Frank Licsko’s life began behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Hungary, but he escaped communism for freedom in the West, where he went on to become a professional artist.
Licsko, who now lives on Vancouver Island in B.C., just completed a two-metre homage to American liberty whose centrepiece is Lady Liberty herself. He says what it expresses is something his father would have been killed for expressing in his once-communist homeland.
“To me, man and God meet in the frame of liberty,” Licsko told The Epoch Times, pointing to his oil reproduction of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” comprising the central top part of his pastiche political painting.
In the painting, titled “Icons of American Liberty,” God reaches out and, with a finger, single-handedly sparks life into Adam while at the same time lighting Liberty’s torch, whose light then radiates through the pages of American history.
Licsko said such pious expressions were forbidden in his native Soviet Hungary.
“You were not allowed to go to church, that was definitely not allowed—no spiritual input,” he said, adding that life was “very hard” for his family, who feared ending up in jail or being tortured to death if they complained about their lot.
“Icons of American Liberty” by Frank Licsko. Courtesy of Frank Licsko
Like many post-war artists, Licsko went overseas, left the old world in the dust, and embraced the New World. Unlike followers of the Frankfurt School—who derided the act of writing poetry after Auschwitz as “barbaric”—Licsko didn’t use trauma from his experiences as an excuse to tear down any edifices. He revered fine art, mainly the Renaissance works.
He says he “wanted to be the best artist in the world,” an ambition that arose in his childhood, but he had to escape communism first.
At age 12, while in his own home in Budapest—before emigrating to Montreal, taking up his brush, and doing shows from Miami to Tokyo, before creating his own style called “Ether Realism” and painting about freedom of expression—Licsko had a close encounter with a bullet.
“My ear started to burn, and basically, a bullet grazed my ear—just like Donald Trump,” he said, speaking of the Hungarian Revolution against communism in 1956. “It was like a hailstorm of red fire.”
(Left) Frank Licsko; (Right) Licsko as a boy with his family in Budapest, Hungary. Courtesy of Frank Licsko
Licsko’s brush with death compounded other grievances—food shortages and hunger, his uncle’s murder, religious oppression—that eventually tipped the family over the edge. They braved the searchlights and Russian tanks along the Hungarian border and escaped to a small town in Austria, where Licsko first tasted the fruits of freedom.
“They had chocolate bars, and I‘d never had a chocolate bar in my life. And oranges. I’d never even seen anything like that,” he says.
Before leaving Austria he watched a film about the Group of Seven, whose paintings were inspired by the Canadian wilderness. It’s hard to not see the impression they left on his work decades later.
Life in the West
After moving to Canada, the Licskos first lived in Montreal, where the young artist noticed that locals would pay “big money” ($25 a pop) for his paintings of horses and moose, and he thought, “Wow, I’m going to become a millionaire!”
He later enrolled in the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, but quit after a few months.
Licsko wanted to paint the “shiny, beautiful faces” of the Renaissance, whose artists expressed what was forbidden in Hungary. “The glory of God,” he said. “I wanted to do that.”
(Left) Frank Licsko presents “Icons of American Liberty;” (Right) Frank Licsko and one of his grandchildren. Courtesy of Frank Licsko
As time passed, Licsko went far with his art enterprise—from having his work gracing New York publications to selling to the likes of Emperor Akihito of Japan, JFK’s lawyer, and Clint Eastwood. The sale to Eastwood was when Licsko’s career brought him south of the border to live in California, where he stayed for over three decades.
He loved the United States, realizing he had unwittingly lived the American Dream. So in 2011, he fittingly conceived “Icons of American Liberty.” He says he saw increasing attacks on individual liberties such as freedom of speech in his home state and decided to create a bold, new painting.
Among the icons depicted in the painting are several former U.S. presidents and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.
It took 14 years, but “Icons of American Liberty” is finally ready. He hasn’t yet shown the painting in a gallery, but is planning to post it on X.
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