The Košut family lived in a modest house covered with reeds, with small, misty windows through which young Tivadar observed and created his own world. Sitting by the oil lamp, he listened to the stories of old women about the creation of the world, Adam and Eve, the flood, Christ and his miracles, dreaming how happy he would be if he could paint it all.
Curious, he watched his mother painting, while the figures from Christian and Catholic icons haunted him through the night. Often, in his mother’s absence, he gazed at the small wooden table with its sparse painting tools, an unfinished icon, and golden powder, absorbing the magic of that moment.
His mother painted out of necessity, “for a few chickens, a piece of bacon, a kilo of lard,” discouraging Tivadar from painting, telling him that one could not live from art. But it was already too late – Tivadar had become a slave to his visions.
He began painting in 1967 as a member of the Novi Bečej art group “Selo,” but quickly realized that this was not his path. Restless and free-spirited, he refused to accept rules or uniformity of any kind. His escape into imagination soon set him apart from many naïve painters whose works had become popular commodities. Tivadar chose a more difficult road. Amidst the flood of sentimental landscapes, pastorals, and folklore, his biblical themes made him seem like a wandering missionary. His early works were not enthusiastically received. However, a chance encounter with Oto Bihalji Merin restored his confidence and strengthened his artistic determination.
Towards the late 1970s, after conflicts with managers and inexperienced gallery owners, Tivadar stopped painting for almost ten years. Yet, he never abandoned art. He experimented with ceramics, creating sculptures and wall compositions with glaze, a complex technique. During this period, he received invitations from abroad, with the decisive one coming from the “Salambo” gallery in Paris, which he took as a voice of destiny.
Tivadar Košut often painted scenes from everyday life: weddings, village musicians, Roma people, wine festivals, the mayfly of the Tisa River, old towns, people in traditional costumes, fishermen, and even bullfights. Still, even in these themes, his distance from folklore was evident – he eliminated literalness and direct description, instead urging the viewer to recognize symbolism. This dialogue between the artist and the visual world revealed his personal commentary on the emotions tied to each object.
His drawings were simple, with soft, rounded lines that framed color layers. Through color contrasts, he unconsciously created complementary relationships, structuring form with stylized shapes, rhythmic surfaces, and scratched accents. With Chagall-like floating figures and architecture as a backdrop, he created a “simultaneous stage.” By breaking the laws of gravity and logic and leaving backgrounds undefined, he still never disrupted harmony. His compositions resembled a carousel without a fixed base, spinning so strongly at times that it lifted, carried away like a bubble in the wind.
“I don’t think it matters what is left or right; for me, what matters is the center of the soul in the painting, which spins within the painter.” (Tivadar Košut)
Even his upside-down figures expressed spatial balance. To his childlike naïve expression, he added a decorative sense of rhythm and color’s musicality. (Oto Bihalji Merin, Nebojša-Bata Tomašević, Encyclopedia of World Naïve Art, Jugoslovenska revija, Belgrade, 1984, p. 367.)
Like many naïve artists, Košut sought to preserve the old in the face of modern times. The people of Bečej long relied on a ferry across the Tisa River before a bridge was built. With the dam’s construction, the “Tisa mayfly” disappeared – a living world of short-lived creatures that rose from the riverbed, transformed, and immediately died like butterflies. This left a deep impression on the painter. Watching their birth and death, crossing from one riverbank to the other, he often witnessed the contrast of life – a wedding on one side, a funeral on the other (“The Wedding of the Tisa Mayfly”).
Identifying human destiny with that of the mayfly, he painted life as a fragile passage between extremes. He became like a ferryman, transporting newlyweds, musicians, and mothers with children (“Birth”), and on the other side – a coffin with mourners (“Death”), a hunchback searching for his place under the sun, and a donkey – symbol of human naivety and weakness, questioning whether life is nothing but a “donkey’s game.”
The suggestive power of his paintings left a lasting impression – observing his compositions, we feel déjà vu. His figures seem to stay with us, becoming part of our imagination and obsession. From the darkness of his dreams emerged a world of poetic inspiration, where symbolism became the core means of expression. Objects lost their tangibility, serving as instruments of reflection. That is Tivadar’s enchanted “endless blue circle and within it a star,” from which he could not and did not want to escape.
Nina Kristić, Art Historian (1991)
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