Product Description This bilingual English-Hungarian publication was produced in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition curated by the author, art historian Gary van Wyk, at the QCC Art Gallery / City University of New York from December 9, 2014 through Februaury 22, 2015. The 174-page volume, including a bibliography and illustrated in full color, is the first book in English to focus on the art and life of Jozsef Jakovits (1909 - 1994), who was inspired by Surrealism and Primitivism. His sculpture resonated with primal sexuality and spirituality, blending genders, animal and human characteristics, and sacred and secular themes. This stance was provocative in conservative Hungary during the early post-World War 2 period, and it became intolerable to the authorities during the Soviet era. His work, along with other avant-gardists', was suppressed, but he was permitted to emigrate to the United States in 1965. Jakovits settled in New York City where he lived in relative obscurity, focusing on esoteric paintings concerned with kabalistic themes. In 1987 he returned to Budapest but did not achieve the belated recognition he had hoped for during his lifetime. He did not live to see the major retrospective of his work in 1996 in Budapest. From the Author Virtually unknown in the United States, despite having lived as a practicing artist in New York from 1965 to 1987, Jakovits is "little-known today even in his native Hungary, except in intellectual and artistic circles, where he is hailed as Hungary's foremost Surrealist sculptor. In the Hungarian National Gallery he is labeled 'post-Surrealist.' Jakovits viewed himself as a Primitivist, declaring his main sources to be 'cave painting, the tribal art of primitive peoples, and the archaic periods of the great religious cultures'--including Judaic lettering and mysticism." The key to Jakovits' obscurity was that Soviet-era Hungary suppressed modernism, although the country's