spirits will still be here. His spirit is still here, very much, in the paintings, and in the books I read and in the mountains I look at, and it’s definitely in my son’s face. It is still here.”

We thank the people and organizations who generously gave their time and made their archives and memories available for this biography: Aranka Matolcsy, Zoltan Matolcsy, the Western Maine Art Group and Barbara Traficonte, The Norway Historical Society and Charles Longley, the Norway Memorial Library and Ann Seikman, and the Norway Summer Festival Committee.