About his Life
János Balázs was born in Alsókubin in 1905. Both his father and grandfather were famous first violinists, who could provide for their families. At the age of 5 he lost his father. With his family they moved to the gypsy hill of Pécskő, next to Salgótarján, where they built a hut and lived from hand to mouth. János Balázs did not finish school. He felt imprisoned by the desks, walls and strict teachers. He learned to read and he became a bookworm. Letters became his God and he accumulated an amazing amount of knowledge and experience that appeared decades later as his own message.
The grumpy, restless young man became a handyman; he repaired instruments, cleaned chimneys and was very good at ‘nearly everything’. He became a reflective young man who also enjoyed good arguments. He served in Losonc as a soldier. In 1944 he fell into captivity and even though the war ended soon, he was at the Szaratov prison camp for three years. He read there a lot, mainly Hungarian classical writers and the works of Shakespeare, Homer and Balzac. He returned to his old place from the camp.
He did not let anybody close to himself and started to write poems and paint as a morose recluse. He lived out of the forest – collected mushrooms, fruits, and fallen branches. He got some coal from the mine dump, made adobe bricks and instruments. Only kids visited his hut and they persuaded him to continue painting after they saw some of his drawings. They brought him the tools: rags, pieces of board and some paints.
His only experience and fun was painting and poetry. The children adored the strange old man, but the adults did not understand him. History, the common fate of gypsies and Hungarians, myths and his enormous lexical knowledge all appear in his poems and paintings. He was interested in everything – history, humanity, the gypsy colony, flowers, animals, Hirosima – visions and reality.
As a hermit he turned to a real renaissance man. He wanted to express his opinion in every field. Without moving out from his hut, he lived and worked without electricity, radio, newspapers and television.’ He passed away in 1977, one year before the opening of the ‘Nationwide exhibition of autodidactic gypsy artists’.
Artworks of János Balázs are available at the Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts.