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THE

EIGHT RÓBERT BERÉNY

DEZSÔ CZIGÁNY

BÉLA CZÓBEL

JANUS PANNONIUS MUSEUM

KÁROLY KERNSTOK

EIGHT

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THE ÖDÖN MÁRFFY

DEZSÔ ORBÁN

BERTALAN PÓR

LAJOS TIHANYI

THE

EIGHT R Ó B E R T B É L A

C Z Ó B E L

Ö D Ö N

PÉCS 2010

B E R É N Y •

M Á R F F Y

B E R T A L A N

P Ó R

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D E Z S Ô

K Á R O L Y •

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C Z I G Á N Y

K E R N S T O K

D E Z S Ô L A J O S

O R B Á N T I H A N Y I

JANUS PANNONIUS MUSEUM PÉCS

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THE

EIGHT

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RÓBERT BERÉNY

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DEZSÔ CZIGÁNY

BÉLA CZÓBEL

KÁROLY KERNSTOK

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THE

EIGHT

ÖDÖN MÁRFFY

DEZSÔ ORBÁN

BERTALAN PÓR

JANUS PANNONIUS MUSEUM PÉCS

LAJOS TIHANYI

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Published by the Baranya County Museums’ Directorate and Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Editors of the catalogue: Csilla Markója, Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences István Bardoly, National Office of Cultural Heritage Reader: Árpád Tímár, Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences English text: Nicholas Bodoczky Patrick Mullowney Krisztina Sarkady – Hart Laura Strong Christopher Sullivan Redaction of the English text: Sélysette Somorjay Illustration editing: Péter Molnos Gergely Barki, Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Photographs: Berényi, Zsuzsa Bokor, Zsuzsa Budapest History Museum, Kiscell Museum, Photo Archives Darabos, György Institute of Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Lukács Archives Füzi, István Hungarian National Museum, Photo Archives Józsa, Dénes Kieselbach Art Gallery Archives Mester, Tibor Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library, Budapest Collection, Museum of Applied Arts, Ferenc Hopp East – Asia Art Museum, Felvinci Takács, Zoltán Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Rázsó, András Sulyok, Miklós and archives of loaning institutions

© Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs authors of the text, and owners of the copyright of reproductions Printed and bound: Printing-Demax Konzorcium General director: Ádám Szöllôsi Editor in chief: Dr. Julia Fabényi Director of Baranya County Museums’ Directorate

Design: © Árpád Fákó With indispensable help and advise from Gergely Barki and Péter Molnos Published by Hungarofest Non-Profit Ltd as part of the Pécs 2010 European Cultural Capital Program Director general: Kálomista Imre

ISBN 978 963 9873 24 7 THE EIGHT A centenary exhibition at Janus Pannonius Museum Modern Hungarian Gallery, Pécs 10 December 2010 – 27 March 2011

This book, or any part of it, shall not be copied or reproduced or circulated in any traditional or electronic way without the prior written consent of the owner of the copyright.

Curators: Gergely Barki, Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Péter Molnos Krisztina Passuth Zoltán Rockenbauer József Sárkány, Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs

Cover illustration: detail of Idyll (Composition) by Róbert Berény; separating pages in the given sequence: details of Károly Kernstok’s Study of a Horseman, Nude of a Boy, Nude of a Man; Vilmos Fémes Beck: Kneeling Woman; Károly Kernstok: Youth on Horseback

Assistants to the curators: István Antal, Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs Diana Bóbics, Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs István Burus, Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs András Nagy, Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs Zsuzsa Rajnai, Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs Lívia Rácz, Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs

K000 under the illustration refers to catalogue numbers as indicated in the List of Illustrations, R000 in the text to the page number of the illustrations.

Restoration of paintings: Ferenc Czakó Gyula Kemény Zoltán Zsilli Restoration of graphic works: Mária Czigler Márta Kirics László Nemes Takách Restoration of frames: Gábor Bodor Transport: Museum Complex Gödöllô-Szentendre

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THE

EIGHT

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The Janus Pannonius Museum wishes to thank all those institutions and private individuals, who loaned works in their possession for the exhibition.

For their invaluable help in searching after pictures in private ownership and keeping contact with the owners a special thank is due to Anita Kieselbach and Kieselbach Art Gallery as well as Judit Virág

The organizers of the exhibition and the authors of the catalogue would like to express their gratitude to Árpád Tímár for generously granting use of his yet unpublished manuscript “The Roads Parted.” Press reactions to the new trends in Hungarian art. An anthology I - III., a collection of sources which is essential for the study of the Eight, and which comprises the result of long years of research.

Cateau-Cambrésis, Musée Matisse Debrecen, Antal–Lusztig Collection Esztergom, Bálint Balassa Museum Gyôr, Gyôr Municipal Museum, Hatvan, Lajos Hatvany Museum Kaposvár, Rippl-Rónai Museum Kecskemét, József Katona Museum London, Tate National Miskolc, Ottó Herman Museum München, Pinakothek der Moderne

Párizs, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris Párizs, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais Párizs, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou Salgótarján, Nógrád History Museum Sümeg, Municipal Museum Székesfehérvár, King St. Stephen Museum Székesfehérvár, Municipal Gallery, Deák Collection Szombathely, Szombathely Art Gallery Tata, Domokos Kuny Museum Wuppertal, Von der Heydt-Museum

Loaning institutions: Budapest, Budapest History Museum, Municipal Picture Gallery History Municipal Picture Gallery Budapest, KOGART Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery Budapest, Hungarian University of Fine Arts Collection of Graphics Budapest, MKB Bank Collections Budapest, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Art Collection Budapest, Museum of Literature Petôfi Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, Hungarian Jewish Museum

The organizers wish especially to thank to the following persons for their help:

Katalin Aknai, Péter Antal, Ágnes Balasi, Kata Balázs, Sophie Barthélémy, László Beke, János Berény, Melinda Berlász, Júlia Bernáth, Éva Bicskei, Judit Boros, Nancy G. Brinker, H. Kirk Brown III, Gilles Chazal, Gábor Csaba, Gabriella Csatári, Csilla E. Csorba, Lôrinc Czell, Orsolya Danyi, Zsuzsanna Demeter, Zsófia Déri, János Egri, Gábor Einspach, Tamás Elek, Kata Gereben, Zoltán Góg, Zsuzsa Farkas, Réka Fazakas, Péter Fertôszögi, Éva Forgács, Ferenc Földesi, Melinda Géger, Ferenc Gosztonyi, Károly Grozdits, Gábor Gulyás, Eszter Gyárfás, László Gyergyádesz, Ágnes Hauck, Sándor Hornyik, Katalin Izinger, Éva Jaksa, László Jurecskó,

Tatjána Kardos, Gábor Kaszás, Gyula Kemény, Terézia Kerny, Csaba Kertész, Anita Kieselbach, Tamás Kieselbach, Zsolt Kishonthy, Ferenc Kiss, Marianna Kolozsváry, Eleni Korani, David Korda, Erzsébet Köcse, Mimi Kratochwill, Valéria Vanília Majoros, György Makky, Kálmán Makláry, Ferenc Máthé, Márton Méhes, Judit Nagy, Ildikó Nagy, Leventéné Nagy, Viktória Nagy, Andor Nagyajtai, Péter Nádas, Zsófia Nemes, Ágnes Nováky, Mária Nyári, Ferenc Offenbächer, Judit Orbán, Lívia Orbán, Erika Orlik, Gábor György Papp, Júlia Papp, Gábor Pataki, Ferencné Páll, Irén Pogány, Tibor Polgár, Márta Pongrácz, Eszter Práger, Propagart Ltd, Tamás Repiszky, Donna Robson,

Éva Rubovszky, Attila Rum, Dezsô Saphier, Edit Sasvári, Krisztián Sauska, Tibor Sándor, Péter Sáránszki, Klára Somogyi, Thomas A. Sos, Orsolya Srankó, Judit Stettner, Ferenc Szajkó, Lídia Szajkó, Ágota Szilasi, András Szûcs, György Szücs, Róbert Szûcs, Dominique Szymusiak, Anikó Tomanicz, Tünde Topor, Gábor Tokai, Árpád Tóth, Balázs Zoltán Tóth, Károly Tóth, Lívia Tóthné Mészáros, Yvette Török, István Törô, István Triznya, Gabriella Uhl, Katalin Urbán, Csaba Varga, Sarolta Varjas, Mária Verô, Gabriella Vincze, Judit Virág, Ágnes Viszoki, Ernst Wastl, Jill A. Wiltse, Katalin Wollák, Zsófia Zachár, Ferenc Zsákovics, András Zwickl

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CONTENTS J ULIA F ABÉNYI : I NTRODUCTION AND A CKNOWLEDGEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 K RISZTINA P ASSUTH : T HE E IGHT – R ESEARCH AND D ISCOVERY . R ECOLLECTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 THE EIGHT A GROUP OF ARTISTS – BACKGROUND SKETCHES AND TOPICS G ERGELY B ARKI : C HIEFS , O RGANISERS , C URATORS . A G LIMPSE BEHIND THE S CENES OF THE E IGHT . . . . . . . . . . . K ATALIN G ELLÉR : T HE A RT S CENE AT THE T IME OF THE E MERGENCE OF THE E IGHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CSILLA MARKÓJA: THE TACT OF THE PAINTER. THE PLACE OF THE EIGHT IN THE HISTORY OF HUNGARIAN MODERNISM . Z OLTÁN R OCKENBAUER : N EW P ICTURES , N EW P OEMS , N EW M USIC . A LLIES OF THE E IGHT , FROM A DY TO B ARTÓK P ÉTER M OLNOS : B EHIND THE E IGHT . THE S OCIAL B ASIS FOR THE N EW H UNGARIAN P AINTING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G YULA K EMÉNY : A PPROACHES TO THE G ROUP OF E IGHT THROUGH P ICTURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V OJTE˘ CH L AHODA : S EEKERS , P REACHERS AND W ARRIORS : T HE E IGHT IN P RAGUE AND B UDAPEST . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . 20 . . . 44 . . . 48 . . 70 . . . 90 . . 104 . . 128

T H E E IG H T . . . G ERGELY B ARKI : R ÓBERT B ERÉNY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A TTILA R UM : D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G ERGELY B ARKI : B ÉLA C ZÓBEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B ERNADETT K OVÁCS : K ÁROLY K ERNSTOK . . . . . . . . . . Z OLTÁN R OCKENBAUER : Ö DÖN M ÁRFFY ’ S E IGHT P ERIOD P ÉTER M OLNOS : THE E IGHTH : D EZSÔ O RBÁN . . . . . . . C SILLA V ÁGÓ : B ERTALAN P ÓR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . K RISZTINA P ASSUTH : L AJOS T IHANYI . . . . . . . . . . . . . J ÓZSEF S ÁRKÁNY : O N THE P ORTRAITS BY L AJOS TIHANYI …AND THEIR GUESTS A TTILA R UM : V ILMOS F ÉMES B ECK . P ÉTER M OLNOS : A RTÚR J AKOBOVITS E SZTER B UTYKA : M ÁRIA L EHEL . . . . P ETRA T ÖRÖK : A NNA L ESZNAI , L ADY A TTILA R UM : M ÁRK V EDRES . . . . . . INDEX L I S T O F WO R K S A N D BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . INDEX OF NAMES . . RECONSTRUCTION .

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INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT The “Pécs – European Capital of Culture” status has offered an exceptional opportunity for the Janus Pannonius Museum, particularly in respect of accomplishing projects related to its art collection. Filling a long-felt want in Hungarian art historiography, we have been able to stage two major exhibitions which represent the main pillars of the “European Capital of Culture” programme. “Hungarians in the Bauhaus” was the first comprehensive exhibition about the role of Hungarian artists in what was perhaps the most important artistic school of the twentieth century, with a special highlight on the activity of Pécs-born artists. The rationale for the other main project of the “European Capital of Culture” programme, presenting the activity of the “Eight” artist group, comes not from the artists’ local ties but from the character of the Museum’s collection. As it is known, the Janus Pannonius Museum holds, alongside the Hungarian National Gallery, the most important collection of classical modern and avant garde art.

The collection acquired its pure and distinguished character after receiving its first substantial donation, when in 1957 Pál Gegesi Kiss presented as a gift to the Museum, together with the oeuvre of his late wife Erzsébet Forgács Hann, several outstanding works by the Eight artists from his collection. Building the collection in 1950s Hungary was a daring act of defiance against the spirit and ideology of the era, which eventually succeeded in preserving these values. The present exhibition is a fitting tribute to this special collection. By hosting the centenary exhibition of the Eight artist group, the Janus Pannonius Museum has been out to accomplish a standard-setting event. Many years of research preceded the exhibition, in the course of which our team of scholars went to great lengths to scour dusty storerooms and the closed world of private collections, looking for works that had been all but committed to oblivion. Their work has, most importantly, enabled us to more or less reconstruct the three emblematic exhibitions of the Eight, held almost a century ago. This exhibition also affords a selection of works by world-famous artists who

influenced the work of the Eight artists. The exhibition explores local and global relations in a unique collection that is a paradigmatic example of the autonomy of local development; consequently it simultaneously examines its subject in the context of the past and the present. The fringe events of the exhibition offer an insight into the intellectual life of the period, likewise at the interpretative surface of the present. The exhibition brings to light the impulses fin-de-siècle Hungarian art – the “Hungarian Golden Age” – received from French and German culture, showing how and what it assimilated, as well as its own contributions. Reconsideration of the activities of the Eight group poses a challenge and an obligation to Hungarian art historiography, with respect to authenticity, cultural transfer and search of identity. We take the opportunity to thank the art historians and museologists for helping to pay this long-standing, immense debt. We would like to express our very deep appreciation for the enormous help we received throughout the preparation

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of this exhibition from the organisations conscious of the importance of the project; in particular the Programme Council of the European Capital of Culture for having regarded the exhibition as a pillar event, providing moral and financial support since 2005. Our special thanks and gratitude goes to Hungarofest Non-Profit Ltd., the former Ministry for Education and Culture and its successor, the Ministry of National Resources, as well

as the private individuals and institutions in Hungary and abroad for their selflessness and understanding in loaning works of art to the exhibition. We are also extremely grateful for the help of the private sector in that it confirmed the exhibition to be an event of more than just professional significance, one that could also count on the interest of wider audiences.

We hope the exhibition and the fringe events will foster a stronger public and international professional awareness of, and interest in, the works of early Hungarian progressive art.

Julia FabĂŠnyi Director PĂŠcs, 2010

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K R I S Z T I N A

P A S S U T H

THE EIGHT RESEARCH & DISCOVERY Recollections

L AJOS K ASSÁK

OPENS THE EXHIBITION

T HE E IGHT

AND THE

A CTIVISTS , I STVÁN C SÓK G ALLERY , S ZÉKESFEHÉRVÁR , 1965

When Márta Kovalovszky, Péter Kovács, and I were arranging the exhibition ‘The Eight and the Activists’ in the István Csók Room at Székesfehérvár’s King Stephen Museum (István Király Múzeum) in 1965, the museum’s deputy director (Mrs. Jenô Fitz, née Éva Petres) arrived unexpectedly at nine in the evening. ‘I just wanted to ask you,’ she said, a little apologetically, ‘to show me the pictures that Comrade Aczél is going to make such a to-do about. Just so that I’ll know in advance.’ After a little hesitation, all three of us

decided to show her some works by Lajos Kassák. She departed reassured. It belongs to the story that this exhibition did not – unlike earlier ones – lead to a ‘to-do’. In fact, it was a success. Still, one question not raised by us at the time but obvious today is why were these two groupings, the Eight and the activists, shown together, when – in time, in style, and in the personality of those participating – they were so different? Lajos Kassák, who opened the exhibition and who featured in it by way of various

works, was clearly the chief representative of the Hungarian Activism movement and was not close to the Eight grouping. Nevertheless, at the time of the exhibition itself, this cobbling together, which had its own antecedents, seemed absolutely warranted, necessary even. Among these antecedents was the fact that the Eight grouping, which was much discussed at the time of its active operation (1909–12), produced a response in the contemporary press which fills several hundred pages in Árpád Timár’s collection of texts published not long ago.1 Later, the grouping largely sank into oblivion. Those who still remembered it did not characterise it as an autonomous group that had a value all its own, that appeared at a definite time with definite goals, and that featured some kind of common denominator. For the most part, it was individual members of the group who were written about; their significance in Hungarian art as a whole was discussed, without the emphasising of the things they had in common. Insofar as there was mention of the Eight at all, it was somewhat negative in tone. Right up until the end of the 1950s, the members of the grouping were spoken of only in general terms and superficially: no-one undertook real scientific research into their history, or the uncovering of relevant data and the works themselves. On the other hand, the younger generation of art historians was sympathetic towards the Eight, regarding them – and the activists – as progressive artists. In this way, both groupings were assigned to the same category: that of left-wing artists describable as radical in their artistic and social approach alike, albeit without real clarification of the concept of progressive art. That a change of attitude took

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D ETAIL

place as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s was connected to the cultural-artistic tendencies of the era. The dogmatism of the early 1950s was shattered, and, after 1956, an apparent liberalism – in the field of culture at least – tolerated more than had been tolerated hitherto. Compared to ebarlier on, it was possible to create more freely and in an individual way, and even, in fortunate cases, to exhibit. Artists of the day sought intellectual contacts with their predecessors, with progressive, avant-garde artists. In the same way, young art historians sought fixed points in the recent past: trends and oeuvres of which they could be fond and with which they could identify. All these things were discovered: the radical currents of the 1910s and 1920s, along with the new endeavours of contemporary art at that time. The two groups, then, were in a way connected.2 Since Márta Kovalovszky, Péter Kovács, and I were endeavouring to make ‘The Eight and the Activists’ in Székesfehérvár as enjoyable as possible visually, we did not concern ourselves overmuch with the antecedents of the two groups. We felt that we were discovering them for ourselves.

OF THE EXHIBITION

We were certain not only that these artists were outstanding in their own time, but also that their approach was by and large valid and topical in our own time also, namely the early 1960s. For this reason, too, we wanted to assert the rights of the earlier period: of the avant-garde, progressive tendencies of the 1910s and 1920s. Accordingly, we looked not only back, in order to find out what had happened half a century before, but also forward, in that through our exhibition we could exert an influence on contemporary endeavours and on cultural and artistic public opinion. Put very simply, the showing of ‘The Eight and the Activists’ was for us not a goal, but a means, one, moreover, in the interests of freedom of art at that time and of acceptance of its products. This was why we needed Lajos Kassák, ever the representative of the ‘Hungarian avant-garde’, as our advocate. That the Eight and the activists were able to fulfil this special role – one looking back on the past but at the same time topical – sprang from the earlier role of the Eight grouping and from the judgment of it. According to our present view also, the Eight, displayed a progressive approach

T HE E IGHT

AND THE

A CTIVISTS

S ZÉKESFEHÉRVÁR , 1965

in their manner of thinking, in their activity in 1918–1919, and in the roles they played in society. And it was precisely this that provoked – actually very early on – antipathy and enthusiasm at one and the same time. And this antipathy, or condemnation, lasted with minor exceptions until the end of the 1950s. Anyhow, the change in their judgment was not simply the result of the individual opinions of critics, but depended also on the socio-political situation current at the time. Even a cursory survey of the image of the Eight that developed from 1914 to 1965 is enough to show that, at least initially, its members were judged separately from the activists. Criticism regarding the Eight existed very early on already, before the appearance of the activists. But when we think not of newspaper articles but of studies possessing wider significance, then the opinion of the critic, organiser, and writer on art Miklós Rózsa is the one we should refer to first of all. This view he formulated in 1914 already, in his book Hungarian Impressionist Paintingt.3 In this work, he considered the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition to be in effect old-fashioned in comparison with the

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I VÁN H EVESY : T HE A RT OF P OST -I MPRESSIONISM , G YOMA , 1922 ( FRONT PAGE )

newest international endeavours, such as the cubists in France and the Der Blaue Reiter in Germany. At the same time, he stated that Károly Kernstok was unjustly branded a revolutionary, although the last mentioned headed the young painters coming together under the name of the Eight.4 When we trace the more important summary books and studies on the grouping, then the next treatment worthy of attention was the art critic Iván Hevesy’s in 1921.5 Interestingly, Hevesy, a leftwing writer, considered the entire activity of the Eight to have been unsuccessful, for social reasons moreover. ‘A social soul has to form beforehand for there to be composition in art. The chercheurs did not see the causes of their lack of success and were therefore unwilling at any price to get off their hobby-horse, namely the principle of form and composition. [...] After the hopeless attempts of the chercheurs who looked back, new experimenters came along,’ argued Hevesy.6 His negative opinion almost suggested that the Eight were responsible for everything that had happened in Hungary. In his view, despite their strict aesthetic principles, their world-view remained just as negative as that of the naturalists, and this was the reason why they could not create a new moral basis. From the bitter – and rather unfair – judgment flows the self-reproaching, pessimistic atmosphere of the period, to all intents and purposes involuntarily projecting its own pessimism onto the Eight. The issues surrounding the Eight were approached in an entirely different way by Ernô Kállai,7 whose treatment dissected artistic and sty-

listic questions in the narrow sense. Kállai did not mention the chercheurs or the Eight grouping as a unit already, analysing instead only the oeuvres of individual painters. Thus, in his chapter ‘Structural Naturalism’, he examined the works made by Róbert Berény around 1910 and afterwards the later creations of Lajos Tihanyi (including Tihanyi’s portrait of Lajos Kassák). He very powerfully praised Kernstok’s 1908 work Nude of a Boy, which in his view was ‘a declaration of war on the official state art represented by Benczúr, and on “more progressive middle-class taste”, which hitherto has barely acquainted itself with plein air’.8 With almost poetic inspiration, he wrote about this painting, in which the intellectual clarity and simplicity of the underlying thought came across despite the detailed plein air approach. On the other hand, he did not mention the Eight, although his characterisation of Kernstok would have fitted the entire group. In this way, Kállai – who was, perhaps, the best Hungarian critic of the 1920s – simply did not – one and a half decades after the formation of the Eight – take account of the fact that this group had once existed, expunging it, so to say, from the continuity of Hungarian art history. (He did the same thing later on also, in his 1934 study on Béla Czóbel.9) The art historian who spoke of the Eight as a group in a serious and lengthy book on Hungarian art was István Genthon,10 who mentioned the history of the group also. He noted that the Eight grouping was more homogeneous than the Circle E RNÔ K ÁLLAI : N EW H UNGARIAN P AINTING 1900–1925, B UDAPEST , 1925 ( FRONT PAGE )

G ÁBOR P OGÁNY Ö.: T HE R EVOLUTIONARIES B UDAPEST , 1947 ( FRONT PAGE )

H UNGARIAN

PAINTING ,

of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists (MIÉNK) formed in 1910. ‘The Eight joined the fight for the recovery of the significance of composition and sharply criticised the form-breaking style of impressionism. [...] The struggle which the Eight provoked with their appearance is still continuing today, although now it is being fought with different weapons.’11 With regard to the careers of the group’s members, it was first and foremost that of Károly Kernstok that he outlined, albeit calling that artist’s endeavours transitional and remarking that he adopted the audacity of deformation from Matisse. However, there his élan ended. ‘He played a large part in the fact that during the years directly preceding the war avant-garde art became something special for urban middleclass intellectuals who were reform-minded.’12 Genthon’s remark is interesting, in that it clearly calls the group avant-garde and recognises how big an influence it had among middle-class intellectuals. With the exception of Dezsô Orbán, the other members of the Eight were all discussed by Genthon: Ödön Márffy, Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Bertalan Pór, Dezsô Czigány, and Lajos Tihanyi. Nevertheless, their common endeavours were not given form in his book, since he discussed them in different contexts: Kernstok he linked to the Eight, Tihanyi to activism, Márffy to stylistic periods of the past, and Czigány to conservatism. István Genthon spoke of them as a group only in one or two sentences: ‘Cézanne’s first Hungarian followers, as mentioned above, livened up in the freedom given by deformation, but slowly gained access to the deeper sense of his teachings, namely to a desire for a permanently

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valid arrangement of space and of masses occupying parts of it. Proceeding further along this road, the French arrived at cubism.’13 He goes on to remark that the Hungarians did not get as far as cubism because of the closure brought about by the First World War. Genthon’s opinion reflects, albeit fragmentarily, the individual endeavours of the painters of the Eight, and to a certain extent common characteristics also, using picture analyses that are well drafted. He places their careers in the totality of Hungarian art at that time. It is thanks to this that later on it was Genthon’s analysis that determined, for many decades, the image people had of the Eight. For a long time, this image was unable to change fundamentally, because in this area no new and detailed research was produced, and because the entire Eight question (along with many others) lost its importance in the wake of the Second World War. Genthon’s opinion in the matter did not alter fundamentally, especially as he himself was sympathetic towards the painters of the New Circle of Artists (KUT) and the Gresham group. Even so, the theme occupied him. Personal evidence of this came decades later – in 1967 – when I was already working at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts and when my book The Painting of the Eight14 was published. Genthon called me to him and discussed the book, which he had read thoroughly beforehand, in detail with me. His interest was a great honour for me, as were his criticisms also, not solely on account of his outstanding knowledge and level of culture, but also because in this matter he represented the ‘other side’, the one less sympathetic to the Eight. A more difficult case was Ö. Gábor Pogány, with whom I became closely acquainted when, in his capacity as director-general of the Hungarian National Gallery, he became my boss. In this period, the 1960s, he took on the principles of official, and, moreover, Party, art not only in the field of theory, but in that of practice also, to which the Gallery’s purchasing and exhibition policy testified.15 In verbal declarations, he mentioned the Eight as a cosmopolitan and contrary group that did not fit into the development of Hungarian art. On the other hand, a problem was caused by the fact that in 1947, in the period of political transition, he himself had published a highly interesting, open-minded book entitled Revolutionaries in Hungarian Painting16 in which he had afforded the Eight greater recognition than anyone previously. Mentioning the MIÉNK and the Hungarian Fauves (Vadak), he remarked that the Eight ‘gave new proof of the progressive propensities of our developing culture. Of those who took part in their 1911 exhibition, many still preserve and enhance their unflagging agility and, among young people prematurely old, often took on alone the inspiring need for restless new beginnings.

K RISZTINA P ASSUTH : T HE P AINTING

Later, the atmosphere of Paris, an intimate homogeneity which made them participants in the business of truth, built up in them reserves sufficient for two generations.’17 In the ‘Situation Report’ chapter already, he writes with great appreciation of Kernstok, Czóbel, Márffy, Berény, and Tihanyi, so much so that afterwards in the ‘Revolutionaries’ chapter he devotes small essays to Márffy, Czóbel, Berény, Kernstok, and Tihanyi. Czigány, Orbán, and Pór on the other hand he ignores. His analyses are in most cases convincing and interesting. For example, of Tihanyi he writes the following: ‘It is as though he failed to take his trade seriously. There is some kind of hard grimace in all of his works, a distorting kind of stylistic intention which takes the life out of the subject matter. [...] Every work by him is full of problems, with attempts at form analysis similarly to the Eight’s area of interest, and yet no anxiety or torrid effort can be sensed on his pictures.’18 Although the

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painters belonging to the Eight were successful individually and not together, in themselves the characterisations still retain their force today. In the 1960s, however, when the Eight were being mentioned and when along with my colleagues Júlia Szabó and Béla Szij I tried to convince Gábor Pogány Ö. of the Eight’s significance (and of the need for an exhibition of their work), his answer was at best the following: in case you think that you’ve managed to set the Thames on fire, I myself wrote this in 1947 already. And although in the last assertion he was completely correct, everything remained as it had been, with the Eight continuing to receive a place in the margins at best and with the King Stephen Museum in Székesfehérvár, and not the Hungarian National Gallery, undertaking the exhibition. Gábor Pogány Ö. was not alone in his opinion in the 1960s: if no other, he had the view of Károly Lyka to rely on, who in 1953 in his Painting in Hungary from the Millennium to

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the First World War,19 a work which embraced a very great amount of material, had written one or two sentences on the Eight. Lyka, an advocate for the Nagybánya artists primarily as is well known, was likewise critical of the MIÉNK group, which preceded the Eight. Presumably it was from Lyka that later commentators adopted assertions holding that the Eight group was born of dissatisfaction with the MIÉNK artists, and that the ‘core members of the Eight were regarded in the literature as representatives first of neo – impressionist, then of post – impressionist, and finally of expressionist painting who, in the interests of expression, proceeded as far as distortion’.20 Of these assertions, the most determinative was the one that spoke of B ÉLA S ZÍJ : R ÓBERT B ERÉNY , B UDAPEST , 1964 ( FRONT

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‘distortion’ in connection with the art of the Eight, which afterwards appeared as a commonplace in many critiques. All the same, opinions in connection with the Eight began to change from 1957 already, even if this was not the merit of Gábor Pogány Ö. If I remember well, the first manifestation of the change sprang from Katalin Dávid, who, in her capacity as director of the Art History Documentation Centre, was planning a new series of exhibitions entitled ‘Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century’, in which the first show was ‘I. Constructive Endeavours’. The small, modest, exhibition booklet which appeared for this occasion was in any event a watershed.21 The introduction was written by Katalin Dávid herself (although her name was not indicated). In it, she remarked that in the exhibition series she ‘wished to show the principal developmental trends in Hungarian fine art in the twentieth century: the art of the “Eight”, the Nagybánya painters, the painters from the Great Plain (Alföldi festôk), and those related to them stylistically [...]. Our series opens with a presentation of the “Eight” and those working in a similar vein, the constructivists, first and foremost because the art of these painters is the least known, and because some characteristics of their art – e.g. picture building and the emphasising of structure – can be profitably studied by the rising generation of artists.’22 At the exhibition, Károly Kernstok, Róbert Berény, Dezsô Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Ödön Márffy, Dezsô Orbán, and Lajos Tihanyi featured with one or two paintings each; there were other works, too. The exhibition was, therefore, not purely an exhibition of work by the Eight. The series did not continue subsequently. I was then attending the Department of Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest and chose the Eight as the topic for my degree thesis there. It was not I who hit upon the subject: the idea for it came from Béla Szij, a fellow student senior to me. He had already been dealing with the art of Róbert Berény for some time and was much more at home in this field than was I. For his selfless help and advice I am grateful to this day, although after his early death he was almost completely forgotten. I spent my research period at the Hungarian National Gallery’s Department of Painting; to begin with, I was happy to be in a place where I could study paintings by the Eight in the original. Unfortunately, my work there was not exactly as I had imagined it. For months, I pleaded to be allowed into the storeroom where paintings by the Eight were gathering dust, but no permission was given. Finally, almost at the last moment, before I was due to write my thesis, I was on a single occasion allowed to enter the storeroom in question, on condition that I was locked in from outside and

that once within I would get along alone as best I could. Most of the paintings were stored in high places, and I did not dare to take them down. Nor was it clear which picture was where. Since I had a total of two hours available to me, with unexpected decision I elected not to look for paintings author by author, but to analyse them thematically genre by genre (landscape, nudes, etc.), comparing individual works and writing my observations on index cards. I did not have a camera, with the result that afterwards, apart from the rare cases where the Gallery’s own index card featured a photograph, I had to rely on my own descriptions and my memory. When I was called out of the storeroom after the two hours allotted, I had already filled a huge number of cards with my

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rough-and-ready picture analyses. According to the possibilities open to me, I attempted to analyse what kind of joint endeavours could be discovered in the works of different artists within individual genres, and in what ways exactly these painters differed from other ones. When later on I wrote my first paper on the Eight,23 in essence I was trying to give expression to my experiences during those two hours in the storeroom. Reading through this paper subsequently, my feeling is, of course, that had I been able to have access to more information, the paper would have been better. In actual fact, I knew rather little about the pictures by the Eight: I was unable to study properly not only those works by them in the Gallery’s storeroom, but also those held by private collectors. In view of the fact that I was an employee of the Gallery (and, moreover, later on someone who worked in the Records Department), many were afraid to show me their pictures, lest I should enter

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In the late 1950s and in the 1960s already, research began on the history of the Eight that was many-sided and much more thorough than that conducted earlier on. Initially, this research took the form of papers and theses rather, but later on book-length studies and finally exhibitions came along. Naturally, all these complemented each other, although as a matter of fact no coordinated research took place. Of those who graduated from the universities in the early 1960s, Júlia Szabó, Philipp Clarisse, and Béla Szij each dealt effectively with a particular area of the subject. Béla Szij’s thesis on Róbert Berény had been written in 1958 already and Philippe Clarisse’s on the young Czóbel a little later. Both published their research in 1963 in the periodical Bulletin de la Galerie Nationale Hongroise.26 I VÁN D ÉVÉNYI : K ERNSTOK , B UDAPEST , 1970, ( FRONT

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them in the records – instead they denied that they even existed. I defended my thesis in the summer of 1961. In the very same year, Dénes Pataky organised an exhibition of graphic art entitled ‘The Eight and the Activists’ at the Hungarian National Gallery.24 This was one of the first shows which linked the two groups and the two movements, and by so doing became – unintentionally even – for many decades a model which most exhibitions followed, even in the 1980s.25 As with the publications earlier on, the distinctive qualities of the Eight did not emerge from this show or from the short catalogue linked to it. This was because some drawings were not dated and of those that were most hailed from the period after the Eight. In any event, the show did provide some information, at least with regard to the graphic art held by the Hungarian National Gallery. L ÁSZLÓ Z OLNAY : M ÁRFFY , B UDAPEST , 1966 ( FRONT

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K RISZTINA P ASSUTH : D ESIDERIUS O RBAN , B UDAPEST , 1977 ( FRONT PAGE )

Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that it was through their writings, the discovery of numerous hitherto unknown facts, the uncovering of international and Hungarian connections, and the publication of pictures hitherto unpublished or lost, that the scientific study of the Eight began. At this time, the requirement appeared that commonplace-like assertions should not be repeated, and that instead the sources themselves should be studied and attempts made on the basis of them to reconstruct events, to date pictures, to analyse works, and so on. The research findings of both Philipp Clarisse and Béla Szíj were published in book form: Szíj’s study of Berény came out in 196427 and Philipp’s large album in 1970.28 Perhaps it is unnecessary to emphasise that these books, which were almost without scientific precedent, were written without the possibility of study-tours abroad or of access to the foreign specialist literature. They are by now, in many respects surpassed, and in need of correction and

supplementation. Despite all this, it is clear that without them the scientific surveying of this period would not have started. This was, however, just one side of the story: apart from the above-mentioned, there were others, too, who discovered this period, which was then still terra incognita almost entirely. Iván Dévényi and Béla Horváth worked during this time on the reconstruction of the story of the Eight. Iván Devényi was not an art historian: he worked in Esztergom as a secondary-school teacher of literature and history. And in the meantime, he corresponded – this was his greatest strength – with the artists who were still alive, with witnesses, with researchers, with anyone who was able to say anything of account on the period of the Eight. And in the meantime, he also visited studios. He began with Róbert Berény, but later on it was Czóbel and Barcsay who interested him. ‘The greatest intellectual and moral influence on him came, however, from Lajos Kassák.’29 His correspondence is today already an extremely valuable source material, as is the material – interviews and so on – collected by Béla Horváth. The collections of both of them are housed in the Archive of the Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Iván Dévényi did not have much opportunity to publish in the specialist periodicals, thus his articles appeared in Jelenkor and Vigilia, and his other writings on the painters of the Eight in Látóhatár (between 1963 and 1968).30 He wrote about those with whom others hardly dealt at all: Dezsô Orbán and Dezsô Czigány. First his slim volume on Lajos Tihanyi appeared,31 after which he addressed himself first and foremost to Károly Kernstok, whose career, mental world, and thought he managed to reconstruct. In 1970, Dévényi’s short volume on Kernstok was published by Corvina Books.32 I VÁN D ÉVÉNYI : T IHANYI , B UDAPEST , 1968 ( FRONT

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Similarly, Béla Horváth devoted most of his attention to Károly Kernstok and Dezsô Czigány. Pursuing his research in libraries primarily, Horváth conducted numerous interviews with those members of the Eight who were still living, e.g. with Ödön Márffy. Between 1958 and 1982, he published thirty-eight studies on Kernstok alone.33 He uncovered and published numerous, highly important data in periodicals of the most

various kinds, but did not manage to create a large, comprehensive study. In this way also, his researches were very advantageous. In his papers, much valuable material survived that would be utilisable later on. The first number of the Kernstok series (Kernstok – füzetek) was published by Horváth himself, while numbers two and three were published by Iván Dévényi’s good friend Ferenc Bodri.34

Although the difference between the Eight’s ideas and manner of artistic expression and those of the activists had already more or less emerged by means of the researches, ‘The Eight and the Activists’, the first comprehensive, larger-scale exhibition on these groupings, was staged in the King Stephen Museum in Székesfehérvár in 1965. In retrospect, it seems that the King Stephen Museum chose this title because it fitted into the ‘Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century’ series launched by it earlier.35 A significant number of the pictures, sculptures, and posters came from museum collections. At the same time, directorgeneral Gábor Pogány Ö initially did not wish to lend works featuring in the Hungarian National Gallery’s permanent exhibition. Finally, though, he did lend them, on condition that paintings could be found in the storerooms to take their place. Private collectors – among them, Milán Füst, Mrs. Dezsô Kosztolányi, Mrs. Ödön Márffy, and Rudolf Bedô – were ready, perhaps happy even, to lend works for the few months of the exhibition’s duration (October–December 1965). On behalf of the King Stephen Museum, Márta Kovalovszky asked Lajos Kassák to lend works, at the same time inviting him to the opening. In her letter to Kassák, she remarked in relation to the Eight that although there had been two minor shows earlier, there had still been no exhibition that strove to be as complete as possible. She also said that she ‘wished to present the given period in a multifaceted way, so that the tendencies characteristic of the architecture, literature, and music of the epoch that were parallel with the endeavours in fine art could be linked to the art history material’.36 As far as I remember, this goal could be achieved at the exhibition: sculptures, photographs, posters, albums, old periodicals, and letters complemented the spectacle offered by the paintings. The Eight occupied a large hall on the upper storey, while the activists were to be found in the small, ground-floor part. The arrangement was itself a real joy, as, in the midst of constant debates but always reaching agreement in the end, three people tried to group the works as effectively as possible. It seems that many were curious with regard to the exhibition, and even before the official opening, many came into the exhibition hall. I, who had been put up in a small room next to it, was awoken at half-past seven in the morning by a journalist asking for an interview, the first interview in my life and one for which I was not fully prepared. The most convincing evidence for the tie between the Eight and the activists was the presence of Lajos Kassák in person and his opening speech. Fortunately, photographs have survived

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K RISZTINA P ASSUTH WITH G YÖRGY S ZÜCS AND P ÉTER M OLNOS INSTALLING THE H UNGARIAN N ATIONAL G ALLERY H UNGARIAN F AUVES FROM P ARIS TO N AGYBÁNYA 1904 –1914, 2006 ( PHOTOGRAPH BY G ERGELY B ARKI )

Notes 1

4 5

6 7

8 9

11 12 13 14

‘Az utak elváltak’. A magyar képzômûvészet új utakat keresô törekvéseinek sajtóvisszhangja. Szöveggyûjtemény. [‘The roads parted.’ Press reactions to the new trends in Hungarian art. An antology] I. 1901–1908. II. 1909–1910. III. 1911–1912. Gyûjtötte, válogatta, szerkesztette, a névmutatót készítette és bev.: Tímár Árpád. Budapest – Pécs, 2009. The various series of exhibitions staged at this time by the King Stephen Museum are the best testimony to this. Rózsa, Miklós: A magyar impresszionista festészet. [Hungarian Impressionist painting] Lyka Károly elôszavával. Bp., 1914. 266. Ibid. 266–267. Hevesy, Iván: ‘Egyetlen út’.[’Single Road’] Független Szemle, 1. 1921. 163–167. – Hevesy, Iván: Az új mûvészetért. (Válogatott írások).[For the new art (Selected writings)] Vál., szerk. az elôszót írta: Krén Katalin. Budapest, 1978. 61–69. Hevesy 1978. Op. cit. 62. Kállai, Ernô: Új magyar piktúra 1900–1925. [New Hungarian painting 1900–1925] Budapest, 1925. – 2nd ed.: Budapest, 1990. Kállai 1990. Op. cit. 86. Kállai, Ernô: Czóbel Béla. Ars Hungarica, 7. Budapest, 1934. – Kállai, Ernô: Összegyûjtött írások / Gesammelte Werke 3. Magyar nyelvû cikkek, tanulmányok 1926–1937. Szerk., a jegyzeteket és a névmutatót összeáll.: Tímár Árpád. [Collected writings 3. Articles and studies in Hungarian 1926–1937. Edited by Árpád Tímár.] Budapest, 2002. 94–106. Genthon, István: Az új magyar festômûvészet története 1800-tól napjainkig. [The history of new Hungarian painting from 1800 to our day] A Magyar Szemle könyvei, 11. Budapest, 1935. Ibid. 233. Ibid. 234. Ibid. 239. Passuth, Krisztina: A Nyolcak festészete. [The painting of the Eight] Budapest, 1967. The story of the Hungarian National Gallery has been presented by Katalin Sinkó in recent publications by her: Katalin Sinkó: ‘The Making of an Independent National Gallery. Between Memory and History’. A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve,

17 18 19

20 21

22 23

28 29

EXHIBITION

2005/2007 [2008]. 9–20 and Sinkó, Katalin: Nemzeti képtár. ‘Emlékezet és történelem között’. [National gallery. Between memory and history] Budapest, 2009. Pogány, Ö. Gábor: A magyar festészet forradalmárai. [The revolutionaries of Hungarian painting] Ars mundi, 10. Bp., n.d. [1947]. Ibid. 12–13. Ibid. 65. Lyka, Károly: Festészeti életünk a millenniumtól az elsô világháborúig. Magyar mûvészet 1896–1914. [Hungarian painting from the Millennium to WWI. Hungarian art, 1896–1914] Budapest, 1953. – 2nd ed.: Budapest, 1983. Lyka 1953. Op. cit. 25. ‘A XX. század magyar mûvészete. I. Konstruktív törekvések’. Budapest, Nemzeti Szalon, 1957 and Dávid Katalin: ‘A XX. század magyar mûvészete. I. Konstruktív törekvések’. [Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century. I. Constructive Endeavours] Mûvészettörténeti Tanulmányok. A Mûvészettörténeti Dokumentációs Központ Évkönyve, 1956–58. Budapest, 1960. 73–89. Katalin Dávid’s introduction. – Ibid. 3. Passuth, Krisztina: Les ‘Huit’. Le premier groupe hongrois de tendance constructive. Analyse par genres de leur peinture. Acta Historiae Artium, 8. 1962. 299–318. A Nyolcak és Aktivisták. [The Eight and the activists] Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, 1961. Bev. Pataky Dénes. Magyar Nemzeti Galéria. A Grafikai Osztály kiállításai, 1. Budapest, 1961. Nyolcak és aktivisták. / The Eight and the activists. Szerk. Bajkay Éva et al. Budapest – Pécs, Magyar Nemzeti Galéria – Janus Pannonius Múzeum, 1981. Szíj, Béla: ‘La vie de Róbert Berény, de son enfance à son émigration à Berlin. / Berény Róbert életútja gyermekéveitôl a berlini emigrációig’. Bulletin de la Galerie Nationale Hongroise, 4. 1963. 5–30, 113–124; Clarisse, Philipp: ‘Les oeuvres du jeune Béla Czóbel. / Czóbel Béla fiatalkori képei’. Ibid. 31– 44, 125–130. Szíj, Béla: Berény Róbert 1887–1953. A mûvészet kiskönyvtára, 56. Budapest, 1964. Clarisse, Philipp: Czóbel. Budapest, 1970. Szalay, Károly: ‘Utószó’. In: Dévényi Iván: Arcképek a XX. század képzômûvészetébôl. [‘Epilogue’ in: Dévényi, Iván: Portraits from 20th century fine arts] Budapest, 2007. 241.

showing Lajos Kassák reading his address in front of Kernstok’s large and impressive picture Horsemen at the Water. At the opening, Kassák spoke at length about the Eight, as he did about his own activist group. He also mentioned Ady’s and Bartók’s links to the Eight: ‘Like them, the Eight’s first exhibition, too, in 1911, produced a great response, and provoked stiff resistance from adherents of academism and from official circles. They did not want to take note of the fact that these impulsive young people not only wished to sweep away the remnants of the past, but also wanted to sketch an outline of the future. With them appeared the generation which – beyond school rules – viewed the world inquisitively and through its own eyes. Their path was full of obstacles deliberately put there, but nevertheless they translated their ideas into reality.’37 In this way, the Eight – with the activists or without them – won at least for a time the attention due to them, the artistic status that they deserved. If this glory did not last forever, nevertheless it existed for as long as the exhibition ran. The Eight had been discovered, and could never be completely forgotten again. Of this, the present 2010 exhibition is one of the best indications.

