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This artwork is not only an outstanding piece of just one artistic epoch of the whole oeuvre, but is also a cardinal masterpiece of 20th century Hungarian art.
Stuck onto a light blue background visionary elements, such as small-town houses, a corpus of Christ from a crucifix, shin-bones placed on each other in an X shape, taken from their original contexts and drawn in firm contours that nevertheless reflect the emotional vibrations of the artist, are combined in one composition. The group of motifs fashioned in plasticity that are positioned contrary to renaissance box-arrangement and the law of gravity, yet kept in the same plane, lend a spiritual meaning to the painting. The centre of the centrifugal force of the picture is positioned in the section point of the two architectonic parts, and the artistically winding brownish garland - a motif taken from the spherical rose of a well in Szentendre - marks an imaginary path for the viewer's eye. Just a moment to go further and the moment of grace, in which the structure of the picture is in equilibrium, breaks up, and disappears irrevocably in time. The figure with his arms apart that copies the silhouette of the body of Christ sculpted in one of the stone crosses of the Szigetmonostor cemetery, now having lost his cross, appearing through the house elements, as if just arriving or ready to swim on, is floating in indefinable space. His gesture is no longer one of the Crucified. It conveys the sense of flying as well as that of protecting the objects around the body. The components converge in the painting according to the logic of the irrational (dreams, thoughts and memories overlapping with one another), i.e. the logic of intuition instead of definitive understanding. In Vajda's art the tragic experience that the Hungarian poet, Ady expressed in these words: "All that is Whole has been broken/All flames burn in fragments only", is reflected in an adequate, lyrically drawn visual form.
The disintegration or narrowing of the traditional world concept that fixed man's place firmly in the world, commencing in the 19th century and then rapidly accelerating, and the exponential expansion of human knowledge and its heavy fall on the individual in an excessive flow of information as well as the social and political tensions arising from the great economic world crisis of around 1930 were all factors that posed new challenges to people living in that age - including the artists - and they found it very difficult to provide authentic and workable answers to these challenges. Vajda's entire oeuvre was a grandiose attempt to provide an answer both in terms of content and artistic form. His attempts at identification with various modern or avant-garde movements following his sojourn in Paris, his rejection of all the variations of contemporary Hungarian art predominantly relying on the illusions of the real spectacle, outlined for him a theoretical programme in the working out of which he co-operated with Dezső Korniss and which was influenced by his conversations with the philosopher Lajos Szabó. The essence of the so-called 'Szentendre programme' can be seen in the way the fragments of traditional culture (cleared of all its superfluous ornaments) could become the means for expressing the personality of modern man here in Hungary. That explains why he and his fellow painters went on motif-collection tours in Szentendre and in the surrounding villages. And Vajda's method as a painter was to draw these motifs one on the other following the principle of transparency and montage, the technique that was used extensively in surrealism and in cinematic art. This painting offers a synthesis of these efforts.
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