Life of Peter Meller

Peter was born in Budapest in 1923. He belonged to a large, prosperous, and cultivated family, Jewish on his father’s side, Catholic on his mother’s. His father, Dezső, was an architect and the friend of several of the city’s leading avant-garde artists; his paternal uncle, Simon, was an eminent art historian and collector who had served, in the years around the first world war, as the director of the department of prints and drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts. Peter attended a distinguished school, the Piarist Gymnasium, excelling at the study of Greek and Latin. He also drew and painted: a self-portrait, made with gouache at the age of fifteen, dated 22 August 1938, reveals an already highly-developed artistic personality. The structure of the head is suggested with economy and assurance; at the same time, there is a restlessness and impatience in the handling of the paint. In addition to precocious skill, the picture attests a strong-willed commitment to spontaneity as an artistic value, a commitment that would be sustained through all his subsequent work.

Peter Meller, Self-Portrait, gouache on paper, dated 22 August 1938

At the University of Budapest, Peter continued his studies of classical literature as well as the history of art. Among his teachers was Károly Kerényi, a renowned specialist in the study of ancient myth. Kerényi encouraged his students to think of myths in modern, existential terms, as representing archetypal characters and universal human dilemmas; his influence would have furthered whatever inclination Peter may already have possessed to see the world in terms of recurrent types and situations. Such an orientation is evident in Peter’s approach to the history of art, but also the way he looked at life in general and thus his practice as an artist. It sharpened and deepened his appreciation of the human comedy. Kerényi must have had a high regard for his student’s intellectual abilities: he invited Peter to participate in an exclusive discussion group that met on Friday evenings.

Civilized as it was, the world into which Peter was born was also full of deadly menace. The Hungarian government tried to maintain a degree of independence from Germany, to which it was formally allied, but Nazi sympathizers were numerous and became increasingly powerful in the late ‘30’s and early ‘40’s. On his way to and from school, Peter had to take care to avoid agents of the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross. He was able to continue his studies during most of the war, but when German troops occupied Hungary in the spring of 1944, it became necessary to go into hiding. He and his immediate family escaped the deportations, but seventeen members of his father’s extended family perished in the Holocaust. His older brother, Andrew, who had been pressed into military service, survived the war only to be picked up on the streets of Budapest by the Red Army shortly after the end of hostilities, then sent to Russia, where, condemned as a “fascist collaborator,” he died within a few years.

At the end of the war, Peter completed his studies and married Edina Stromer, whom he had met while in hiding from the Germans. He spent the academic year 1947-8 at the Hungarian Academy in Rome engaged in art-historical research. After his return to Budapest, he took a position as curator of the modern sculpture collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, taught art history at the Academies of Fine Arts and Applied Arts, and learned to negotiate the sinister absurdities of a Communist regime he quickly grew to detest. Once ordered by his superiors to remove some pictures by El Greco from display because they represented decadent Western individualism, Peter and his colleagues successfully argued that they should remain on display precisely because they represented decadent Western individualism.

Edina gave birth to a daughter, Judit, in 1949. Partly motivated by the desire to make a little extra money, Peter started translating ancient literature into Hungarian: Greek lyric poetry, satyr plays, and epigrams from the Greek Anthology, as well as Latin verse. He began the ambitious project of translating the great philosophical poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), but did not complete it. These translations are poetic achievements in their own right, adapting the lyrical potential of his native language to the various ancient meters with great skill and imagination. Peter would go on to compose Hungarian verse of his own, in the form of epigrams to his images, affectionate parodies of the ancient models he knew so well. Like a Renaissance humanist, he occasionally composed original verse in Latin. He was a poet, in other words, as well as a scholar and artist, and his literary habit of mind had a deep influence on both his scholarship and his art.

In his spare time, Peter sang in a choral group that specialized in the technically difficult music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. He also continued to draw and paint, and created designs for scarves, belts, and jewelry. He and Edina enjoyed hosting dinners, and would do their best, even in the period of austerity that followed the war, to prepare memorably sumptuous meals.