‘Czóbel Béla’. Látóhatár, 5. 1966. 711–719; ‘Kernstok Károly’. Látóhatár, 6. 1967. 713–722; ‘Márffy Ödön’. Látóhatár, 8. 1969. 378–384; ‘Orbán Dezsô’. Látóhatár, 7. 1968. 330–335; ‘Tihanyi Lajos’. Látóhatár, 6. 1967. 1127–1136. Dévényi, Iván: Tihanyi. A mûvészet kiskönyvtára, 29. Budapest, 1968. Dévényi, Iván: Kernstok. A mûvészet kiskönyvtára, 55. Budapest, 1970. For a list of the publications, see Horváth, Béla: Kernstok Károly. Tatabánya, 1993. 47–48. Kernstok Károly írásaiból. A kutató mûvészettôl a Vallomásig 1911–1939. Gyûjtötte és közreadja: Bodri Ferenc. [Selected writings by K. K. From the research of art to Confession 1911–1939. Collected and ed. By Ferenc Bodri] Tatabánya, 1997; Kernstok Károly és vendégei, látogatói Nyergesújfalun. Gyûjtötte és közreadja: Bodri Ferenc. [K.K. and his guests and visitors at Nyergesújfalu. Collected and ed. By Ferenc Bodri] Tatabánya, 2000. – See also Horváth, Béla: Kernstok Károly.(Tanulmányok). [K.K. (Studies)]Budapest, 1997. To the exhibition was linked a catalogue also. As was usual at that time, this appeared a good while after the opening of the exhibition, but in a French edition as well as a Hungarian. Le cercle des Huits et des activistes. Székesfehérvár, Galerie István Csók, 10. oct. – 31 déc. 1965. Red. et intr. du catalogue Krisztina Passuth, Márta K. Kovalovszky. Bulletin du Musée Roi Saint Étienne, 44. Székesfehérvár, 1965. In each edition, I devoted approximately six pages to the Eight movement and two to the activists. Letter from Márta Kovalovszky to Lajos Kassák, 27 July 1965. MS. – Székesfehérvár, Szent István Király Múzeum, Archívum, inv. no. 1755 K/39. The Eight and Activists file. Kassák, Lajos: ‘A Nyolcak és aktivisták kiállítása. Megnyitó beszéd a székesfehérvári Csók István Képtár tárlatán’. [The exhibition of the Eight and the Activists] Élet és Irodalom (Budapest), 16 October 1965 issue. 9. – Kassák, Lajos: Éljünk a mi idônkben. Írások a képzômûvészetrôl. Vál. és sajtó alá rendezte: Ferencz Zsuzsa.[Let us live in our time. Writings on the fine arts. Selected and ed. By Zsuzsa Ferencz] Budapest, 1978. 489–491. – Quotation: 489.

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B A R K I

CHIEFS, ORGANISERS, CURATORS A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE The Eight, in spite of their name, never appeared in an exhibition in their full number. This is surprising, as is the fact that every one of their group exhibition is linked with the name of somebody different, and the organiser was always a different person or a group of varying composition. Károly Kernstok was widely accepted as the leader of the group, but by his side and behind him – and as the time passed, replacing him – were active organisers who, their individual interests aside, fought for the success of the group. The emergence and founding of the Eight is unclear, and likewise, the organisation of their exhibitions raises many issues. This study not only seeks to shed light on their organisation as a group and explore the background of their three Budapest exhibitions, but also discusses the – chiefly foreign – shows where the Eight appeared jointly as a group. The literature has failed to give a straightforward and satisfying answer with respect to when, how and why the Eight group was founded. This is largely due to the fact that, lacking the relevant contemporary sources, scholars are left to rely on frequently contradictory recollections dating from much later, which are brimming with

errors regarding the chronology, locations and the persons involved. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to establish which piece of information stands up to scrutiny. On account of the irreconcilable contradictions, it is impossible to establish a genuine, precise chain of events. Several threads of events led up to the Eight becoming a group. As a whole, they give us some idea of how it all happened; however, on the basis of our present knowledge, our questions cannot be given a straightforward, reasoned answer, not least because the scholars themselves hold different views.

P RELIMINARY E VENTS The leading role of Károly Kernstok in founding the group cannot be doubted; however, it has to be admitted that, going by our knowledge of the events leading up to the group coming into being, the first real initiator was in fact Béla Czóbel, although he eventually did not play a role in the operation of the group. Czóbel has to be regarded as a key figure in the preliminary events not only because in the summer of 1906 he triggered a veritable artistic revolution in Nagybánya

EIGHT [today Baia Mare, Romania] and turned his back on plein-air Naturalism, but chiefly because a year later he would become a symbol of renouncing Nagybánya, the artist colony and the founding elders, and of breaking with Impressionism and becoming a model of the later “secessions”. His refusal to return as a teacher to Nagybánya after the autumn of 19061 meant that he had accomplished the “walk-out” which the Eight, by then a group, failed to do until three years later. Czóbel’s act must have served as an example to Kernstok, as did his painterly style and par excellence Fauvism greatly influence Kernstok’s artistic attitude. The friendship of Czóbel and Kernstok began in Paris in 1906 and became more profound on Kernstok’s estate in Nyergesújfalu where, as a result of the Paris experience, and probably even more so the joint work, Kernstok’s work changed fundamentally. Strewn by Czóbel, the seeds of Fauvism germinated on Kernstok’s estate in the painting of Ödön Márffy who was staying there the next summer, yielding Fauvism-inspired paintings that were so radically new in attitude that they would become the greatest sensations or scandals of the first exhibition of the Eight. C ARICATURE

E IGHT

ON THE FRONT

COVER OF THE SATIRICAL PAPER

F IDIBUSZ , 1911

OF THE EXHIBITION OF THE

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K ÁROLY K ERNSTOK IN 1911 ( PHOTOGRAPH BY E RZSI G AJDUSEK )

This close circle, albeit not a group yet – the three men never stayed at Nyerges at the same time – can be regarded as the first “base” of the Eight. When in late 1907 MIÉNK (Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists) was founded, Czóbel and Márffy were able to enter the most (but in actual fact only moderately) progressive group of the era as the protégés of Kernstok who had by then come to hold considerable influence. Already at the moment of its founding MIÉNK carried the possibility of yet a new “secession”, given Circle members Czóbel and Márffy, and by then Kernstok too, represented a much more modern trend than some of the other founders, including Károly Ferenczy, Pál Szinyei Merse or even József Rippl-Rónai. The only basis of their community was the fact that all of them were seeking independence from the academising Mûcsarnok and the mainstream company of the National Salon. Lacking an alternative, young artists joining MIÉNK had to wait years for what was a pre-determined, unstoppable secession, but until then they presented their works at two MIÉNK group exhibitions. Consequently, the group brought together the staunch advocates of Impressionism and Naturalism, as well as the representatives of the latest Parisian sensation, Fauvism, which included Czóbel, Márffy, Kernstok and a burgeoning company of young artists. All of the future Eight except Berény participated in the second exhibition of MIÉNK in 1909.

G YÖRGY B ÖLÖNI

AND J ÓZSEF

R IPPL -R ÓNAI , C . 1910

With his self-assurance, reputation and social standing in Hungary – and, it should be added, truly charismatic character – Kernstok had become an authority among the youngest painters, chiefly active in Paris, who had come to regard him as a sort of leader. Although leadership was not entirely foreign to Kernstok's nature, his “election” as a leader was not merely due to his own assertiveness, but more so to several coincidental initiatives. The propagators of one such initiative were pupils of Matisse, Csaba Vilmos Perlrott and Géza Bornemissza, two gifted artists of the socalled "Neos" group, artists “infected" by Czóbel at Nagybánya. In August 1908 they wrote a letter to Károly Kernstok, asking him in his capacity as an older master, to support their cause, an exhibition they were organising.2 Drawn up by Perlrott and Bornemissza, the list of the participants of the proposed exhibition at the new Váci utca space of the Könyves Kálmán Salon in Budapest included Matisse, Picasso and Maillol, with Kernstok, Rippl-Rónai and Iványi Grünwald representing the older Hungarian generation, and

Berény, Czóbel, Pór, Gulácsy, Csáktornyai, Vedres and “perhaps” Ziffer of the young painters, in addition to the writers of the letter. Eventually nothing came of the exhibition, and the artists listed by the two young painters did not form a group of any kind. The reasons for this are unknown. However, there was another initiative which did not come from the future members of the Eight group either and which was one of the last things to spark off the creation of a group. Its architect, who single-handedly managed it, was György Bölöni. Not only had he witnessed, during his prolonged stay in Paris, the birth and rise of the Fauves and the other latest French trends, but in his capacity as a critic closely associated with the Hungarian colony in Paris, he had also made friends with every member of the future Eight group, and followed their development. Bölöni’s growing circle of Parisian friends at that time was wider than just the eight painters, and he was on particularly friendly terms with József Rippl-Rónai. Accordingly, he invited to contribute to the travelling exhibition “New Hungarian Painters”, held in the spring and summer

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of 1909, the “elders”3 named by Perlrott and Bornemissza, but his list of young artists was largely different from theirs. The exhibitions held in Kolozsvár [today Cluj-Napoca, Romania], Nagyvárad and Arad [today Oradea and Arad, Romania],4 went down in the contemporary press and later literature as the country début of MIÉNK. However, MIÉNK had not officially taken part in organising the show, and Bölöni did not hold a post in MIÉNK. The view gained currency in the literature that Bölöni’s road show was in fact held because the ultra-modernist clique had been booted out of the National Salon after its scandalous appearance in the second exhibition of MIÉNK; in other words, the homeless “group – obviously having nowhere to go in the capital city – is taking its exhibits to the country.”5 Certainly it was true that the National Salon and MIÉNK, never on the best of terms, came to a head over the scandal of the second MIÉNK exhibition, and the situation culminated in the general assembly of the Salon deciding on 16 May that MIÉNK was unwelcome within its walls; however, this did not prompt MIÉNK to try its fortune in the country. Contemporary documents clearly suggest that the travelling exhibition was exclusively Bölöni’s idea and far preceded the scandalous general assembly. In other words, the series of exhibitions had nothing to do with MIÉNK or MIÉNK being banned from the National Salon. It also transpires from Bölöni’s correspondence with the painters that it was an enterprise independent of any organisation, and that he was essentially inviting his friends to participate in what he hoped would be a lucrative exhibition. The letters also inform us that some of the painters spread the news of the up-coming show, prompting various other painters to approach Bölöni directly, offering their works.6 In spite of the rather “organic” organisation process, in the event the travelling exhibition reflected Bölöni’s tastes. The exhibitors, who had more in common in comparison with the heterogeneous company of MIÉNK, were still no representatives of any particular trend, yet it is also a fact that part of the works on display in the first exhibition of the Eight had also appeared in Bölöni’s show.7 Whether or not Bölöni was out to create a new artists’ group or not is unknown, but certainly later he recalled with pride how the Eight group came together from painters who had contributed to his exhibitions. Far from Budapest, Bölöni’s enterprise did not live up to his financial expectations, but the moral success and press coverage reverberated there. The series of exhibitions presented the opportunity to a young group of Hungarian painters to make themselves heard, showing they were ready to make their début as an independent group.

C ARICATURE

OF THE SECOND EXHIBITION OF

Almost concurrently with Bölöni’s initiative, an even more energetic, indeed more aggressive, organising personality entered the scene and set out to accomplish similar plans. Exploiting the discord in the ranks of the National Salon and with an agenda to present modern Hungarian art, Miklós Rózsa created the Artist House Society (Mûvészház) which was a serious competitor to the National Salon and MIÉNK. In a telegram to Tibor Boromisza dated 30 November 1909, Rózsa mentions an exhibition at Mûvészház which he was organis-

MIÉNK

IN THE SATIRICAL PAPER

B ORSSZEM J ANKÓ , 1909

ing for the “Kernstok group”.8 It cannot be ascertained if “Kernstok group” in Rózsa’s usage meant the same community that would become known as the Eight or if it referred a wider circle of artists. Also, it remains a question if the initiative was Rózsa’s or whether Kernstok and his group approached the director of Mûvészház. Neither is it known why nothing came of the exhibition. Twenty days after the above-mentioned telegram, the papers reported that Károly Kernstok and seven of his fellow artists were giving an exhibition in the rooms of the Kálmán Könyves Art

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MENTIONING THE

E IGHT .

Institute.9 Desiderius Orban recalled the events in a letter written many decades later, saying, “Miklós Rózsa omitted my name from his description of the ‘Eight’ in a lexicon being published at the time because as far as he was aware I was opposed to the Eight exhibiting at Mûvészház which he directed, whereas in fact Kernstok was the one against it.”10 Even if Kernstok did oppose their début at Mûvészház, we have no knowledge of why he did so, or why the exhibition was eventually held somewhere else. Certainly Rózsa lashed out at Kernstok’s ultramodernist efforts in many of his reviews at the time, yet only a few weeks ahead of the exhibition opening, the foursome founders of MIÉNK, including Károly Kernstok, were elected at Rózsa's initiative honorary members of Mûvészház. Kernstok’s relationship with Mûvészház was an up and down affair, but in spite of instances of friction, he presented his works at many of its group exhibitions, and in 1911 it hosted his solo show. The members of the future Eight, too, had an ambivalent relationship with Rózsa, but eventually all, with the exception of Bertalan Pór, contributed to the shows of the institution. Still, Orbán made some cruel remarks about the director of Mûvészház. He recalled: “Miklós Rózsa (not a favourite of the artists’ table) left. Tihanyi then said, ‘this Miklós Rózsa talks such nonsense, it’s times like this that I'm glad I can't hear.”11

According to a letter that has recently come to light, co-operation with the Eight came up on another occasion,12 but eventually they – as a group – did not officially participate in the exhibitions of Mûvészház. “Uj Képek” (New Pictures), the first exhibition of not-yet-the-Eight artists, was therefore hosted not by Mûvészház, but the Kálmán Könyves Salon, and did not open on 27 December, but in the last days of the month.13 The change of location was due to many possible reasons, in addition to the fact that Kernstok was on excellent terms with the art establishment. What presumably weighed heavily was that by choosing this venue, the group formed around Kernstok was able to be independent from every possible art organisation. Published during the run-up to the exhibition, their manifesto underlines this: “The sole purpose of this exhibition of theirs is to help them avoid the pitfalls facing a new trend in progressive painting."14 Also, they claimed, “These eight painters did not get together in order to form a well-defined alliance, so fashionable abroad nowadays, but rather, to establish the foundation of a purely artistic group altogether devoid of convention. Their only stipulation is therefore that the works exhibited serve a common artistic goal. Because their means of expression differs from the usual clichés and they express their creed, unusually in Hungary, in terms of forms, it is natural that their pictures have always seemed alien, giving cause for misunderstanding. So they are now aligned, all alien element excluded, to bring their works together and to assert an art that is, for the time being – with the exception of one or two culturally highly-developed countries – tendentiously misinterpreted and repeatedly, and at great length, shown to be inconsequential.”15 The exhibition carried a straightforward and unmistakable message: Kernstok and his companions seceded from MIÉNK and had no wish to co-operate with Mûvészház either. It was the most clamorous and successful secession in the history of modern Hungarian painting. The key to success was firstly Kernstok’s powerful personality and secondly the fact that by reducing their numbers, they could reveal the substratum of modern trends which, in this form of pure essence, was considerably more effective than embedded amid the trends they had long come to surpass. Kernstok was the leading figure of this ultimate secession and his assertiveness was almost certainly fuelled by his personal lust for power in the struggle for supremacy in modern pictorial trends. While clearly this secession had been in the making for a long time, the exhibition at the Kálmán Könyves Salon nevertheless betrayed a confusion making it seem to be a hasty,

F RONT

PAGE OF THE CATALOGUE OF

N EW P ICTURES

spontaneous reaction. It was no accident therefore that the exhibition came as an instantaneous riposte to the first group exhibition of the Artist House, but preceding the third show of MIÉNK, in which the group did not participate. The fact that a mere 32 paintings were on display – presumably some of them would have contributed to the third show of MIÉNK – goes to show that the works were collected in haste and there was no time to bring together a larger collection. And likewise, the way in which the artists invited to the show were chosen attests do disorganisation and hastily made spontaneous decisions. How did this group of eight artists come into being then? Had they formed a group before the opening of the exhibition? Did they have a discussion or an inaugural meeting? On the basis of the documentary evidence available to us, there was not. Many of the eight exhibiting artists were abroad, preventing them from taking part in the organisation. Berény and Czóbel were in Paris in those days. It is believed they were written letters, inviting them to send pictures to the exhibition. Far away from home, they evidently did not take the invitation very seriously and failed to understand the importance of the initiative, given that Berény was represented by one and Czóbel by three paintings. The fact that more or less the same paintings of theirs were on display here as during the country tour in the summer, suggests that they did not answer the

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I NNER PAGES IN THE CATALOGUE OF N EW P ICTURES C ENTRE RIGHT : T HE LARGE EXHIBITION ROOM OF THE K ÁLMÁN K ÖNYVES S ALON , 1904 L OWER RIGHT : E NTRANCE OF THE K ÁLMÁN K ÖNYVES S ALON , 1904

call at all (if there ever was one) and that possibly their works made it to the exhibition via Bölöni.16 Márffy was not present either; in fact, he declared several times that he did not belong among the founders and was merely invited to send works.17 How, then, was the list drawn up, who put it together, who initiated the exhibition and who invited the artists abroad to participate? That is, who initiated their becoming a group? Some recollections suggest that Kernstok was not the only initiator. “We had this conversation in my studio with Pál Relle about how the painters who’d been to Paris and who were producing works in keeping with the spirit of the age ought to form a group,” Desiderius Orban recalled in a letter to Iván Dévényi,18 and in a radio interview he repeated this, adding “and we sifted and sorted and arrived at us eight artists who knew each other well. We’d met in Paris or since then in Hungary.”19 An erroneous assumption previously made by the literature needs to be rectified here. It was mistakenly believed that the Eight group had a second founding occasion in Desiderius Orban’s studio in 1911. This can be put down to the fact that in every statement of his Orban spoke of the Eight, albeit at that time the group had not taken this name yet, and neither do we have any information about whether or not the group was officially founded in Orban’s studio in 1911.

Naturally, the possibility that the idea of becoming a group came from Orban in 1909 is not at odds with Kernstok nurturing similar plans; but rather, the two would have been parallel initiatives that were not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing. A statement by Pál Relle from the year after the events seems to confirm this, as well as Orban’s words. “I adore the arts and I have gone to a lot of trouble over them, the upshot of it all being that together with my friends Károly Kernstok, Jenô Miklós and Dezsô Orbán, I succeeded in organising the group ‘New Pictures’.”20 It would appear then that starting a group was initiated by this hard core of two painters and two journalists. In connection with Jenô Miklós, mentioned by Relle, several sources – including, for example, one of Desiderius Orban’s recollections21 – suggest that he was actively involved in setting up the group. However, Miklós’s name has not come up before in the literature in connection with the Eight.22 Although Jenô Miklós is known to have owned several works by the Eight, his short biography which appeared in the 1912 almanac of the National Salon seems to have escaped attention: “He was actively involved in launching the artist group ‘New Pictures’.”23 The words above are repeated verbatim in the biography of Pál Relle in the same book.24 Relle comes up considerably more often in the

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M IKLÓS , 1911 (D ETAIL )

context of the Eight compared to Miklós; he made close friends with every member of the Eight and, being as he was one of their main propagators, he was invited to write a preface to their 1911 exhibition; however, nothing came of this and in the event the catalogue was headed by a writing by Géza Feleky. Beyond the fact that both Miklós and Relle were “actively involved” in founding the group, it is unclear what exactly constituted their activities. Interestingly, Bölöni’s name does not come up in documents related to the founding of the group, even though he was a key figure in the events running up to it. Bölöni had presumably wanted to see a wider circle of artists together, one that would include József Rippl-Rónai in any case. This could be put down to the workings of the journalists, and it seems that not only the painters were involved in healthy rivalry, but the critics too had their say when it came to forming groups.25 Although Bölöni had no involvement in forming the group, he nevertheless became one of the group’s main supporter and number one mentor, in particular around the time of their second exhibition. In addition to the four initiators mentioned above – the two painters and the two critics – the name of Dezsô Czigány comes up, who was also involved in preparing the exhibition and subsequently put much effort into raising publicity for the exhibition after it was opened. Firstly, on the day of the opening, on behalf of the exhibiting artists Czigány welcomed state secretary Viktor Molnár,26 giving him a guided tour

J ENÔ M IKLÓS ,

IN THE

1920 S ( PHOTOGRAPH )

through the rooms, and secondly at the famous event hosted by the Galileo Circle where Károly Kernstok read out his manifesto A kutató mûvészet [Inquisitive Art]27 and Dezsô Czigány also made a speech.28 Unfortunately the text of this has not come down to us. Bertalan Pór, too, recalls being invited to join by the three painters,29 in Budapest at the time. “At the time of the Eight I was painting Family. I was approached by Kernstok, Czigány and I think Orban. They came to me asking to exhibit at the Eight’s show. I said ‘Fine but what? I’ve no pictures.’ ‘What’s this then?’ they ask pointing at Family. I told them it was not finished. Never mind, it can go to the show as it is. The picture, the faces in particular, were not finished. That’s how it went to the exhibition of the Eight.”30 (R. 365) Pór’s painting did not arrive until a few days after the opening. He recalled later how there had been no group meetings, but rather, a hasty, almost secretive, collection of works. This way the exhibition was all the more a surprise, but for the same reason it became a bone of contention because many artists were left out, including József Rippl-Rónai who would gladly have stood at the vanguard of a secession of this kind. A few months later Elek Petrovics recalled, “in the winter of 1909 (after Christmas) a separate exhibition was held at the Kálmán Könyves [Salon], he [Pál Szinyei Merse] in particular bore a grudge against the members who had also belonged to MIÉNK (Kernstok, Czigány, Czóbel, Márffy). For the whole affair had been accomplished without his knowledge, and the old man

J ENÔ M IKLÓS

WITH WRITERS AND POETS ,

1923

learnt about it only from the papers. He considered this an unloyal, clandestine matter. He was of the belief that the members of MIÉNK had the duty to send the cream of their crop to the exhibition of MIÉNK; and if they decided to make a new début, they ought at least to have announced their intention of doing so. The exhibition led Rónai, too, to become estranged from the group. He also was left out, even though he had always stood up for them vigorously, and he also took upon himself Szinyei’s grudge. Being as he had for years a representative of the extreme left in art, he made common cause with them and followed them, and saw himself as something of an official leader and mentor of the group; I think he may have believed a possible secession – when the time came – would be conducted by his company under his leadership. And here they were, acting without his knowledge (presumably because they were aware that if their action involved Rónai, all public interest and recognition would go to the fully-fledged and almost popular artist). This must have offended Rónai. Although he happened to be in Budapest at the time, he refused to go and see the exhibition for days. It should be noted though that after viewing the show, he did not allow his grudge to influence his judgement. He found much to appreciate in the exhibition. He was truly interested. He considered two of Czóbel’s still lifes to be the most accomplished works, but had an interest in Kernstok, too. ‘A very interesting reincarnation,’ he said.”31 In all probability, Petrovics was a keen observer of the situation, and underlying the

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Kernstoks’ coup-like secession there may have been a struggle for dominance between Kernstok and Rippl-Rónai – not unlike the journalists’ “cliqueing”. However, Rippl-Rónai’s artistic outlook would also probably have had a role in his failure to enter the club. The Kernstoks were openly anti-Impressionists, while Rippl-Rónai – although he came to reconcile himself with the group and accept their innovative initiatives – dedicated an entire chapter to the defence of Impressionism in his Memoirs, published in 1911. In connection with the Eight he recalled, “They are seven. In any case, they have the right to accomplish their artistic ambitions. They love each other, including their faults. I believe they have no fear of obstacles, for they are aware that those who lay obstacles give up soon enough. They are even in agreement about condemning Impressionism. They may condemn it, yet not only was it their starting point, but also, the majority of them continue to thrive on it; they paint impressions, yet go on to stylise them.”32 However, Rippl-Rónai was not the only one left out of the club, but also many a young artist who had been to Paris and who, based on their style, could easily have integrated. The group failed to include Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, Géza Bornemisza, Tibor Boromisza, Sándor Ziffer, the Galimberti couple, Zoltán Csáktornyai and Ferenc Csont, as well as scores of people labelled as “Neos” and whom are today included among the Hungarian Fauves. The reasons were different in the case of every individual, and it would seem that stylistic criteria had a lesser role to play than friendship and camaraderie. It is striking that, reduced to eight, the company consisted of Budapest painters only, and they seem to have neglected the Nagybánya painters. The view that the Eight chiefly consisted of the “Neos” – which has gained broad currency in the literature – is a fallacy. Five of the eight painters had not been to Nagybánya,33 the Nagybánya recalcitrant Czóbel had avoided the colony since 1906, Czigány kept loose links and only Tihanyi ever went there during the period of the Eight, and soon he too looked down on what he referred to as a “pile of manure” and the “Neos” working there.34 Márffy’s recollections clearly indicate that being a “Nagybánya” painter had no role whatsoever within the Eight group.35 While a whole range of painters who easily matched the profile of the group were left out, there was one artist who hardly deserved the honour, yet still received an invitation. Represented by just one painting, Artúr Jakobovits probably owed his presence to Bertalan Pór.36 However, it should be noted that Jakobovits was a guest artist, meaning that at the time the exhibition was being organised, the curators considered the

A BOVE : R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : P ÁL R ELLE AND HIS W IFE B LANKA P ÉCHY WITH HER S ON , 1926–1928 B ELOW : P ÁL R ELLE AND B LANKA P ÉCHY WITH FRIENDS AT THE CAFÉ J APÁN K ÁVÉHÁZ , 1930 S

eight artists they had selected to be a group. One of the many articles announcing the exhibition seems to support this when it speaks of “a few guest artists”.37 Jakobovits’s name features on the list of works in the catalogue alongside the eight

painters, but not on the front page. In reviews about the exhibition his is the only name that appears together with the eight “core members”, but one of the reports mentions the works of Elza Kövesházi Kalmár. However, the assump-

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tion that she was also a guest artist is mistaken. Árpád Tímár called attention to the fact that the stylised bust and relief mentioned in a review by Frigyes Hervay38 must have been left behind in the rooms of the Kálmán Könyves Salon following the exhibition of works by Kövesházi that preceded the “New Pictures” exhibition.

“S EEKERS ” / “K ERNSTOK G ROUP ” / “N EW P ICTURES ” / “N EW P ICTURES A RT G ROUP ”= (?) T HE E IGHT

H UMOROUS COMMENTARY ABOUT THE EXHIBITION N EW P ICTURES IN THE SATIRICAL PAPER U RAMBÁTYÁM , 1910

A letter penned by Csaba Vilmos Perlrott in April or September 1909 is customarily quoted in connection with the group coming into being and the people left out. It is a draft and the addressee cannot be identified. “To the most honourable Dr. – [name illegible] Sir, I hereby inform you that I shall not participate in the exhibition of the ‘Seekers’. I am joining another company. Yours sincerely Vilmos Perlrott 16/09 [04?]/[1]909”39 This short message has commonly been interpreted in the literature as Perlrott receiving an invitation to join the Eight, which he declined. However, the letter is also cited as a presumed “Crown witness” in a controversial issue among Eight scholars as to whether the Eight were called “Seekers” prior to their official founding in 1911.40 I believe both hypotheses to be questionable.41 Perlrott’s letter firstly raises the question as to the identity of “Dr X” inviting Perlrott to join the group at the behest of the Kernstoks. Scholars commonly believe the addressee to be Dr Béla Lázár; however, it does not follow from this assumption that the “Seekers” stand for the Eight painters, owing to the fact that, so far as our present knowledge goes, Béla Lázár was not involved in bringing the group into existence. I am convinced that nothing whatsoever confirms that the painters grouping around Károly Kernstok ever founded the society of “Seekers” and neither do I believe there is enough evidence to prove that Perlrott’s letter was about his joining the Eight. The group of eight painters had several names at the time, the most widely used one being “Kernstok group” that had been used earlier (and applied to the clique within MIÉNK that had not yet been reduced to eight artists), but even as early as 1910

V IKTOR W OLLEMANN ’ S CARICATURE OF K ÁROLY K ERNSTOK ' S Y OUTHS , AND L AJOS T IHANYI ’ S W RESTLERS , 1910

the name “the Eight” and “the eight” appeared. However, the moment they are treated a group, the names variably used were “New Pictures”, “New Pictures Group” and “New Pictures artistic group”. They were known by these names in the biographies of Pál Relle and Jenô Miklós that appeared in the afore-mentioned Almanac of the National Salon, as well as in the also-quoted recollections of Pál Relle and the contemporary press.42

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C SABA V ILMOS P ERLROTT , 1909

B ERLIN – 1910 A few weeks after the “New Pictures” exhibition closed at the Kálmán Könyves Salon, the eight painters were involved as a group in its own right in the first truly representative international début of Hungarian painting in the rooms of the Secession in Berlin. Initiated in Hungary by Lajos Hatvany, “Ausstellung Ungarischer Maler” was open to visitors from 5 February to 3 March 1910.43 The eight painters’ début as a group was again not a straightforward matter. Their belonging together was marked by the fact that they were assigned a room of their own, but no group name was associated to indicate they were a separate entity within the exhibition, and in the catalogue they featured under the designation “Neoimpressionisten”. This cannot have been merely because they had not taken a name yet – i.e. they were not “official” – but because Béla Iványi Grünwald had asked to share the room with the eight painters.44 This notwithstanding, the Berlin show was the first important foreign event attended by the future Eight (not counting Iványi) where they appeared jointly and isolated from others. As many later examples attest, this did not come about as a result of their own efforts. The exhibition was organised by individuals independent of the Eight, and the fact that the eight painters had the opportunity to present their works separately was the express wish of the organisers:

T HE

HANGING COMMITTEE OF THE

B ERLIN S ECESSION

“By direct request, the artists whose works were recently on display at the rooms of the Kálmán Könyves Salon will be presented,” wrote presumably Pál Relle.45 The “direct request” is believed to have come from the initiator of the exhibition, the Berlin art dealer Paul Cassirer, leader of the Secession who had visited Budapest with Lajos Hatvany at the end of the previous year, which is how he would have seen the acclaimed exhibition.46 Not being against the artists’s intention to demonstrate their belonging together, the invitation was accepted and Dezsô Czigány, then active also in Budapest, represented the Eight. In the company of József Rippl-Rónai he gave a guided tour to one of the most eminent German art historian, Julius Meier-Graefe, who, according to Czigány, “spoke highly about the pictures, perhaps with the least reservation about the neo-Impressionists”47 that is the Eight, extended with Iványi. RipplRónai’ account is more subtle. “Kernstok aroused his interest, but at the same time belittled him, arguing that he should have produced this sort of work at the age of 20, but he was by now too old for this and he had no high hopes for him. With respect to the others he said there were thousands like them at the Salon d’Automne – he deemed the young ones interesting and wellversed, and because they were young, he would keep up his interest in them.”48 The local press followed the Hungarian premiere closely and enthusiastically, and the some 200-strong collection of art works drew, for the most part, good

ON A

1904

EXHIBITION . I N THE CORNER :

P ORTRAIT

P AUL C ASIRER

critical response. Szinyei, Rippl-Rónai and Fényes were the most successful. Many articles gave a detailed account of the individual artists, often mentioning specific works or offering a detailed analysis. Exhibiting in the most progressive room of the exhibition, the “nine”49 naturally received some biting remarks in Berlin, but some of the more sophisticated negative critics had heard about the Fauves and, having lumped the most modern Hungarians under the category, they evaluated them accordingly. For example Adolph Donat, while accepting the accomplishment of their painting, he reproached the “Fauves” – that is, Czóbel, Czigány, Kernstok and Kosztolányi Kann – for misunderstanding the art of Cézanne and Van Gogh, yet like the conservative Hungarian critics, he too derided Kernstok’s Youths.50 Fritz Stahl from the Berliner Tageblatt51 blamed Pór for his misinterpreting Cézanne in connection with his painting The Family. Citing Fauvism and Primitivism in the context of the works of Czigány, Czóbel and Orban, Hans Rosenhagen wrote appreciatively about their proficiency, noting their art “stood on more solid grounds than some of the German ultra-moderns.”52 Dezsô Czigány also gave a detailed account of the local critics’ reception of the exhibition in an article for Pesti Napló, in which he also wrote about their inspirational meeting with Berlin intellectuals.53 Czigány not only represented the group and was their correspondent on location, but it seems likely that he himself installed the group’s

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paintings in the room allocated to them,54 so he was clearly acting as the “emissary of the Eight”. 55 It is not known why Kernstok did not accompany the collection or why the “chief” did not represent the group on international forums. Neither do we know, by whom, and on the basis of what criteria, the 32 works originally exhibited at the Kálmán Könyves Salon were selected and reduced to half for the Berlin show. Was it the artist organisers of the Budapest exhibition who came to an agreement on which pictures should go, or did Cassirer make a pick, or was the decision Simon Meller’s who had put together the rest of the exhibition? Leafing through the Berlin catalogue what first strikes the eye is that the paintings that had created a scandal back in Budapest – Tihanyi’s wrestling men, Czigány’s infamous self-portrait called “the green-haired A BOVE LEFT : J ULES P ASCIN : R IDER , C . 1912 L EFT : J ULES P ASCIN (?) AND L IPÓT H ERMAN : L AJOS T IHANYI RIDING THE K ERNSTOK K ENTAUR , C . 1912 L OWER LEFT : C ARICATURES OF PAINTINGS AT THE EXHIBITION OF THE E IGHT ON A CARD ADDRESSED TO I STVÁN R ÉTI , 1911

Ö DÖN M ÁRFFY

D EZSÔ O RBÁN

monster”, Márffy’s nude composition – were left out, perhaps out of caution, and the artists were chiefly represented by landscapes and still lifes, with only Kernstok’s irreverent nudes, Youths, and Marcell Komor’s Youth representing the trend believed to be the most extreme. (R: 286, 293)

THE E XHIBITION OF B ERTALAN P ÓR AND THE “T ISZA D EBATE ” After more than a year of preparation, the collective’s next exhibition was held in the spring of 1911. This, however, came after an exhibition of the collected works of Bertalan Pór – who had contributed just one uncompleted work on the turn of 1910 – hosted by the Kálmán Könyves Salon in January 1911. Pór’s “isolation” is interesting for several reasons. When his exhibition opened, the next show of the then-still “New Pictures” group had been in the pipeline and was due to open a few months later, with an entire section dedicated to the collected works of Róbert Berény, his younger friend. Presumably Pór would have had the same opportunity, yet he chose the Kálmán Könyves Salon – and an entirely solo exhibition. This goes to show that while they functioned as a group, they acted as independent individuals, and their personal ambitions could override group interests. It is equally true, though, that by then Pór was a household name on the Hungarian art scene, while Berény was practically unknown and consequently stood a better chance of making a name as part of the Eight. Pór’s solo exhibition attracted all limelight he could wish for; and, consisting of lectures on literature and art theory and complete with a celebration of the poet Endre Ady, the series of programmes eventually caused a scandal not unlike the group exhibition had a year earlier. Eventually becoming an event on a national scale, Pór’s exhibition ruffled former prime minister István Tisza – who had been previously incensed by the Mûcsarnok painter

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István Bosznay – to the point that after “making a dash” from the exhibition, he gave yet another vitriolic rant against artistic issues. In an article published in Magyar Figyelô,56 a paper Tisza had recently launched together with Ferenc Herczeg for the promotion of conservative political views, he not only vented his dislike of Pór’s painting, but also rejected everything associated with the activities of the artists belonging to progressive bourgeois radical circles, that is his political adversaries. A month prior to his vilification of Pór and his exhibition, Tisza had launched an open attack on modern trends, singled out classical works such as Pál Szinyei Merse’s May Day – which had by then long lost its progressive appeal and could hardly be called ultra-modern – arguing that “its absolute value is problematic at the very least”.57 The bungling incompetence of the arch-conservative Tisza aroused much controversy, and eventually his articles backfired. He was jeered at for his narrow-mindedness not only by the radical press, but was widely pilloried for his attempt at sneaking his openly-professed political views into the realm of art. On 16 April 1911 Pesti Napló published a series of interviews with the title “The artists and István Tisza”. It put four questions to artists with more modern outlooks, leaving them to answer at will. Interestingly, Rippl-Rónai, whose exhibition had made Tisza physically sick, elegantly avoided giving a straightforward answer. The others, for the most part, took up the gauntlet, albeit in a gentlemanly manner, and condemned Tisza’s interference in artistic issues he little understood. The replies of all of the Eight were published in the paper – all except Czóbel’s that is, because he was busy emigrating to France at the time. Around the same time György Bölöni brought out a series of articles in Aurora, a literary and art review diametrically opposed in terms of worldview to Tisza’s paper, dedicating a monographic article to each of the members of the Eight.58 The first articles were published prior to the official founding of the group, and they can be regarded as the launch of a carefully constructed press campaign, an important preliminary leading up to the official announcement of the

M ÁRK V EDRES

M ÁRIA L EHEL

group. Much as he had remained in the background in the organisation of “New Pictures”, Bölöni was now moving to the forefront in setting up the début of the Eight.

