{"id":3768,"date":"2021-06-10T08:30:13","date_gmt":"2021-06-10T12:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dvsnightingstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=3768"},"modified":"2021-06-10T13:05:47","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T17:05:47","slug":"gyorgy-markos-and-his-pictorial-information-graphics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nightingaledvs.com\/gyorgy-markos-and-his-pictorial-information-graphics\/","title":{"rendered":"Gy\u00f6rgy Markos and His Pictorial Information Graphics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Hungarian Marxist, self-made geographer, and economist Gy\u00f6rgy Markos (1902\u20131976) was not the first to introduce ISOTYPE to the Hungarian public, but he was the only one to leave a consistent body of work with pictorial statistics. The ISOTYPE method was not widely used in Hungary, only a couple of sources recognized and praised it as a powerful and useful way of presenting data. That\u2019s why the oeuvre of Markos is unique in Hungary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the emigration<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Once called the \u201corganizer and propagandist of the Socialist planned economy\u201d (Tatai 1984), after World War II, Markos\u2019 carrier skyrocketed. In 1948, he was appointed as the director of the Economic Geography Department of the Karl Marx University Budapest, he became the press secretary of the Planning Bureau, and he had primary responsibility for the Sovietization of the Hungarian geography. Some things are quite obscure about his life as an illegal communist in the emigration before 1945. What we know, is mostly based on his own words and memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to an interview with him (S\u00fck\u00f6sd 1975), Markos was born in a religious, reactionary family (his father, Gyula Markos, was the chief editor of the Catholic, anti-semitic pamphlet Herk\u00f3 P\u00e1ter<\/em>), and as a young man, he wanted to be an abstract painter, influenced by the circles of the Hungarian avant-garde poet and painter, Lajos Kass\u00e1k (1887\u20131967). In his twenties, he turned to advertising and political graphics during his emigration to Berlin. He designed posters for the German Communist Party, then he continued his agitative work in Paris. In Paris, he connected graphic design with economic statistics, and he worked for newspapers and magazines like L\u2019Humanit\u00e9<\/em>, Le Monde<\/em> and Regards<\/em>. He describes his interest in graphics in the following way: \u201cI always wanted to paint philosophical content, but I could not make a living out of it. Then I made illustrations for various newspapers and journals, and I arrived to statistical graphs and charts through them. I recognized there was something ideological what can be represented visually: the economic statistics. I tried to extend the economic writings with visualizations. Therefore I met with economics through drawings. During these years I dealt very much with the planned economy of the Soviet Union. I demonstrated its development in the French leftist press through graphs\u201d (S\u00fck\u00f6sd 1975: 54).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ma\u00eetres et valet Contre les 200 familles. Advertising poster for the Les Trusts Contre La France. L\u2019Humanit\u00e9, 1936. Image courtesy of Biblioth\u00e9que National de France<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

According to Markos, his first significant graphic work was the Les Trusts contre La France (Trusts Against France). <\/em>In the epilogue of his Hungarian booklet, 50 Families and their Servants,<\/em> from 1947, he writes that \u201cthis work is based on my pre-war work in France about the role in the society of the two hundred French families (Les Trusts contre La France\u200a\u2014\u200aTr\u00f6szt\u00f6k Franciaorsz\u00e1g ellen.\u200a\u2014\u200aL\u2019Humanit\u00e9-kiad\u00e1s.).\u201d Zolt\u00e1n Tatai, in his biographical summary of the literary and ideological oeuvre of Markos, writes that his 200 families booklet on the French financial capital was published in 1937 (Tatai 1984), and the Hungarian Telegraph Agency\u2019s biography also gives the 1937 date for the publication. But Markos tells\u200a\u2014\u200ain the aforementioned interview\u200a\u2014\u200athat the booklet was published in 1936 and it was a joint work with Pierre Lenoir (S\u00fck\u00f6sd 1975: 54). The contemporary French reviews put the date 1937 for the publication, but I can\u2019t find Markos\u2019 name amongst the contributors. The authors were the union leader, later Nobel Prize-winner, and labour activist L\u00e9on Jouhaux, the Sorbonne-professor Marcel Prenant, the Hungarian-born, Marxist philosopher, Georges Politzer, and the Communist politician, Jacques Duclos. The graphic work was organized by the Swiss engineer, Georges Baehler alias Pierre Lenoir<\/em>, secretary of the Maison de la Technique of the French Communist Party. The illustrators were the caricaturist Raoul Cabrol and Ren\u00e9 Dubosc, and we know the pseudonyms of two designers, May and L\u00e9pine. Since we don\u2019t know whether Markos used any alias in his emigration, we can\u2019t preclude the possibility that May or L\u00e9pine could be Markos. Finally, it is worth noting, in 1946, Baehler published a book on the Swiss cement industry (Zement und Baumaterialen Trust<\/em>) under the pseudonym Pollux with a series of complex, but non-figurative, network diagrams (Nichols 2018). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is something more to the mystery. The newspaper L\u2019Humanit\u00e9<\/em> published a coloured advertising poster showing the networked connections between French millionaires, right-wing parties, and corporations in 1936 to promote the booklet. This design is similar to the design Markos used in his Hungarian booklet in 1947. At this point, it\u2019s not clear the extent to which, if at all, Markos contributed to the Les Trusts<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pages from Gy\u00f6rgy Markos: The 50 Families and their Servants. Budapest, 1947. Top Left: The Empire of the Credit Bank\u200a, Top Right: The largest stronghold of the fifty families.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

After the emigration<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Markos arrived back to Hungary after 1937, and in 1939, he started a proto-data journalism column in the newly established conservative newspaper Magyar Nemzet<\/em>. He ran this \u201cgraphic article\u201d series until 1942. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some graphic articles by Gy\u00f6rgy Markos in the newspaper Magyar Nemzet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His first book, Az orosz ipar fejl\u0151d\u00e9se Nagy P\u00e9tert\u0151l Szt\u00e1linig<\/em> (The Development of the Russian Industry from Peter the Great to Stalin<\/em>), was published in 1940, and it contained nearly twenty ISOTYPE-like statistical graphics. The book was considered a breakthrough for the locally-almost unknown Markos. The journalist Istv\u00e1n G\u00e1bor Benedek, in Markos\u2019 necrology, wrote in 1976 that the book was sold out in a couple of weeks and that censorship forbid the reprint in 1941. \u201cMany people asked then, who is Gy\u00f6rgy Markos? Those, who did not know his articles in N\u00e9pszava and Magyar Nemzet, thought it was a pen-name. Others presumed that it was a collective work of the illegal Communist party. They thought there is no one in Hungary who knows so well the Soviet Union (Benedek 1976: 5).\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n