Edina died in 1953. A couple of years later, Peter married Mária (Mári) Kálmán, also an art-historian. Like many of their compatriots, they were devastated by the failure of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and soon after the brutal Soviet suppression began, they made plans to escape. Attempting to cross over into Austria on foot in the middle of the night, they were captured and briefly imprisoned: released with a stern warning to return to Budapest, they simply made another – this time, successful – effort to flee. Judit, who was seven, always remembered the way her father pressed her hand as they lay side by side in a snowy ditch while a border patrol, on skis, scanned the surrounding woods with flashlights. Having given all their money to the guides who helped them escape, Peter and his family arrived in Vienna with next to nothing. Sympathetic colleagues arranged for them to stay in some rooms of the Kunsthistorisches Museum for a few months until a more regular living situation could be found. In a letter written shortly after his arrival in Vienna to his colleague and lifelong friend, János Szilágyi, back in Budapest, Peter expressed his pleasure and excitement at having made his way to freedom: he looked forward both to the possibility of unrestricted travel and to opportunities that would allow him to pursue his scholarship. Because permanent academic positions were hard to come by, however, and especially hard to get if one were an émigré, Peter had to take a series of temporary and part-time appointments, interspersed with research fellowships and grants. He moved his family to Florence in 1958, where they remained for a decade, although his academic commitments often involved long periods away. To supplement their income, he and Mári made jewelry. A photo of Peter, taken at the Trevi Fountain in Rome in 1962, captures his intensity and sensitivity, as well as his understated but acute sense of style.

Peter Meller at the Trevi Fountain, 1962, photograph from the family archive

In 1968, he was invited to the University of California, Santa Barbara, as a visiting professor; the following year he was offered a permanent position. He regretted having to leave Europe – and especially to give up on his dream of being able to establish a permanent home in Italy – but the prospect of financial security was welcome after years of living from one job to the next. He would return to Europe regularly on short trips connected with his research, and even returned several times to Hungary. Still, as anyone who has experienced it knows, life in Italy is infinitely more than the sum of its moments, and intermittent visits offer nothing like the cumulative effect of its more habitual sway.

Something of an exile, therefore, always carefully dressed in jacket and tie, with a rather formal, old-world sense of courtesy and a charming accent, Peter began his adjustment to Southern California. His lectures were popular: students found them impressively learned, thought-provoking, and entertaining. His classes attracted many adult members of the local community: mature auditors often detected a current of sly humor beneath the serious surface of the lectures and wondered whether most of it was not lost on students too naive to appreciate it.

As a boy, Peter had collected mineral specimens in the mountains of Transylvania; now he could often be seen on the beach, adding to his collection of sea shells. Mári, unable to accept her new surroundings, returned to Europe before long. Judit, who had been trained as a conservator of paintings in Florence, worked in Los Angeles, first at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, then at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where she set up the conservation studio: she remained close to her father throughout his life. Upon retiring from teaching in 1994, Peter moved with Judit and her husband, John Moore, to a serene hilltop house outside the nearby village of Solvang, and was thus able to spend his remaining years in surroundings similar to the rural Tuscany he loved.

Peter Meller in retirement, Santa Barbara, c.1995, photograph from the family archive

As a scholar, Peter specialized in the art of Renaissance Italy. His approach drew upon a range of methods prevalent at the time of his training: like many art-historians of his generation, he was attracted to the work of Erwin Panofsky and his student, Edgar Wind. Their emphasis on recurrent themes in the art of the Renaissance, and especially on themes and ideas derived from ancient literature and thought, appealed to Peter’s training in the classics and resonated with Kerényi’s approach to myth. Yet Peter’s interests were wide-ranging. He made his reputation with essays on especially complex, elusive figures such as Leonardo da Vinci and Giorgione. He was fascinated by the transmission of forms and styles across cultures, and in how, during the Renaissance, the graphic arts contributed to that process. Much of his best work is on portraiture. He seems to have inherited his interest in small-scale bronze sculpture from his uncle Simon, who published a book on German Renaissance bronzes: Peter eventually became a leading authority on the bronzes of Renaissance Italy, his expertise sought out by dealers and collectors until the very last days of his life. A good indication of the range of his interests and erudition is the fact that one of his best-known essays – published after his retirement and only at the repeated urging of colleagues – is entitled “Manet in Italy,” and concerns the way in which a pioneering modernist painter responded to the art of Antiquity and the Renaissance. Beyond its insights into Manet, it offers a glimpse – revealing for the understanding of Peter’s own art – of what he thought a modern artist might learn from the art of the past.

Chapter from the book: Robert Williams, The Zodiac of Wit: Peter Meller and the Graphic Imagination, exh. cat., Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2012, 9-11.