THE O FFICIAL FOUNDING OF THE E IGHT Not having an official name in general use prior to the new joint exhibition, on 16 April 1911 they reported that the group that had made its début a year before at the Könyves Kálmán Salon, had three days before, that is “at its meeting on Maundy Thursday formed a regular association, and since there were eight of them present, they took the name ‘the Eight’,”59 The laconic report offered meagre explanation of their choice of name, and since Czóbel was in Paris at the time and did not even attend the opening, reference to their number raises some questions. In listing the core members, they consistently insisted on including Czóbel, so it is possible that their choice of name can be put down to such a prosaic reason. Attila Rum believes that taking the name “Eight” “was symbolic for the Kernstoks. The number eight assumes great significance in religious and cultural history; in a general sense it represents cosmic equilibrium and harmony, tranquillity and order, in Christianity it is the number of Resurrection and Redemption, in Judaism it is the symbol of the Covenant.”60 Zoltán Rockebauer goes on to say “Masonic symbolism may also have had a role in the case of the Eight.”61 On account of the fact that I am not aware of any specific contemporary source or reference or recently-found evidence that points to this assumption, I am inclined to go for the simple answer, that is, the core members of the group consisted of eight artists who opted for the previously unofficial “the Eight” and scrapped the original “New Pictures” that was not working as a group name anyway. The contemporary sources do not speak of who the name came from, but many journalists had already been call-

V ILMOS F ÉMES B ECK

A NNA L ESZNAI

ing them “the eight” in the context of the “New Pictures” exhibition, that is, the name was, so to speak, “in the air”.62 In a statement dating from 1926, former director of the National Salon Béla Déry arrogated to himself the right to being godfather of the Eight,63 and in an interview conducted in the late 1920s Berény claimed to have given the name himself.64 The choice of an official name would have been motivated by the fact that the Eight had wanted to get rid of the widespread “Kernstok group” designation which they found slightly offensive and in violation of their sovereignty and pride. This raises the question as to what extent Kernstok can be regarded to be the leader of the group and what exactly his leadership consisted in. Knowing the activities of the group it seems that no hierarchical relationships emerged, nobody was more superior or inferior, albeit Kernstok did enjoy the respect and esteem of the younger artists on account of his age, social standing and artistic past. Nevertheless, I NVITATION

TO THE

1911

EXHIBITION OF THE

E IGHT

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F RONT

PAGE OF THE CATALOGUE OF THE

OF THE

E IGHT

1911

EXHIBITION

we have no knowledge of any situation where he expected his orders or guidelines to be followed; they acted as completely autonomous, independent artists, each carrying the same weight in the management of the group. Kersntok’s leadership was chiefly for the outside world, and while presumably the role flattered his vanity, the younger ones did not particularly mind.65 Géza Bornemissza, a close friend of Kernstok’s but not a group member, assessed the situation thus: “His acting outwards as a kind of chieftain (of the 8) can be put down largely to journalistic convention. It was thought that talking and writing about a group was only possible ‘under his guidance’.”66 Due to his social standing, Kernstok was the natural choice as a chief, or rather, representative of the group in official matters. In actual fact it was the media that made him a leader, in the same way as it had greatly contributed – by means of a well-organised press campaign in the run-up to the exhibition – to propelling the Eight to the vanguard of Hungarian painting. The press kept up public interest in the group during and after the exhibition through articles and reports on a daily basis. Compared to the Kálmán Könyves Salon, a commercial gallery, having the National Salon to host the next exhibition was a leap forward, and the high-profile opening lent the event prestige in spite of attacks from the conservatives. Tripling the number of pictures compared to the previous show, the group had the opportunity to

prove in the stately rooms of the National Salon that they were the vanguard of modern Hungarian painting. Literary nights, recitals, debates in art theory and prestigious musical events were held throughout the period of the exhibition. Organising the fringe events involved some real teamwork, and the management of the National Salon, the journalists supporting the Eight as well as the group members made a great joint effort to make the exhibition one of the noisiest and most significant events at the turn of the century art scene. Later recollections confirm the memory of this exhibition to have stuck most in the mind of the group members. They regarded it to be the most important joint action of the Eight in that it was the first and last time they were involved as a real group. All of them were present, with the exception of Czóbel. Kernstok was represented at the exhibition by the fewest works, and although his giant Horsemen at the Water was the priciest painting in the catalogue, press and public attention focused to a lesser extent on the group’s doyen and chief, and more on the young artists, in particular Róbert Berény whose solo collection, making up for half of the total works exhibited, dominated the rooms of the National Salon. This notwithstanding, the exhibition was considered to be the event that most democratically welded together the spirit of the group, and documents attest they formed a true intellectual community of friends; they spent much time together, they met and demonstrated their belonging together. The first buyer of the Eight, one of their patrons and subsequently closest friends, Ciaclan Virgil recalled how “The life of this group was extremely interesting. They went everywhere together, they were always together and knew everything about each other.”67 In light of contemporary documents and subsequent anecdotes and recollections it certainly does seem that the resounding success of the exhibition that crowned the founding of the group put the collective in a euphoric mood, ending in night-long revelry, and particularly partying together with the poet Endre Ady.68 The community by then included artists and friends who would appear as guest artists at the 1911 exhibition. We have no information as to who invited the guests. In the case of the sculptors – in particular Márk Vedres – it seems likely that the idea came from Kernstok, although Vilmos Fémes Beck was a close friend of the younger artists, too. Anna Lesznai was good friends with every member of the group, and inviting her was more a token of friendship than artistic kinship with the Eight. The lastminute invitation of Mária Lehel, too, was also personally motivated and she probably joined

the exhibitors at Károly Kernstok’s invitation.69 She presented her collection at Mûvészház coincidentally with the Eight, yet she also actively participated in the events connected to the Eight, and like her husband, she gave a talk at the Galileo Circle on the technical aspects of modern painterly trends.70

S ONDERBUND , C OLOGNE The zenith of the group’s career, the 1911 show was followed by just one exhibition under the aegis of the “Eight”, at the end of 1912. However, before and after this they appeared in exhibitions more or less as a group. One such occasion was the international exhibition of the Düsseldorf-based Sonderbund Society in Cologne between 25 May and 30 September 1912,71 the most important event of European progressive art prior to the outbreak of the Great War. The Cologne Sonderbund exhibition – the first representative international show of Expressionism – featured an extensive retrospective collection of works by the ancestral triad of new initiatives, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, as well as a considerable collection of Picasso, Cross, Signac and Munch. The show was preponderantly made up of works by representatives of the latest German, Austrian and French trends, consequently bringing together under the same roof Kokoschka, the members of die Brücke and der Blaue Reiter, the French Fauves and Cubists. In the wider international field, alongside the Dutch, the Swiss, the Norwegians, the Austrians and the Czechs, the Hungarians featured prominently and were discussed in the local press right after the French. Although some contemporary Hungarian accounts claimed that “Hungarian art was represented by the pictures of the ‘Eight’”72 at the Cologne show, this was only partly true. The exhibition, as the catalogue attests, also included works by József Bató, Géza Bornemisza, Baron Ferenc Hatvany, Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba, József Rippl-Rónai (who could not be overlooked), and Lili Somló, an artist of more modest talent thought to have got in through Ignotus.73 The collective of artists from Hungary was joined by the Parisian Jules Pascin who was in Budapest at the time and acquainted with the Eight. In addition to the Eight’s painter guests there were sculptors, too, including Vilmos Fémes Beck and Márk Vedres,74 as well as Jenô Körmendi Frim and Elza Kövesházi Kalmár. Almost every member of the Eight – except Czóbel and Pór – had works on display, and their belonging together would have been evident even if they had not been given a room of

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Z OLTÁN F ELVINCZI T AKÁCS , C . 1910

their own. Although they were not attending the Cologne show on their own initiative, and unlike the Berlin exhibition, the invitation was not specifically for the group, certain sources suggest the Eight made common cause with each other during the selection procedure.75 The organisers of the exhibition invited Zoltán Takács Felvinczi to curate the Hungarian section. Felvinczi was and art critic whose name has not come up yet in the context of the Eight. He was custodian of the Museum of Fine Arts, and eventually proved to be an important supporter of the Eight, and in particular a sincere and knowledgeable adherent of Róbert Berény.76 Takács Felvinczi was presumably chosen for his reputation in Germany. In his capacity as correspondent in Hungary for the art journal Der Cicerone, he regularly reported about artistic initiatives around Hungary and was at home on the German art scene, too.77 He is believed to have been invited by one of the exhibition organisers, the vice-director of the Provinzialmuseum in Bonn, Dr Walter Cohen who, according to his correspondence with Felvinczi Takács, had been to Budapest several times,78 but we have no knowledge of whether Cohen had seen works by the Eight or other modern Hungarian artists or if he even had a say in the selection. The list of names in the exhibition advertisement79 is at odds with the list eventually published in the catalogue, but there is a discrepancy between the information about the opened exhibition cited in certain reviews and the catalogue. In the light of this it is difficult to reconstruct who, in the event, contributed and what works to the exhibition. In the context of the Eight none of the sources mention Pór, and Czóbel’s name only comes up in the preliminary reports. According to the catalogue, Berény had two studies on display; the paint could barely have dried on one of

W ALTER C OHEN ’ S

POSTCARD TO

his plausibly identifiable works, given that he had completed it only a month before.80 At the same time, Czigány was represented by the painting Portraits of Two Women81 that had been to Bölöni’s tour many years before as well as at the “New Pictures” show, and a still life with fruit. Underlying Kernstok’s significance was the display of a large composition of his that had been presented at the exhibition of the Eight, Horsemen at the Water, and perhaps two other nudes, not featuring in the catalogue.82 The catalogue listed just one work by Márffy, but the correspondent for Világ claimed the show had a sitting nude, a Badacsony landscape and a picture of a street in Budapest by him.83 The catalogue lists one work each by Orban and Tihanyi, but the above-mentioned review claimed that in addition to Portrait of Jenô Miklós, in the catalogue, he had a larger landscape and a smaller still life, too; and mentioned two landscapes by Orban, rather than just one as the catalogue would have one believe.84 The correspondent of Független Magyarország opined that the Hungarian collection had been well-received by the local press, and although he drew up a list of all the German papers that mentioned the Hungarians, his report does not directly contribute to the theoretical reconstruction of the exhibition, only highlights the fact that “Károly Kernstok was the most successful; however, certain papers were clearly eager to lump him under the Germans.”85

Z OLTÁN F ELVINCZI T AKÁCS

WITH

S ONDERBUND

LETTERHEAD ,

1912

Felvinczi Takács dedicated a thorough study to the exhibition in which he wrote about Kernstok in great detail.86 He brought up the obvious intellectual kinship between Kernstok and Hans von Marées to explain the German connection, and described with the most disguised sympathy Berény’s experiments in emancipating colouristic and plastic values. An interesting fact regarding the reception of the exhibition is that the future acclaimed art historian Máriusz Rabinovszky, then a student, visited the show and entered in his diary, “I was particularly interested in Hungary which, even though it did not stand out, was on a par with the rest. It is a shame this feisty modernising desire has begun T HE M UNCH

S ONDERBUND C OLOGNE , 1912

ROOM AT THE

EXHIBITION IN

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to gain currency at home, too, leading astray such gorgeous a brush as Róbert Berényi’s [sic]. […] Kernstock’s [sic] ‘Reiter’ I cannot assess at all, for it does not stand out either in form or in colouring.”87

THE THIRD E XHIBITION OF THE E IGHT – DISINTEGRATION ? The third and last exhibition of the Eight opened, after multiple postponements, as late as November 15, 1912 again in the upstairs halls of the National Salon. The exhibition had sought to surpass88 the previous one; however only four of the original core members – Berény, Orbán, Pór and Tihanyi – participated, extended by sculptor Vilmos Fémes Beck. In spite of the drop in numbers, the group made every effort to repeat the excitement surrounding the previous exhibition. The opening was preceded by the issuing of “The Eight” letterhead stationery, ornamental invitations and stately events with people in dinner jackets. The splendidly designed catalogue, containing reproductions of works and the artists’

F RONT

PAGE OF THE THIRD EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

E IGHT , 1912 B ELOW : K ÁROLY K ERNSTOK ’ S

OF THE

MURAL

IN THE GYM HALL OF THE SCHOOL IN

P RIMITIVE H UNTERS D UGONICS UTCA

S TREET , 1912 A T THE BOTTOM : K ÁROLY K ERNSTOK ’ S STAINED - GLASS WINDOW AT THE D EBRECEN COUNTY HALL , 1912 ( DETAIL )

own introductions, claimed that Czóbel, Czigány, Márffy, Kernstok and Lesznai were not participating due to “other artistic engagements”. The exhibition had been postponed for reasons including, “several members of the group, Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Bertalan Pór and others too were engaged in decorating public buildings and frescoes,”89 which was true, only it was a lame excuse to explain why they eventually failed to contribute to the show altogether. After all, Pór managed to hang the sketches for these works of his. Zoltán Rockenbauer believes Márffy was no short of works to exhibit, given that he had completed the murals in Kiscelli utca and also found the time to go on holiday in Dalmatia where he produced scores of works.90 The real reasons are not yet known, but looking at Berény’s and Tihanyi’s highly expressive, out-of-the-ordinary and eccentric works, which brought the onset of a new stylistic turn, comparing them to Kernstok’s works dating from this time – the classicising and Secession-revivalist stained glass windows in the Schiffer villa or the “Seven chieftains stained glass windows” that satisfied even the political aspects of public taste – it becomes clear that in some respects the roads had parted again. Significantly, too, Czigány had made a comeback and after five years of silence, exhibited his works at the Mûcsarnok, a venue the group had sworn to avoid. Presumably many of the group members were seeking to better cater to public tastes for financial reasons, hoping to receive official commissions that invariably came with considerable honoraria. Since Kernstok was not participating in the show, his already dubitable role as chief became meaningless. There was no noisy separation, but the always artistically heterogeneous collective could not be held together, and while several exhibitions of Mûvészház displayed collections by almost every one of them, they were no longer participating as a group as such.

B RÜKO S ALON What appears to be the final break-up of the Eight occurred in the spring of 1914. Mûvészház invited a bunch of artists to participate in a guest appearance in Vienna in 1914, but the jury of Künstlerhaus hosting the event turned down the works of Róbert Berény and Lajos Tihanyi. The rejected artists organised a counter-exhibition in a previously hardly known venue, the so called Kunst Salon “Brüko”. The second exhibition of the Kohn brothers (hence the name of the place)91 was originally going to feature four artists, together with Bertalan Pór and Vilmos Fémes Beck who stood up for their colleagues.

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Initially – according to Lajos Tihanyi at least – the exhibition poster sought to call the Viennese public’s attention to the exhibition of four Hungarian artists on the first floor space at 10 Weihburggasse,92 but after sculptor Fémes Beck pulled out (in spite of his colleagues’ insistence and making them angry), the Viennese papers announced the upcoming event of “3 Budapester Mahler” and a week later “3 Ungarische Maler”.93 In the event, the exhibition “Ausstellung von Werken der 3 Künstler” opened on March 23, 1914. The modern “counter-exhibition” was an event much-reported in the local and Hungarian press. Not known previously but recently found,

U PPER

LEFT :

B ÉLA D ÉRY ’ S LETTER TO V ILMOS F ÉMES B ECK N ATIONAL S ALON ’ S LETTERHEAD PAPER FOR THE EXHIBITION OF THE E IGHT , 1912 L OWER LEFT : I NVITATION TO THE THIRD EXHIBITION OF THE E IGHT , 1912

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : C APRI V ISION , 1913

•

C AT .

NO .

ON THE

the catalogue94 reveals that Berény exhibited his latest works, not counting a still life from 1909, most of which had been exhibited at the exhibitions of the Eight or made later, and hanging in the window display were his decorative embroideries. Pór displayed his expressive self-portraits

and large paintings, Tihanyi, too, some suggestive portraits, self-portraits and an interesting cityscape that had inspired a caricaturist at a previous Budapest show. This exhibition relentlessly drew attention to the moderately progressive orientation of

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U PPER LEFT : T HE BUILDING OF THE B RÜKO S ALON IN V IENNA TODAY L EFT AND ABOVE : C ATALOGUE AND INVITATION OF THE EXHIBITION AT THE B RÜKO S ALON IN V IENNAFOR B ERÉNY , P ÓR AND T IHANYI , 1914

Mûvészház, and coincidentally led to the symbolic break-up of the Eight because while Berény, Tihanyi and Pór were exhibiting modern works at the “Brüko”, their companions, Czigány, Kernstok, Márffy and Orban refused to express solidarity and exhibited their paintings in the conservative Künstlerhaus instead. Kernstok and Orban personally attended the opening at the Künsterhaus. Orban had exhibited together with his ideal, Berény, at the last exhibition of the Eight, as well as with Tihanyi whom he was not so fond of, and Pór, but this time he too opted for the safety of the official forum and was hoping to find a buyer for his best-accomplished works shown there.95 The question is which half of the collective can be regarded as successor to the spirit of the

Eight? Due to differences that existed from the very outset, it is impossible to say which trend can be regarded as authentic “Eight”, yet the first advocate of the group, György Bölöni subtly hinted that he believed the exhibition of the group reduced to three at the Brüko to be a manifestation of the truncated Eight group.96 “There used to be more of them, a small closed phalanx representing Hungarian revolutionary spirit. [...] Reduced to three I love them for their obstinacy and I love them for their own values, in the way they sum up Hungarian life as a whole, where there are many who set out, and eagerly too, but very few persevere and finally arrive.” Bertalan Pór later reported about the success of the exhibition and the inspirational effect it had: “In the March of 1914, my colleagues Lajos Tihanyi and Róbert Berény and I organised an exhibition in Vienna at the Kunstsalon ‘Brücko’ [sic]. The Viennese press was full of our show and our success inspired us to take the collection to Berlin, Saint Petersburg, that is the large cities for the purpose of exhibiting it there. The outbreak of the war obliterated our great expectations and hopes.”97 It would appear then that the collective, reduced to three, was planning to continue to exhibit its works as a group, but this would not materialise. The Eight did not announce their dissolution, but neither did they ever organise a joint exhibition again and, to all intents and purposes, the collective had fallen apart. The reasons cited by the artists concerned were very different. Pór and Márffy blamed the outbreak of the war, while Orban spoke of professional rivalry and jealousy.98 In truth, probably every reason and a lot more other circumstances played a role in the collective of artists ending their activities as a group with mutual goals.

E XHIBITIONS O VERSEAS Since the Eight had not been officially pronounced dissolved, the press continued to refer to them as a group and at the international events Hungary participated in after the exhibition at the National Salon, they were generally lumped together for convenience. Prior to the break-up around the Künstlerhaus and Brücko Salon incident, they organised a grandiose series of exhibitions overseas where every member of the Eight were represented. The travelling exhibition – that sought to present the American audiences with the cream of the crop of art from the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy – featured graphic works only, but the very latest trends were well represented. What

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erroneously went down in the literature as the “Hungarian exhibition in Buffalo” was in fact merely one station of the travelling exhibition that went to five cities around the United States. The official title was “Exhibition of Contemporary Graphic Art in Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria”.99 The works that went to this series of exhibitions were collected by Viktor Olgyay, an Academy of Fine Arts professor, and Kálmán Pogány, official at the Department of Engravings at the Museum of Fine Arts,100 but the main organiser and curator of the exhibitions was the Hungarian-born Martin Birnbaum.101 Published in the catalogue of the exhibition(s), his introduction gives an exhaustive history of Hungarian graphic art to the present. Of the Eight he highlighted the drawings of Czóbel, Márffy and in particular Berény, which he expected to scandalise the American audiences with their novelty and modernity. With respect to the radicalism of the Eight he caustically remarked that when they were not working in their studios, they hung out at the Japán Coffee House with the Hungarian doyen of the Secession – that is, the representative of a style all of them had surpassed – Ödön Lechner.102 The American tour of Hungarian graphic works was in full sway when an extremely energetic organiser, the Norwegian-born American journalist, John Nielsen Laurvik visited Hungary. Laurvik was sent to Europe by the art department of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco (PPIE)103 to collect works from countries that were taking part on the fair nonofficially. During his visit to Hungary he approached Count Gyula Andrássy who offered him works from his own private collection and encouraged others to follow suit. The Museum of Fine Arts offered Laurvik considerable help, too, but their contribution is thought to have been limited to graphic works. Supporting this is the fact that in the Hungarian section of the catalogue104 only the notes for the graphic works indicate that the collection of the material was organised by the Museum of Fine Arts. It transpires from the exhibition catalogue that individuals entrusting major collections to Laurvik included Marcell Nemes, Baron Ferenc Hatvany, Béla Benczúr, Dr Ignácz Fekete, Dr Ágoston Alcsúti, Dr Lajos Ferenczi, Adolf Kellner, Lajos Jámbor and the world-famous psychoanalyst Dr Sándor Ferenczi. Apart from their own works, the exhibiting artists – Károly Kernstok, Márk Vedres and Count Gyula Battyány – contributed works in their own collection by other artists. The majority of works were loaned by the exhibiting artists. Laurvik’s visit in 1914 was his second time in Hungary. He had been to Budapest in the summer of 1913 as the correspondent for

N EWSPAPER

American papers reporting on the International Woman Suffrage Alliance’s congress. Elma Pálos, future “stepdaughter” of the acclaimed psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, was attending the congress as an interpreter.105 Ferenczi had initially courted Elma, a young girl then, but eventually married her mother, Gizella, after Elma – perhaps to escape Ferenczi’s advances – married

ARTICLE ABOUT THE

M ÛVÉSZHÁZ

EXHIBITION IN

V IENNA , 1914

Laurvik on 18 September 1914 not long after she had met him in Budapest. Laurvik wrote Frank Burty-Haviland a letter in December 1914 telling him that his wife, Elma Pálos, participated in the Hoover Relief Work, and in addition to this diplomatic task, had helped him collect Hungarian paintings for the Panama-Pacific exposition.106

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T HE P ANAMA -P ACIFIC I NTERNATIONAL E XPOSITION

DURING THE DAY AND AT NIGHT ,

THE ROOM OF THE FUTURISTS AT THE PANAMA-PACIFIC INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION, 1915

Seen from this angle, it is not very surprising then that such a great number of Hungarian works went to the San Francisco world exposition. Laurvik visited Hungary for the second time in the latter half of 1914, by which time he had a considerably larger circle of acquaintances.107 His father-in-law, doctor Ferenczi was one of Róbert Berény’s best friends. The artist later entertained the Laurviks, an occasion György Bölöni was invited to. It transpires from the invitation108 Berény sent Bölöni that the art critic had known Laurvik by then. Through this acquaintance, Bölöni too came to assume an important role. Firstly, he wrote the Hungarian chapter in the de luxe catalogue of the PPIE, which Elma Pálos translated into English, and secondly, is presumed to have participated in collecting the Hungarian art works.109 Bölöni, a man of modern tastes, had a colleague with an important task to help him. According to two articles published in the Hungarian press, Béla Lázár can be regarded as a key figure in this matter. An editorial article

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published in Magyarország on December 30, 1914 lashed out at Laurvik for entrusting a critic, who was hardly the epitome of impartiality, with the task of collecting the works representing Hungary instead of asking the bodies best qualified to do so, the Society of Fine Artists or the Fine Arts Association.110 A patron of the modern arts and head of the modern-biased artists’ table at the café the Japán Kávéház, Béla Lázár was accused of sending invitation letters only to the artists belonging to the company, and consequently, the material collected for the world exposition would give an extremely onesided and reprehensible image of the country’s art life. Commented by the editors of the paper and published the following day, Lázár’s reply denies the allegations and stresses that like in all of his previous writings he remained objective.111 The retrospective and broad representation of contemporary artists justifies Lázár, but it is not known how much say he had in the final selection. What is certain is that Laurvik, too, was attracted to modern art, and perhaps it is thanks to this, that he borrowed dozens of works from Róbert Berény, one of the most progressive Hungarian artists of the time, and many other members of the Eight, including Bertalan Pór, sent a huge collections to the fair. One of the most important collections at the PPIE – in terms of numbers, as well as in respect of progressiveness second only to the Futurists – was the ensemble of Hungarian paintings, displayed in eight rooms. The catalogue listed 76 Hungarian painters, 12 sculptors, represented by some five hundred works of art.112 The sheer number helps to explain why the PPIE is regarded as the first truly representative overseas début of Hungarian art. The numbers aside, the

most salient feature of the Hungarian collection was the fact that as opposed to most exhibiting countries, it was truly retrospective and the modern trends were given a greater emphasis than in the case of other countries.113 As it transpires from Elma Pálos’s on-site report,114 with an emphasis on Berény, the paintings of the Eight (without Orban and Czóbel, neither of whom had loaned works) were on display in the same room and “caused a sensation”. This is also confirmed by Arthur B. Clark’s little booklet.115 In it, he publishes the floor plans of Palace of Fine Arts, the art division of the exhibition, and the Annexbuilding, the venue of late arrivals. On this floor plan the room housing the painting of the Eight is entitled “Hungarian Cubistst”. Apart from the Italian Futurists, only the Eight were “granted” such a progressive description. In his book highlighting remarkable works on show he is calling attention to Berény’s portrait of Bartók that was reproduced in the twovolume de luxe catalogue, too, and hastens to add that the majority of Berény’s wall reflected chaotic ideas. Interestingly, in addition to Forest Path, a so far unidentified painting by Márffy, his interest in Bertalan Pór’s My Family, in which he saw the embodiment of a new art, and praised the painter’s sincerity and courage.116 Berény’s 26-work collection included works that had caused a stir at the last exhibition of the Eight, including Christ (Golgotha) which, together with the portrait of Bartók, Laurvik unlawfully kept for himself until the end of his life, as well as his highly successful embroideries,117 and his latest canvases, the landscapes painted on Capri, and a few yet unidentified works. Pór was represented by a massive collection of 72 works, but his giant compositions would not fit in the room assigned to the Eight.118 On display was

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Kernstok’s large equestrian composition from 1912 then in the possession of Marcell Nemes (R: 65), his stained glass window designs, a portrait of Czóbel from 1907 and a nude; Czigány’s Woman Combing her Hair which has unfortunately since been destroyed in a fire; Márffy’s male portrait, two landscapes and a Cézanne-style still life that recently re-surfaced in the United States; and two of Tihanyi’s self-portraits, a male portrait and Szomolnok (Forest Landscape, Szepes-county Landscape) which had been long missing and found only during the preparation of the present exhibition. (R. 416) After the international exposition closed, an “after-exhibition” was held at the same location, and because during the World War Hungary counted as an enemy state, the American government impounded the Hungarian collection, the majority of which did not make it back to Hungary until the late 1920s, but the whereabouts of certain works continues to be unknown, while many have only recently surfaced.

L AST C HANCES The Waldbauer-Kerpely String Quartet gave a concert at the 1911 exhibition of the Eight, and several members of the artist group became close friends with them. Viola player Egon Kornstein, who had joined the quartet later, organised an exhibition out of dedication to the fine arts, in the capital of Serbia in the final days of the World War in September 1918.119 In his capacity as reserve lieutenant of the 37th Nagyvárad regiment of the Austro-Hungarian infantry, he intended to donate the income of the Belgrade exhibition to war orphans, while naturally he sought to promote Hungarian artists for when happier times set in. Hosted in the rooms of the royal konak, the grand-scale exhibition naturally failed to meet the organiser’s expectations, and although only seven of the Eight and their former guest artists sent works to the show, their belonging together was not apparent. After the World War, the Eight had more than one opportunity to exhibit together under the Károlyi government. There were several ideas for events where the Eight could have made a joint appearance as part of a representative Hungarian exhibition, but none materialised. In connection with a planned exhibition in Zurich, public prosecutor Ernô Reinitz composed a letter on behalf of the Eight to Károly Kernstok, then government commissioner for fine arts affairs. “Mr Commissioner, The ‘Eight’ group does not deem the jury of the Zurich exhibition – constituted as it is in the spirit of the last

government’s artistic policies – fit to judge its works. Consequently, it asks you to exert your influence in an effort to bypass this jury, and to allow the group to make its own selection and present its works together, possibly in a separate room. Should this wish of the group not be granted, it will regretfully refrain from participating in the exhibition.”120 The letter is short of unambiguously revealing whether or not Kernstok still counted among the Eight, given that he was being asked to pull strings for them – which would suggest Kernstok was not one of the petitioners. In a letter to Bölöni’s wife Itóka, Lajos Tihanyi brought up the request to Kernstok. “The Zurich exhibition called for an ultimatum by the 8, submitted to Kernstok. Either we are our own jurors, we are jury-free – or we do not go. Stoki [Kernstok] will now have to rack his brains, trying to figure out what to say, because lately he’s also been an 8er, but in his capacity as commissioner he does not fear the Pentelei jury either.”121 This clearly suggests that Kernstok was not involved in composing the letter, that is, he was regarded as being outside the inner circle of the Eight. Quite what “he’s also been an 8er lately” is supposed to mean is yet unclear. What we do know, however (from a note in pencil on the margin on the Tihanyis ultimatum), is that Kernstok did not give permission for the Eight to bypass the jury and exhibit in a separate room. The question arises that if Kernstok was not a member of the Eight at this time (and needless to say, as regards his leadership in the group, this points to the fact that after 1911 he had gradually withdrawn from the Eight), then who constituted the group and what cohesive force kept them together? Tihanyi’s above-quoted letter answers this question to some extent, and gives an inkling of the other plans of the Eight. “There is another exhibition underway, Kunfi said so, in Bern. Have you heard about it? It would be best to go with the plan that avoids the national celebrations. We received an invitation from a new group in Vienna, ‘Bewegung Freie Künstler 4 Kärtnerstrasse Wien’. This venue is already advertising the exhibition ‘Today’ of the 8 in May. Doing this together will be a problem. The place, I believe, is small and Orban has played a part in the Viennese advertising this exhibition without any prior agreement. A young Viennese poet was here in December. A friend of a friend of Orban’s. The Berénys told me they had plans of this kind, but I did not consider them timely in these troubled times. In any case, I learnt my lesson, seeing that none of my colleagues sent this gentleman to see me. Yet at the time I had an entire collection going. It is still together and I’d been looking into whether

I could do a solo exhibition in Vienna in the autumn. Why would I go there again with but a few pictures? Also, it has been decided to have another big 8 exhibition in November. [...] There is also an ‘ex serviceman’ exhibition with Márffy who is appallingly bad, as are all the others. None of the boys have come forward as an ‘invalid painter’.”122 Beyond the fact that the Eight had been planning further exhibitions, reading between the lines, the letter says a lot about their relationship at the time and their individual ambitions. I believe it to reveal how the secession within the Eight, that had started in 1912 (or earlier) or even taken place by then, divided the collective into two camps, and who were still counting themselves part of the group in 1918–1919. Clearly, Czóbel was only nominally present and never really belonged to the group; Kernstok, hailed by the outside world as their leader, had been absent from the life of the group since the end of 1911 or 1912; Czigány followed Kernstok’s suit and was not adverse to the Mûcsarnok either. Márffy was also outside of the circle that Tihanyi referred to as “the boys”, that is, the painters still exhibiting jointly in 1912 or possibly the company of the Brüko show (given that Orban was no longer with them there). Whether or not in 1918 the by-then nominally existing Eight consisted of the men that had known each other from Pór’s time as a private art tutor, that is Pór, Berény and Tihanyi and perhaps Fémes

E LMA P ÁLOS

AND J OHN

N ILSEN L AURVIK

1915

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ARMS !

ARMS !,

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Beck (unless they had finally broken up with him after the Brüko incident), it cannot be said. Nevertheless, in the following year, during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, it seemed that the collective could work together in the interest of a common goal again. Two of the most active individuals of the Eight at the time, Berény and Pór, were turning out propaganda posters advertising the new social order. In addition to producing some brilliant works, they were active in official art-political organisation in high-

ranking positions while their former “leader”, Károly Kernstok was sidelined and resigned to his fate. The yet undisclosed history of the Eight, bursting at the seams from inner struggle, is a controversial, exciting period of Hungarian Modernism. Their inner struggles, however, did not turn them into enemies, since during their Berlin emigration and later in the KUT group, they worked together more or less peacefully. The Eight did not get together again either in

1919 or ever again. Since then their works have been presented at several minor and major exhibitions; however, no exhibition has ever been dedicated to the period when they were actually active as a group. Today, 98 years after their last group exhibition, their works come together once more in a collection of the most important artist group in Hungarian art history which in the period from 1909 to 1912 significantly changed the face of modern Hungarian trends in painting.

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Notes 1

5 6

13 14

A letter dated May 4 has been published (variously without specifying the year or dated 1907–1908) in which Károly Ferenczy tells István Réti the news of János Thorma having Perlrott invite Czóbel to teach in Nagybánya. See Válogatás a nagybányai mûvészek leveleibôl 1893–1944 [The selected letters of the Nagybánya artists], eds. Edit András, Mária Bernáth, Miskolc, 1997, p. 147. – The name Jancsi, i.e. János Thorma is not explained in the text, and the day is missing from the date of the letter given in the original: Saturday. With this addition the year can also be identified: May 4 fell on a Saturday in 1907, thus Czóbel received his commission as teacher in this year. See Béla Horváth, “Matisse... szívesen kiállítana nálunk... Picasso... hasonlóan nyilatkozott...” Matisse [...] would gladly exhibit with us [...] Picasso [...] said the same” from an unknown letter by Csaba Vilmos Perlrott and Géza Bornemisza Géza in Mûgyûjtô, 5, 1973, no. 2, pp. 38–39. The name of Béla Iványi Grünwald came up in reports heralding the show, but his name was dropped and his works were not included in the exhibition. The show was planned to go to Temesvár [today Timis‚oara, Romania], Szeged and Debrecen, but eventually it never did. See Árpád Tímár: “A MIÉNK mûvészegyesület története a korabeli sajtóban. I–II” [The history of the MIÉNK artists’ group in the contemporary press] in Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 57, 2008, pp. 47–82, 249–286. Krisztina Passuth: A Nyolcak festészete [The painting of the Eight], Budapest, 1967, p. 58. “Sir, several of my painter colleagues have called my attention to the fact that you propose to organise a joint exhibition in major country towns. Béla Czóbel and Ervin Frim in Paris mentioned this to me and it also came to me from Tihanyi and Mikola in [Buda]pest.” Letter from Géza Bornemissza to György Bölöni, Fehérgyarmat, 18 May 1909, Hungarian National Archives, archival fonds 127/728. The travelling exhibition did not feature any pictures by Orbán and Pór. Contemporary reports fail to mention Márffy either, but Zoltán Rockenbauer has suggested that paintings by Márffy were included. Zoltán Rockenbauer: Márffy. Életmûkatalógus [Márffy. The catalogue of an oeuvre] Budapest–Paris, 2006, pp. 35–36. Not a single copy of Bölöni’s exhibition has come down to us. Edit Erki had come across a catalogue with prices in Bölöni’s estate, but this, too, has gone missing. Cf. with Edit Erki’s comments, György Bölöni: Képek között. [Among pictures], coll. and ed., Budapest, 1967, p. 571. András Zwickl: “A Palotafelavató és az Iparmûvészeti Kiállítás” [The palace inauguration ceremony and the exhibition of applied art] in A Mûvészház 1909–1914. Modern kiállítások Budapesten [The Artist House 1909–1914. Modern exhibitions in Budapest], eds. Judit Gömöry, Nóra Veszprémi, Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery, 2009, p. 135. “Új Képek kiállítása” [The exhibition of new works] in Független Magyarország, 19 December 1909, p. 14 and Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 216–217. Letter from Desiderius Orban to Iván Dévényi, Sydney, 21 June 1963, Archives of the Art Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, inv. no. MKCs–C–159/1132. The letter also informs us that this happened around the time of the first exhibition. Letter from Desiderius Orban to Iván Dévényi, Archives of the Art Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, inv. no. MKCS–C–I–159/1153.1. I came across a letter written by Rózsa on the Mûvészház letterhead paper during the take-over of the estate of Béla Horváth. The recipient is not indicated, and in spite of the fact that Rózsa mentions the Eight in his letter, it was probably addressed to Kernstok. “My dear friend, I beg you not contact either Lyka or Gergô until you’ve spoken to me and Grünwald and the other Eight members coming to me. This is extremely important. If you do talk to them, everything will be over. Please send word most urgently where and when I can talk to you this morning. With unremitting love, truly yours, Miklós Rózsa.” – The estate of Béla Horváth, Archives of the Art Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, inv. no. MDK–C–I–217. The press was allowed to preview the exhibition on 30 December and the opening took place the following day. “Új képek kiállítása” [The exhibition of new works] in Budapesti Hírlap, 22 December 1909, p. 13. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, p. 221. “Új képek kiállítása” [The exhibition of new works] in Független Magyarország, 19 December 1909, p. 14. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 216-217.

