In this volume, the poetry of Imre Horváth (1906 – 1993) is paired up with the drawings and sketches of Miklós Jakobovits (1936 – 2012). The volume is a result of the friendship and creative encounter of the two, as well as a result of their experience of the ‘yellow house’ – another name for the mental asylum.
This volume was created between yellow houses. It is not bound to a single time or place, or to a single asylum, but to the question of how each of us relate to the boundaries of asylum, its inside/outside, and to the experiences of breakdown and madness.
On the sleeve of the first edition, Miklós Jakobovits notes that his drawings and sketches of the yellow house deeply moved Imre Horváth. Their atmosphere both attracted and repelled the poet, but he also felt a profound kinship with them. A solid, tender and creative friendship developed between artist and poet, both living in Oradea/Nagyvárad, in West Transylvania.
The figures populating A Yellow House, either conjured by words or by pen markings, evoke deep suffering, but also incredible cities and possibilities for life.
The collaborative book A Yellow House by Imre Horváth and Miklós Jakobovits resonates deeply with My Farewell to the Yellow House, written in 1927 by Hungarian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst István Hollós (2024, 1968 Press). My Farewell to the Yellow House is a manifesto that rethinks psychiatric care. To follow István Hollós’s own words, it aims to break down the walls of the asylum.