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21 22

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Berény’s landscape was in private property, as was Czóbels; his two still lifes were for sale and later passed into the property of Mrs Mór Haas, a close friend of the Czóbels. “When the Eight came together I was in Florence; they wrote me a letter to grab my things and bring them along for the exhibition,” Márffy recalled. Published in Rockenbauer 2006, ibid., p. 43. In an interview on radio he said “I was in Italy at the time, so the founders were in fact Kernstok, Bertalan Pór, Róbert Berény and Dezsô Czigány. When they founded the Eight, I received a telegram from them in Italy asking me to urgently send my works, as they were organising an exhibition of my works.” Talking to Ödön Márffy, 1958, Hungarian Radio, Prose Archives, inv. no.: 0031010. Márffy was mistaken about Berény who was in Paris at the time, and he did not mention Desiderius Orbán who had been part of the group since day one. Letter from Desiderius Orban to Iván Dévényi, Sydney, 25 April 1967 – HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MKCS–C–I–159/1136.2. Desiderius Orban talks about his Paris study trip and the founding of the Eight, Hungarian Radio, Prose Archives, inv. no.: 155917. Budapesti Újságírók Egyesülete Almanachja [Almanac of the Society of Budapest Journalists], Budapest, 1911, p. 355. I came across the preliminaries to this source among the notes of Béla Horváth, following up which Árpád Tímár discovered this quotation. I hereby take the opportunity to thank him for his help. Letter from Desiderius Orban to Iván Dévényi, Sydney, 25 April 1967 – HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MKCS–C–I–159/1136.2. There is one exception, namely an article identifying a portrait of him by Tihanyi, which, however, does not mention that Miklós co-initiated the group. Ottó Mezei: “Megjegyzések Tihanyi Lajos ismeretlen portréjához” [Notes on an anonymous portrait by Tihanyi] in Mûvészet, vol. 16, 1975, no. 9, pp. 19–20. Almanach. (Képzômûvészeti lexikon) [Almanac. (Lexicon of the Fine Arts)], Béla Déry, László Bányász, Ernô Margitay (eds.) Budapest, 1912, p. 242. Ibid., p. 248. The painters themselves noticeably clustered together in cliques, each according to his sympathy for one or the other journalist. There is a letter that sheds much light on the relationship between Pál Relle and György Bölöni; letter from József Rippl-Rónai to Endre Ady, 25 September 1913, published in Rippl-Rónai József gyûjteményes kiállítása [An exhibition of the collected works of József Rippl-Rónai], Bernáth Mária, Nagy Ildikó (eds.) Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery, 1998, p. 508. “Neoimpresszionista kiállítás” [A neo-Impressionist exhibition] in Egyetértés, 1 January 1910, p. 10. – Az Utak II [The roads parted], p. 235. It should be mentioned that the motto of the exhibition catalogue (“We believe in nature. We do not copy nature through the eyes of the schools. We are mindfully inspired by it.”) chimes in with the purport of Kernstok’s talk, and in all probability ot was Kernstok who came up with this very appropriate motto that condenses Hildebrand’s theory. “Elôadás a modern mûvészetrôl” [A lecture on modern art] in Pesti Hírlap, 12 January 1910, p. 11. – Az Utak II [The Roads Parted], p. 275. Only with respect to Tihanyi do we lack any information whatsoever as to whether he was in Budapest at the time of the organisation on the exhibition “New Pictures”. An interview with Béla Horváth with Bertalan Pór, June 1963, manuscript – from the estate of art historian Béla Horváth, HAS RIA Archives, inv. no. MDK–C–I–217. Elek Petrovics: Töredékes feljegyzések Szinyeirôl [Fragments about Szinyei], manuscript – published in Péter Molnos: “Petrovics Elek (1873–1945) az ember. Kései kárpótlás egy elmaradt lakomáért” [Elek Petrovics the man. A belated compensation for a feast that was not realized.] in “Emberek, és nem frakkok”. A magyar mûvészettörténet-írás nagy alakjai. Tudománytörténeti esszégyûjtemény. [“People, not dinner jackets.” Great individuals in Hungarian art historiography. A collection essays in the history of scholarship], István Bardoly, Csilla Markója (eds.), Budapest, 2007, pp. 238–239. Rippl-Rónai József emlékezései [The memoirs of József Rippl-Rónai], Budapest, 1911, p. 153. Neither before nor later had Berény, Kernstok, Márffy and Pór been to Nagybánya, and only a few his later works suggest that Desiderius Orban may have visited the place. “The pile of manure is certain. Boromisza. And Ziffer is coming, I can smell it. Which is why I’m not going to [Nagy]Bánya, though without all that I’d long to be back.” Letter from Lajos Tihanyi to Jenô Teresánszky Józsi, 1 June 1911, PML Archives, inv. no.: V. 4330/167/10 – published by Valéria Vanília Majoros: Tihanyi Lajos írásai és dokumentumok [Writings and documents of Lajos Tihanyi], Budapest, 2002, p. 46; “Write and tell me who’s smelling up the grove? It’s these odours that keep me away from [Nagy]Bánya, Ziffer’s ...’s, etc.’s”, letter from Tihanyi

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to Jenô Teresánszky Józsi, 20 June 1911 – PML Archives, inv. no.: V. 4330/167/12 – Majoros 2002, ibid., p. 47. “We had no interest in Nagybánya painting. We did not depreciate it, but I had never been to Nagybánya and had no wish to go there. Nagybánya is not Hungarian but Munich painting. Neither is Munkácsy Hungarian painting. Hungarian painting is colourful, Asian.” From an interview by Béla Horváth with Ödön Márffy, 21 March 1956, manuscript, from the estate of art historian Béla Horváth. HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MDK–C–I–217. “Artúr Jakobovits worked under my supervision. He has a self-portrait and several drawings here bearing my influence. It’s a very early work under the influence of my first portrait from 1901. An extremely gifted boy.” Béla Horváth’s interview with Bertalan Pór, June 1963, manuscript, from the estate of art historian Béla Horváth. HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MDK–C–I–217. “Új képek kiállítása” [An exhibition of New pictures] in Budapesti Hírlap, 22 December 1909, p. 13 – Az Utak II [The Roads Parted], p. 221. (H.) [Frigyes Hervay]: “Új képek” [New Pictures] in Magyarország, 31 December 1909, p. 10 – Az Utak II [The roads parted], p. 230. HNG Archives, inv. no. 4579/a. E.g. Rockenbauer 2006. ibid., pp. 43–44. I take Attila Rum’s and Árpád Tímár’s view that challenges both hypotheses. Understood to mean the predecessor of the Eight, “Seekers” probably gained currency in the literature following the publication of Krisztina Passuth’s monograph on the Eight. Even former Eight member Desiderius Orban, who lived to a venerable age, adopted it after reading Passuth’s book (in his “Looking back” in Desiderius Orban Retrospective. Works from 1900 to 1975, Sydney, New South Wales Art Gallery, 1975, pp. 8–12). Orban had not used the name before. With respect to my doubts about the technical term, see Gergely Barki: “Párizsi elôzmények és a modern francia mûvészet hatása a Nyolcak aktfestészetében” / “The Influence of Parisian Studies and Modern French Art on the Nude Painting of the Eight” in A modell – Nôi akt a 19. századi magyar mûvészetben [The Model – Female Nudes in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Art], Györgyi Imre (ed.), Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 2004, p. 465 – cf. Attila Rum: “Kutatóárok a magyar Vadak kereséséhez” [An Excavation Pit for Finding the Hungarian Fauves] in Magyar Vadak Párizstól Nagybányáig 1904–1914 [Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914], Krisztina Passuth, Szücs György (eds.), Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 2006, pp. 61–68; and Árpád Tímár’s preface in Az Utak I [The Roads Parted], p. 5. A telling argument in favour of my hypothesis is that these names were used even in 1911 in the context of their following exhibition in April. E.g. “Director Béla Déry submitted the outcome of the negotiations with the artists, according to which ‘Sheaf’ would be followed by the atelier exhibition of László Kézsi-Kovács, followed by the Hungarian Graphic Artists and Aquarellists, the Society of Hungarian Female Artists (with the collection of Kata Kalivoda), the ‘New Pictures’ artists’ group and the Spring Exhibition.”, in “A Nemzeti Szalon választmányi ülése” [The board meeting of the National Salon] in Az Ujság, 24 January 1911, p. 15. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, p. 24. For further articles, see also Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 27, 94–96, 98, 142–147 and 178. Rudolf Diener-Dénes used these names even after the opening of the second exhibition of the Eight, see Rum 2004. op. cit., p. 105. Ausstellung Ungarischer Maler im Ausstellungsgebäude, Kurfürstendamm 208/209, Berlin, 5 February – 3 March 1910, Berlin, 1910. For a commentary on the catalogue see Dezsô Czigány: “Magyarok sikere Berlinben” [Hungarian success in Berlin] in Pesti Napló, 12 February 1910, pp. 10–11. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 331–332. “Modern festészetünk bemutatása Berlinben” [Presenting our modern painting in Berlin] in Egyetértés, 26 January 1910, p. 11. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 308–309. In next day’s issue of the paper presumably Relle again wrote, “The German art scene awaits with great anticipation the collection of the eight Hungarian artists who caused such a sensation with their exhibition at the Kálmán Könvyes Salon,” “Magyar mûvészek Berlinben” [Hungarian artists in Berlin] in Egyetértés, 27 January 1910, p. 11. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, p. 310. “Cassirer visited Budapest with Lajos Hatvany, the well-known writer, at the end of last year, and having visited some of our largest collections, he invited the Hungarian painters to an exhibition in Berlin and offered them the rooms of the Secession,” wrote Jenô Szatmári in the daily Budapest. See Jenô Szatmári: “Magyar festôk Berlinben” [Hungarian painters in Berlin] in Budapest, 6 February 1910, p. 11. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 327–328.

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Czigány 1910, op. cit. – Az Utak II [The Roads Parted], pp. 331–332. Ervin Ybl, “Meier-Graefe véleménye a magyar festôkrôl. Rippl-Rónai levele Szinyei Merse Pálhoz az 1910. évi berlini kiállításról” [Meier-Graefe’s opinion about the Hungarian painters. Letter from Rippl-Rónai to Pál Szinyei Merse about the 1910 Berlin exhibition] in Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô no. 8, 1959, pp. 80–82. Károly Lyka had used the term in connection with the exhibition “New Pictures” (Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, p. 262), and later in his account of the Berlin show and other writings of his (Az Utak III p. 362). See Adolph Donat: “Die Ungarn in der Sezession”, a cutting from an unknown paper. – “Rippl-Rónai hat újságkivágata a berlini magyar kiállítás visszhangjáról” [Rippl-Rónai’s six newspaper cuttings about the press response of the Hungarian exhibition in Berlin], 3 February 1910 – MNG Archives, inv. no.: Rippl–4980. Fritz Stahl: “Ungarische Maler. Zur Ausstellung im Hause der Sezession” cutting from an unknown newspaper. – “Rippl-Rónai hat újságkivágata a berlini magyar kiállítás visszhangjáról” [Rippl-Rónai’s six newspaper cuttings about the press response of the Hungarian exhibition in Berlin], 3 February 1910 – MNG Archives, inv. no.: Rippl–4980. It was Menyhért Lengyel who believed Stahl to be the critic of Berliner Tageblatt. See Menyhért Lengyel: “Magyar festôk Berlinben” [Hungarian painters in Berlin] in Az Ujság, 8 February 1910, p. 15. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, p. 329. A review by Hans Rosenhagen published in Der Tag told by Géza Lengyel: “A berlini kiállítás mérlege” [The balance of the Berlin exhibition] in Nyugat, 3, 1910, II, pp. 440–444 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 372–373. Czigány 1910, op. cit. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, p. 331–332. “Having arrived, our artists instantly set out to arrange their collections in the Kunstfürstendamm palace of the Secession, while the works of the others will be installed by Dr Simon Meller.” (“A berlini modern magyar kiállítás” [The modern Hungarian exhibition in Berlin] in Pesti Napló, 30 January 1910, p. 19 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, p. 310. Attila Rum mentions József Vészi, too, alongside with Htvany and Meller as organiser of the show. Rum, Attila: Czigány Dezsô. Budapest, 2004. 83. The expression comes from György Bölöni. See György Bölöni: “Czigány Dezsô” in Szombat, 1, 1910, p. 9. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, p. 380. István Tisza: “Andrássy Gyula a mûvészetrôl” [Gyula Andrássy on art] in Magyar Figyelô, 1. 1911, p. 439. István Tisza: “20000 korona” [20 thousand crowns] in Magyar Figyelô, 1, 1911, pp. 256–259 – republished: Valéria Vanília Majoros: Tihanyi Lajos. A mûvész és mûvészete [Lajos Tihanyi. The man and his art], Budapest, 2004, pp. 388–389 Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 87–89 (Márk Vedres); pp. 94–96 (Róbert Berény); pp. 107–108 (Károly Kernstok); pp. 188–119 (Ödön Márffy); pp. 149–150 (Lajos Tihanyi); pp. 166–168 (Bertalan Pór); pp. 189–190 (Desiderius Orban); pp. 201–202 (Dezsô Czigány) and pp. 212–213 (Vilmos Fémes Beck). “A ‘Nyolcak’” [The Eight] in Egyetértés, 16 April 1911, p. 13 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, p. 98. Attila Rum: “A Nyolcak története” [The history of the Eight] in Modern magyar festészet 1892–1919 [Modern Hungarian painting 1892–1919], Tamás Kieselbach (ed.), Budapest, 2003, pp. 50–51. Rockenbauer 2006, op. cit., p. 54. The expression first came up in an article by Imre Déri (Imre Déri: “Pór Bertalan képe” [A picture by bertalan Pór] in Egyetértés, 6 January 1910, p. 11. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, p. 244–246), and later in two reports in Idô, as well as the writings of György Bölöni. “I am talking about the ‘eight’ whose first exhibition, the ‘Eight’ I made fifteen years ago at the National Salon. I say ‘I made’ because I was godfather to the eight who more like eighteen, calling them the ‘Eight’ which has since become a household name.” Dezsô Ádám: “Today’s youths are “pseudo-youths” which is why: long-live the real youths!, says Béa Déry, director of the National Salon” in Ma Este, 1926, 6, pp. 25–26. – quoted in Rum 2004, op. cit., p. 94. Jenô Bálint: “Mûvészfejek – Berény Róbert” [Leading artists – Róbert Berény] in A Reggel, 4 November 1929, p. 11 – republished in Jenô Bálint: Mûvészfejek [Leading artists], Budapest, [1929], p. 78. Bertalan Pór told the following interesting story on many occasions. As his painting Yearning for Pure Love was being installed, Kernstok went up to the picture, and pulling out his penknife from his pocket, he vehemently scratched off the canvas the flower which the central male figure was handing the woman in the picture, saying “this is completely unnecessary.” The arbitrary act happened so fast there was no way Pór could have stopped his friend. “Eventually I reconciled

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myself to the adjustment, out of sheer respect for Kernstok,” the painter recalled. HAS RIA Archives, MKCS–C–I–159/1191/c. Numerous recollections highlight Kernstok’s violent and self-important behaviour. Cf. “Desiderius Orban speaks about his Parisian studies and the founding of the Eight,” Hungarian Radio Prose Archives, inv. no.: 155917. Géza Bornemisza’s letter to Béla Horváth. Csörög, 24 September 1962 – the estate of art historian Béla Horváth, HAS RIA, inv. no.: MDK–C–I–217. Tibor Török: “Egy meghasonlott lélek tragédiája. Dr. Ciaclan Virgil nagyváradi ügyvéd, aki lakásán ôrzi a családirtó Cigány Dezsô önarcképét, beszél a „nyolcak”-ról és a különös életû festômûvész egyéniségérôl. ” [Tragedy of a troubled mind. Nagyvárad solicitor Dr Virgil Ciaclan – who has at home a self-portrait by Dezsô C[z]igány, a man who committed familicide – speaks about the ‘Eight’ and the personality of the curiously fated painter] in Friss Ujság, 6 January 1938, p. 3. János Bende recalls that following a literary night where Frida Gombaszögi recited poems by Ady the Eight threw a dinner party at the Pannonia Hotel where Ady became exceedingly inebriated. (János Bende: Emlékeim [Memoirs], type-written manuscript, HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MDK–C–II–20/5/21–22). Desiderius Orban remembered this night, too. The Eight (also) held a dinner party at the Pannonia after the opening of their third exhibition, so it is possible János Bende’s memory had failed him over the event. The name of Mária Lehel was latterly stamped in the guest list in a few copies of the catalogue, but does not feature in the list of works. Interestingly, however, the exhibition report of Ország-Világ is illustrated by a photograph of Mária Lehel’s three works. See (bán.) [László Bányász]: “A ‘Nyolcak’ kiállítása” [The exhibition of the “Eight”] in Ország-Világ, 7 May 1911, p. 495 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 151–152. Mária Lehetl and her husband Ferenc Lehel were regular guests at Károly Kernstok’s estate at Nyergesújfalu, and for a while Kernstok improved and corrected Lehel’s works. “Ferenc Lehel gave a talk on the ambitions of the Eight to the members of the Galileo Circle on Sunday.” – “Elôadás a ‘Nyolcak’-ról” [Talk on the “Eight”] in Világ, 10 May 1911, p. 13 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 162–163. Several reports were published about Mária Lehel’s talk, e.g. “Felolvasás a ‘Nyolcak’-ról” [Lecture about the “Eight”] in Világ, 20 May 1911, p. 10 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, p. 193. Internationale Kunstausstellung des Sonderbundes Westdeutscher Künstler, Cologne, Stadtische Ausstellunghalle, 1912. “Magyar festôk Kölnben” [Hungarian painters in Cologne] in Világ, 30 May 1912, p. 12. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 396–397. Lili Somló was Ignotus’s second wife, the elder sister of Berény’s first wife. The Sonderbund catalogue erroneously lists Lajos Tihanyi among the sculptors. See Attila Rum’s article on Márk Vedres in the present catalogue. In connection with this, Zoltán Rockenbauer quotes (Rockenbauer 2006, op. cit., p. 64) from a draft letter dated 8 August 1918 from Zoltán Felvinczi Takács to Károly Kernstok (Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts, Archives, inv. no.: A2776/3): “I only took Márffy along to Cologne because I wished to comply with the solidarity between the Gentlemen.” Felvinczi Takács wrote several reviews of Berény’s embroideries and the exhibition of the Eight. Held at the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts, his correspondence with the editors of Der Cicerone is also an important source in addition to his articles. Letter from Walter Cohen to Zoltán Takács Felvinczi, Bonn, 6 September 1911, Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts, Archives, inv. no.: A 1809.1.2. I would like to take the opportunity to thank Tatjana Kardos of the Archives for her help. “Expresszionista kiállítás” [An Expressionist exhibition] in Mûvészeti Krónika, 15 May 1912, p. 7 – Az Utak [The roads parted] III, pp. 389–390. Gergely Barki: Berény Róbert: Karosszékben ülô nô, 1912. [A Kieselbach Galéria aktuális kínálata] [Róbert Berény: Woman Sitting in an Armchair, 1912], Budapest, [2009], pp. 80–85. The reporter of Világ provided information at odds with the catalogue. Cf. “Magyar festôk Kölnben” [Hungarian painters in Cologne] in Világ, 30 May 1912, p. 12 – Az Utak [The roads parted] III, pp. 396–397. At variance with the information in the catalogue and Attila Rum’s identification (Rum 2004, op. cit., p. 296.), the correspondent of Világ said Czigány had exhibited one of his self-portraits. “Magyar festôk Kölnben” [Hungarian painters in Cologne] in Világ, 30 May 1912, p. 12 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 396–397. Ibid.

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Ibid. Zoltán Rockenbauer has suggested the latter painting might be Old Vác Customs. Rockenbauer 2006, op. cit., p. 64. Ibid. “Modern magyar mûvészek sikere Kölnben” [The success of modern Hungarian artists in Cologne] in Független Magyarország, 20 August 1912, p. 9 – Az Utak [The roads parted] III, p. 420. Zoltán Felvinczi Takács: “Mûvészeti programkiállítások és beszámolók” [Artistic programme exhibitions and reports] in Nyugat, 5, 1912, II, pp. 373–375 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 421–423. The diary of Máriusz Rabinovszky 1912–1913 – HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MKCs–C–I–64/48/47. “A ‘Nyolcak’ kiállítása a Nemzeti Szalonban” [The exhibition of the “Eight” at the National Salon] in Egyetértés, 15 September 1912, p. 13. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, p. 438. “A ‘Nyolcak’” [The “Eight”] in Világ, 7 April 1912, p. 15 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 356–357. Rockenbauer 2006, op. cit., p. 64. Altogether three exhibitions were held at the Brüko Salon. I would like to thank Werner J. Schweiger, who is working on a monograph on the art dealers in turn-of-the-century Vienna, for his help. Majoros 2002, op. cit., p. 55. Werner J. Schweiger sent me the copies of the announcements that appeared in the 23 and 30 March 1914 issues of Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung. I would hereby like to thank him for his help. I would hereby like to thank Ferenc Kiss for sending me his copy of the catalogue. See Péter Molnos’s essay on Desiderius Orban in this catalogue. György Bölöni: “Három magyar festô” [Three Hungarian painters] in Nyugat, 7, 1914. I, p. 497. – Bölöni 1967, op. cit., p. 431. Bertalan Pór’s questionnaire filled in his own hand – the estate of Károly Lyka, HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MDK–C–I–17/1496. Ibid and an interview by Béla Horváth with Ödön Márffy, 21 March 1956 – the estate of art historian Béla Horváth Béla. HAS RIA, inv. no.: MDK–C–I–217; painter Desiderius Orban talks about his Paris study trip and the founding of the Eight, Hungarian Radio, Prose Archives, inv. no.: 155917. Attila Rum 2004, op. cit., mentions two locations, New York (6–27 December 1913) and Buffalo (4 January–1 February 1914), but a Chicago copy of the catalogue turned up (The Art Institute of Chicago, 5 March–1 April 1914) and according to the 1914 American Art Annual, the exhibition travelled to two other locations, St. Louis: 8 February–1 March (?) and Boston: 7–28 April. – op. cit., pp. 185 and 137. “Magyar mûvészeti kiállítás Amerikában” [Hungarian art exhibition in America] in Egyetértés, 20 July 1913, p. 14. Art critic, historian, collector and dealer Martin Birnbaum (né Márton Birnbaum) was born in Miskolc in 1878 and lived in the United States from 1883 until his death in 1970. E.g.: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Contemporary Graphic art in Hungary, Bohemia and Austria, The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, introd by Martin Birnbaum New York, Albright Art Gallery, 1914, p. 10. I have dedicated three studies to the topic, reflecting different stages of my researches. Published in Hungarian: Gergely Barki: “A magyar mûvészet elsô reprezentatív bemutatkozása(i) Amerikában” [The first representative introduction(s) of Hungarian art in America] in Nulla dies sine linea. Tanulmányok Passuth Krisztina hetvenedik születésnapjára [Studies on the seventieth birthday of Krisztina Passuth], pp. 99–113, and Gergely Barki: “The Panama-Pacific International Exposition: Hungarian Art’s American Debut or Its Bermuda Triangle?” in Centropa, 10, 2010, 3, pp. 259–271. Catalogue de Luxe of the Department of Fine Arts PanamaPacific International Exposition, John E. D. Trask, J. Nilsen Laurvik (eds.), San Francisco, 1915. Emanuel Berman: Sándor, Gizella, Elma: A biographical journey” in The International Journal of Psychoanalysys, 85, 2004, pp. 489–520. I would hereby like to thank Krisztina Passuth for calling my attention to the letter, kept in the Archives of the Musée d’Orsay. It is not known exactly how many artists Laurvik visited in person; we do know, however, that of the Eight he went to see Bertalan Pór and Róbert Berény in their studio. Anna Oelmacher: Pór Bertalan, 1955, p. 28. On the reverse of his visiting card Róbert wrote the following: “Dear Gyurka, the Laurvik’s are coming round to my place around 4ish tomorrow, Sunday, to listen to Hungarian music, they and I would be delighted if you could also come. I understand he has business to discuss with you. I am assuming you’ll be coming. Regards, Rob.” PML Archives, inv. no. V. 4132/28/1.

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The estate of Bölöni in the Petôfi Musem of Literature includes the critic’s notebook where one of the entries reads, “J. N. Laurvik director of Fine Arts Palace S. Francisco California U. S. A. 18 pictures, 15 50 _ 60 cm, 3 9 cm, 1 landscape … [illegible] _ and 1/3rd 700 600. Give commission or shipping on him…[illegible] 4 h…[illegible]” – PML Archives, inv. no.: V. 3501/61. “A magyar mûvészek és a san franciscoi világkiállítás” [Hungarian artists and the San Francisco world exposition] in Magyarország, 30 December 1914, pp. 8–9. “A magyar mûvészek és a san franciscoi világkiállítás” [Hungarian artists and the San Francisco world exposition] in Magyarország, 31 December 1914, p. 6. For a list of Hungarian artists see Majoros 2002, op. cit., pp. 335–336. Of all the nations, Laurvik believed the Hungarian section to be the most interesting and illuminating perhaps for the reason that it was the only one that sough to present every stage in the artistic development of the country from the early nineteenth century to the moderns. (J. Nilsen Laurvik: “Notes on the foreign paintings” in Art and Progress, 6, August 1915, pp. 353–363.) Elma Pálos: “Magyar mûvészet San Franciscóban” [Hungarian art in San Franisco] in Világ, 12 September 1915, p. 18. Arthur B. Clark: Significant Paintings at the Panama-Pacific Exposition. How to find them and how to enjoy them, Stanford, CA, 1915.

116

117

118

“Por. ‘My Family’, C425, has not flattered these dejected people. His art is a new kind; we can at least admire his sincerity, intensity and courage,” ibid., p. 14. Berény’s collection also featured three graphic works which were on display separately form the other works, and appeared in the catalogue on a different page, too. Sewing in the Garden is believed to be identical with a known copper etching dating from 1912; there was also a portrait of Ignotus, property of Dr Sándor Ferenczi and perhaps identical with a drawing of Ignotus in the Petôfi Museum of literature, dating from 1914; the third graphic work cannot be identified. Elma Pálos’s account (ibid.) dating from 1915 claims that in addition to the eight rooms constituting the Hungarian section, the entrances and the staircases were adorned by Hungarian works and Pór’s large-scale works went to one the staircases. Pór himself recalled, “This [My Family] and other canvases went to the San Francisco world exposition where I was given a room of my own, and I would liked to have gone too, but the outbreak of the war prevented me from doing so.” (An interview by Béla Horváth with Bertalan Pór, June 1963, manuscript – The estate of art historian Béla Horváth. HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MDK–C–I–217.) In another recollection he wrote, “The fine arts curator of the international exposition picked 4 of my grand-scale works and took them along with him to the exhibition, together with some 30 drawings. (These included Family, Yearning for Pure Love, Sermon on the Mount and the

C OURTYARD

119

120

121

122

original sketch for the Folk Opera).” NSL Archives, inv. no.: 80/31. In actual fact he had more works than this on display, and Pór’s 72-work collection made him the second artist – in terms of the numbers of works exhibited – at the world exposition. An exhibition of Hungarian artists in Belgrade, 15–29 September 1918. See Zoltán Bálint: “Magyar képzômûvészeti kiállítás Belgrádban 1918 ôszén” [A Hungarian art exhibition in Belgrade in the autumn of 1918] in Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 15, 1966, pp. 119–121. HNG Archives, inv. no.: 15716/62. I would hereby like to thank Bernadett Kovács for calling my attention to this document. Cf. László Szögi–József Mihály Kiss: A Magyar Képzômûvészeti Fôiskola Levéltára [The Archives of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts], Budapest, 1997. Letter of Lajos Tihanyi to Mrs György Bölöni, 18 March 1919 – PML Archives, inv. no.: V. 4132/350/2 – published in Majoros 2002, op. cit., pp. 118–119. The exhibitions mentioned by Tihanyi never materialised. In connection with this, Péter Molnos called my attention to the following document: “Presenting foreign collections was not possible for technical reasons, resulting in the cancellation of the spring exhibition of the ‘Guild’ at the Circle of Hungarian Fine Artists in the spring, and, for the third time now, of the exhibition of the artist collective called the ‘Eight’,” Budapest, Hungarian Nationa Archives, 175/1919 K 305IV, box 3, item 2. Letter of Béla Déry to the People’s Commisar for Public Education, June 27, 1919.

OF THE NURSERY SCHOOL ON

K ISCELLI

ÚT WITH WALL PAINTINGS BY

Ö DÖN M ÁRFFY

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G E L L É R

THE ART SCENE AT THE TIME OF THE EMERGENCE OF THE EIGHT

A RTISTS ’

COLONIES , ASSOCIATIONS , EXHIBITION VENUES

P AINTER AT N AGYBÁNYA , 1920 S ( PHOTOGRAPH BY R UDOLF B EDÔ )

The formation of the ‘New Pictures’ group, later called the Eight (Nyolcak), in 1909 and their first exhibition in Budapest, marked a clear break in the art scene in the early twentieth century.

The members of the Eight adhered to the principles of characteristically urban, middle-class radicalism, in sharp contrast to the Hungarian artist colonies that emerged in the nineteenth century and the fin de siècle, and followed the trend set by their European counterparts. The Hungarian artist colonies included the one at Nagybánya, active from 1896, the one at Gödöllô, starting in 1901 and gradually developing into a larger group, and the Szolnok colony, which operated as an official establishment from 1902 and which, continuing its earlier Romantic traditions, set itself the objective of capturing the character of the Hungarian landscape. The Gödöllô artists, for example, revived the myth of the village and olden traditions driven by a nostalgic desire to preserve the crafts. Similarly to other Central and Eastern European Secessionist associations, the members of these groups regarded folk art and the rural regions far away from mainstream civilisation as an opportunity to return to an ancient and more genuine lifestyle and as a potential expression of national characteristic traits adapted to the Modern Era. All this was coupled with an attempt to revive a universal worldview, a lost religious faith and the symbolism of tales and myths. In the first decade of the twentieth century a number of signs pointing to radical change could be seen in the Hungarian art scene with the emergence of a new generation with a French orientation which increasingly broke away from the true-to-life manner of representation, manifesting in the naturalism and impressionism of the Nagybánya colony.

In 1906 the so-called ‘Neos’ – Béla Czóbel, Csaba Vilmos Perlrott, Géza Bornemisza, Tibor Boromisza, Lajos Tihanyi and Sándor Ziffer, artists working under the influence of the latest French art – emerged from the Nagybánya colony, which created a unique version of the plein air manner of painting and exerted the greatest influence on twentieth-century Hungarian art. Béla Czóbel’s works initially reflecting the influence of the Nabis and then that of the Fauves sharply divided the Nagybánya artists into two distinct groups. They exerted an influence not only on the young artists studying and working at Nagybánya but also on the founding masters, especially on Béla Iványi Grünwald; some of the young artists left the colony with him at the helm. Béla Iványi Grünwald, who made a spectacular exit from the Nagybánya colony, professed avant-garde principles and, together with the ‘Neos’, started to set up an artist colony in Kecskemét in 1909, which eventually started in 1912. Some of the former Nagybánya artists that joined the new colony, such as Géza Bornemisza, Csaba Vilmos Perlrott and Iványi Grünwald, created highly decorative works. Of these Csaba Perlrott, one of the first to visit the Matisse school, stood closest to the aspirations of the Eight. Some of the works produced in Kecskemét can be likened to the trends that led from the Nabis to the Fauves in France, including the desire for monumentality. It appears that in Hungarian art this course of development followed the same stages.

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Even though the artist colony of Kecskemét was started by young artists of Nagybánya yearning for something new, it was not unified. Some of them, like their French contemporaries, drew inspiration from Cézanne and Matisse, while others adopted a more conventional approach and remained loyal to naturalism, and some came over from the artist colony of Szolnok. The influence of folk art which was intertwined with the Secessionist revival of the crafts and applied arts continued to play a prominent role in the Kecskemét colony, where weaving and embroidery remained a key activity. The art group called A KÉVE [literally meaning ‘the shief’], established in 1907 under the leadership of Ferenc Szablya Frischauf, was more unified than the Kecskemét colony although it represented a more traditional approach in the spirit of continuity and cautious modernity. The group’s leader and some of its members studied in Nagybánya, while others separated from the intellectually more unified artist colony of Gödöllô. Unlike those who followed in Walter Crane’s or Aubrey Beardsley’s footsteps, the members of A KÉVE gave preference to the Vienna Secession, whose geometric approach was more reconcilable with the functionality of modern art, and they integrated folk art motifs into their style in this vein. However, these artists had no affinity with the Eight, since their striving to create a unified style took a different direction, one more resembling that of the Vienna group. The young artists with a bolder and more modern vision – including some of the ‘Neos’ of Nagybánya – formed a temporary association and mounted a show in 1907 with the title ‘Youth’ in the Könyves Kálmán Salon. Two future members of the Eight, Dezsô Czigány and Ödön Márffy, also participated at the event. However, the association did not last and a second exhibition did not take place. The young artists were unable to form an autonomous organisation at the time. In contrast, the older generation of progressive artists did manage to turn their movement into the more organised form of an association. Károly Ferenczy organised an exclusive exhibition in 1907 for the opening of the National Salon’s new exhibition venue, where only one artist, Károly Kernstok, participated from among the future founders of the Eight. The success of this exhibition prompted the forming in October 1907 of the Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists (MIÉNK) headed by Pál Szinyei Merse, József RipplRónai and Károly Ferenczy, who by that time had been recognised as great masters. The seventeen founding members mostly came from the first generation of Nagybánya artists (István Réti, Béla Iványi Grünwald, István Csók, Oszkár Glatz), but some of them were from the ‘Neos’. In addition Kernstok, Czóbel and Márffy also became regular

A BOVE : V ILMOS P ERLROTT C SABA AT THE K ECSKEMÉT ARTISTS ’ COLONY , 1913 B ELOW : J ÓZSEF R IPPL -R ÓNAI : T HE MEMBERS OF MIÉNK ON AN OUTING , C . 1909

members, and at the first independent show of MIÉNK in 1908 Czigány and Pór also exhibited, albeit only as guest artists. At the second MIÉNK exhibition in 1919 Orbán and Tihanyi appeared as new participants besides Kernstok, Czigány, Márffy

and Pór. The contemporaneous press coverage of the show reveals that a significant number of art critics saw a sharp and irreconcilable opposition between the representatives of the older generation – Károly Ferenczy, Adolf Fényes, Rippl-Rónai,

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A BOVE : T AKING INVENTORY OF PICTURES ARRIVING B ELOW : E XHIBITION OF L ÁSZLÓ K ÉZDI -K OVÁCS AT

M ÛCSARNOK , 1903. ( PHOTOGRAPH K ÖNYVES K ÁLMÁN S ALON , 1906

FROM ABROAD AT THE THE

Szinyei – and the more radical, ‘ultramodern’ young artists. The young artists who were excluded from the exhibition were also dissatisfied, which triggered the idea of yet another separation, another ‘exodus’. An initiative launched by György Bölöni held the promise of a new group forming. In sum-

E XHIBITION

OF J ÓZSEF

R IPPL -R ÓNAI

AT THE

Ö DÖN B ÉKEI )

mer 1909 he organised a travelling exhibition to three towns outside Budapest, namely Kolozsvár, Nagyvárad and Arad, and although he selected most of the participants from among the radical young artists, Rippl-Rónai and Gulácsy were also accorded highlighted importance. Virtually all the

M ÛVÉSZHÁZ , 1911 ( PHOTOGRAPH

G YULA J ELFY )

’ultramodern’ young artists took part in the exhibitions, such as Boromisza, Galimberti, Perlrott, Ziffer, Mikola, Körmendi-Frim, several members of the would-be Eight, such as Czigány, Czóbel, Kernstok, Tihanyi and Berény, who exhibited his paintings demonstrating a new approach for the first time in Hungary. In the end, the temporary association did not develop into an organised group or association, and these artists had no more joint exhibitions. However, the process whereby artists with different approaches split up and organised into groups continued and this resulted on the one hand in the establishment of the Artists’ House (Mûvészház) in autumn 1909, which provided a venue to many sidelined and offended young people who had not been admitted into MIÉNK and on the other hand the first joint appearance for young people who had formed a group around Kernstok with their exhibition titled ‘New Pictures’, which opened at the end of December 1909 in the Könyves Kálmán Salon. The earlier artists’ colonies and groups varied in the main objectives they set as well as in the works made by the masters and students; thus, an extraordinarily eclectic overall picture emerged around 1910, attested to by the Secessionist graphic art of the leading Nagybánya masters, the plein air features of the Gödöllö landscape artists and the various trends of the Kecskemét colony. As the example of Iványi Grünwald, who was active at the artists’ colonies in Nagybánya and Kecskemét, indicates there were no strict boundaries between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’. It is therefore understandable why the appearance of the Kernstok group caused a stir in this community. Their unified, common approach, artistic concept and radical shift in style clearly demonstrated a true ‘exodus’ and an irreversible isolation and break from domestic traditions. After their emergence the rural colonies of artists who had left the city behind no longer formed the centres of Hungarian art as focus shifted to Budapest, which had developed into a modern world city. Being an avantgarde movement, Kernstok and his group deliberately cut off the threads of continuity and did not regard the greats of the first generation – Szinyei, Ferenczy, Rippl-Rónai – either as paragons or starting points for their art. The power relations in the various exhibiting institutions also attest to the diversity represented by the groups and artist colonies and the rapid change on the art scene. Besides the Mûcsarnok, directed by the National Society of Hungarian Fine Arts, which rallied conservative artists and dominated the arts scene at the turn of the 19th20th centuries, a succession of exhibiting institutions and art dealers supporting the new artistic aspirations came into being. The first of these was the National Salon, established as an association in

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1894 by those members of the young generation who were dissatisfied with the Mûcsarnok, and operated as an exhibiting institution with varying venues. Every year several regularly held - spring, summer, autumn and Christmas – group exhibitions were organised by the National Salon, the summer and Christmas ones being pronouncedly commercial in character. However, space was also set aside for one-man shows by noted artists. During Lajos Ernst’s tenure as director it increasingly became the exhibiting venue for the representatives of new trends in painting that defined themselves against academism. Károly Fernczy exhibited there in 1903 and was soon followed by Pál Szinyei Merse, Adolf Fényes, Béla Iványi Grünwald and János Vaszary. In 1907 the association’s new headquarters with splendid exhibition halls, designed by József and László Vágó, was opened on Erzsébet Square in Budapest. The opening of this ‘palace’ also created the opportunity to display the work of bigger groups: shows were organised there by MIÉNK, and A KÉVE, as well as by the Eight in 1911 and 1912. Enterprises that primarily pursued commercial activities also undertook a significant role in the espousal and exhibition of modern aspirations. The Könyves Kálmán Company – which among other things engaged in the publication of reproductions of works of art – opened its Salon on Nagymezô Street in 1903. Kernstok was involved in its furnishing and later participated in the opening show as an exhibitor, in the company of Mednyánszky, Rippl-Rónai, Vaszary, and Gulácsy. At the next exhibition, titled ‘Modern Hungarian Painters’, organised in the salon in 1904, Kernstok was there again among the most distinguished artists of the period. The Könyves Kálmán Salon also reserved a space for the exhibition of works by Hollósy and his youngest students. In January 1906 the Könyves Kálmán Salon hosted a Rippl-Rónai exhibition, the success of which represented a turning point in Rippl’s domestic recognition and the acceptance of the most modern aspirations. The salon attracted attention by its daring, novel initiatives, an example of which was the exhibition titled ‘Youth’ in 1907, at which the very youngest and most modern artists were given a début opportunity. The youthful daring and eccentricity of this show made it a kind of precursor of the would-be Eight. Its tone was principally dominated by artists espousing the new French painting, including András Mikola, Csaba Vilmos Perlrott, Dezsô Czigány, Ödön Márffy, Tibor Boromisza, Körmendi-Frim, and Alfréd Réth; however, the overall picture was not unified as others also played a role who belonged to different age-groups and adhered to other artistic trends such as József Egry, Gyula Rudnay, István Nagy and János Tornyai.

D ETAIL

The reaction of the press to the ‘Youth’ exhibition is also worthy of note as the high number of passionately written articles could be sharply divided between the ones written by supporting adherents and boorish critics. The nature of the arguments and the tone of the debates were later often repeated in how the Eight were received. The pinnacle of success in the exhibition organisation activities of the Könyves Kálmán Salon was without doubt the exhibition by the Kernstok group opened on 31 December 1909 titled ‘New Pictures’. This show sparked off a wide-ranging reaction in society, which to a great extent increased the authority and status of the institution. The later exhibitions did not exclude the members of the Eight but there were no more joint shows organised there displaying their work. A one-man exhibition by Bertalan Pór, which enjoyed resounding success, was mounted in the salon in 1911. Mention must be made of the exhibition venue of Uránia. The Uránia art dealers’ limited company was established in 1905 by fine and applied artists and with significant state support. The most distinguished art collectors were given a role on its board of directors. Its exhibition venue opened in 1906 and participants in the first show included Ferenczy, Mednyánszky and Vaszary, as well as Kernstok and Bertalan Pór. During its operation the institution’s Gulácsy–Márffy exhibition organised in 1907 caused the most memorable, extraordinarily lively reaction in the press. This show – similarly to ‘Youth’

OF THE

U RANIA N UDE

EXHIBITION ,

1907

in the Könyves Kálmán Salon – represented a milestone in the propagation of modern art. Kernstok and Pór also participated in the exhibition of nudes in Uránia and Pór’s ‘vigorously drawn and daring’ nude did not escape the attention of the critics. The applied arts association known as Workshop [Mûhely] organised both of their exhibitions in Uránia in 1908, with works by Czigány, Czóbel, Kernstok and Márffy exhibited in the interiors. The Artist House (Mûvészház), which was formed on 4 December 1909, set itself the pronounced goal of supporting young talent. Similarly to the National Salon, it was an association and an exhibiting institute, although it was forced to change the venue for its exhibitions several times as it only managed to secure itself its own building after many years of struggle. However, a small group soon formed consisting of young people who participated in several of the group and thematic exhibitions organised by the association. They included Tibor Boromisza, József Egry, Béla Kádár, József Pechán, Attila Sassy and Sándor Ziffer. The activities of the Mûvészház – and more precisely those of Miklós Rózsa – are linked to the introduction in Hungary of the so-called counter salon and jury-free exhibitions. No independent group exhibition was staged there for the Eight, and the members of the group participated first only in 1913, at the association’s inauguration event organised as a celebration of its new, independent building and exhibition venue.

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M A R K Ó J A

THE TACT OF THE PAINTER THE PLACE OF THE EIGHT IN THE HISTORY OF HUNGARIAN MODERNISM THE E IGHT ’ S FAUVIST YEARS OF A PPRENTICESHIP ‘I long believed that Hungarian modernism began with the Eight, but it turned out that it started with the “Hungarian Fauves”, around 1906,’ declared Krisztina Passuth, curator-in-chief to the newspaper Népszabadság in February 2006. She went on to add: ‘Hungarian art history needs to be rewritten.’1 This euphoric pronouncement heralded the exhibition ‘Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914’,2 staged at the Hungarian National Gallery between 21 March and 30 June 2006. This show, which was afterwards displayed at three locations in France, prompting widespread interest in the media there,3 was accompanied in Hungary by debates regarding terminology. ‘Were the Hungarian fauves really fauves?’ asked art historians and art critics. During the discussions which followed, problems of cultural transfer – i.e. those of the acceptance, adoption, translation, and interpretation of a given segment of another culture, another narrative – were given a good airing, especially at the conference organised as just one of the events intended to augment and interpret the exhibition.4 Together with her doctoral students Gergely Barki, Péter Molnos, Zoltán Rockenbauer, and Attila Rum, Krisztina Passuth, professor at the Institute

for Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest and an eminent researcher of the Eight and the activists, investigated the years preceding the appearance of the Eight. The threads led to France. ‘A fine exhibition – perhaps this is the first feeling the visitor has on seeing the representative selection,’ wrote the correspondent of the periodical Új Mûvészet, summing up his impressions, ‘An exhibition like this can only be put together from works made in a great period of art. Can we say that the art of the Hungarian fauves counts as one of the exceptional moments in Hungarian painting?’ Passuth replied: ‘Yes. This was the moment – to be more exact, it was a period of few years, from 1906 to 1912 specifically – when modern Hungarian painting was born. For us today, what happened then seems fully amazing. An art was born that was absolutely in synchrony with European trends, even the most recent French and German ones, an art whose autonomous peculiarities and values were – and continue to be – characteristic only of the Hungarian fauves.’5 In his assessment of the exhibition’s significance in art history, Géza Perneczky went even further than this: ‘We should attach much more weight after this exhibition to the young Hungarian artists familiar with Fauvism who visited Paris after 1904 and who in some cases stayed there for a longer period. But as regards their role in Hungary, we should see these artists, whom their col-

leagues called ‘Neos’ (neoimpressionists), a label that stuck for decades, simply as representatives of the ferment that started at the Nagybánya artists’ colony and in the MIÉNK circle. More is needed. Although in the contemporary press the word chercheurs was voiced many times in connection with them (this term later found an echo in Kernstok’s expression ‘Inquisitive Art’), it was they who found, and represented for a year or two, what later on already could only be spoilt. If we accept this, though, then we must move to an earlier date the fault line that separates the story of the direct influence of plein air painting (more specifically the Nagybánya school), and the secessionist endeavours in Hungary that were occurring almost in parallel with it, from the avant-garde, which was then knocking at the door. The start of the Hungarian avant-garde thus moves a few years earlier. But even this correction does not express entirely the full extent of the new recognitions. It is not simply that the Eight’s appearance around 1910 now seems not to have been the first avantgarde stirring in the history of Hungarian art. An additional factor is that our impression of the Eight as a classicising branch – one more retrogressive than progressive in respect of innovation – of the stirring that had begun five or six years earlier may be growing.’ However, to his markedly unsympathetic opinion he immediately added: ‘Of course, it could be that we remember only R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : G RUMPY S ELF P ORTRAIT , C . 1907

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I NTERIOR OF T HE E IGHT – A CENTENARY 10 D ECEMBER 2010 – 27 M ARCH 2011

EXHIBITION AT J ANUS

erroneously what the Eight actually painted [...]. In this, a role is most certainly played by the fact that many of their works are in private collections; without these the Eight cannot be shown in a way that is truly fitting. [...] But however much we try to save the situation, this much is certain: a landslide has taken place.’6 After preparations lasting four years for the exhibition that gave rise to this ‘landslide’, another four years needed to pass for the same ‘research group’ to step forth with a ‘fitting’ presentation of the Eight, as an organic continuation of the earlier show. The group’s members undertook a task that seemed impossible, namely to reconstruct the three emblematic exhibitions staged between 1909 and 1912 at which members of the Eight (Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Dezsô Czigány, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezsô Orbán, Bertalan Pór, Lajos Tihanyi) – who were recruited from the much broader circle7 of the ‘Hungarian Fauves’ – took part along with friends they had invited (Artúr Jakobovits, Vilmos Fémes Beck, Mária Lehel, Anna Lesznai, Márk Vedres). We thus have an opportunity to ponder questions that Éva Forgács put in the columns of the journal Holmi: ‘Can concepts or artistic practices be transferred from one culture to another; and how much can another cultural context modify the meaning and function of a given artistic language, in the present case a language of painters?’ Forgács herself answers these questions, when in her nuanced analysis she points out that some-

P ANNONIUS M USEUM M ODERN H UNGARIAN G ALLERY , P ÉCS

times ‘cultures of forms and languages of images can be transferred from one culture to another’, ‘which, however, cannot be lifted across [...], the embeddedness in history of some modes of expression, in this case the context created by the French Enlightenment and French Revolution, in the frameworks of which the French viewer saw the pictures of the fauves, even when these were mediated, since antecedents of these pictures [...] “had given rise to unconscious associations.”’ According to Forgács, the historical context of early twentieth-century progressivism in Hungary is essentially different from the French: ‘Those Budapest intellectuals who served as the repository of progressivism did not hark back to the ideas – of 1848, let us say – relating to Hungarian attempts to secure civil freedoms, but, turning against their liberal fathers, relied on the ideas of German philosophy, and wished to create a new metaphysics. As the early essays of György Lukács, [Georg Lukács] Béla Balázs, and Lajos Fülep show, these intellectuals wished to create a new and extensive Hungarian national culture in the spirit of German idealism, a culture for which they drew inspiration from Ady’s poetry, from the pathos of his ‘New Poems’ that heralded a new age. Their rebellion was directed first and foremost against impressionism, which – having partly misunderstood – they considered art characterised by superficiality and subjectivism. Their ideal was Cézanne, in whose structured pictures they saw – likewise partly erroneously – the glorification of metaphysics.’8

At this point, Forgács quotes one of the authors of the catalogue, Péter Molnos, who in one of his studies speaks of how ‘at the birth of the new painting, at the starting out in Nagybánya of Czóbel, Berény, Perlrott, and their associates [...], it was problems purely to do with painting that were in focus of attention, independently of every element outside art’, and of how ‘conscious emphasising of structure and composition was basically alien from the colour-centred, deconstructing spontaneity of Fauvism’.9 Despite the labelling, the members of the research group evaluated – and formulated – the differences accurately. Gergely Barki, one of the organisers of the exhibition, declared to the periodical Mûértô: ‘Seeing the pictures emerging in the art trade, one could guess even at the outset that something new would come together, and we were aware that if we began in a systematic way to dig out the pictures hidden away at public collections, there would be surprises for everyone. An appreciable part of the exhibition came from material that had been gathering dust in museum storerooms. The period between 1905 and 1909 had not been markedly represented in the specialist literature earlier on; the term itself ‘magyar Vadak’ [translation of Hungarian Fauves] raised questions. For the time being, no one was able to come up with anything better, although I, too, did not consider this term entirely appropriate, nor in the end the expression ‘Hungarian Fauves’ either. Even now we know little. The exhibition at best called attention to the fact that there was a tendency that needed to be addressed.’10 One difference between the viewpoints related to the usefulness or harmfulness of the term ‘Hungarian Fauves’, which was declared unsatisfactory. ‘For strategic reasons’, Éva Forgács did not deem fortunate ‘the labelling of this painting, rich and encompassing different endeavours, with the expression ‘Hungarian Fauves’. The entirety of modern Hungarian painting, which began late, has never been described using terminology other than that created by Western and Russian narratives, this giving no chance for any kind of distinctive quality, voice, or half-voice, or something original even, to be present in Hungarian art.’11 The situation was evaluated similarly by Ilona Sármány-Parsons: ‘When local art histories began to be constructed as the history of a national art, a universal measure of a virtual kind dangled in the collective consciousness of the day: the path of French art, as a universal path. [...] When we read the exciting and interesting studies in the catalogue for the ‘Hungarian Fauves’, it becomes clear that the very same fire burned in the breasts of the young Hungarian art historians of 2006 as had burned in the breasts of those of 1906. The proof that we Hungarians managed to connect synchronically with the French experi-

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O PEN A IR , 1906

ments with form; in other words, we were modern and we did not lag behind in the race for new visual solutions. [...] In other words, Czóbel, Berény, Perlrott, etc. were there in the Salon d’Automne, alongside Matissse and in the company of Derain, with fresh, uniquely new pictures: in Paris and in the vanguard! [...] But did anyone notice us? Is it not illusory to hope that with this evidential material we can step, albeit afterwards, into the “centre” and integrate into the principal trends in the history of painting?’12 According to Katalin Sinkó, we can move nearer to an understanding of the problem if we bear in mind that ‘cultural transfer differs essentially from comparison, since it builds on the premise that there are no national cultures that have developed in an autochthonous way. These cultures have formed in the wake of influences, co-habitation, and motif adoption of many different kinds. Investigation of cultural transfers, then, places the emphasis on similarities existing in the social memory and not on differences. This is because “com-

ABOVE: VILMOS CSABA PERLROTT: SELF PORTRAIT WITH A SCULPTURE, C. 1910 BELOW: BÉLA IVÁNYI GRÜNWALD: NUDE WITH A PARROT, C. 1909

mon cultural elements ease movement from one context to another”, in other words, understanding.’13 In the case of the ‘Hungarian Fauves’, Sinkó analyses the process of cultural transfer as follows: ‘The renaming of the “Neos” as “Hungarian Fauves” was, however, unable to take place until this change of designation had been legitimated by an exhibition in France. [...] The decisive step in this area was taken by the organisers of the show “Le fauvisme ou l’épreuve du feu”, which opened in October 1999 at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. This exhibition, which dealt with painting in the period between 1905 and 1911, devoted a special section to artists working in Paris, Dresden, Munich, Prague, Budapest, and Moscow, as well as in Belgium, Switzerland, and Finland, who were in the circle of the French fauves or under their influence. [...] The fauve movement or trend was one that was built on the traditional centre–periphery approach taken by writings on French and European modern art. We can say that the modernisation of this concept has still not

taken place.’14 In essence, Sinkó agrees with Éva Forgács in that neither concept nor artistic practice can be transferred from one context to another without a modification of meaning. According to Sinkó, ‘in the background of reformulations and new names there are the less conscious processes of cultural transfer. In the course of these, French culture and Hungarian culture alike have been placed in the role of receiver. While works by Hungarian artists that were created under French influence, and the names of these artists also, are perhaps fixed in the narratives of French modernisms, the different time-horizon and the special characteristics of Hungarian and Central European history remain considerably outside the processes of this transfer. Generalising from our example, for a real understanding of the situation only the understanding of the concepts – in the present case, the different meanings of the expression “fauves” – can help. [...] The frame of this can only be “crossed history” (histoire croissé, to use Bénédicte Zimmermann’s term), which can come into being

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through the bilateral investigation of processes. For the writing of history of this kind, it is necessary that in concrete situations the different national histories – in our case, the French art history and Hungarian art history – step out of the frames of national monocausality followed hitherto and, in the development of theories, take into account, in a multilateral way, the earlier or actual determinedness of the historiography of the other nation. For example, to what extent are the ongoing processes of historical interpretation mirrors of cultural transfers, or are they sensitive indicators of the already complete crisis of the Europe ideal in both Central and Western Europe, or perhaps harbingers of the new nationalisms strengthening in the West, too, in the current situation?"15 This provocative question remains unanswered. But in order to understand the operation of cultural transfer, it is enough to think of a connection that develops between two strangers. To begin with, they measure their similarities and a possible common basis. They instinctively seek out in their own histories those points which they can offer to each other for identification. In this phase, the smallest similarity can be the source of immeasurable joy. But when there is a common denominator, already the differences, too, can give them pleasure. Of course, relations are never perfectly equal and never perfectly mutual. The art history of the time around 1900 has been recorded by way of the narrative of progressivism, in the paradigm of the centre and the periphery. The model itself is historical. We can and should remark upon on the material of past in its capacity as such and we may emphasise different aspects of it. L EÓ P OPPER ( ON

THE RIGHT ), C .

1910

E NDRE A DY , 1912 ( PHOTOGRAPH

A LADÁR S ZÉKELY )

Nevertheless, the material of the past is malleable only up to a certain limit. The historical marker of the art of the era under discussion is progressivism: we would be ahistorical were we to divest it of this tag. The expression ‘Hungarian Fauves’ is a proposal for a common denominator. Albeit differently and with different emphases, the Paris of Matisse was, at one and the same time, the Paris of the Hungarian painters, too. The name itself is a proposal; the meaning is already a variation on the name. However, as far as the history of the Eight is concerned, it is not the common denominator, but the delight in the distinctive and the different that matters.

THE EIGHT

AND THE

PRESS

As a fine arts example of the movements active in the different spheres of cultural life in Hungary between 1909 in 1912, the Eight group was a loosely organised, informal association, although its leader Károly Kernstok, who was known in the press largely on account of his organisational ability, mature years, and prestige, had clear views on what it represented and what its task should be in society. It was Ödön Márffy who, with hindsight, summarised its programme most succinctly: ‘The joint or kindred endeavours of these artists could perhaps be formulated as follows, namely that they tried to make pictures according to strict principles by placing emphasis on composition, construction, shapes, drawing, and essence.’16 Behind these endeavours, journalists and art critics, numbering

just a handful but nevertheless highly effectual, organised and influenced the group’s growing middle-class public, which was primarily drawn from the ranks of the urban intelligentsia. In the absence of a real art market, this public purchased works by the group members on a patronage basis, measured their accomplishment in the light of its politicalideological alignment and intellectual preconceptions, which was at the same time the undertaking of a social role. The unique features of their art were for a long time engraved on the countenance of a small yet powerful public; in turn, the mimicry and gestures of this public influenced their art, and, through mediation, have – down to the present day – determined the artistic orientation and approach to forms of generations. Éva Körner, who coined the term ‘avant-garde without isms’, considers convergence to be the main characteristic of the period under discussion, but also calls attention to the distinctively Hungarian features of the process of bourgeois transformation: ‘In the 1910s, large-scale social co-operation was characteristic of intellectual life in Hungary, from the socio-political movements through the transformation of the system of philosophical thought to the fashioning of forms in art. For the time being, intellectual solidarity prevailed; the cracks, and later the splits, that emerge during times of ordeals in political life had not yet appeared. [...] It was not by chance that for the first time in Hungary culture acquired a new meaning, one orientated towards the living of life in a more just and true way, because never in Hungary did the system of middle-class values, and grounded in it the specialist branches of learning, taken root to such an extent that the desire for a different, more just and true life was erased.’17 Nevertheless, cracks appeared well before the paths finally diverged. Intense solidarity characterised the Eight only at the end of 1910 and the beginning of 1911: many of the members failed to take part in the group’s third exhibition, which was held in 1912. Kernstok lost his leading role and left the group. When we speak of the Eight, in a certain sense we are speaking about an effective fiction, but this vision or fantasy regarding a community created ensembles of art works of emblematic significance, moreover with matchless vehemence for art as a whole. In connection with the Eight, it is primarily paintings that we think of, although the members displayed sculptures and even applied art creations. At their third show, Berény exhibited, in addition to a writing-case, eight women’s handbags, hangings, and eight pillow-case embroideries. From their circle, Anna Lesznai also produced high-standard embroideries. Capable of being pieced together from entries in her diary, her ideas concerning decoration were also significant. A separate study in the present publication deals with the events that

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accompanied the exhibitions staged by the Eight. Many of the members could play a musical instrument. Róbert Berény, an all-rounder in the group and the other leading figure besides Kernstok, not only understood mathematics, but also wrote music criticism; indeed, he also composed music, and not just on any level. Seen through today’s eyes, the press campaign surrounding the Eight reached enormous dimensions, even if ample contributions appeared by conservative writers. During the scientific preparations for the exhibition, Árpád Timár published, in a three-volume collection of sources, more than 1500 pages of articles and reviews from the press response of the time to progressivism in Hungary in the early twentieth century. This huge amount was – leaving out of account the anonymous newspaper contributors on the subject – produced by a few dozen individuals, including such devoted or well-disposed supporters of the Eight as Aladár Bálint, Artúr Bárdos, György Bölöni, Andor Cserna, József Diner-Dénes, Géza Feleky, Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, Ödön Gerô, Géza Lengyel, Pál Relle, Béla Revész, and Dezsô Rózsaffy. With regard to those in the field of theory, special mention may be made of Géza Feleky, who wrote the introduction to the Eight’s second catalogue, and György Bölöni, who followed their activity in Paris and from Paris and who organised exhibitions for them. The most powerful support, however, came from a poet and a philosopher respectively: Endre Ady and György Lukács represented a broad guarantee for the acknowledgement of the merits of their work.

T HE R ECEPTION OF M ATISSE Behind György Lukács was the sophisticated, distinguished figure of Leó Popper, a brilliant critic who died young, a few months after the Eight’s second exhibition. In the twenty-five years of his life, he published a total of twelve short pieces. Of these, only a few were on fine art subjects. These influenced neither Hungarian art, nor the Sunday Circle, which, continued, with philosophical force, the lines of thought begun by artists in the years of the First World War. On the other hand, he did exert an influence on his friend György Lukács, not only inspiring his thinking, but guiding, up to his death, the morality of that thinking by means of well-disposed criticisms, in the course of their correspondence, their joint articles, and their translations. Nevertheless, in 1919, at the time of the dramatic turn represented by the Hungarian Soviet Republic, there occurred what Popper had so much feared: ‘For Lukács, art was apocalyptic

G YÖRGY L UKÁCS , 1910 S

power. It was exciting, but, for that very reason, dangerous. The recognition that the forms of art needed to be regulated was, therefore, a matter of time only. Popper – with his utopian notions – was, as we shall see, a man of liberty; in Lukács, however, there already lurked the commissar who dreamt of apocalyptic powers for himself, which, in due course, he would firmly withstand.’18 One of the most sincere manifestations of this desire to regulate appears in Lukács’s work, ‘The Roads Parted’, a response to ‘Inquisitive Art’,19 Kernstok’s text setting out a programme for the Eight. In his article, Lukács defined form as follows: ‘Form is the principle of evaluation, of differentiation, and of the creation of order.’20 In the best moments of his philosophical career, Lukács could have experienced how his thought sequences were dictated by a kind of inspired necessity: Lukács was capable of seeing this on a theoretical level, but never on an emotional one. Accordingly, the form concept, despite every endeavour on the part of his friend, from time to time degenerated in Lukács’s hands into a genre category, or else acquired the shape of a dogmatic metaphysical imperative. On the other hand, Leó Popper still knew that form involves risking, and that we can understand the independent and unbridled intentions of form only when we are capable of giving up the ‘security given by full understanding’ for ‘the type of uncertain adventuring’ which leads us to ‘the most secret and most unlikely realms of form, towards

B ÉLA B ALÁZS : ‘G EORG

L UKÁCS – A DY ’, 1909

VON

WRITING AN ARTICLE ON

deeper truth’.21 On the other hand, philosophy – and in the given historical moment left-wing, bourgeois thinking, too – had no need more pressing than this ‘full understanding’. The Lukácsian demand for an exact discipline bent to the yoke of categorisations, systemicism, and definitions cannot be reconciled with any kind of adventuring that is risky and uncertain in outcome. Just as Popper’s ‘Let the will of form prevail’ and Lukács’s formal strictness denoted diverging paths, the Eight, too, cannot be reduced to a common denominator: the artists in question followed their inner lines of bearing. As regards reception and frame of interpretation, the Popperian liberty

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H ENRI M ATISSE : P ORTRAIT

A NDRÉ D ERAIN , 1905 ©TATE, LONDON, 2010

ideal was not a realistic alternative to the ideas of Lukács and his supporters, as, one by one, the Hungarian painters had their French orientation recoded through the influence of German theory, which in Hungary followed on from geopolitical and historical factors. Their reception in the country was determined by art critics who had read the German art historians, primarily Meier-Graefe. The German cultural circle held sway over Popper’s formulations, too, and decisively: the keenest indi-

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cation of this was its criticisms in connection with Fauvism. However, all this does not mean that the political and artistic ideas of Kernstok, who was especially critical of German art, would have prevailed. The members of the Eight were autonomous artists who did not remain together for long, because their views and interests could not be lastingly reconciled. For each of them, Paris meant something different, principally a technique, i.e. acquisition of skills and the reinterpretation of means.

It is no coincidence that it is precisely to this period and to Leó Popper that the so-called double-misunderstanding theory is connected. A summary of it has survived as a fragment, as follows: ‘Proposition: The principal factor in the development of art is misunderstanding. ‘Argument: Development consists of the influence (including inherited influences) of people and periods on each other. However, since man cannot know his fellow-man from within and cannot understand what it is that his fellow-man wants, across historical period to period still less (since finding out is impossible), when, nevertheless, he receives what he sees, he does so wrongly, misunderstanding it, and preparing the ground for new misunderstandings.’22 Popper’s idea was processed by Lukács as follows: ‘The existence of a work can be understood without confusion only when we regard the misunderstanding of it as the sole possible direct communication form: how a world comes into being from a double misunderstanding (from the misunderstanding of “term” and “understanding”) which on the one hand one cannot adequately achieve from one of them but which, however, is in a necessary, normative connection with both is already merely a problem that has to be solved, and not an incomprehensible phenomenon.’23 Not long after Berény and his circle, we find Popper in Paris. The young man, who had contracted tuberculosis while young, certainly turned up and made sketches at the Matisse Academy, although his letters attest that he also took part in training more systematic and more thorough than this. On 20 May 1909, he informed his friend Lukács: ‘I have enrolled at the modelling department. And it was a clever thing to do, because I’m learning an incredible amount there: at one and the same time drawing and architecture, anatomy and painting, dynamics and metaphysics, and singing, and how to write articles and art history, as well as Swedish gymnastics, the theory of knowledge, and ju-jitsu.’24 A few weeks later he was already writing from Wengen in Switzerland: ‘I made a model of an amazing mulatto woman, a little creature from Martinique, who taught me more in a week that fifty Jean-Paul Laurenses or Matissses could have done.’25 Popper read forthwith the programmeannouncing – or, more precisely, programmechanging – piece published by Matisse, the fauvechef, in the journal Grande revue. This article appeared in Hungarian in 1911 entitled ‘Remarks by a Painter’, in the periodical A Ház.26 The text was of enormous importance from the point of view of Matisse’s reception in Hungary. In his ‘Letter from Paris’, a piece written in early 1909 that likewise remained unpublished and which was probably shared only with Lukács, Popper sums up its lessons as follows: ‘The path of today’s painting leads to peace. It leads out of the stylistic chaos of impres-

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sionism and towards a solidly based calm art which, no matter how it manifests itself, is the brother of architecture: it carries in itself the features of profound security and equilibrium of which it is the embodiment. And, on paths that are concealed, the old order returns: the immobile or mobile sacred order of the Greeks and the Oriental peoples.’27 Here Popper makes reference to Matisse’s concept change, which the leader of the French fauves announced as follows: ‘Both harmonies and dissonances of color can produce agreeable effects. Often when I start to work I record fresh and superficial sensations during the first session. A few nears ago I was sometimes satisfied with the result. (…) I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting. (…) There was a time when I never left my paintings hanging on the wall because they reminded me of moments of overexcitement and I did not like to see them again when I was calm. Nowadays I try to put serenity into my pictures and rework them as long as I have not succeeded. (…) Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation.’28 29 Popper, who can be termed a liberal almost in the French sense in comparison with Lukács, found Matisse’s turn towards classicism unsatisfactory and instead considered the example of Cézanne and Aristide Maillol the one to follow. In a number of places, the authors of the ‘Hungarian Fauves’ catalogue called attention to the fact that in Paris the Hungarians had encountered Matisse’s ‘tamed’ fauvism’ at the same time as they encountered cubism, which was then gaining more and more ground. The same process ran its course among Matisse’s German followers: ‘In the works of young painters liberated from the school of Matisse, during the time of cubism, Cézanne’s influence strengthened further in Paris. This occurred in Berlin, too, when in 1909–10 pictures by Cézanne featured at a number of exhibitions. Instead of loud colours, there were stable forms, and in an era of growing confusion discipline and concentrated picture-building received new emphasis.’30 However, this generally characteristic structural change meant different things in the different regions of Europe. Passing through a succession of cultural filters wedged not between intention and expression, but also between expression and understanding, very many opportunities for misunderstanding presented themselves. What a painter could acquire from Matisse was a mass of skills which could be understood as a kind of procedural system only in the context of the history of French visual culture. And at the same time this meant that the Hungarians arrived in Paris with a vision formed in advance by the procedural systems of their own visual culture.

H ENRI M ATISSE : S TANDING F EMALE N UDE , 1907 ©TATE, LONDON, 2010

For their part, these systems determined in advance what they would acquire and receive. The restorator Gyula Kemény, an ‘honorary’ member of the research group, drew up a list showing – paradoxically – which French influences could have contributed to the preservation of Hungarian traditions: ‘1. They encountered brushwork with generous use of paint also on Van Gogh’s surfaces transubstantiated by

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way of expressivity; 2. Decorative, two-dimensional surfaces and calligraphic outlining, a tradition known from the Hungarian Secession, made Gauguinesque formal elements easily comprehensible; 3. The strong plastic approach did not appear as a necessarily outworn tradition, since after 1907, with the spread of cubism, Cézanne’s system of drafting spatially and organising mass again became topical.’31

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : I DYLL , 1911 One of the most obvious examples of reinterpretation and autonomous approach to form is Róbert Berény’s Idyll (R: 56, 185), a major work from the period of the Eight. This enigmatic creation is a multiple paraphrasing of derived formal solutions, inherited content, stylistic procedures, and basic examples of pathos. It is like a palimpsest. Works from a single iconographic tradition jostle each other in it, in such a way that eventually, by way of its emblematic denseness, it leads us back to its archaic roots system. In the middle point of the picture, small in size but achieving the most monumental effect possible, a man in dark attire is lying, almost grown together with a naked, white-skinned woman. In the literal sense of the term, the woman grows out of the man’s lap, as if a symbolic extension of his body. The work is clearly a paraphrase of Manet’s picture Breakfast in Open Air (R: 57). However, as Gergely Barki has pointed out,32 a direct model for it may have been Cézanne’s painting Pastorale (Idyll) (R: 57), from which Berény simply lifted the figure of the woman bending over and drying herself after bathing that can be seen on the right side of the work, and that of the man in dark clothing leaning on his elbow, presenting the latter in mirror image. Barki’s hypothesis is supported by a preparatory sketch made by Berény for the work in which the female figure follows Cézanne almost completely from the stylistic point of view. The nude’s pose is typical, appearing in many of Cézanne’s pictures; indeed, there is even a photograph of an elderly Matisse in his studio with a model in the very same pose. Berény achieves the cubistic, strongly threedimensional formulation of his nude through the phases of Matisse’s much distorted but nevertheless airily sketched nudes. In the Matisse work Joie de Vivre (R: 57) made in 1905–1906, and also in preparatory sketches made for it, we encounter a buxom nude with her arms above her head exposing her body to our gaze, in just the same way as we do a female version of the figure whose back is to the viewer. Furthermore, in Matisse’s picture already, viewpoint distortions leading us to perceive a union between the figures also appear. As we see in his Nude of an Italian Girl (1907, R: 144.), in his Montparnasse Nude (1907, R: 174, 175), and especially in the fourth sketch for it – constructed from over-emphasised masses framed with absolute brutality – Berény far exceeded his mentor in boldness. ‘Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s com-

R ÓBET B ERÉNY : I DYLL (C OMPOSITION ), 1911

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mand to express his feelings. In a picture every part will be visible and will play its appointed role, whether it be principal or secondary. Everything that is not useful in the picture is, it follows, harmful. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety: any superfluous detail would replace some other essential detail in the mind of the spectator.’33 Berény accepted this counsel in its entirety. Nevertheless, while Cézanne’s and Matisse’s Arcadian compositions based on loose groupings and on the eloquent voids of the spaces between speak of their own traditions in the language of continuability and open-ended ornamentation, Berény’s work, which is built from centrally structured, dramatic contrasts of colour and form, radiates a sense of closedness and solid, heavy presence. Despite all their unusualness, the above-mentioned works by Cézanne and Matisse do not seem mysterious; we concentrate not on their meaning, but on their decorative forms. Although they strive to emphasise the essential, nevertheless we keep track with them as with some whimsical natural phenomenon. Berény’s work, however, cries out for interpretation, although over and above the closedness of its composition, we immediately sense that it is exactly the meaning of the work that will remain an open question. Already it is not Manet or Cézanne – the latter’s Modern Olympia, where the work to be created, a nude figure of timeless beauty, appears before the artist out of the white mist of imagination – that comes to mind.

Nor are we reminded of the antecedents of the Manet picture that was so shocking for the respectable citizenry, e.g. of Giorgione’s Concert in the Open Air, which radiates balance and harmony. The Berény work evokes something more archaic and primeval – and at the same time something more modern. In the recumbent man’s pose, which we see in a Renaissance treatment in one of the groups on a Raimondi etching of Raffaello’s The Judgment of Paris, the art historian Aby Warburg has discovered the pose of an antique river god. One of the earliest pathos forms handed down from antiquity, the melancholic, grieving river god and the ecstatic nymph appear – by way of the reinterpreted fauve close up – in the almost united formation of the artist and his model. The recumbent man, whose black clothing refers simultaneously to the bourgeois dress of Manet and Cézanne and to the Russian attire of Tolstoy and the anarchists, is perhaps Berény himself: a sombre, brooding, two-dimensional figure. This figure also appears in another of his principal works, Composition with Silhouette (R: 116, 146) , a fine analysis of which by Gyula Kemény is published in the present volume. The man in the foreground, this time in a hat, is again a free reinterpretation of a repussoir figure in a Cézanne work, as pointed out by Barki in his study. In Idyll, we do not see the face of the painter, just the woman, a model for his art covering herself with her hair, like a veil that attracts our view; a full figured, plastically formed, pure life character

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that almost stands out from the canvas. The strange pair is placed in the border area between the purely two-dimensional picture and the third dimension, in the zone of confabulation where flatness collides with depth. The desire of the painter is that essence, which made plastic, can be lifted out from chaotic reality. The theme of the picture is the desire of the artist himself. It is he who is lying on the dissecting table; it is his inner being that the cleaving wedge reveals. His work, like his own flesh, is laid bare by it. The painter’s desire is directed towards the work that takes shape by way of his own potential. This desire is all but idyllic. With self-irony and at the same time with dramatic emphasis, Berény’s Idyll speaks of risk and of danger. His dark, Dostoevskian figure is exposed to sin and to temptation. The model in the work – the nymph in the spring, like Venus at her birth – now rises out of the foam, which is painted in flesh colours and is like wrinkled skin. She is shootig up and is opening before the fascinated eyes of the painter and viewer like some flesh-eating flower. Elemental eroticism and erective excitement pervade the picture. Its heatedness is only heightened by a coloration attuned to dark hues, to the primary colours blue and green; by the strong chiaroscuro; by the contrast between the secondary colours; and additionally by the exciting red of the futuristic trees framing the central formation as rib arches. The stick-like trunks leaning above the pair recall in a literal sense, probably intentionally, the creation of the woman from a rib of the man, in accordance with the metaphysical orientation and Christomania of Berény. Confined in the wickerwork of stick-like ribs given by the trees, the pictorial emblem of the act of creation pulsates as the heart of the composition. The massive formulation of the picture conceals infinitely rich possibilities of meaning; it is a wildly vivid, dramatic work of art. Despite its constructive approach and its cubist and futuristic elements, it is scarcely reminiscent of the sources on which it draws: it is an autonomous masterpiece of Hungarian painting.

T HE R ECEPTION OF C ÉZANNE

F ROM

ABOVE :

É DOUARD M ANET : B REAKFAST O UTDOORS , 1863 P AUL C ÉZANNE : P ASTORALE (I DYLL ), C . 1870 R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : S KETCH FOR I DYLL , 1911 • C AT . H ENRI M ATISSE : J OY OF L IFE , 1905–1906

NO .

Károly Kernstok, who cultivated an ever deepening friendship with Oszkár Jászi, the constantly selfrenewing, politically very active leader of middleclass radicals (who even gave a lecture on the Eight)34 was, after Berény, the other rallying point for the company of the Eight. In his memoirs, Lajos Bálint wrote of Kernstok as follows: ‘In outer appearance and in his entire manner he was an attractive figure. When he appeared somewhere, he became, almost involuntarily, the centre of the company. With his blond beard, bright blue eyes,

and irresistible smile, he was sometimes reminiscent of some legendary prophet. Had he utilised these qualities for his own purposes alone, he would, clearly, have enhanced his success as a painter. But – in the first half of his life at least – he was a rebel. I have often asked myself whether political life itself was of greater interest to him than his calling as a painter. [...] However many new principles or experiments appeared, with his lucid intelligence and his excellent professional training he immediately tried them out, but only for so long. Even in his most interesting phases, in his pictures depicting large equestrian groups, he was unable to remain in the experimental style long enough to cast the strongly outlined galloping nudes built on structures of bundles of powerful muscles in the form final. [...] He was already around thirty when, along with successes achieved, he abruptly turned his back on his entire output as a painter up until then and set out on his quest in the world of the ‘Neos’. If the Eight respected him as their leader, this esteem did not extend to their following him in his quick changes. [...] The reality is that without the assistance of the critics and that part of the public that stood behind them, they would never have obtained a hearing in the storm that they generated with their first appearance. I myself was present at that meeting of the Galileo Circle at which Kernstok delivered his lecture entitled ‘Inquisitive Art’. The essence of this canvassing address was the opposition between the art of the emotions and the art of the intellect. He established a connection between the radical programme of the Circle and the essence of the new art. [...] Increasing numbers of people were becoming interested in the art of the Eight, primarily that section of the public which was grouped around the Galileo Circle and the periodical Huszadik Század, and later on around the journal Nyugat. This section already celebrated Ady, attended with interest the musical manifestations of Bartók and Kodály, and subsequently the new developments in painting and sculpture, too.’35 Having been obliged to leave Hungary following the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Károly Kernstok wrote from Berlin to Gyula Kosztolányi Kann on 31 October 1920: ‘Manet’s mission was to dismantle tradition, Delacroix’s to provide bold ideas, Cézanne’s to lead one to the specific in the individual, and those after him to show freedom of emotions and means in the interests of a goal. The rawest colour is permissible, the bluntest valeur is permissible, the most individual manner of drawing is permissible, and every synthesis is permissible, only there must be a goal.’36 It is worth stopping for a moment and pondering why it was that Kernstok stressed subjectivity in connection with Cézanne’s highly objective art. One of the most interesting products of the reception of Cézanne in Hungary was a study by

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P AUL C ÉZANNE : B ATHERS WITH 1896–1897 • C AT . NO . 86

P AUL C ÉZANNE : T HE B IBÉMUS Q UARRY , 1900–1904

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the critic Géza Feleky entitled ‘The Legacy of Cézanne’. According to Feleky, at a time ‘when art is no longer being produced socially but is instead individual discovery, and when every true artist is a revolutionary being on account of necessity and not of temperament, Eastern art is losing its exotic character and Western art – by virtue of its anthropocentric world-view a necessarily three-dimensional art – is acknowledging, in the most confused and most critical period of its history, the legitimacy of two-dimensional art. This is an indication and consequence of the fact that art is no longer an essential need of Western man, or rather that art, not longer performing its essential mission, is already a thing of pleasure and not a thing that is

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necessary.’37 Behold an ‘end of art’ idea from 1911, one that is connected with the wish to surpass the ideas of subjectivity and individualism. In the centre of Feleky’s analysis of Cézanne is the problem of the two-dimensional plane and the three-dimensional space, and also that of the thrusting together of chaos and order: ‘Cezanne, then, did not just create space, mass, and the structure-like fitting together of different masses from nothing, from shades of colour, from degrees of atmospheric moistness, and from other tonal differences; in his pictures, order emerges from disorder. But the acknowledgment of several points of view, deconstructs the picture only in one direction and leads only seemingly to disorder. [...] Hence, the picture surface is uneven,

THE

M ONT S AINTE V ICTOIRE ,

contradictory, anarchic, and chaotic. Nevertheless, it achieves its goal, because the vision appears in a clear way through the help of the unclear means. These visions are calm and logical: there are clear balances between the clearly outlined masses and also clear, counterbalanced movements. The technique, however, is intuitive; from time to time, very different means add to the tonal differences.’38 The ‘very different means’ and their various misunderstandings in the art of Hungarians, e.g. Tihanyi, are analysed in the present publication by Gyula Kemény, in the course of picture analogies. In 2000, an outstanding Cézanne exhibition was staged at the Kunstforum Wien that bore the eloquent sub-title ‘Vollendet, unvollendet’.39 In the course of the different phases represented by the pictures, it was possible to observe how Cézanne struggled with the organising principle of organised chaos: what he left open and how much space he assigned to the accidental, what he attended to or constructed and how much, and whether from processes that were almost infinite he put together art works that could be described as finished. In the case of the Hungarian painters, instead of thinking oriented to the future, concentration on the past, on the completeness of the composition, was more characteristic: in this the rise of psychoanalysis in Hungary would have an increasingly significant role. Berény spoke rather of memories when he defined himself in comparison with the futurists: ‘The increase in the elements of composition means the development of painting from now on. These elements – memories and emotions – are parts of the painter’s soul.’40 On the other hand, Kernstok, in ‘Inquisitive Art’, trusts in the preservation of traditions: ‘The reaction to our little exhibition just now was, as far as I know, much greater than the one we envisaged on the basis of its modest funding. The progressive ones among those who make up our public [...] felt that that if this was not the end, the final product, of a big journey, but rather the beginning of a long road on which we should go

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forward proceeding from traditions, in order to seek and find those new great values which in essence will be very much akin to those of the good art of every era.’41 Nothing in the seemingly shared substructure shows better the different approaches of Berény and Kernstok than the difference in their works. In the field of graphic art, it was they, of all the members of the Eight, who created perhaps the most enduring works. It is worth looking at two drawings of heads by them one after the other (R: 59). Both are fine works composed in a balanced way. The Kernstok work, kept at Sümeg, is a cool depiction showing an almost androgenic character and radiating timeless calm, while in the Berény piece the face of the female figure is disfigured by emotions; snake-like, her mouth is wincing, and she is looking at us contemptuously out of the corners of her eyes, which are in slits that are deliberately asymmetrical. Her whole being is torn asunder by tension. The difference is perhaps even more striking when we compare another work by Kernstok, a harmonious, classically calm depiction of a man with an expressive brow and folded arms, with a 1911 Berény seated female nude now kept in the Graphic Art Collection at Budapest’s University of Fine Arts (R: 59). On the latter work, one can clearly see – besides the attempt at a closed composition – that Berény was more excited than any other member of the Eight by Cézanne-type superintended chaos; except that he focused chiefly on the psychic and emotional, that is the energy of pathos. When speaking of Kernstok’s drawings, again it was Feleky who named the difference between the two extremes the most tellingly: ‘Bernard Berenson published, in two enormous volumes, beautiful reproductions of drawings of this kind by Florentine painters. Perhaps not even his keen eye and splendid critical sense would, at first glance, think Kernstok’s drawings of nudes out of place in this collection. What the drawings have in common is an undisguised emphasising of centres of movement and of intersections. Drawing is the art of and omission. At the end of their lives, one or two old masters – every true painter’s language of forms develops from complexity towards simplicity – contented themselves with dominant details. It seems that the great synthetic power manifest in their drawings is the stage preceding Kernstok’s highest synthesis, his ultimate simplification. But Kernstok commits to paper only the movement and structive nodes, and surrounds them with a one-stroke outlining. The Florentine way of seeing things cannot get that far. Behind Quattrocento painting stood the sculptor Donatello: he, just like his painter colleagues, asserted the structural connection only within the decorative body unit, emphasising, so to speak, the organic nature of the decoration. For Kernstok’s manner of seeing, it is necessary to seek analogies in the work of the elderly Rodin or in that

ABOVE: RÓBERT BERÉNY: FEMALE PORTRAIT, 1911

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BOY, C. 1909

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of Maillol. Even then there remains the affinity between the graphic art of Florence and that of Kernstok.’42 At the end of his train of thought, in

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which he refers to Kernstok’s social commitment, Feleky tactfully quotes from a letter of Van Gogh: ‘Giotto and Cimabue lived in an obelisk-like environment where everything was placed on architectonic foundations, where individual uniqueness was the stone of the building and where everything rested on everything else and created the monumental order of society. If the socialists would construct their buildings in a logical way – today they are still a long way from doing this –, then this social order would revive again in a similar form. We, however, are living in the midst of complete anarchy and lack of discipline.’43

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : C HRIST (S CENE ), 1912 Staged at the National Salon in the November and December of 1912, the Eight’s third exhibition was received by the press with almost uniform rejection. It sat in triumph over the vanguard that had shrunk to four artists, but even in the mocking reviews there was little mention of a strange creation by Berény, one that announced the beginning of a new, experimentally-inclined period in that artist’s oeuvre (R: 60). Clearly, even supporters of the Eight did not know what to begin with it. Zoltán Felvinczi Takács wrote about it in some detail: ‘We sensed in large measure the influence of Cézanne in Róbert Berény, too, at the time of the Eight’s exhibition last year. [...] In the portrait of Leó Weiner and in a still life by him even, it is tones inspired by Cézanne that convey the plasticity of the bodies, but already in these, too, especially in the second-mentioned work, a new endeavour is apparent: the standardisation of the spatial effects in the interests of the rhythmic balancing of the picture elements. [...] He considers colour such an important factor that he has undertaken even the technical perfecting of painting. The paint he uses is his own invention. A Golgotha scene illustrates to greatest effect his calculations as an artist. [...] The centre of gravity is in the middle, in the figure of Christ nailed to the cross. The movement of his two arms is emphasised by the boundary-lines of the masses of light and shadow that appear as continuations of the limbs. Similar direction lines reinforce the effect of this movement down at the foot of the cross. In the bottom left-hand corner, a naked female figure kneeling down on one knee counterbalances the main protagonist.’44 Aladár Bálint did not even take the trouble to distinguish between the figures: ‘Of Berény’s pictures, the one of Christ and his composition entitled “Scene” uncover depths of a kind scarcely imaginable in a picture built purely on depiction. [...] Christ’s battered body, the unnaturally long and thin arms, the shrivelled trunk, the wailing followers huddled below, and the gloom and

RÓBERT BERÉNY : CHRIST

uncertainty covering the entire picture all proclaim to us: I do not want to show you a beautiful, proportionate body, but I do want you, too, to experience the feeling which is the cause and basis of this picture.’45 The other side says even less: ‘No.1, a portrait, tells of his eccentric, Matisse-like, Picasso-like cubist propensities; no. 9, a horrible picture of Christ, shows him unmature.’46 Berény was so annoyed by the lack of comprehension that he published a statement in the newspaper Magyar Hírlap in which he declared: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, by far the greater part of our public, and Officials Carrying Hungarian Painting on your Palms – do you lack the heart to acknowledge that if my works are new, unusual, and not pleasing either, they nevertheless come from me, are my feelings, and my thoughts; and that if in the struggle for expression, I do stammer out my speeches, it is in any case my own words that I articulate.’47 Berény made this pronouncement at around this time in some measure already against Kernstok’s classicising concept of form that built on the priority of drawing, referring to it not long afterwards in the columns of Nyugat: ‘In reality, there are no lines: it is only we who tend to see them. Generally it is easiest to sense a line on a so-called silhouette, a dark stain that stands out sharply on a light background. [...] We can keep the dark stain in our memory, as something seen at the same time. But we can only sense the contour of the stain if we direct our gaze to it time and again along the whole length of the contour by which the dark stain stands out against the light background. [...] For a long time, draughtsmen directed their attention to the following of outlines (contours). However, this is only one of the lines of an object, as it appears, the route of our gaze by habit. If we wish to convey our vision process, too,

at the time of drawing, and not just to draw the seen object with just any line, then we must represent the progress of our gaze in other directions on the object to be depicted, and in the space surrounding it. If at the time of drawing we wish to express the spatial nature of an object, then a mere contour drawing will not be sufficient. I do not believe that, let’s say, the contours of a human body will, without added input, evoke a three-dimensional form in space.’48 This thinking concerning contours corresponded to Cézanne’s perception, which Merleau-Ponty summed up as follows: ‘A contour framing an object by means of a single, definite line is likewise merely a geometrical fiction, and is not a feature of the world seen with the eye. When we provide the silhouette of an apple with a single line that can be easily made out, we invest the contour with an independent existence, although it is only an ideal border towards which the power-lines creating the side of the apple run in their depths. To give a contour of any kind is not a satisfactory solution, because in this way we annihilate the identity of the object. The single contour is not good, because it abolishes the depth, namely the dimension, which shows the object not as a completely explored flat surface set out before us, but as an unfathomable, mysterious reality receding from us. Cézanne therefore tries to convey the three-dimensionality of objects by means of a complex colour modulation, giving several contours at the same time. Straying and governed from one contour to another the gaze eventually settles on a in - between, virtual contour – exactly in the same way as happens in the order of spontaneous sensing also.’49 Cézanne, who earlier on was interested in ‘the emotive physiognomy of movement’, now was prying into the rules of regularities and differences, in the ‘faltering hand movements of nature’.50 His inter-

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F RANCIS B ACON : T HREE S TUDIES

est was directed in an increasingly ascetic way to the syntax of pictures; instead of the emotional charge of the statement, the connection possibilities between creative elements interested him, to see what kind of connections were formed by the values placed next to one another (understanding the missing colour precisely as a building element, too). With his seemingly detached, rational thinking, Cézanne was the precise opposite of Berény, who planned to illustrate a study by Freud,51 was part of the innermost circles of the psychoanalytical school through his friendship with Sándor Ferenczi, and who held that ‘the aim of the artist was to disclose, by means of his art, the entire content of his soul’.52 What Cézanne attempted to cool, Berény for his part heated: instead of locally ‘germinated’ colour modulations, he applied centrally organised and directed cuts of light to his pictures. With Berény, light was for dissolving the contours of objects. However, he did this not by means of Cézanne’s exact perception of reality, but by following emotions (expressions). Of course, Berény knew exactly what he was doing: he controlled and transmitted energy, bringing into equilibrium wildly divergent, dissonant elements. With the self-knowledge of a demiurge of infinite power, he declared: ‘All perception caused by inner tension is erotic.’ Later: ‘to my knowledge, three artists convey a perception of space in a similar way and manner, completely independently of one another: Kokoschka, the Frenchman Delaunay, and I. Kokoschka does so using direction lines, Delaunay by the placing in different directions the parts of the objects he is depicting, and I by employing colours that shade into one another in certain directions and that intersect with one another. What we have in common is a strong sense of spatial directions, which gives new possibilities for composition.’53 On his

Christ picture, made at almost the same time as Kokoschka’s similar subject, he follows Cézanne’s principle of spontaneous perception when he makes the female nude of the foreground a good deal larger than the central motif, although in that which he expresses with this perception there is nothing reminiscent of the hermit of Aix. Mary Magdalene is painted as a mound of flesh dumped at the side of the picture, anticipating the Golgotha figures of Francis Bacon, with her neck, elongated by gravitation, sinking back into her body. It is as though her body, helplessly gravitating and, with its rosy mound hang-

FOR

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ing out of the picture, is itself the hill of Golgotha, and as though the emotional scene represented by her is the foundation for Christ’s death as a spiritual act. Her protruding Vanitas figure, which almost mockingly and jeeringly recalls and distorts the sacral and pathetic nude-idols in the art of the Eight, not only lays the foundation of, but like a curtain of flesh that has been pulled up, reveals the scene of Mary with the dead Christ. In contrast to the decrepit Mary Magdalene, who is collapsing into an animal grief, Christ’s mother is spreading her legs hysterically, as if she wanted to pull the spent, sagM IHÁLY M UNKÁCSY : G OLGOTHA , 1884.

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ging body hanging from the cross into her and revive it by the act to new life. Almost like a scream, desire for the deceased nearly splits the picture, which is dominated by the by the contrasts between flesh colours and the ochre, as well as the dark greens and the blues radiating sacrality. If the subject of this picture is that which Anna Lesznai, who was close to Berény and who thought similarly to him on the role of ornamentation in art, called the metaphysics of the body, then another Golgotha picture by Berény tells of the physics of spiritual suffering. Dressed in mourning, the figure falling at the feet of Christ corresponds to one known from Munkácsy’s Trilogy (R: 61), an early model mentioned by Feleky in the Eight’s second catalogue, too. However, the black-attired figure is squirming in agony like a squashed worm; his suffering rivals that of the Crucified. Perhaps we should not see Mary in this maggot-figure, which is formulated so brutally despite its mark-like nature, but instead a self-portrait of the painter as a prodigal son (prodigal with his talent) clasping the knees of the father. ‘Form: among the given possibilities of a given situation the maximum exertion of power,’ wrote Lukács in 1910. And he finished his text as follows: ‘The tragedy of being alone here, too, is an a priori of life, but here from this being alone grows the principal heroism, the heroism of the formation of the self, just as the desire for redemption, along with its possibility and reality, grew from a knowledge of original sin. […] And timidly I write here – as the only possible final chord to what has been said here – the name of the greatest on which I was constantly thinking while writing this, that of our greatest epic poet, the hallowed name of Dostoyevsky.’54 The cult of Dostoyevsky and the ethical imperative of metaphysics: Berény was not the only one in the circle of the Eight to reinterpret sacral themes. In The Sermon on the Mount (R: 342), another emblematic work of the Eight, Bertalan Pór shows man framing himself as law. As we can see on a preparatory sketch made for the work, Pór originally planned a whip in the hand of the central figure, with the result that the painting started out as a modern paraphrasing of the ‘Driving the Moneychangers out of the Temple’ theme. The place of the whip being brought down mercilessly is taken by the joint use of the finger pointing towards the sky (the home of ideas) and the palm turned towards the earth (i.e. the material); this double motif is known from Raphael’s School of Athens.55 However, the Old Testament ethos of lawgiving, too, comes to the forefront. With their savage lack of tools and their abstracted corporeality, Pór’s figures, depending solely on their ornamental rhythmicity and harking back to Renaissance prototypes, preach the necessity of building a new man, idealistic and materialistic at the same time, and of a new society, with the decorative rhythmic formula of figures and not with the ‘Eight Beatitudes’.

Anna Lesznai put her finger on the essence of Hungarian characteristics when she declared: ‘By ornamentation, I understand not decorative art, but art that turns away from depiction and achieves its effect by means of “rhythm and equilibrium”. It is often two-dimensional, since it may renounce threedimensionality, too, but this is not its essence. [...] The Hungarian is given to ornamentation and not to construction. Is this a characteristic of the race or of development? It produces lyric poetry, decoration in two dimensions, melodies, and tones rather than architecture, systems of thought, metaphysics, dramas (epics and novels), organisations, and cities? Here I sense some kind of analogy for the differences between the political parties and the organised social units.’56 With her instructive critique, Lesznai proved, in 1912, more keen-sighted than the men. Ernô Kállai, who subsequently – from Berlin in the 1920s – observed constructivist endeavours with such great sympathy, in 1945 already could summarise those characteristics of Hungarian modernisation that led to the appearance in Hungary of the Eight. Probably delivered at a retraining course for secondary-school teachers and thus completely forgotten, a lecture by him has recently come to light in connection with the latest volume of his oeuvre to be published.57 The address contains a historical survey that begins as follows: ‘In 1867, the nation reached a compromise with the monarch, and Hungary, as one half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, joined the political system of the Great Powers. At a stroke, almost limitless opportunities for economic and social success opened up for the middle class. Overnight Hungary became an Eldorado for founders of commercial, industrial, and financial enterprises, and for the nouveaux riches. [...] They found willing partners and business connections in the nobility which staffed the state and county offices, and also in the landowning aristocracy, to which they endeavoured to assimilate, outwardly at least, according to the old, accepted custom of snobbery especially favoured in Hungary.’58 According to Kállai, this parvenu middle class, in the absence of which, however, Hungary would never have shaken off its agrarian character, naturally did not wish to see in its own surroundings the seamy side of its own feverish economic and social activity, but magnificent stage sets instead. This is why there was such a great demand for genre pictures or ‘for landscapes amply and eloquently supplied with figures, and for festive, theatrical compositions illuminating the historical or religious past’, since ‘this vigorous and elated bourgeoisie took pleasure in images of sensual pomp and bombastic, idealistic pathos, and in dignified, showy portraits.’ The second phase in the rise of the middle class was a need to find a public for the plein air painting of Nagybánya. At the head of the

Nagybánya school was Károly Ferenczy, in whose work finely weighed and balanced composition is deeply concealed in the proportions and structure of apparently accidental extracts from nature and surfaces suffused with light. In these ‘abstract, intellectual values’, which so to say give the ‘brilliantly light and intelligent ground plan for the work’, Kállai already saw possibilities for the appearance on the scene of the MIÉNK group of artists that could be regarded as a kind of antecedent for Rippl-Rónai and the Eight. But for this, however, a new generation of middle-class individuals was required, one whose fathers ‘were already over the first, great, greedy triumph of economic and social arrival and the many bogus pretensions to prestige, who already did not pander to the feudal historical classes, and who did not weave sentimental, romantic illusions about the so-called unspoilt, simple, and innocent ordinary people. Naturalism and impressionism restricted to the sober and clear depiction of nature was the art of a bourgeoisie conscious of itself, of its own real situation as a class, and of its mission. It was the art of a bourgeoisie which had already gathered in its own class harvest, which was in possession and in power, and which no longer pushed for spurious externalities, but which surveyed and enjoyed life in a relaxed, calm, and cultured way.’ Only little by little did this stratum become susceptible to the art of Rippl-Rónai, who in the 1890s and the early 1900s worked and featured in Paris alongside Maillol, Gauguin, Denis, and Bonnard. However, wrote Kállai, to begin with ‘Rippl-Rónai’s fate was the same as Szinyei Merse’s and that of the Nagybánya painters [...]. For the most part, he was said to be “primitive” and that any schoolchild could draw better than he.’ The bourgeois public that was trying to accustom itself to the joint arrival on the scene of primitivism, naturalism, and impressionism, had, shortly afterwards, to encounter currents that were even more shocking and unsettling. The appearance of the Eight was summed up by Kállai as follows: ‘Fired by the examples of Cézanne and Matisse, these currents manifested themselves in contradistinction to the preceding trends in a painterly formulation that was much more solid, more constructive, and more plastic. Some of these artists formed themselves into a group. [...] This excellent, tough, manly vigour lasted until about 1920, i.e. until the reactionary political landslide that follows miscarried revolutions. This was the heroic age of Hungarian expressionism, positive and constructive in spirit. Among other things, Hungarian expressionism differed from the chaotically exciting emotional world of German expressionism and from its ecstatic, mystical, extrasensory perspectives exactly in this, enabling us to discern in it the intelligent, goal orientated plasticity and the solid reality of earthly reliability.

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S ONIA D ELAUNAY : Y OUNG G IRL A SLEEP , 1907

Ernô Kállai’s historical survey is, by and large, still valid today. Undoubtedly, it is difficult to reduce the Eight to a common denominator with the loose Der blaue Reiter formation noted by Franz Marc and Kandinsky that likewise only lasted for a couple of years and was fully contemporaneous with it. However, as we have seen, with the Golgotha pictures and with the Scenes series Berény, too, had a period, albeit a brief one, that could be called ‘orphic’ and the groups in question had a common attraction to music and, generally speaking, to artistic activity more widely. But as regards the unbroken unity of their vigour that Kállai called tough and manly,

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at the two poles of the Eight notions diverged greatly. Kernstok – whom the press was inclined to call the leader of the group, not merely on account of his more mature years and his charismatic personality, but also because he was already known and respected by the public for an earlier naturalistic period of his that was heir to the social sensitivity of Millet and Mednyánszky and partly to its themes as well – developed his own characteristic, paradoxical, socially-oriented, community primitivism. While with Gauguin primitivism was a kind of secession and escape from society and with the Germans it was a visual taste, a return to an archaic, non-aes-

469

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thetic, instinct-following, emotional mode of expression, in Kernstok’s case it was a programme, moreover one which – thanks to Lukács – was written in the language of the most sophisticated German aesthetic culture, and which translated the energies of a counter-culture into gestures for the founding of a culture. Instead of the inspiration by carvings from Africa and Oceania that echoes from the woodcuts of the Die Brücke group and from Pechstein’s or Kirchner’s landscapes with nudes, Kernstok for his part draws on Greek and Etruscan vase drawings, Egyptian depictions, and the Renaissance stock of forms.

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KÁROLY KERNSTOK: HORSEMAN

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T HE R ECEPTION OF H ILDEBRAND A utopian ideology containing connections between structured picture-building and the restructuring of society – and between essence focused artistic form and man remaking himself – had by this time come into being in the hands of Kernstok, who operated with Hildebrand’s terminology. Kernstok’s speech, famous but – typically for an artist’s approach offering only sensory-emotional connections –was György Lukács by a concrete programme text, in which Popperian ideas were already to be found in a form that was a good deal more doctrinaire and aggressive, but undoubtedly more elaborated.59 Lukács, in his lecture ÌThe Roads Parted’ delivered to the Galileo Circle, practically quoted (without giving any kind of reference) the words written by Popper in his Matisse article, applying them to the works of Kernstok rather than to those of the French fauves: ‘These pictures bring calm, peace, relaxation, and harmony – that they could shock anyone is completely incomprehensible. [...] Here it is not the success of a new art that is the issue, but the resurrection once again of old art, of art, and about the life-and-death struggle against the new, modern art that this resurrection brought about. Károly Kernstok has said what the issue is here. That those pictures that he and his friends paint (and those poetic works created by a couple of poets, and those philosophies brought into being by a couple of thinkers) want to express the essence of things. The essence of things! With these simple words, avoiding polemics, the mate-

T HE

SALON OF THE VILLA OF J ÓZSEF

L UKÁCS

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rial of the great debate is indicated, and also the point at which the paths diverge.’60 Written in 1908 and already quoted, Popper’s words on equilibrium and calm art on a solid base were interpreted in 1910 by Lukács as follows: ‘This art is the old art, the art of order and values. Impressionism made everything a decorative surface [...].The new art is architectonic in the old and true sense of the term. Its colours, words, and lines are just means for the expression of essence, order and harmony, the weight and equilibrium of things.’61 One possible source for these ideas can be found in the introduction to Adolf Hildebrand’s successful 1893 book ‘The Problem of Form in Fine Art’: ‘While the issue here is the imitative, in fine art a kind of research into nature is concealed, and it is to this that the work of the artist is linked. The problems which form places before the artist in this are supplied by nature and dictated by perception. If just these problems happen upon solution, i.e. if just in this relation the work has existence, then also, as a work in itself, it has not become an independent whole which could speak in favour of nature or against it. In order to achieve this, its imitative content – in its development from the wider point of view – has to be raised to a higher realm of art. I would call this point of view architectonic, not concerning myself, naturally, with the ordinary specialist meaning of the word architecture. A dramatic play or a symphony has this kind of architecture, this kind of inner structure, an organic totality of

PAINTING

H ORSEMAN

D AWN , 1920 S

relations, as does a picture or a sculpture, even when individual branches of art are living in completely separate worlds of form. Problems of form emerging in tandem with such an architectonic shaping of an art work do not arise from nature and are not self-evident; nevertheless, it is precisely these that are absolutely artistic. Architectonic shaping is that which creates a higher-order in art work from the artistic researching of nature.’62 The passage quoted from Hildebrand is one of the nearest sources of another of Popper’s ideas, namely the notion of art as a mode of being ‘of a different God’, a mode of being in parallel with nature. Similarly to Kernstok’s lecture, the title of which, too, ‘Inquisitive art’, was borrowed from Hildebrand: ‘The arts, painting let’s say, always start out from nature. [...] That is to say, the means with which the painter works and those with which nature works are very, very, different. [...] In vain do we sit before nature in order to copy it like a camera obscura: there is no light-sensitive plate in us; in vain do we wish to paint the colours as we see them: we have no sunlight in us. There is, it is true, something that we have as human beings which in its significance is of equal value to these things, namely our intelligence. [...] This, this nature [i.e. those things that have bodies – Cs. M.] must be called upon to help and must be interpreted.’63 As a matter of fact, the ideas of Lukács, who was conducting an ideological war, and Kernstok, who was seeking autonomous artistic solutions,

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were brought to a common denominator by their joint hostility to impressionism. The reclaiming of ‘old art’ (e.g. that of the Greeks) meant on the one hand the demand for tradition and continuity, and on the other an idealistic philosophy directed towards a metaphysics that hypothesised its own viewpoint in the absolute. After the failure of Simmel’s experiment to discover something of substance in impressionism (an example of this was Simmel’s first Rodin analysis, a critique of which was given by Popper in his essay ‘Sculpture, Rodin, and Maillol’; it is not a coincidence that in his obituary for Simmel in 1918 Lukács mentions their one-time teacher as follows: ‘He was the Monet of philosophy, whom so far no Cézanne has followed.’64), an equals sign was placed between impressionism and a metaphysics-free world. For example, so it was in the work of the above-mentioned Géza Feleky also, to whose Kernstok article published in Nyugat in 1910 Popper reacted in a letter written from Berlin on 6 February 1910: ‘As well as you, Géza Feleky writes very cleverly about the Kernstok things. Indeed, and this is the greatest acclamation, he says a couple of things which I myself wanted to write; instead of these, I shall now be forced to serve up something even more brilliant.’65 Here, Popper is perhaps referring to the article which he was to have written on the Eight’s exhibition in Berlin for the periodical Kunst und Künstler. This piece was, unfortunately, never produced (or, if it was, we do not know about it), although its basis would probably have been the ‘ImpressionismusTektonismus’ difference. According to Timár, this was precisely the term by means of which Popper could have contributed significantly to the art criticism of the day. In connection with the terminological debates that became more lively followK ÁROLY K ERNSTOK : E QUESTRIAN C OMPOSITION

WITH THE

ing the ‘Hungarian Fauves’ exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery, it is worth reminding ourselves that ‘The name tectonism is very fortunate, on the one hand because the everyday meaning of the expression is in harmony with the essential characteristics of the artistic endeavours indicated, and on the other hand because this term isolates something for which contemporary criticism had no special term, and for which art history scholarship since then has had no special term either.’66

KÁROLY KERNSTOK: EQUESTRIAN COMPOSITION WITH THE ESZTERGOM CATHEDRAL IN THE BACKGROUND,

1912

H ANS VON M ARÉES : Y OUTH LEADING A H ORSE ,

Of Kernstok’s equestrian compositions, this one is closest to the heart of the present writer (R: 65). It was not shown at any of the Eight’s exhibitions, but was one of the logical closing accords of the series that began with the still static figures of the creation Horseman at Dawn (R: 64, 287); on the other hand, among others, this work represented Hungary at the San Francisco World Exposition, the first high-level presentation of Hungarian art in the United States. Staged in 1915, the PanamaPacific show was viewed by approximately twice the population of Hungary. It was at this time that the already analysed Christ picture by Berény went missing (R: 60), along with the Portrait of Béla Bartók

(R: 87) and many other masterpieces.67 Fortunately, Kernstok’s equestrian composition returned home; today, it is kept at the Hungarian National Gallery. The Horseman at Dawn (also named Aurora) was displayed at the Eight’s second, 1911, exhibition, along with the notorious composition Horsemen at the Water (R: 108, 285). A photograph has survived that shows the monumental picture on a wall in the villa belonging to the bank director and freemason József Lukács, the father of György Lukács.68 The massive, pithy figure found its way to the title-page of the periodical Szabadgondolat and appeared in other Kernstok pictures also, thus becoming a visual emblem or logo of the Eight’s endeavours. As established by its researchers, Aurora was probably inspired by one of Hans von Marées’s works, perhaps Orangenpflückender Reiter und nackte Frau. Marées’s Riding School, and the sketches for it, may have influenced the Hungarian’s large equestrian compositions. Kernstok’s personal experiences in the field of crossing streams on horseback at Nyerges and of equestrian sports in the village also contributed to them. Marées certainly made a profound impression on Kernstok, who time and again mentioned his name with acknowledgment even during his time as an émigré in Berlin, despite stressing his distaste for German art, especially German expressionism.69 At this time already, he was critical of Matisse, too, although the priority enjoyed by French artists in his world of taste was still strong: ‘How refined French painters are. Matisse has a batch of pictures here. Bad ones and immature ones, too. How to see in the case of others whether inner experience finds expression on a work. But

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M ARÉES : T HREE M EN

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how very much Matisse destroied German painting. Pechstein – how very bad his pictures are. [...] Cézanne’s vision that seeks out nature and endeavours to enrich its forms, his quest for the formal and psychological characteristics of the whole man, led in Matisses, Picassos, and in other cubists to such a scholastic formalism of forms, and accordingly of dialectic in painting, that instead of the goal that Cézanne set himself, namely the rendition of nature seen through the artistic factors of a human being, a schema termed a generalising style came into being which lost its way in the painterly dialectic of universalia ante rem, in re, or post rem. [...] Matisse and his circle have brought a renewal of forms only (this is already a great deal!), but today these forms are tending to formalism, i.e. forms have to be pushed further and developed, and with the forms a new Weltbild of a new man has to be made.’70 The new world-view of the new man: even a world war had been unable to shake Kernstok’s faith in socially-sensitive human beings awakened to middle-class self-awareness. Mednyánszky exerted a powerful influence on the young Kernstok. From the former’s solitary rider roaming in the wilderness, which sums up symbolically the way of thinking, passivity, and subdued mood of a conservative reform generation pushed to the periphery, it was a short but stormy distance to the breaking of day in Aurora. The power of Kernstok’s rider is increased by the bulging rump of the horse, as a visible extension of the muscles and power of the man: this eroticism was already not that of Marées’s starved youngsters wandering in sultry, tropical glades, although contemporary caricatures do not neglect this associational possibility, e.g. in connection with Tihanyi’s nude wrestlers. Marées was perhaps motivated to paint a number of three-figure compositions by the attraction he felt towards the young sculptor Hildebrand, and by the supportive company of Konrad Fiedler, where the men, depicted surprisingly naturally and plainly, create a melancholic consonance with

P AUL G AUGUIN : F AA I HEIHE , 1898 ( DETAIL )

nature, which is depicted almost too idyllically and as though covered by a veil. However, Kernstok was not excited by his collision zones of nature and man. In his works appears almost always a static figure radiating strength, two figures reinforcing each other in symmetry, or an endless group arranged as an ornamental garland that multiplies its strength through coming together. The work Horsemen at the Water was analysed by Kállai as follows: ‘A huge contrast this, whether we think of Mednyánszky’s tramps blazing up and dying down like will o’ the wisps, or of Ferenczy’s, Csók’s, Réti’s, and Rippl-Rónai’s calm idylls. In contrast to the restless and aimless drivenness of Mednyánszky’s tramps and the figures sunk in quiet passivity in other pictures by him, we sense, in these wiry, sinewy, and muscular male bodies, in these hard profiles, trained will and the impulse to strive. With regard to coloration, this picture is almost completely monochrome. It verges on greyishbrownish tones and on moderate green for the distant, waterside vegetation. After the fresh, sunny ampleness of colour of the impressionists, it is, then, almost palpably terse. It has to be so for the solid, hard three-dimensionality of the bodyforms and the steely rhythm of the outlining to come across as clearly and decisively as possible. This line rhythm is different to Rippl-Rónai’s softer, suppler contours, which outline two-dimensional forms when they are not sucked into the soft embrace of the colours. Within Kernstok’s contours stretches a resolute plasticity of forms. And another important, new element appears before our eyes in this picture: the composition includes wide space, moreover such space which does dissipate into uncertain remoteness, but which serves as a closed and solid frame for depiction. In this solid, plastic power of depiction, and in the wonderful, space-conquering drive of it, we again see a painterly sign of new social and psychological promptings.’71 According to Kállai, Károly Kernstok and the Eight ‘were fanatical, rationalistic adherents of progress: brilliant positivists in whose

works there was a kind of heroically-minded, humane espousal, not a bombastic and forced but a natural, wholesome pathos. Accordingly, their pictures were grounded in a clear, structural logic, and for this reason are of plastic expressive force.’ In contrast with Berény’s expressive visions, which emerged from the depths of the soul and which, in line with his inclination to experiment, this clever ‘searching hound’ (forever searching, according to Lesznai) put, in different ways, into the yoke of constructive form structures, Kernstok’s edited visions of man were visual concepts that were rooted in the drawing culture of the Secession and that looked, more deeply than Lukács even, into the nature of ornamentation. On the ornamentation issue, there was a dispute between Lukács and Anna Lesznai, a studio neighbour to Dezsô Orbán, and exhibitor of her embroideries at the Eight shows. We cannot, however, go into the details of their controversy here.72 Lesznai later elaborated her multilayered ideas concerning ornamentation in the kaleidoscopic, coordinative structures of her long novel ‘In the Beginning Was the Garden’, which was written over a number of decades. In this work, just as in her paintings (which were less esteemed by her contemporaries), ornamentation annihilates hierarchy, and replaces the significance of things with the meaningfulness of things. Ornament always refers to essence, without its captivation by essence detracting from its sensitivity towards details. The need for transcendence is strongly characteristic of the world of ornamentation. Worringer expresses this as follows: ‘Where the abstract line is the bearer of formal will, there we have transcendental art, since such art is determined by a need for deliverance.’73 Kernstok’s linear figural abstractions are very close to Lesznai’s conception of ornamentation. Just for this reason his equestrian pictures display much more kinship with the frieze on the Parthenon than, let’s say, with the equestrian pictures by Gauguin and Picasso. They offer their figural bodies as decorative motifs, but they do not carry their

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power in their bodies, since their energy is concealed in the dynamics of their appearance on the scene. It is for this reason that the horses are needed, and the musically-ordered, rhyming figure-festoons homogenised with the horses and with the landscape, and almost recalling the animal ornamentation of medieval Irish codex painting. Kernstok’s primitivism and his archaising approach point towards a common root. This is an explanation for the intentional androgyny. ‘In the past,’ wrote Lesznai, ‘it was scarcely possible to tell the men from the women on Egyptian sculptures and on the oldest Greek ones, too. In all likelihood, then as well women were different and more bosomy, but the old artists, with a strong stylistic sense and using a simple technique, wished to show in relief only what was essential. Indeed, is not the principle essence of every human being the fact that he or she is a human being rather than a man or a woman, as the case may be? When did the female principle split off from the male? What was the developmental path in this field: the development of differences or the diminishing of them?’74 Even so, the figures are homogeneous not just on account of the wished-for archaising. Again, only Lesznai formulates this in the clearest terms: ‘Only in its totality can a work be interesting. In my view, the most perfect unity is that which is able to incorporate in a great hierarchy numerous units which in themselves are complete and not just fragments. Examples are Oriental carpets, ornamentation, and miniatures. If we crush a large crystal, each of the parts thus made is itself a little crystal and perfect. The details of the largest pictures, too, are complete units and have an effect of their own: the setting of all these units together results in a higher-order and richer unit. I am here thinking of a novel, or of a story, which consists merely of tiny, complete, and finished pictures.’75 Kernstok’s Equestrian Composition, with Esztergom Cathedral in the Background accords perfectly with Lesznai’s vision. Some of its figures are drawn with a maddeningly sure hand; in the preparatory sketches, too, we see units fully on the same level and complete in themselves. Every part has a separate visual significance, the incredibly powerful dynamic of the male nude mounted on the galloping horse in the same way as – in the case of another equestrian composition – the boy running beside the horse and caught up in its momentum. Giving sacral perspectives by means of the Esztergom Cathedral and with its own energetic mobility, the composition, which is natural and at the same time decorative in a stylised way, is suffused by the same power of derivation from one material as Nude of a Boy Leaning against a Tree (R: 106, 271), the subject of which merges with the background on account of the homogeneity of the brushwork.76

P AUL G AUGUIN : H ORSEMEN

The notion of homogeneity was raised by Popper in his Brueghel essay, with which the artists were probably unfamiliar, and from which Lukács developed his ‘homogeneous medium’ philosophical category only a good deal later. Although Lesznai, too, made no reference to Popper by name, her common thinking with the Eight and with Lukács’s circle led to the very same findings. As Árpád Timár has already proved by means of convincing arguments, the poetic metaphor of the Alltag, or the universal substance, in Popper’s Brueghel essay was not really suitable for the philosophical generalisation of the substance problem. ‘From a draft of the article that has survived, it turns out unequivocally that Popper really did take trouble in describing the substance problem and sought the appropriate term. To begin with Brei (‘pulp’, ‘paste’), and then the expressions Teig (raw dough) and Weltenteig feature in those places where later on Allteig appeared in the printed text. The completely concrete everyday meaning of Teig Popper attempted to make a little more abstract and general by adding Welten (‘world’) and then All (‘universe’). It is worth stressing, however, that Popper moved away from the concrete meaning only to a very small degree; the sensual concreteness of the term was extremely important for him, and finally he employed the category for a very narrow field. The Brueghel study suggests that this expression was valid for Brueghel first and foremost.’77 Nevertheless, when

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everywhere from the humps of the hills through the backs of the horses to the curving lines of human bellies and chest muscles we see arching shapes drawn with a sure hand, we realise that Kernstok’s ornamental experiment was in fact aimed at giving the same backbone to every form.

T HE P LACE OF THE E IGHT In the differences between the theoretical and moral approaches of Popper and Lukács we can glimpse the essential difference between the open art of Cézanne and the art of the Eight which was soon closed. However, to analyse the approaches adopted by eight different artists in the theoretical force fields of two thinkers in itself an act of violence. ‘These people here did not come together in a school; it cannot be said of them that Kernstok is their teacher. [...] They are travelling on roads whose direction is still unknown and whose destination no-one can yet know,’ wrote the newspaper Népszava in connection with their first exhibition, namely ‘New Pictures’.78 Éva Forgács’s hypothesis quoted at the beginning of this study – this held that every artistic phenomenon can be understood only in its social embeddedness, in its own historical tradition, and in its

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K ÁROLY K ERNSTOK : S TUDY

cultural context – is especially warranted in the case of the Eight. Károly Kernstok’s strong political commitment to the middle-class radicals and the freemasons influenced the members of the group (to different degrees, admittedly), but his undertaking of this role, or the pathetic energy that stemmed from this choice, determined the contemporary reception of the works rather than the works themselves. The activity of Oszkár Jászi, cultivating friendly contacts with Károly Kernstok and with his sculptor relative Márk Vedres, has again come to the forefront of research. ‘A characteristic of middle-class radicalism as a way of thinking is a metapolitical commitment, which means that the questions of practice are judged by philosophy, from the standpoint of theory. For this reason, a necessary concomitant of it is a “semantic rationalism”, which pictures reality in models, and wants to tailor concrete conditions and actors to these models. [...] Middle-class radicalism is a socialist standpoint,

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a left-wing critique which is directed towards the superseding of liberalism, and conducts the critique of capitalism from the position of a postcapitalist – in other words, a socialist – order. But here we shall make two necessary restrictions: both the concept of socialism and the picture of capitalism are flexible.’79 The movement of the middle-class radicals failed, and, along with Kernstok, Oszkár Jászi, too, was obliged to emigrate after 1919. Both came into conflict with György Lukács’s ideologemes put into effect at the time of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. However, the ‘schematic rationalism’ of the middle-class radicals and their theoretical presuppositions developed together, in fruitful reciprocity with the progressive literary and artistic movements of the age. This historic exchange of ideas left its mark on Kernstok’s and his associates’ art, which was sometimes stylebreaking, sometimes style-securing,80 sometimes schematic, and sometimes biddable.

‘If we are to proceed from this approach, we must acknowledge that somewhere between the dead naturalist painting of nature and the reshaped presentation of phenomena given by nature runs a perilous borderland. We must acknowledge naturalist paintings that have inspired us and those that inspire us now, and we must acknowledge nature-altering, stylised pictures that have filled us with artistic joy. It does not, therefore, depend on the trend. But precisely from this we see that in the interpretation of nature vague boundaries lurk in some places, and we sense, too, that every artistic work that expresses truly noble joy in human beings takes shape between these limits that are vague and not precisely set by any aesthetic. But who dares to say to a painter “This far and no further”? For this there is only one forum enjoying full legitimacy: the painter’s talent, his fine feelings.’81 The tact of the painter – Károly Lyka’s beautiful expression condenses in itself everything that is comprehensively characteristic of the Eight. Plastic art was theirs, powerful, bold, in the collision zone of two- and three-dimensionality, experimenting with the metaphysics of the body, with rhythm, decoration, primitivism, musicality, and abstraction: everything depended on their sense of proportion. Feel and tact: the common root is at the same time the common denominator. Their art is neither avant-garde nor the sum or permutation of French or German influences. Instead, it is an organic local outcome of Hungarian capabilities, an art which had an antecedent, and which even achieved a paradoxical continuation in the Arcadian painting of the 1920s. In the history of Hungarian modernism since 1867, theirs was the change that finally liberated art from the constraints of mimetic, mapping, vision: in the nature seen and recomposed by them we can acquaint ourselves with our own creative strength and with the demons that threaten it. The introduction to the catalogue for the Los Angeles exhibition ‘Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation 1910–1930’,82 which was exemplary in its depiction of the ‘panEuropean horizon’, was written by Péter Nádas, who spoke of the possibilities for cultural transfer. Its title of the introduction was itself eloquent: ‘Careful Definition of the Locale’. The sub-title, on the other hand, revealed what would later lie at the heart of the discussion: ‘Walking around and around a Solitary Wild Pear Tree’. The Eight group stands before us in the centre of one possible narrative of our own art history. It is rather like the Hungarian writer’s wild-pear tree that pushed its roots into the soil of a given garden, a given village, a larger district, and a historical region, while generating year-ring waves in an ever-extending space and time.

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Notes

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14 15 16

The writing of this paper was funded by a János Bolyai Research Scholarship awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. ‘A “magyar Vadak” fölfedezése. Ismeretlen remekmûvek a Nemzeti Galériában. Varsányi Gyula riportja Passuth Krisztinával’ [Discovering the Hungarian Fauves. Unknown masterpieces at the HNG], Népszabadság, 27 February 2006 issue. 11. The exhibition was curated by Krisztina Passuth, Gergely Barki, and György Szücs. The international response to the exhibition was highly impressive, at least with regard to the statistics. The show featured 3 times on television and 6 times on radio. In addition, the French daily and weekly press (including Le Monde, L’indépendant, La Tribune, Paris Match, Elle, and Palette) reported on it – briefly or at greater length but almost invariably in illustrated articles – on 44 occasions and the monthly press on 74 occasions. The foreign press published 42 articles on the exhibition, along with invitations and snippets of news that together numbered more than these. Fifty Internet sites informed their readers concerning the travelling exhibition, which was augmented with works by French fauves. The show was accompanied by a series of lectures, with the participation of György Szücs Krisztina Passuth, Anna Szinyei Merse, Gyula Kemény, László Jurecskó, Gergely Barki, Zoltán Rockenbauer, and Tamás Tarján. P. Szabó, Ernô: ‘A modern festészet ünnepi pillanatai. Beszélgetés Passuth Krisztinával a Magyar Vadak Párizstól Nagybányáig 1904–1914 címû kiállításról’[Festive moments of modern painting. Interview with KP]. Új Mûvészet, 16, 2006, 6. 8. Perneczky, Géza: ‘Revízió a magyar avantgárd kezdeteinek kérdésében’[Reviosion concerning the beginning of Hungarian avant garde]. Holmi, 19. 2007. 296–297. The authors of the catalogue included under the collective term ‘Hungarian Fauves’ the following artists, by virtue of works they produced during a particular phase of their careers: Béla Balla, Rezsô Bálint, Róbert Berény, Géza Bornemisza, Tibor Boromisza, István Csók, Dezsô Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Valéria Dénes, Sándor Galimberti, Gitta Gyenes, Vilmos Huszár, Béla Iványi Grünwald, Károly Kernstok, Nana Kukovetz, Ödön Márffy, András Mikola, József Nemes Lampérth, Dezsô Orbán, Vilmos Csaba Perlrott, Tibor Pólya, Bertalan Pór, Armand Schönberger, Lajos Tihanyi, János Vaszary, Sándor Ziffer. Forgács, Éva: ‘Vadak vagy koloristák?’[Fauves or colourists] Holmi, 19. 2007. 310–312. Molnos, Péter: ‘The “Paris of the East” in the Hungarian Wilderness’. In: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya. Ed. by Krisztina Passuth, György Szücs. Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery, 2006. 118. Gréczi, Emôke: ‘Vadak után, Nyolcak elôtt. Beszélgetés Barki Gergely mûvészettörténésszel’.[After the Fuves, before the Eight. Interview with art historian GB] Mûértô, 10 April 2007 issue. Forgács 2007. Op. cit. 313. Sármány-Parsons, Ilona: ‘Marginalizált magyar festôk, avagy egy közép-európai festészeti kánon kérdései’[Marginalised Hungarian painters or issues of the canon of Central European painting]. Holmi, 19. 2007. 3. 324. Here Sinkó cites Espagne. Sinkó, Katalin: Nemzeti Képtár. A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria története. [Gallery of the nation. The history of the Hungarian National Gallery] Budapest, 2009. 147. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 159. Dévényi, Iván: ‘Márffy Ödön levele a Nyolcak törekvéseirôl’[Letter of ÖM about ont he goals of the Eight]. Mûvészet, 10, 1969, 8. 10. Körner, Éva: ‘Lovasok a vízparton – Fekete négyzet fehér alapon’ [Horsemen at the Water – Black square on a white surface]. [1984] – Idem: Avantgárd – izmusokkal és izmusok nélkül. Válogatott cikkek és tanulmányok. Szerk. Aknai Katalin, Hornyik Sándor. Budapest, 2005. 318. Perneczky, Géza: ‘Leó és a formák’ [Leo and the forms]. Buksz, 5. 1993. 409. Kernstock, Károly: ‘A kutató mûvészet’ [Inquisitive art]. Nyugat, 3. 1910. I.: 95. – Az Utak II.: 288–292. Lukács, György: ‘Az utak elváltak’[The Roads Parted]. Nyugat, 3. 1910. I.: 190–193. – Az Utak II.: 321. Hévizi, Ottó: ‘A forma mint szabadakarat. Popper Leó esztétikája’ [The form as free will int he aesthetics of Leo Popper]. Világosság, 28. 1987. 397. Popper, Leó: Esszék és kritikák. [Essays and criticisms] Ed. By Tímár, Árpád. Budapest, 1983. 116

25 26

27 28 29 30

33 34

38 39

41 42

43 44

50 51

52 53

Ibid., 46, 47. Dialógus a mûvészetrôl. Popper Leó írásai. Popper Leó és Lukács György levelezése. [A dialogue on art. The writings of L.P. The correspondence of L.P and Gy. L.] Ed. and introduced by Hévizi, Ottó, Tímár, Árpád. Budapest, 1993. 271. Ibid., 274. Matisse, Henri: Notes d’un peintre (Notes of a Painter), La Grande Revue. XII. December 25, 1908. For English translation see: Matisse on Art (ed: Flam, Jack). Berkeley. 1995. 37–42. Matisse 1908. Op. cit. 38. Matisse 1911. Op. cit. 188. Popper 1983. Op. cit. 54. R. Bajkay, Éva: ‘Magyar és német kapcsolatok Matisse nyomán’ [Hungarian – German connection int he footsteps of Matisse]. In: Nulla dies sine linea. Tanulmányok Passuth Krisztina hetvenedik születésnapjára. Szerk. Berecz Ágnes, L. Molnár Mária, Tatai Erzsébet. Budapest, 2007. 94. Kemény, Gyula: ‘Francia nyomvonalak a magyar Vadak és a neósok festészetében. Egy restaurátor feljegyzései’ [French tracks in the painting of the H. fauves and ‘neos’. Notes of a restaurator]. Hungarian Fauves 2006. Op. cit. 186. Barki, Gergely: ‘Berény Róbert: Idill / Kompozíció’ [R. B.: Idyll/Composition]. In: A modell. Nôi akt a 19. századi magyar mûvészetben. Szerk. Imre Györgyi. Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, 2004. 348–350: No. VI–44. Matisse 1908. Op. cit. 38. ‘Felolvasás a Nyolcak kiállításán’ [Lecture at the exhibition of the Eight[. Pesti Hírlap, 29 November 1912 issue. 26 – Az Utak III.: 496. Bálint, Lajos: Ecset és vésô. [Brush and chisel].Budapest, 1973. 118, 120, 122, 123. The repository holding the letter: MTA MKI Adattár, Inv. No.: MDK-C-I-17/2026. Feleky, Géza: ‘Cézanne hagyatéka’ [The legacy of C.]. In: idem: Könyvek, képek, évek. Budapest, 1912. 16. First published in the periodical Nyugat: 4. 1911. I.: 749–754. Ibid., 20. Cézanne – vollendet, unvollendet. Hrsg. von Felix Baumann, Evelin Benesch. Wien: Kunstforum Bank Austria, 2000. Berény, Róbert: ‘A Nemzeti Szalonbeli képekrôl’ [On the picture at the National Salon]. Nyugat, 6. 1913. I.: 197–198. Kernstok 1910. Op. cit. – Az Utak II.: 288. Feleky, Géza: ‘Széljegyzetek Kernstock képeihez’ [On the margin of Kernstok’s pictures]. Nyugat, 1910. I.: 195–198. – Az Utak II.: 325. Ibid., 326. Felvinczi Takács, Zoltán: ‘Négyen a Nyolcak közül. Glosszák egy modern mûvészeti kiállításhoz’ [Four of the Eight. Commentaries on a modern art exhibition]. Nyugat, 5. 1912. II.: 763–768. – Az Utak III.: 484. B-t. [Bálint, Aladár]: ‘A “Nyolcak” kiállítása’[The exhibition of the Eight]. Népszava, 24 November 1912 issue. 11. – Az Utak III.: 493. Magyar, Elek: ‘A Nyolcak harmadik kiállítása’ [The third exhibition of the Eight]. Magyarország, 15 November 1912 issue. 13. – Az Utak III.: 474. ‘Berény Róbert nyilatkozata’ [Statement of R.B.]. Magyar Hírlap, 27 November 1912 issue. 10. – Az Utak III.: 495. Berény, Róbert: ‘A festôi közlés’ [The painterly expression]. Nyugat, 6. 1913. I.: 528–530. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: ‘Cézanne kételye’[The exhibition of the Eight]. Enigma, No. 10. 1996. 82. – Part of his study ‘Le doute de Cézanne’. Idem: Sens et non-sens, Paris, 1948. 15–51. Ibid., 78. ‘I await the Moses proof with interest and hope that by friend Berény is proving more suitable than Heller’s protégé.’ Letter of Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud from 1914. Sigmund Freud–Ferenci Sándor levelezés. [The Doubt of Cézanne]. Enigma, 14. 2007. No. 51. 125: note 24. Berény 1913. Op. cit. ‘Pór Bertalan kiállítása a „Könyves Kálmán”-ban’ [The exhibition of B.P. in the Könyves Kálmán Salon]. Nyugat, 4. 1911. II.: 406–409. – Az Utak III.: 45.; Berény, Róbert: ‘Oesterreichische Künstler’. Nyugat, 6. 1913. I.: 501. Lukács, György: ‘Esztétikai kultúra’ [The culture of aesthetics] (1910). In: idem: Ifjúkori mûvek 1902–1918. Sajtó alá rend. Tímár Árpád. Budapest, 1977. 434, 435, 437. My thanks are due to Gergely Barki for drawing my attention was drawn to the connection, as well as to the preparatory sketches for The Sermon on the Mount. Sorsával tetováltan önmaga. Válogatás Lesznai Anna naplójegyzeteibôl. [Herself, tattooed by her fate. From the diary of A.L.] Ed. and introduced by Török, Petra. Budapest, 2010. 89., 106.

60 61 62

63 64

70 71 72

74 75 76

77 78

Here I should like to thank Árpád Tímár for drawing my attention to the text. So far, seven volumes of his oeuvre have been published: Kállai, Ernô: Összegyûjtött írások / Gesammelte Werke. Vols. 1–6, 8. Ed. Tímár Árpád, Markója Csilla, Monika Wucher. Budapest, 1999–2003. Kállai, Ernô: ‘A magyar festômûvészet Nagybányától napjainkig’ [Hungarian painting from Nagybánya to our day]. In: Demokrácia és köznevelés. Budapest, 1945. 646–661. In what follows, I quote the main trains of thought from the second part of the text without giving references. For the connection between Popper and Lukács in more detail, see Markója, Csilla: ‘Popper Leó (1886–1911)’. In: “Emberek, és nem frakkok”. A magyar mûvészettörténet-írás nagy alakjai. Tudománytörténeti esszégyûjtemény. II. Szerk. Bardoly István, Markója Csilla. Enigma, 13. 2006. No. 48. 263–284. For quotations concerning Hildebrand: 270–271; 277–278. Lukács 1910. Op. cit. – Az Utak II.: 320. Ibid., 322. Hildebrand, Adolf: Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (1893). Hungarian trans. Wilde János. Budapest, 1910. 5. Kernstok 1910. Op. cit. – Az Utak II.: 289, 290. Lukács, György: ‘Georg Simmel’. Pester Lloyd, 2 October 1918. issue. Republished in Lukács 1977. Op. cit. 746–751. Quotation: 748. Popper – Lukács 1993. Op. cit. 328. For the article in question, see Feleky, Géza: ‘Széljegyzetek Kernstock képeihez’ [On the margin of painting by K.] Nyugat, 3. 1910. I.: 195–198. – Az Utak II.: 323–326. Tímár, Árpád: ‘Élmény és teória. Adalékok Popper Leó mûvészetelméletének keletkezéstörténetéhez’ [Experience and theory. On the origin history of L.P.’s art theory] In: Lehetséges-e egyáltalán? Márkus Györgynek tanítványai. Szerk. Háy, János. A szöveget gondozta és a bibliográfiát készítette: Erdélyi, Ágnes; Lakatos, András. Budapest, 1994. 429. Cf. Barki, Gergely: ‘A magyar mûvészet elsô reprezentatív bemutatkozása(i) Amerikában’ [The first representative introduction of Hungarian Art in America]. Nulla dies sine linea. Tanulmányok Passuth Krisztina hetvenedik születésnapjára. Szerk. Berecz, Ágnes; L. Molnár, Mária; Tatai, Erzsébet. Budapest, 2007. 99–113 and idem: ‘The Panama-Pacific International Exposition: Hungarian Art’s American Debut or Its Bermuda Triangle?’ Centropa, 10, 2010, 3. 259–271. For this contemporary interior photograph of the Gyopár utca villa, see Lukács György élete képekben és dokumentumokban. [The life of Gy. L. in pictures and documents] Ed.: Fekete Éva, Karádi Éva. Budapest, 1980. 39. Kernstok Károly emigrációban írt feljegyzései és önéletrajza. [The diaries and notes of KK written in his emigration]. Enigma, no. 65., 2010. 46. Ibid. Kállai 1945. Op. cit. For a deeper discussion of the question, see Markója, Csilla: ‘Három kulcsregény és három sorsába zárt „Vasárnapos” – Lesznai Anna, Ritoók Emma és Kaffka Margit találkozása a válaszúton’ [Three key novels and three Sundayists “locked” in their fates. The encounter of A. L., R. and M. K. at the crossroads]. Enigma, 14. 2007. No. 52. 67–108. Worringer, Wilhelm: Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1907). Hungarian translation: Budapest, 1989. 141. Lesznai 2010. Op. cit. 88. Ibid., 104. Cf. the relevant statements by Gyula Kemény in his study published in the present volume. Tímár 1994. Op. cit. 440. (vd) [Várnai, Dániel]: ‘Új képek’ [New Pictures]. Népszava, 31 December 1909 issue. 5. – Az Utak II.: 230. G. Fodor, Gábor: Gondoljuk újra a polgári radikálisokat [Let us reconsider the radical middle-class]. Budapest, 2004. 148–149. See also the relevant publications of György Litván. Gyula Kemény describes the first two ‘as an undoing and as a doing up’ in his above-mentioned study published in the present volume. Lyka, Károly: ‘A MIÉNK bemutatója’ [The show of MIÉNK]. Új Idôk, 21 February 1909 issue. 190–191. – Az Utak II.: 28. Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation 1910–1930. Ed. by Timothy O. Benson. Cambridge, Mass.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002.

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R O C K E N B A U E R

NEW PICTURES, NEW POEMS, NEW MUSIC ALLIES OF THE EIGHT, FROM ADY TO BARTÓK

D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : P ORTRAIT (M ISSING )

E NDRE A DY , 1907–1908

In the evening of 18 May 1911 a young woman threw herself from Margaret Bridge into the Danube. That Hungarians are predisposed to suicide has long been a sad cliché – and things were no different a century ago either. The method and the site recalls the ballad of suicides, János Arany’s Híd-avatás [Inauguration of the Bridge],

and though we might think it was one case of many, it nevertheless still shocked the public. The radical bourgeois daily Világ carried an extended report on the story: “only this morning was it established who the suicidal lady was: the wife of artist Károly Réthy, née Irma Seidler, who herself had considerable talent as a painter. [...] Already as a child she loved painting, and since she had talent, she studied it too. Thus she arrived in the painters’ colony in Nagybánya, where two-anda-half years ago, when already a girl of twenty-five, she met painter Károly Réthy. They fell in love and soon married. They settled at 28 Oszlop utca in Budapest, where they set up a joint studio.”1 Although Világ kept clear of the presumable reasons, it was more-or-less known that a romantic tragedy lay behind the suicide, which justifiably pricked the conscience of a young philosopher, György Lukács. This young man met the lady teacher, two years older than him, in 1907. Posterity holds her to have been the greatest love of his life, and he dedicated the main work of his youth, “The Spirit and Forms”, to her. Only 23 years old, therefore officially still under age, the young son of a banker could not make up his mind to engage her, and struggling with the uncertainty of the situation, the lady

painter fled into a marriage with Károly Réthy. However, their relationship broke up only temporarily: after a hiatus of one-and-a-half years they began to seek each other’s company again.2 According to Világ, the Réthys “were much-loved [...] in the art world and that part of the good society of the capital, which was interested in literature, music, and painting, and willingly spent time with artists and writers. With her fine looks and interesting appearance, the clever and temperamental lady was well-liked everywhere. In recent times she has progressed much in her art, and she intended to exhibit a few pictures, already developed works, at an exhibition of the ‘Eight’. [...] Yesterday afternoon, after tea, she [...] went to a dear lady-friend in Városliget Alley, [...] The two women went together to the ‘Eight’ exhibition at the National Salon, where they attended a concert. There were many people there. Writers, painters, musicians – all of them disciples of modern trends. After the concert Mrs. Réthy left the party and set off home accompanied by a few acquaintances. For a while she was escorted by the writer Béla Balázs and the painter Dezsô Orban, but they took their leave of her on the Embankment: Orbán returned to the company for dinner, and Balázs went to E NDRE A DY , 1908 ( PHOTOGRAPH

A LADÁR S ZÉKELY )

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G YÖRGY L UKÁCS , A NNA H AMVASSY

AND

B ÉLA B ALÁZS , C . 1915

visit a family he knew. Meanwhile the tragedy took place on Margaret Bridge.”3 While the journalist of Világ kept a coy silence over intimate details, Pester Lloyd wrote that amongst other things a letter, too, had been found in her handbag: “My Dear Irma, Unfortunately this afternoon you cannot visit me. I had forgotten, because I wanted you to visit me. [...] I will be at home from 6 until 7 on Saturday. Herbert.”14 György Lukács could not have been in much doubt that Irma Seidler tried to escape from the renewed emotional crisis by engaging in a brief relationship with his friend Herbert Bauer, who published poems and essays in A Holnap and Nyugat under the name Béla Balázs. Naturally there were those who, learning all this, gave a barbed interpretation to events: “Some whirlwind, some fantastic mania, contagious disease is at work in certain Budapest circles, [...]” writes Nap, “The spouse of an excellent Hungarian painter, the lady suicide of Szondy utca, three young lady medics, and the unhappy Irma Réthy are the exhausted victims of this St Vitus’s dance, performed in the name of modern literature in the salons of rich smocks, in Lipótváros [a well-heeled area of Budapest – trans.]. This society is more noxious than the great cholera in the year dot, because then one could fight with disinfectant, carbolic and sublimate, but in vain would we sprinkle zacherlin [insecti-

cide – trans.] on the parquet to ward off these crazed herberts. It’s no use. Suffice to submit to a modern reading, and see the ladies of the audience swooning in delight, and the fantastic dervish dance whirling around the leaders of literature, and no longer will we be astonished if the rattling and wailing of suicides, women and ladies, rings in the ears of the public. A similar frenzy has been produced neither in Paris nor in Belgrade. The most sensible thing would be to relocate the entire company, beyond the city borders, in the mild green of Hûvösvölgy, or to the district named Angyalföld, but not after Murillo’s angels.”5 The reader very likely senses that the events came under the media spotlight not because of some family drama, but a deeper conflict lay in the background. This was a genuine battle of cultures, and the radically different attitude of the papers is a faithful reflection of the intellectual milieu in which the articles were written. The Hungarian capital was on fire with a fever of new arts, and as with every artistic revolution, the clash of tempers resounded. It may initially seem odd that the pointed arrow of the Nap's attack was directed at literature rather than at the fine arts. Irma Seidler was a painter, and she set off on her fatal journey from a venue just then a hotbed of scandal, the exhibition of the Eight. Furthermore she had not come from one of the condemned reading evenings, but from a concert where Béla

Bartók and his circle had presented their equally unusual compositions. But the writer for the Nap (and many at the time agreed with him) believed that the main bane of the entire “ultramodern” intellectual movement was literature, the crazed poets were those who had infected the whole of Hungarian cultural life, so it was them he lambasted using this case as a pretext. Without doubt, the literati had a handsome share at the opening event of the Eight in the National Salon on 29 April 1911. The exhibition presented a previously unheard-of collaboration between artists in modern Hungarian visual arts, literature, theatre, music and philosophy of art. Extended after the opening to last nearly a month, the exhibition was enhanced by five grand events: Ferenc Lehel’s lecture in the Galileo Circle on the painting of the Eight on 7 May; a literary reading evening on the sight on 12 May; a concert by Bartók and others at the same place on 18 May; the following day a debate organised by the Galileo Circle on “the artistic and social significance of trends in modern painting” in the Old Parliament Building, and as a closing event another literary evening on 25 May. Even an incomplete list of the names of those speaking at these events is impressive: Anna Lesznai, Gyula Szini, Ernô Szép, Ignotus, Dezsô Kosztolányi read from their own works, Frida Gombaszögi read poems by Ady, Sári Ferenczi recited Sekler folk ballads, performing in the concert were Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály and the Waldbauer– Kerpely String Quartet (with pieces by Bartók, Kodály and Weiner), and in the Galileo Circle either speaking or participating in debate were Ferenc Lehel, Mária Lehel, György Bölöni, Géza Lengyel, Károly Lyka, Károly Polányi, Pál Relle, and Károly Sztrakoniczky. In other words, here was everything that was new: the Eight and their entourage, the Nyugat and its circle, Bartók, Kodály and the New Hungarian Music Society.

A NTECEDENTS : M ODERN P ICTURES AND THE J OURNAL A H OLNAP The true roots of the process which culminated in the Eight exhibition in 1911 go back to 1908. This was the year Nyugat was launched, but the beginnings of collaboration between branches of the arts are not linked to this groundbreaking journal. Nor, in fact, to any other forum in the capital. The very same year the Holnap [Tomorrow] Literary Society was established in

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Nagyvárad, close in spirit to Nyugat and with some overlap amongst the founders, with the intention of creating a modern literary centre operating in the provinces. Main organisers of the society were Gyula Juhász, the outstanding poet, then working as a teacher, and Ákos Dutka, a Nagyvárad poet-journalist, and they won over Endre Ady, Mihály Babits and Béla Balázs, as well as two young local poets: Tamás Emôd and Jutka Miklós, to their cause.6 The Holnap Society did not have the strength to launch a regular publication and thereby to provide true competition to the literary journals of the capital, Nyugat in the first place, but the two anthologies of poetry published by the society and bearing its name (1908, 1909) sparked a veritable war in the Hungarian literary world, and at the time many saw the Holnap group as the standard-bearers of Modernism. “Holnap” was also the first to attempt to link its events with innovative trends in other fields of art – contemporary painting, music and theatre. In this Gyula Juhász and Ákos Dutka were those who took the most active role in the presentation of new Hungarian painters in Nagyvárad. The first such show came about under the aegis of the Hungarian Art Society in April 1908,7 with papal prelate Count Péter Vay nominally at the helm, though things were managed by artistic director Miklós Rózsa, who barely a year later was to found Mûvészház [Artist House]. The enterprise formed in February 1908 to make the works of Hungarian artists as widely accessible (and purchasable) as possible.8 The 260 paintings selected by Rózsa presented a much broader spectrum of what can be said to be contemporary Hungarian art, through nearly 80 painters, in Dutka’s words “from Károly Lotz to Ödön Márffy”.9 Of modern artists only Rippl-Rónai, Gulácsy, Márffy, Czigány, Boromisza and Ziffer participated with a considerable collection. Holnap, which formed in the days preceding the opening, was not formally present, but Ákos Dutka and Gyula Juhász played an important role in the events linked to the exhibition. During the one-week programme three so-called matinées were held: at the first Miklós Rózsa spoke on modern Western painting, and Gyula Juhász read some of his poems on works of art; at the second Gusztika Hevesi, member of the Szigliget Theatre recited poems, and at the third aesthete Artúr Bárdos gave a talk on “Artistic representation”.10 Endre Ady wrote a publicity piece, and Gyula Juhász and Ákos Dutka reviews on the exhibition, the latter two drawing parallels between the painting of Cézanne and Gauguin and that of the young Hungarians.11 In the abundant press reviews alongside Rippl-Rónai and Gulácsy, Czigány and Márffy also won praise, prompting the latter to hold

a retrospective in Nagyvárad the coming spring. Márffy asked Gyula Juhász in a letter dated January to help him organising it.12 The local press mentioned the exhibition, which opened on 11 April 1909 in the Great Hall of the County Hall for only nine days, merely as “Modern Pictures”, and Dutka and Juhász once more wrote feuilletons praising new Hungarian painting. On the Sunday before closing a literary matinée was held. According to the correspon-

F RONT

PAGE OF THE ANTHOLOGY

H OLNAP , 1908

dent of the daily paper Nagyvárad “At the beginning there was a small unpleasant surprise. The invitations to the matinée advertised a talk by Ákos Dutka, which due to unforeseen circumstances was cancelled, instead Boldizsár Kollányi [editor of the second Holnap anthology – Z.R.] “stepped in” and opened the matinée. He improvised a highly interesting and noteworthy commentary on the way of seeing of modern art. This off-the-cuff lecture of great intelligence roused keen interest. Afterwards Elza Batizfalvy and Nusi Diósi, the celebrated prima-donnas of the theatre, performed modern, fresh chansons, noisily welcome, and finally virtuoso violinist Zsigmond Mezey provided artistic delight. Gyula Juhász performed the finest parts of his “Atalanta” with immediacy and artistic precision, accompanied delicately by Károly Lehel, a com-

poser of operetta, on the piano.”13 Incidentally, in addition to entertainment and education, the event openly aimed to set the tone for the closing picture fair. Because the Márffy exhibition was supported by the Holnap group, a minor polemic developed among the local papers. Gyula Németh, a critic of the conservative Tiszántúl compared Márffy’s art to the “decadent symbolism” of Ady and A Holnap, and expressed the opinion that this kind of “Impressionism” had already gone out of fashion in France. Nagyváradi Napló defended the Holnap group, stirring Tiszántúl to a fresh attack. This time however it was not Márffy in the line of fire, but Károly Ferenczy and Béla Iványi Grünwald.14 The altercation faithfully shows how unclear the notions of contemporary art critics were. Just as the conservative critique rejected almost unanimously everything that it judged as beyond its norms, the globetrotting Ady and Dutka, and Gyula Juhász who versed on Meunier, Rippl-Rónai and Gauguin, were likewise insufficiently equipped to differentiate between contemporary trends. The front stretched between the “outdated” and the “innovative”. Two months earlier already, at the second exhibition of MIÉNK, it seemed almost obvious that the young group – the “Seekers” as they were generally referred to at the time – were to turn against the Nagybánya leaders, primarily opposing Károly Ferenczy’s naturalistic approach.15 The internal crisis was further deepened by the fact that at the general assembly in May of the National Salon, which housed the exhibition, the whole of the art society was fiercely attacked for having allowed the “ultra-moderns” to exhibit. It was against this background that in the summer of 1909 György Bölöni organised a travelling exhibition which presented the innovators of the time in Kolozsvár, Nagyvárad and Arad [today Cluj-Napoca, Baia Mare, Arad, Romania]. “Although the Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists (MIÉNK) did not take part officially as a society in the organisation, nor did Bölöni have any formal function in MIÉNK, it was generally known to both the contemporary press and later specialist literature that this series of exhibitions was considered as the presentation of MIÉNK in the provinces,”16 points out Árpád Tímár in a study dealing with the history of the association. In fact the exhibition bore the title “New Hungarian Painters”, and only those participated who were classified as the most radical members – those who had caused scandal at the second MIÉNK show. Without a catalogue no list of names can yet be drawn up, but it is certain that the selection was more daring than any previous one. Of the later members of the Eight certainly exhibited Károly Kernstok, Dezsô

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Ö DÖN M ÁRFFY : P ORTRAIT OF L AJOS G ULÁCSY , 1907 O NT HE LEFT : G YÖRGY B ÖLÖNI , 1910 S

Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Lajos Tihanyi and perhaps Ödön Márffy,17 as well as Róbert Berény, who had not hitherto exhibited with the Eight; of the older rebels József Rippl-Rónai and Béla Iványi Grünwald, from the Nagybánya “Neos” Ervin Körmendi-Frim, András Mikola, Sándor Galimberti, Tibor Boromisza, Csaba Vilmos Perlrott and Sándor Ziffer, and in terms of style something of an odd one out, but with a considerable collection, Lajos Gulácsy. (Discounting Gulácsy, Bölöni had actually organised an exhibition of the painters more recently described as the “Hungarian Fauves”.) This series of exhibitions resulted in mixed reception, and bankruptcy to Bölöni. The fringe events offered a richer and better thought out programme than on previous occasions. The Bolyai Circle of free thinkers, led by neurologist Hugó Lukács (Ady’s friend and later his doctor), was founded in Kolozsvár directly preceding the exhibition.18 This organisation, close in spirit to Holnap, took on the organisation of the show, including the matinée planned for the closing ceremony. Following introductory words by Hugó Lukács, Aranka Hettyei, member of the Kolozsvár National Theatre recited poems by young poets from Kolozsvár (Mária Berde, Zsolt Harsányi and Ernô Ligeti), then György Bölöni gave a talk on modern painting, with special emphasis on the art of József Rippl-Rónai. He was followed by actor Gyula Fehér reciting poems by Vajda, Reviczky and Ady, and Emma Dezséri read an – unidentified – short story by Oscar Wilde.19 Organs of the press close to the Bolyai Circle lauded the programme, and regretted only that the audi-

ence was spares. Erdélyi Lapok, from the other side, wrote maliciously: “Following the pattern of metropolitan exhibitions, the organisers threw a literary do in the exhibition pavilion. In this, works by Ady and other young modern poets heightened the gaudiness of the works, which already float in over-bright colours. At this moment the muses of poetry and painting shed tears of bitterness on Parnassus.”20 In addition to the organisation, Hugó Lukács wrote an insightful study on the exhibition,21 and through his purchases assisted the enterprise financially. In fact, he accompanied Bölöni’s group to Nagyvárad, in order to hold a talk on modern painting at the second matinée there. The programme in Nagyvárad was organised by Holnap, and this time not content with a single event, they held events on both Sundays during the exhibition. But not everything went according to plan. The special guests were to have been Rippl-Rónai and Gulácsy, but only the latter arrived, and the first event was given without the promised concert in which “the Barta Quartet [was to perform] a modern piece of music”.22 On 7 June in the exhibition venue called Fekete Sas, after György Bölöni’s introductory talk a telegram greeting from Rippl-Rónai was read, and Mrs. Ákos Dutka “read aloud a couple of Impressionist poems from the new Holnap volume, in mood and tone akin to the MIÉNK pictures”, that is by Ákos Dutka, Gyula Juhász, Tamás Emôd and Ady, then Gyula Juhász praised his friend Lajos Gulácsy. More “Holnap” poems followed, and in conclusion Ákos Dutka spoke about the painting of Rippl-Rónai and the MIÉNK group. “With this impressive lecture the

matinée, which interestingly documents the related artistic endeavours of A Holnap and MIÉNK, and which was attended all along with focused interest, ended.” – wrote the correspondent to Nagyvárad about this programme, a marathon even without music.23 The sensation of the next event, according to advance publicity,24 was to have been a joint performance by Endre Ady, just returned from Paris, and Béla Reinitz, the “congenial composer of Ady songs”. Reinitz in the end did not arrive, but the audience was not left without music. Nagyváradi Napló enthusiastically reported: “At eleven o’clock in the morning one could hardly move in the Fekete Sas exhibition venue. The public had filled the vast hall choc-a-bloc. A particularly large number of ladies were present. The matinée was opened by grammar school professor Gyula Juhász. In a brief, enthusiastic speech he welcomed Endre Ady, who as a guest took the time to appear once more before the Nagyvárad public. This encounter is always welcome and moving. For it was from here, Nagyvárad, that Endre Ady set out on that phenomenal journey which has now led him into the ranks of the greatest poets of world literature. After the opening, Dr. Hugó Lukács, chief medical officer in Kolozsvár and chairman of Bolyai Society spoke of how to view modern art, how to learn to like it, and what treasures it held. He spoke on this subject with great immediacy, rhetorical elegance, and vast knowledge. The audience repaid the fine reading with an extended applause. Next, piano teacher Irma Rafael played Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. The young lady musician interpreted this fine creation of Italian music with deep feeling and perfect virtuosity. After this, painter Lajos Gulácsy read his fantasy ‘Aurelia’, which is in fact the description of a picture to be painted. This small description (just like all of Lajos Gulácsy’s pictures) was resplendent, glowing in rich colours brought into harmony with refined taste. Lajos Gulácsy is a great master of mysteriously delicate colours. This small composition too, is like a Byzantine picture. It pleased the public greatly. Gulácsy’s reading won much applause. This was followed by another piece of music, the young violinist Zsigmond Mezey, accompanied by Irma Rafael on the piano, played Wieniawski’s Legend. The depth and noble purity of his playing conquered the audience, who gave long applause. Finally Endre Ady approached the reading table. The audience greeted him with an outbreak of applause and cheering. He read his poems ‘Az antikrisztus útja’, ‘Szeretném, ha szeretnének’, ‘Elsô szeretôm ölében’, and ‘Virágkezek a fejemen’. [...] The poetry of Endre Ady is becoming deeper, with a nobler ring, more enchantingly

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magical. All of his poems had an elemental effect. Particularly the verse ‘Szeretném, ha szeretnének’ had such a touchingly direct effect that many wept. The great poet’s reading closed in a roar of applause.”25 This was indeed a splendid programme, of which the standard and the variety of branches of art represented was not to be found in any of the oncoming events of the Eight – true, in 1911 they separated the programmes of the fringe events into categories of literature, art criticism and music. While in respect of art the first matinée focused mainly on Rippl-Rónai, the painter in the spotlight at the second was Lajos Gulácsy, who had a large collection on show in Nagyvárad.

AND

M IHÁLY N AGY

N AGYVÁRAD

WITH THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE LITERARY PERIODICAL

This reflected the tastes of Gyula Juhász and Ákos Dutka, for whom the decadent Symbolism veering towards mysticism was closer than the bright, a thematic pictures of the Hungarian Fauves. The two Romantic composers – the contemporary Puccini, and Wieniawski who had died a quarter of a century beforehand – in fact, matched Gulácsy’s world well. Nevertheless, the cautious shift of emphasis in the Nagyvárad event was rather an allowance for bourgeois Secessionist taste, than “revolutionary daring”, as Ákos Dutka claimed in his memoirs.26 Indeed, Árpád Tímár may have been right when he came to the conclusion that “through the focusing on Rippl-Rónai and Gulácsy a new split became apparent among the MIÉNK members, more pre-

N YUGAT , 1908 ( PHOTOGRAPH

E DE L EMBERT )

cisely among those more modern members of MIÉNK who participated in the touring exhibition. Although, he goes on to state, the Nagyvárad press, unlike Budapest, did not draw a sharp line of distinction between the successful artists to be accepted and the radicals to be rejected, the difference in the degree of sympathy was perceptible. It may be that this split played – to some extent – a role in forming the Kernstok group, and the evolving of the Eight.”27 The Nagyvárad public knew little of the painters’ internal affairs. Local intellectuals were far more sensitive to a literary conflict which had become known as the “duk-duk affair”, and was launched by a piece published by Endre Ady in November the preceding year. Wishing to pre-

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D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : E NDRE A DY , 1908 (M ISSING )

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serve his independence, the poet had had enough of the endeavours of literary bandwagons to appropriate him, and in Ferenc Herczeg’s journal Új Idôk wrote a parable in which he rather coarsely rejected all attempts of the kind, saying: “In my name and alongside me moves a band of nobodies, ranting and raving, fighting and writing, with whom I have nothing to do with.”28 Ady’s words were taken to heart (and indignantly) by both the Nyugat group and the Holnap circle. The Nagyvárad group felt that in the competition between Nyugat, Új Idôk and A Holnap Ady had deserted them. Thus it was of special significance to them that Ady appeared personally at the second matinée of the exhibition, moreover, with “Szeretném, ha szeretnének” [I'd love to be loved] he made a kind of reparation to the Holnap group.29

and exhibitions wearied Ady. Even to the Louvre he only went for Léda’s sake, and he considered the artistic revolution at the time to be an eccentric fad. Bölöni claimed: “He was even less of a connoisseur than the average exhibition visitor, and he wouldn't have been able to tell a Van Gogh from a Gauguin, a Picasso from a Matisse, or a László Paál landscape from a Munkácsy.”30 Although Gauguin’s career captured his imagination, he was too lazy to go to the large retrospective Gauguin show in the Salon d’Automne (1906) In the end he wrote a review of the exhibition without seeing a single picture by the painter, and only had an idea of the works from Bölöni’s detailed account.31 He wrote nearly fifty feuilletons on art32 but they are almost devoid of critical or aesthetic considerations, being little more than occasional reports on the atmosphere. That later Ady used the respect, he had as a writer, in the cause of modern art was thanks to the friendships he established with young Hungarian painters studying in Paris. At the beginning of 1906 his new volume of poems, Új versek rolled off the press to burst onto the Hungarian intellectual scene. “In March [in fact February – Z.R.] Új versek came out,” writes Bölöni “and with the volume I received from Ady I became the main preacher of his poetry in Paris. Ady’s first fans were painters. I lived up on Montparnasse, a quiet place then, below Rue Campagne-Première in a studio house still there today. Here was Róbert Berény’s studio, Dezsô Czigány painted here, I often played host to

A DY AND A DYISM IN PAINTING The person of Ady was of key importance for artists as well as literary circles. He nurtured friendly relations with modern painters, mainly with Rippl-Rónai and the Eight, which might seem odd in light of the fact that contemporary opinion held unanimously that Ady had little sensitivity to painting. György Bölöni had awoken his interest in the fine arts in Paris, when they met. It was not an easy task, for visiting museums

FRONT PAGE OF

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Lajos Gulácsy [...], the two Körmendi-Frims, the sculptor and the painter, Sándor Galimberti, András Mikola, Ziffer and others, whose names are swept from my memory by time; I have been living away from Hungary for so long. The leader of the young generation of painters was Béla Czóbel, who created a stir in the Indépendants then, when Henri Matisse appeared.” As well as those mentioned above, Ady also made friends with Károly Kernstok,33 and Ödön Márffy. Some years older than him, Kernstok was perhaps the only one whose name the poet had come across before.34 Márffy and Ady were initially eyeing each other with mutual suspicion nourished by unfamiliarity: “It must have been in the summer of 1906,” wrote Márffy “when I was sitting with Lajos Fülep on the terrace of Café Cluny, a meeting point for Hungarians in the Latin Quarter, when Ady came in. That was where I first met him. Fülep, who had known him for some time, introduced him. With Hungarians there was always the constant suspicion and risk of them asking for a loan, so I was cautious and reserved with the unknown young man. I lived most frugally, lunching on twenty francs a month, all paid in advance, to ensure that I could stay in Paris for as long as possible. Ady also lacked confidence, and in return he behaved frigidly at this first encounter. This, in turn, struck me as unpleasant, and when Ady left, I asked Fülep who his friend was. I was surprised when he said, simply and seriously: “The greatest poet of our time.” From then on I saw Ady in

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a completely different light, and watched him curiously at our later meetings.”35 The writer of Új versek proved to be not only an excellent poet, but a great chum too. “As for Ady’s relations with artists,” Márffy goes on “it was more like friendship and not any deep interest in the artists. He did the rounds of the exhibitions, because he wrote articles on them for his paper in Pest. In Budapest he came to one or two shows only for the sake of our group, because of the friendship that linked him to us. He took an interest in modern painting movements and the Eight Group, then newly formed, and made friends with artists. [...] Ady felt solidarity with us as representatives of modern art, particularly with Kernstok, Tihanyi and Czigány.”36 He immortalised the type of the Hungarian painter living in Paris at the beginning of the century in the figure of Ottokár in his novel in verse Margaret wants to Live (1912). Literary historians believe the heroine to be modelled on Margit Vészi, while the lawyer of the triumvirate, György, is to represent Bölöni. Many suspected Károly Kernstok to to be the model of Ottokár, but Bölöni and Márffy agree that Ady combined several painters in the character of the artist.37 The friendship between the poet and the painters of the later Eight group, of which countless anecdotes survive – mainly memories of drinking together, and mutual leg-pulling – continued in Hungary. There is no space to go into these stories38 here, but it is important to note that Ady’s

relationship with the painters remained genuinely intimate and free of formalities until his death. Of the Eight, Dezsô Czigány did the most portraits of Ady (at least eight in number), of which one, a charcoal drawing, illustrated the volume Vér és Arany (1908). Apart from RipplRónai, perhaps Czigány was the only one for whom the impatient Ady was willing to sit for,40 the portraits by Lajos Tihanyi, Ödön Márffy, and Bertalan Pór were made later from memory, or based on photographs. Though Ady was no art collector (since he had no permanent home until 1917, he hardly could be one) over the years several works by painters of the Eight came into his possession. Dezsô Czigány presumably gave him as a gift the oil portrait made in 1907, which functioned as a kind of “love barometer’ in the poet’s relationship with his muse, Léda. “The portrait played an amusing role in the tiffs between Léda and Bandi [Endre],” wrote Bölöni. “At such times Ady demanded the portrait back from Léda. Sometimes Léda tore it off the wall in anger, and the portrait flew out of the room into the corridor, only to later be hung in its place by the same hands with a loving smile.”41 An India ink drawing of a rider42 was probably also a gift from Kernstock, maybe in return for Ady dedicating his poem Sípja régi babonának to him. But while receiving pictures as a gift, the poet also bought them. Persuaded by Bölöni, Léda bought two paintings from Czóbel in July 1909 in Paris.43 These pictures are now unfortunately lost and

AND

L ÉDA , 1907 ( PHOTOGRAPH

A LADÁR S ZÉKELY )

only Itóka’s description can give us some idea of Czóbel’s fauve masterpieces: “On two walls [of Ady’s room] two particularly fine Czóbel pictures hold one’s eye for a long time. They are composed landscapes structured with great art and a subduing of fresh, bright colours. The sunlight streams in them, and in their air the open branches seem to stir. Madame Léda was initially averse to the somewhat raw power of their novelty, like with over-intense sun, against which we shade our eyes. But encouraged by Gyurka [György] he went ahead and bought these two Czóbel pictures. Then she quickly learnt to understand and like them. Initially Ady, too, had DEZSÔ CZIGÁNY: PORTRAIT

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this attitude to them, but his understanding flashed like lightening over the art of the pictures.”44 He bought a painting (or drawing)45 from Márffy at the 1911 exhibition of the Eight, though we do not know exactly what, which later presumably returned to the painter’s possession via Csinszka, the poet’s widow. He bought another picture from Márffy in the mid-1910s, and from Tihanyi in his studio in Dráva utca, where the two painters lived. According to Bölöni Ady “did not pay for Márffy’s picture, no matter how many times Márffy asked him for the sum. But Tihanyi made Ady pay up, aggressively and mercilessly.”46 If Ady was so close to the painters of the Eight, why did he not appear in any of their fringe programmes, as he had done in Nagyvárad under the auspices of A Holnap? The explanation is prosaic: mainly because he was not in Budapest at the time. When the “New Pictures” show was on he was in Paris (December 1909–May 1910); from April 1911 (after a brief separation from Léda) he spent two weeks in Érmindszent, then in May returned to the French capital. He could perhaps have appeared at the third, incomplete, exhibition, but this did not have such a large series of accompanying cultural events as the previous ones, and another factor may have been that of his closest friends only Tihanyi exhibited (not Kernstok, Czigány, Czigány or Márffy). Poems by Ady were, however, performed at the literary evenings at the Eight exhibitions in 1911 and 1912, in the expert interpretation of the actress Frida Gombaszögi. As a matter of fact, Ady visited the third exhibition. Bölöni gives a sarcastic account of the event: “I took Ady to the exhibition of the ‘Eight’, which caused such a great stir, to introduce him to new painting. In the great hall opposite the entrance hung my portrait: It was by Tihanyi. [...] ‘Who is this Caesar then?’ asked Oszkár Jászi when I gave him a tour of the exhibition. ‘Who is this bloated convict?’ asked Mrs. Lajos Barta as we passed in front of the picture. ‘Tell me, whose portrait is this?’ Ady asked Tihanyi as we stood in front of it. ‘He seems familiar!’ ‘I bet!’ said Tihany. ‘You sit next to him day after day. But as I see it, you relate to pictures the way readers relate to your poems,’ he added teasingly.”47 The question naturally arises, that if it was so obvious to the painters that Ady stumbled around in the world of art, why did they feel the need to emphasise the kinship between their own art and Ady’s? And is it indeed a genuine kinship of approach? For sure, when the group formed at the end of 1909 – and they had not yet chosen to call themselves the Eight – they paid homage to Ady with the choice of the title for their first exhibition. The title “New Pictures”,

with its simplicity, was more effective than holding the show under the name “Seekers” or some other general name. But, besides the title indicating the intention to break with the past, it also expressed a link to a tradition in the making. Just as Ady’s volume Új versek [New Poems] had been a milestone in literature, Kernstok’s group wanted “New Pictures” to be a milestone in Hungarian painting. Two years later Bartók and his colleagues used the same symbolism in founding the New Hungarian Music Society. Critics too, sensed this endeavour, and judged the intellectual fellowship variously according to their own disposition in sympathising or not

le at travesty; but we also concede that it makes the disciples of revolutionary daring not only understanding, but enthusiastic.”49 Bölöni clearly intended the comparison as praise: “As to what this means culturally, the balance of this artistic endeavour stands thus: as colloquial Hungarian compares to Ignotus’s, as Mihály Szabolcska’s poems to Endre Ady’s, so do the painters of today’s exhibitions [i.e. the (conventional) Mûcsarnok group – Z. R.] compare to the endeavours of the young Hungarian artists.50 In spite of all this, one can only with difficulty show an actual link between the poetry of Ady, symbolic, sensitive to social world-view and religious issues, and passionate all through, and the painting of the Eight, which explored mainly formal problems. The primary link between them was the desire for newness expressed in the title. The painters of “New Pictures” felt that, in their own way, they transplant spirit of modern Paris to the “Hungarian fallow land” just like the poet of “New Poems” [Új versek]. For the very same reason, Ady saw an ally in the group, even if he was not particularly given to this kind of modern painting. Critics approached them in the same way – tarring poet and painters with the same brush: one side saw them as modern revolutionaries, rioting against the outmoded and the “persecuting aesthetics”, the other as unpatriotic rebels, picking up notions alien to the Hungarian ideal without any criticism.

THE E IGHT AND THE J OURNAL N YUGAT

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PAGE OF THE FIRST ISSUE OF

N YUGAT , 1 J ANUARY 1908

with Ady’s poetry. László Bányász made no secret of his belief that “the true but deeply concealed intention of this painterly Adyism is the desire to be noticed, the yearning for success over all tribulations. Of artistic conviction, however, it contains not a jot, and for sure, at the witching midnight hour, they must be confessing this to themselves remorsefully.”48 Ferenc Kanizsai adopted a more understanding stance: “The notable and significant exhibition we viewed today in the exhibition venue of the Könyves Kálmán society, to be able to inform the public, could be labelled the Adyism of Hungarian painting. By this we have stated that it gives good occasion for caricature, for a cheap chuck-

This battle of approaches raged mainly between the journal Nyugat and its allies – to use Aladár Komlós’s expression the “sub-Nyugat” papers (Huszadik Század, Aurora, Renaissance etc.) and (to use Eszter Balázs’s expression) the “counterNyugat” press (Élet, Magyar Figyelô, Magyar Kultúra etc.).51 Columns by critics in the dailies also joined the camps of this battle of culture. Some of the standard-bearers of Western modernism were Világ, Egyetértés, and Népszava, while the protecting bastions of national ideas included the Budapesti Hírlap, the Pesti Hírlap and Magyar Szó. The epicentre of the struggle was undoubtedly Nyugat, launched in January 1908, and the intellectual milieu of this journal had supporters and opponents alike. Although Nyugat was launched primarily as a literary organ, it expressed solidarity with artists in related branches of art in the interest of protecting artistic autonomy. From the beginning, it regularly published art reviews, opinions, and from July 1912 each issue reserved space for contemporary graphics

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by way of illustration. In addition to the permanent art critic at Nyugat, Géza Lengyel, pieces on art were published in the journal by those committed to new painting, Aladár Bálint, Géza Bölöni and Géza Feleky, and sometimes Ignotus himself took a stand in artistic questions. During the period we are interested in now, the journal’s attitude was characterised by support of all Hungarian endeavours against academicism. In line with this, it regularly criticised the exhibitions at Mûcsarnok, while it reported more benevolently (if not without criticism) on shows judged to be modern. Nothing can show the views of Nyugat better than the fact that in the very first issue in January 1908, Géza Lengyel paid homage to the pictures of the French Impressionists, shown at the National Salon, with a detailed review, while a few pages later unleashed his scorn on the Winter Show of53 Mûcsarnok. In the years to follow Lengyel wrote with dedication and prolifically on the programmes of MIÉNK, the KÉVE and Mûvészház. Nyugat also put emphasis on reporting on the international context, thus there were pieces published on Gauguin, Cézanne, Carrière, Klimt, Rodin, on the exhibitions of the Salon des Indépendants in Paris and the German Expressionists in Dresden. It is impossible, however, not to notice that the most modern foreign trends won only cautious acclaim in the journal – if at all. But Nyugat was not slow with an opinion if Hungarian Modernism was to be defended, as is well shown by the so-called Tisza debate which broke out at the beginning of 1911. On 1 February István Tisza, a highly influential politician, published an article in Magyar Figyelô, a monthly journal dedicated to national cultural policy – largely seeking to counterbalance Nyugat – which he had recently launched together with Ferenc Herczeg. In an article under the title “20 000 crowns” the former (and future) Prime Minister expounded his hostile views on modern painting on the example of Pál Szinyei Merse. Tisza argued that his painting of the “interesting” but “problematic” May Day had not lead Szinyei astray, yet lo and behold, his showy late canvas The Park had recently been sold for 20 thousand crowns. “Does he still paint May Days? Oh no – he paints the eternally true and the eternally beautiful that his soul had imbibed from nature […]” Tisza wrote, but went on to reproach the elderly artist for supporting the young modernists. “Anyone who can paint like that should not take sides with sick trends, but should lend his whole weight to true, holy art,”54 However, Tisza did not stop at that. In the first half of the year he made a point of visiting every exhibition of modern art and struck an increasingly belligerent note. “A whole legion of paintbrushwavers, who scorn knowledge of drawing and

M IHÁLY B ÍRÓ : P OSTER

painting, have inundated with their mottled canvasses the Budapest exhibitions and invaded the naïve audiences of the countryside. Grotesque things, such as the latest exhibition of KÉVE or

FOR THE PERIODICAL

A URORA , 1911

that of Bertalan Pór, have a magically deterrent effect. May God bless these fine allies of ours. Let them make bold strides, let them keep painting more and more dreadful things. Every square

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D EZSÔ K OSZTOLÁNYI , 1915 ( PHOTOGRAPH ( DETAIL )

D ÉNES R ÓNAI )

metre of canvas and every kilogram of paint that falls prey to their creative rage will perish in the service of true art, for they merely hasten the healthy resurrection of good taste.”55 Nyugat was quick to stand up to the charges. In its issue of 16 February, it repudiated Tisza’s claims in no less then three writings. Reiteratively titled “Twenty thousand crowns”, Ignotus’s editor’s letter defended May Day and its artist in a polite albeit preachy tone, arguing that it is not the job of a politician to say whether or not something counts as healthy in art.56 However, Aladár Bálint went further, concluding his summary of Szinyei Merse’s work by saying he did not produce any important works after May Day, and it was consequently a mistake to make him out to be the leader of young artists in any way. “Indeed there was among us who stood the ground, in fight, and suffered the roaring laughter of the non accepting, but he was not called Pál Szinyei Merse, but József Rippl Rónai; and let us be reminded of another big fighter, also known by a different name: Károly Kernstok,” he wrote.57 Publishing his speech read at Pór’s exhibition, Lajos Hatvany argued in the heat of the debate with Tisza that “the entire life of Pál Szinyei Merse is a great debt. […] Is it right to present Szinyei Merse’s career to young people as an example – a career that turned from early despair into resigned subtlety, and which, in spite of its humane purity and beauty, is immoral by the peculiar ethical standards of art, on account of its crimes against the holiest of things: talent?58 Nyugat would return to the issue from time to time,59 in particular as István Tisza allegedly made disparaging remarks about the works of Rippl-Rónai at his Mûvészház exhibition.60

L AJOS T IHANYI : P ORTRAIT (M ISSING )

D EZSÔ K OSZTOLÁNYI , 1914

In the context of this “cultural war” it is understandable that the Eight received every possible support from Nyugat. While Nyugat’s backing did not extend to the kind of revolutionary zeal that György Bölöni and Pál Relle vented in other papers, the journal did dedicate lengthy analytical writings to all three exhibitions of the Eight; Géza Lengyel wrote about the first two, Géza Feleky published a separate article about the second, and Zoltán Felvinczi Takács about the third. The tone of these texts ranged from the wait-and-see sympathising attitude to the understanding and explanatory, propagandistic elements were avoided, adhering to the professional standards of their views by maintaining a contemplative distance. That Nyugat regarded the Eight as an ally is apparent from the fact that in early 1910 it published in consecutive issues Károly Kernstok’s essay “Inquisitive Art” and György Lukács’s “The Roads Parted”.61 The two texts – that can be regarded as manifestos of the group – had originally been read by their respective authors at the debates held at the Galileo Circle at the time of “New Pictures”. The contributors of Nyugat, Ignotus in particular,62 would have been offended by the radical critique of Impressionism expounded in the two essays, since up till that point (and later on too) they brought out numerous appreciative articles about Impressionism, yet both Kernstok’s and Lukács’s talk was in keeping with the journal’s modernity rooted in classical values. “The progressive half of our audiences, that is to say the public ostracised by the conservatives just like us, painters, have become aware of the beginning – not the end or the result – of a long journey that we shall

Ö DÖN M ÁRFFY : P ORTRAIT OF M RS D EZSÔ K OSZTOLÁNYI , C . 1913 • C AT . NO . 282

embark on, with tradition as our starting point, in quest of the new values that will in essence be closely related to the good art of all times,” Kernstok wrote,63 while Lukács expressed the same idea in his more belligerent manner: “What we are looking at is not differences but conflicts; the people who are now at odds with each other have landed in opposite camps not merely on account of their orientation, but by virtue of their sheer existence. This is not about a new art making itself heard, but about the resurrection of old art, and about the death-and-life struggle with modern art caused by this resurrection.”64 A year later Ignotus wrote his short piece “The case of the Eight”, “This has befallen the world before, and knowledge as art was captivating in the naïvely conscious power of Mantegna. His bold foreshortening, daring perspectives and equilibrium of form must have appeared shockingly distorted to people accustomed to the mottled picture plane. Beautiful and disciplined academism goes back to him, and the shocking painters of today will soon find their own voice in some beautiful and disciplined academism. And apropos of the French: Ingres is currently being rediscovered in Paris, he is being hailed as a great painter and a brilliant draughtsman.”65 The anti-Academism and anti-Impressionism of the Eight was not in fact rebellion against the past, but rather, against the present, though frequently with reference to the past. Genuinely based on Cézannian principles, their objectives – to seek the “essence” of things as opposed to mere atmospheres and fleeting impressions – were in keeping with the professed creed of Nyugat. In an analysis of the design of the journal and Ignotus’s introductory article, György

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Eisemann wittily remarks, “In the medium of Nyugat there was plenty of room for the mutually-reinforcing opposites immanent in modernity, such as Babits’s Latin culture and Ady’s ‘allegro barbaro’ voice; actually, what there was no room for, was the avant-garde.”66 Which explains why the critics of Nyugat endorsed the art of the Eight, which otherwise scandalised many people, but were at a loss to comprehend the radical Expressionist Die Brücke group and in particular the Futurists (whose name even sought to break with the past). In addition to publishing the manifestoessay, Nyugat devoted much space to Károly Kernstok whom it hailed as a great painter as well as an intellectual comrade. Kernstok received many mentions in various articles and writings dedicated specially to his art.67 It is presumably no accident either that the first illustration, leading to the publication of many graphic works from July 1912 onwards, was Kernstok’s copper engraving made for the Horsemen at the Water theme. Nyugat’s other favoured artist from the group was evidently Bertalan Pór, with no fewer than five writings dedicated to him in this period.68 So, Nyugat devoted its primary attention to the two least “wild” and most widely acclaimed, senior artists; in other words, it attached greater importance to conveying modernist values it considered to be classical than to experimental intention. However, the editors proved to be more daring when it came to publishing illustrations of artworks. It is true, though, that the first drawing was brought out after the dust of the big art scandals had settled. The dominance of the Eight and their circles in illustrations published in Nyugat prior to the outbreak of the First World War is striking. Róbert Berény was the artist with the most reproductions (four graphic works), followed by Kernstok (three works), Márffy and Tihanyi (two each), Czóbel, Orbán and Pór (one each). Artists appearing in groups exhibitions with the Eight – Fémes Beck (two works), Márk Vedres and Mária Lehel (one each) – were also given space in Nyugat. Works by Artists whose style was similar to the Eight artists – Rezsô Bálint, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, Géza Bornemisza, János Kmetty, Béla Kádár and József Nemes Lampérth – also featured in the journal, as well as the older generation represented by Rippl-Rónai, Iványi Grünwald and Vaszary. The list of names is formidable and the majority of the works published were considered to be extremely modern at the time. Berény’s prominent role might seem surprising at first sight, him being the most radical figure of the Eight. To dispel the mystery, however, it should be considered that Berény had family connections to Ignotus. For an outstandingly skilful artist like Berény, this in itself

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : P ORTRAIT

would not raise many eyebrows. However, the second illustrator publishing most in 1912–1913 was Lili Somló who, going by her drawings, was an amateur – but she was Berény’s sister-in-law, Ignotus’s girlfriend and future wife. Róbert Berény had the opportunity to publish in Nyugat, apart from his graphic works, theoretical treatises, exhibition reports and music critiques. The authors of Nyugat made further flamboyant testimony of their allegiance to the Eight

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by participating in the events accompanying their exhibitions. At the exhibition of the collected works of Bertalan Pór at the Könyves Kálmán Salon on 12 February 1911, Ignotus, Lajos Hatvany, György Bölöni and Jenô Tersánszky Józsi gave a lecture about “artistic and literary issues”.69 Pór must have considered the relationship of painting and literature to be important, because four days later József Diner-Dénes gave a lecture titled “Modern painting and modern

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lyrics” which included his recital, as an illustration of “several modern Hungarian, German and French poems”.70 Soon afterwards, at the Eight’s exhibition at the National Salon, two literary evenings were held with the participation of Nyugat members. On 12 May Ernô Szép, Anna Lesznai (who contributed to the exhibition, in no negligible way, with her applied art works) and Gyula Szini read their own works, and Frida Gombaszögi (a rising star of the Hungarian Theatre, later a prominent theatre and film actress) recited poems by Endre Ady and Ernô Szép.71 Az Est even published a humorous-melancholic poem by Ernô Szép in defence of the Eight:72 The Eight The poor Eight are being bullied, They’re all tattered and all sullied. Do not bray, The critics say Spitting at the canvas Wilfully to harass, There’s just no ending To all the pestering, And they’re hit on By every moron. Punches keep showering down For coming from Cézanne’s crowd, And many an art patron grumbles That Goya was better by miles,

I NVITATION

And splutters an old man, irreverent, How Mukácsy was more excellent. Thus are the Eight by the Scyths tormented, Smothered with wound and mud and taint, They sob, wanting their frustration vented: “We are eight, sir, we are Eight!” The second lecture was part of the closing event on 25 May. It started with a talk by Ödön Gerô, a long excerpt of which was brought out by the 5 August issue of the “sub-Nyugat” Aurora. Gerô spoke about the new art coming together with its audiences, and the importance of joint performances with the sister arts:73 “This exhibition was special for the sense of solidarity between not only audience and artist, but also between every new trend in art and every current of social progression. […] And we have witnessed in these rooms such manifestations of the sister arts, literature and music that confirm this very beautiful, motivating and holy solidarity.” Following the critic’s performance, Margit Kaffka recited her own poems, Sári Ferenczi folk ballads, and Dezsô Kosztolányi read excerpts from The Laments of a poor little child.74 There was considerably less fuss about the exhibition of the incomplete 1912 Eight show than a year and a half before, and consequently the accompanying events were more modest, too. It included just one literary night where, sandwiched between talks given by György Bölöni and Oszkár Jászi, Anna Lesznai recited

TO THE CONCERT HOSTED DURING THE EXHIBITION OF THE

E IGHT

18 M AY 1911

her own poems, and Frida Gombaszögi poems by Ady and Petôfi. According to articles advertising the exhibition Endre Nagy and Frigyes Karinthy from Nyugat should also have participated, but Karinthy in the end did not turn up.75 His participation would have been very special indeed, since his famous parody, Így írtok ti [That’s how you write], published in 1912, included the pamphlet “A critique of Hungarian paintings. (The exhibition of paintings of the ‘Crazy’)”, which was targeted at modern art criticism, but at the same time spoke without mercy of its subject, too. The “Crazy” [“Kergék”] cannot, in the text, be identified with the Eight (or the “Seekers”, i.e. “Keresôk”, close in acoustics to the nickname) – among the painters, mentioned by name, “Ferenc Fringia” for example very probably stands for the founder of the KÉVE group, Ferenc SzablyaFrischauf – but the writing is as much saturated with sarcasm over the exaggerations of modern painting as are László Kézdi-Kovács’s critiques.76 The critics of Nyugat were no alien to coarse or sarcastic discourse when it came to a trend they considered to be an exaggeration. They were least kind to the Futurists. As early as 1910 Babits referred to Marinetti as infamous, and declared that Nyugat could not make common cause with Futurist poetry. “What this Italian is trying at with his infantile enthusiasm has long been surpassed here, and we do not consider it to be modern, but rather, a parody of modernity. In Hungary, only a third-rate imitator of Ady would stick to being meaningless, and only a country writer would seek perversion, like a grammar school student dreaming about forbidden fruit,” he wrote.77 As for Ady, he used Puccini (!) as a pretext to grumble about Futurist music. “Well, I loath Futurists, naturally only and foremost because they are not very talented, but they are very programmatic.”78 Written in connection with an exhibition in Paris, Béla Balázs’s words sound as if they were quoted from some oldfashioned anti-Eight criticism: “On the walls of the three exhibition rooms of the BernheimJeune Gallery, mutilated body parts whirl in a vortex of tumbling chimneys, tattered clothes and dismantled machines. The audience... well, the audience are watching one another, not daring to laugh.”79 Róbert Berény discussing the modern international show at the National Salon, seemingly takes sides with the Futurists: “This is not anarchy, nor is it pointless blustering or denial of everything that happened before, but rather, the expansion and increase of possibilities. There is no need to shower abuse on them and go into a foaming rant about them.” But, he goes on depreciatingly about the paintings of Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo: “Generally speaking these Italians are better Futurists than

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painters, which is of course no fault of Futurism.” In Berény’s review, Kandinsky is also treated roughly: “I find fault in his use of frames, moreover the abstract lines, neither descriptive nor stylising, led simply by emotion can hardly be followed and are not fit to generate similar emotions in the viewer. Which is why ornamental arts stagnate, too, they are good for balance– games only, but useless for conveying spiritual content.”80 What is even more surprising than Berény’s supercilious attitude is the refusal and contempt expressed by Aladár Bálint – speaking always in the highest terms of the Eight – in connection with Die Brücke, a group that was in many respects the German equivalent of the Eight. “Upstairs the Dresden youths, the members of the ‘Brücke’ exhibited their works. Épater les bourgeois! Every canvas is a veritable battle cry. The trouble is the boys haven’t a clue for whom and why they’re fighting. Their weapons? They are poor, very poor. I mean, cramming the character of an entire landscape within four frames by means of three or four thick lines […] As I walk downstairs, I involuntarily sigh: poor Gauguin, what has become of you!”81 It should be added that in this period the Fauves received no attention at all in Nyugat, nor did Matisse very much, and when he did, it was not in a very flattering context. Cubism was first mentioned very late, in 1912 only, and in a negative way,82 although subsequently (in 1912–1913) two independent writings were discussing the trend, objectively, seeking to understand.83 Nyugat’s sympathy for the Eight was naturally reciprocated, but the painters had relatively few means of returning the journal’s cultural backing. Their way of expressing their gratitude was mainly and foremost to draw or paint portraits of people belonging to the circle of the journal. The Ady portraits have already been discussed, mention should be made of Lajos Tihanyi’s portrait of Dezsô Kosztolányi and Ödön Márffy’s painting of the poet’s wife, Ilona Harmos; both works are in the constructive style typical of the Eight. Tihanyi is credited with painting the largest number of portraits. Over the decades, he painted György Bölöni and later his wife Itóka, Béla Révész, the sons of Miksa Fenyô, and created several graphic works of Nyugat writers, including Jenô Tersánszky Józsi, Lajos Barta, Mihály Babits and Zsigmond Móricz. Róbert Berény drew a traditional portrait of Ignotus built of dynamic lines almost reminiscent of the Futurists, which was eventually printed in Nyugat. Praised by the critics at the third exhibition of the Eight, a painting based on this sketch is substantially more reserved and realistic. It may not be surprising that the longest review of the painting was also published in Nyugat.84

D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY , C . 1920

THE E IGHT

AND

M USIC

“We are truly at the threshold of a new era. The exhibition of the ‘Eight’ constitutes an era. Not because it crowns all the tragicomic horrors that have flooded the capital’s pitiable man of culture under the heading of art, but rather because it is no longer only painting reaching out with yearning arms for the simple audiences, but poetry and music, too, in which it seeks for and finds an ally. After all, this phenomenon is not exactly new.

Our young giants have, on and off, urged the means of advertisement for their cause, but never before was the ‘Bauernfängerei’ going on as merrily, with bang and whistle, as these days. The market stall on Erzsébet tér is enlivened by concerts, recitals and discussions, and in its poetically soaring introduction the exhibition catalogue reveals to the simple viewer the mysterious beauties of the art of the ‘Eight’”,85 ranted Tisza in his own journal, Magyar Figyelô. His understanding of the situation was correct: 1911 was the year when the modern arts joined forces. The main

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D EZSÔ O RBAN , 1930 S

T HE W ALDBAUER –K ERPELY S TRING Q UARTET , 1910 S ( PHOTOGRAPH BY O LGA M ÁTÉ )

J ENÔ K ERPELY , 1910 S

catalyst was the exhibition of the Eight in the Erzsébet tér building of the National Salon. Emotionally on the other side, the elderly Márffy was essentially confirming Tisza when saying, “It’s a bliss to […] know that my youth coincided with a memorable period of intellectual development, when not only in other countries around Europe, but also here in Hungary, people seeking for something new and better were swept along in vibrating, turbulent trends in literature, music, painting, science, political and social life. It can hardly be a freak of fortune that Ady burst into the scene with new songs of a new era, Bartók’s new chords were heard, the progressively-spirited Hungarians gathered round Nyugat and XX. század, artists seeking new ways in the group of the Eight made their début, and the teachings of Ervin Szabó paved the way to social renewal, all at the same time.”86 In a radio interview late in his life Dezsô Orban explained the friendship of the Eight painters, Bartók and his circle, and the Nyugat authors with the cooperation of the “progressive” art movements.87 However, the real innovation was not the recital soirées – even if most of those on the conservative side condemned these – much rather the integration of contemporary music. Word is a natural ally of pictorial representation, but music is pure abstraction, their joining forces took place on an artistic level that was more abstract than anything before. Naturally, music had accompanied exhibition openings and matinées before, but concerts given by Bartók and his friends in the exhibition venue of the Eight, was

of quite a different quality and meant a different role. Music was not an accompanying event, but the most eminent partner. The truth is that a year before, in the late spring of 1910, contemporary music had been part of a series of five performances at the international Impressionist exhibition in Mûvészház. On 3 June, after a talk on music aesthetics by Béla Balázs, Imre Balabán played pieces by Debussy, and Bartók played his own works and Kodály's.88 It can be said, therefore, that Mûvészház preceded the Eight not only in time but also in organising complex accompanying events. However, the uneven artistic quality, less well organised press coverage and the financial scandal around the society that broke out in the autumn greatly thwarted Miklós Rózsa in establishing his leading role in the world of modern art. The concert given on 18 May 1911 among the paintings of the Eight at the National Salon was an outstanding event in music history, regarding the participants as well as the programme. The Waldbauer–Kerpely Quartet performed Bartók’s first (op. 7) and Leo Weiner’s first (op. 4) string quartet; Béla Bartók and Jenô Kerpely played Kodály’s Sonata for cello and piano (op. 4), followed by Bartók’s new piano pieces, Four Dirges (op. 9a) and Three Burlesques (op. 8c). The quartet bearing violinist Imre Waldbauer’s and cellist Jenô Kerpely’s name had been founded in 1909 with second violinist János Temesváry and viola player Antal Molnár (who later swapped for a career in musicology). Molnár recalled the day, saying, not without irony,

“Erzsébet tér, National Salon. Opposite the entrance was Róbert Berény gigantic work of two men and a woman. The deaf-and-dumb Lajos Tihanyi escorted the lady visitors around like a good cicerone. Neither do they understand what he is mumbling, nor does he understand what they are asking. Márffy’s handsome figure with his smiling Slovak peasant features also appears in the crowd. Some of those present, sense the revolutionary renewal of our painting, but the majority are here for the sensation, laugh outright, or suppress giggles. Ignorance is rife. […] The Eight emphasised their kinship with the innovations of Bartók and Kodály. Their social standing could be said to be the same; they arrived unexpectedly and did not have a party. They hoped to reinforce their efforts through collaboration with the musicians struggling along parallel paths. We, the Waldbauer String Quartet, that is, performed new Hungarian music surrounded by the paintings; Bartók played his own works [...] The members of the Quartet were given ink drawings by way of payment. Temesváry and I ended up with the scrap. I still possess a dull Márffy and a not-so-good Orban. But since then, Kernstok greeted me from his coffee house table as if I was his sworn comrade.”89 Roughly around the same time as the exhibition of the Eight the New Hungarian Music Society (UMZE) was founded with the objective of setting up a Hungarian orchestra able to play contemporary music at a high level. The idea came from Bartók, but Zoltán Kodály, Leo Weiner and the members of the Waldbauer–Kerpely

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Quartet also participated. Their choice of name was evocative of the titles New Poems and “New Pictures”. Their intellectual and emotional bond with the writers and painters seemed self-evident. On the pages of Nyugat, Géza Csáth compared Bartók’s musical world to Ady,90 while the other side, the critic of Pesti Hírlap reproached Bartók for his adoration of the ugly, and his musical perversion, that is Bartók was eliciting the same response (from both sides) as the painters of “New Pictures”. Nyugat made a point of reporting about the concerts of Bartók, Weiner, the Waldbauer Quartet and Jenô Kerpely. It discussed Debussy as well as other new arrivals of foreign contemporary music: Schoenberg, to whom a separate article was dedicated, and the musical supplement of Der Blaue Reiter Almanach. In connection of the latter Antal Molnár raises dilemmas, but shows, on the whole, understanding of the radically new music of the second Viennese school, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.92 In fact, on one occasion, Nyugat published the full score of Allegro Barbaro instead of an art illustration.93 Making his début as a music critic alongside Géza Csáth, Dezsô Jász and Antal Molnár, Róbert Berény published concert reviews and articles campaigning for the UMZE. Modern musical idiom, however, was having an even harder time finding its way to its audiences than literature or art, and so the first founding of UMZE proved to be a short-lived experiment.94 The members of the Eight were on friendly terms with the writers as well as the musicians. “The ‘Eight’ were intimate friends with a whole bunch of musicians,” Dezsô Orban recalled. “I hung out the most with Leo Weiner. But the member of the Waldbauer –Kerpely Quartet and Béla Bartók also belonged to our circle of friends.”95 According to a story often told by Márffy, he personally introduced Bartók to Ady at the third exhibition of the Eight. The painter had met Béla Bartók, like Endre Ady, in Paris,96 presumably through the composer Rezsô Lavotta with whom he shared lodgings in rue Jacob during his studies. Berény, too, came to meet Bartók early on. They were good friends by 1909 and spent Christmas together in Paris.97 Leo Weiner and Frigyes (Fritz) Reiner, the future world-famous conductor, were Berény’s friends from childhood. Márffy met the conductor Egisto Tango98-who would later become musical director of the Royal Hungarian Opera House and conduct the première of Bartók’s stage works The Wooden Prince (1917) and Bluebeard’s Castle (1918) – years back in 1906 in Bruges. With Jenô Kerpely he made friends returning from his Parisian studies in 1906 at the famous Balszélfogó [Left-wind-break] table of the Baross coffee house that was frequented –

Ö DÖN M ÁRFFY : P ORTRAIT

next to the circle of Thália Theatre – by painters, musicians and writers. He painted both musicians’ portrait, Kerpely’s at least twice. Although Márffy believed him to be good at practically everything except music,99 Kernstok had close musician friends, too. He was friends with Bartók and Weiner, as well as violinist Artúr Hartmann and Jenô Kerpely who for a short while taught his son, Károly Kernstok Jnr. to play the cello.100

OF J ENÔ

K ERPELY , C . 1913

•

C AT .

NO .

279

It was no accident that the members of the Eight maintained such close links with the music world. Four of them played well; Bertalan Pór and Berény so much so that they were both originally going to be violinists.101 Berény could also play the piano, as could Dezsô Orban102 who, like Berény, wrote music criticism. Dezsô Czigány had a passion for the cello; he could apparently bribe Ady into to sitting for a portrait by playing him the cello.103

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B ÉLA B ARTÓK , C . 1915

Czigány painted numerous music-related canvases. “There were three sacraments in the life of Dezsô Czigány,” Róbert Berény recalled. “Cézanne, Ady and Casals.”104 He met the world-famous cellist when he was playing in Hungary in 1911, and he subsequently painted several portraits of him. He also painted Vilmos Grünfeld, leader of the Opera House orchestra, and accidentally violin teacher to Bertalan Pór. In his mimicking self-portraits, Czigány often depicted himself as a singing monk or a youth playing the guitar, and he painted several portraits of his third wife, Borbála Szilasi, playing the cello. Pór had known Bartók since his youth through the composer’s distinguished piano teacher, István Thomán. He had long been planning to paint his portrait, but eventually only got as far as making sketches.105 One of his masterpieces was an eleven meter long and over two meter wide allegorical panel he made for the

Folk Opera in 1912. When the theatre was rebuilt, the picture was transferred to the Municipal Gallery and subsequently went missing.106 We owe the most music-related works of the group to Róbert Berény. He made several paintings and graphic works of his childhood friend Leo Weiner, drew the pianist Joseph Lhévinne during his guest appearance in Budapest, and later Stravinsky inspired a caricature. Although it falls well outside of this period, it is worth mentioning that the model of his most famous painting, Woman Playing the Cello, was his second wife Eta Breuer whom he painted on numerous other occasions, too. It was Berény who painted the most authentic and suggestive portrait of Béla Bartók in April 1913,107 at a rather contradictory period in the composer’s life. Upset over the failure of UMZE and the rejection of Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók retired from publicity and devoted himself fully to collecting folk songs. Yet, in the spring of 1912, Miklós Bánffy was appointed as head of the state-owned theatres, and he engaged for the Opera House the conductor Egisto Tango. The news, that “The Opera House accepted a new ballet titled ‘The Wooden Prince’ to be staged in the following season” reached Bartók in Máramaros [today Maramure_, Romania], so on his return from Transylvania and about to leave on a collecting trip to Algeria, Bartók had something to look forward to. Aladár Bálint may have been aware of his inner tension writing enthusiastically in Nyugat about how “Róbert Berény’s portrait of Bartók reverberates in gigantic chords the struggle between the painter and his model, two remarkable personalities. The intensity of this struggle heats the head, constructed of masses moulded by an iron hand. This picture projects the optical equivalents of the subtlest quivers of the soul with wonderful radiance. Condensed energies burst the flaming colours that form firm units enclosed by the constructive drawing. Quite how this portrait will bear on Róbert Berény’s future as a painter, is hard to say; however, doubtlessly this picture is an ‘event’ magnificently testifying to the artist’s conscious efforts and consistent activities with respect not only to tendencies but also to accomplished results.”109 It is illuminating how Berény, a music lover and amateur composer, could not – or would not – break with his painterly perspective in his essay on Bartók in Nyugat. “The collective of sounds stands in front of him as colours (the visible nature) stand in front of a painter; he draws sounds from it like a painter borrows colours from nature he is looking at.” And as if he were projecting his own poetic creed on Bartók as he sums up his message, “In general we expect development to produce brilliant things, that is,

from things that are ahead of us and not things that are behind us, for our desire for delight forever seeks new things, and only that which is more developed than the average will we regard to be delightfully new. Therefore, what we consider to be brilliant must eo ipso be new. Consequently, Bartók, developed as he is, has produced something new which we consider to be brilliant because it is new.”110

E PILOGUE The conflict-laden yet more or less undisturbed flowering of the Hungarian art scene was dealt a frosty blow by the outbreak of the First World War. Firstly, because in wartime, the concept of patriotism in cultural-political debates is seen in a quite different dimension than in times of peace, and the main charge against the new art – since its very appearance – has been that it was unpatriotic. Secondly, due to the fact that the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and France entered the war on opposite sides, the navel-chord that connected Hungarian cultural life to Paris was cut. Previously being almost as much at home in Paris as in Budapest, Hungarian artists became enemies on French grounds overnight. Many of them were deported, others were forced to flee. Hungarian Modernism lost its main source of inspiration. At the same time, it would be pointless to deny that the spontaneous alliance of the innovative artists, typical of the turn of the decade, had been exhausted by 1914. Perhaps they no longer required each other’s reinforcement. They had more or less fought their battles of existence, and they lacked an actual leader or a shared ideology or aesthetic principles that would hold them together as a community of art events. Perhaps a well-chosen location – such as the palace of Mûvészház, opened in 1913, was intended for – might have become a centre for public exposition of the different branches of art. The founder, Miklós Rózsa, however, was not up to the task as a theoretician or a businessman, nor did he possess the authority to accomplish such a large-scale enterprise. In the meantime Nyugat underwent the greatest crisis in its history, which led to a break between Ernô Osvát and Lajos Hatvany over editorial principles, ending in a duel. By 1 July 1912 the journal was consolidated under Ignotus, and Nyugat managed to preserve its leading role in literary life, although it was at a loss to deal with the emergence of the avant-garde. Radical innovators were given space in Tett [Action], launched in 1915, and Ma [Today] which replaced Tett a year later.

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Bartók continued to shun publicity, but kept up his research, collecting and composition. The Wooden Prince was eventually completed only in early 1917, and the first performance took place on 12 May conducted by Egisto Tango. Its success lifted Bartók’s spirits and also paved the way to the staging of Bluebeard at the Opera House. Although publicly denied, the Eight were entering a crisis in 1912, too. The group never broke up, but testifying to the decay of their inner cohesion was the fact that the third exhibition was first postponed from spring to autumn, and only half of the founders contributed to the show which eventually opened in November (while the catalogue claimed the Eight to be a uniform group). And when in the spring of 1914 Berény and Tihanyi were unexpectedly juried out of the exhibition at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna, only Bertalan Pór stood up for them out of solidarity. Thus Kernstok, Márffy, Czigány and Orbán joined the main stream of Hungarian artists exhibiting at the Künstlerhaus, while the rebels had a show in a small gallery, the Brüko. Bölöni reported bitterly in Nyugat, openly taking sides with “the three”: “I saw the exhibition of Berény, Pór and Tihanyi in Vienna; torn as these boys are from their ground of noisy and quarrelsome Budapest and replanted in a new Viennese gallery […] I came to understand, better than ever, what these three painters mean to us. There used to be more of them, a small closed phalanx represented Hungarian revolutionary spirit and courage – meaning by this the breaking with traditional art and the big decision, that this way something shall come of us on the Hungarian globe. Reduced to three, I love them for their own merits, for representing the whole of Hungarian life, where there are many who set out, and eagerly too, but only few persevere and arrive.”111 The Great War proceeded to muddle the group completely: Czóbel, who had only ever been present nominally anyway, fled from Paris to Holland; Márffy, Berény, Orbán and Pór became painters at war. The great men of intellectual life – from Lukács to Kernstok and Bartók, but already without the since deceased Ady – were briefly swept together once more in 1919 by politics – but that is already another story. R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : P ORTRAIT

B ÉLA B ARTÓK , 1913

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26 27 28

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B ÉLA B ARTÓK AND Z OLTÁN K ODÁLY ( PHOTOGRAPH BY A LADÁR S ZÉKELY )

WITH THE MEMBERS OF THE

W ALDBAUER –K ERPELY Q UARTET , 1910 32

Notes 1

3 4 5 6

10 11

“Öngyilkos festônô” [The paintress who committed suicide] in Világ, 20 May 1911, p. 11. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 193. About the tragic relationship of Irma Seidler and György Lukács see, among other works, Júlia Bendl: Lukács György élete a századfordulótól 1918-ig [The life of György Lukács from the turn of the century to 1918], Budapest, 1994; Ferenc L. Lendvai: A fiatal Lukács. Útja Marxhoz 1902–1918 [The young Lukács. His way to Marx 1902–1918], Budapest, 2008, pp. 191–212. Világ, 20 May 1911, p. 11. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 193. Pester Lloyd, 19 May 1911, evening issue. A Nap, 21 May 1911, p. 6. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 194. About the creation of the Holnap society, see, among other works, Ákos Dutka: A Holnap városa [The city of Holnap], Budapest, 1955. Press view: 4 April, official opening: 5 April. No catalogue of the exhibition is known. The list of exhibitors: “Tavaszi tárlat a megyeházán. A ‘Magyar Mûvészet’ kiállítása” [Spring show at the county council. The exhibition of “Hungarian art”] in Nagyvárad, 1 April 1908, p. 6. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], I, p. 410. “Új Mûvészeti vállalat” [A new art corporation] in Egyetértés, 8 February 1908, p. 11 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], I, p. 367. Ákos Dutka: “A magyar mûvészet tárlata” [The exhibition of Hungarian art] in Nagyvárad, 4 April 1908, pp. 1–2 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], I, pp. 415–416. See reviews of the exhibition: Az Utak I, p. 399 ff.. Endre Ady: “Egy gyönge kürtszó” [A weak sound of the bugle] in Szabadság [Nagyvárad], 3 April 1908, p. 4; Ákos Dutka: “A magyar mûvészet tárlata” [The exhibition of Hungarian art] in Nagyvárad, 4 April 1908, pp. 1–2; Gyula Juhász: “A Nagyváradi Tárlat. A Magyar Mûvészet képkiállítása” [The Nagyvárad Exhibition. Exhibition of Hungarian pictures] in Szabadság, 4 April 1908, pp. 1–2 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], I, pp. 414–418.

Letter of Ödön Márffy to Gyula Juhász, 23 January 1909 – first published in: Juhász Gyula 1883–1937, Imre Paku (ed.), Budapest, 1962, p. 144 – republished in Zoltán Rockenbauer: Márffy. Életmûkatalógus [M.Complete works], Budapest – Paris, 2006, p. 141. Nagyvárad, 20 April 1909, p. 7 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, p. 64. Articles on the matinée: pp. 61–63. See: Gy. N. [Gyula Németh]: “Márffy kollektív kiállítása” [An exhibition of the collected works of Márffy] in Tiszántúl [Nagyvárad], 14 April 1909, p. 5; “Impressziók” in Nagyváradi Napló, 15 April 1909, p. 5; Gy. N. Gy. [Gyula Németh]: “Válaszul az ‘Impressziók’-ra” [In response to “Impressions”] in Tiszántúl [Nagyvárad], 16 April 1909, p. 4 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, pp. 59–63. László Kézdi Kovács put it the most succinctly when he wrote, “However, nothing is permanent. And the mischief-makers are saying that Kernstok is about to head a new secession from MIÉNK, and form a new artists’ group known as the ‘Seekers’ together with the Hungarian ultra-youth – these youthful giants of our art. The conservative members of MIÉNK, however, will unite with the arch-conservatives of the Mûcsarnok and will perhaps take control of the Mûcsarnok under the title of ‘The Lords’.” (Kézdi.) [László Kovács]: “A MIÉNK új kiállítása” [The new exhibition of MIÉNK] in Pesti Hirlap, 14 February 1909, pp 9–10. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, pp. 15–16. Árpád Tímár: “A MIÉNK mûvészegyesület története a korabeli sajtó tükrében II” [The history of the MIÉNK artists’ collective in the contemporary press] in Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 57, 2008, p. 265. There is no unambiguous proof for Márffy’s participation, but we do know that Bölöni intended to exhibit paintings by Márffy and that the artist intended to take part. Dutka and Bölöni later recalled that Márffy contributed works to the exhibition, but his name is not mentioned in contemporary press reviews. More in: Rockenbauer 2006, op. cit., pp. 35–36.

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Jenô Murádin wrote a detailed review about the Kolozsvár exhibition: “Vadak a végeken. A MIÉNK kolozsvári kiállítása 1909-ben” [Fauves on the borderlands. The Kolozsvár exhibition of MIÉNK in 1909] in Korunk, 17, 2006, 4, pp. 95–100. See, among other works: “Matiné a képkiállításon” [Matinée at the exhibition] in Ujság [Kolozsvár], 8 June 1909, p. 4. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, pp. 108–110. Gy. N. [Gyula Nagy]: “A kolozsvári képkiállítás” [The Kolozsvár exhibition] in Erdélyi Lapok, 15 June 1909, p. 272 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, p. 116. Hugó Lukács: “Új magyar festôk tárlata” [Exhibition of new Hungarian painters] in Ujság [Kolozsvár], 4 June 1909, p. 3 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, pp. 105–106. About the plans, see Nagyvárad, 12 June 1909, p. 6. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, p. 113. “Matiné az impresszionisták tárlatán” [Matinée at the exhibition of the Impressionists] in Nagyvárad, 15 June 1909, p. 5 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, pp. 116–117. “Irodalmi ünnep a Miénk kiállításán” [Literary feast at the exhibition of MIÉNK] in Nagyvárad, 19 June 1909, p. 5 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, pp. 23-124. “Matiné a Miénk tárlatán” [Matinée at the exhibition of MIÉNK] in Nagyváradi Napló, 22 June 1909, p. 6 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, pp. 127–128. Cf.: Dutka 1955, op. cit., pp. 170–173. Tímár 2008, op. cit., p. 273. Endre Ady: “A duk-duk affér” [The duk-duk affair] in Új Idôk, 15 November 1908, p. 443 – Ady Endre összes prózai mûvei. Újságcikkek, tanulmányok. IX [The complete prose works of Endre Ady. Newspaper articles and essays], compiled by Erzsébet Vezér. Budapest, 1973, pp. 278–280 and notes: pp. 522–564. Dutka 1955, op. cit., pp. 160–173. György Bölöni: Az igazi Ady [The real Ady], 5th edition, Budapest, 1978, p. 171. Endre Ady: “Paul Gauguin” in Budapesti Napló, 21 November 1906, pp. 2–3 – Ady Endre összes prózai mûvei. Újságcikkek, tanulmányok. VIII [The complete prose of Endre Ady. Newspaper articles and essays], compiled by Erzsébet Vezér. Budapest, 1968, pp. 121–122 and notes: pp. 446–448 – While Ady claimed “I lived in the two Gauguin rooms of the Grand-Palais for two days,” Bölöni believed this to be untrue. Bölöni 1978, op. cit., p. 170. Collected in a separate volume: Az élet szobra. Ady Endre képzômûvészeti írásai [The sculpture of life. Writings on art by Endre Ady], József Varga (ed. and intro.), Afterword by Lajos Németh, Budapest, 1977. Cf.: Bölöni 1978, op. cit., p. 160. In 1900 Ady mentions Kernstok’s painting Love that had been banned from the Nagyvárad exhibition. See: [Endre Ady]: “Éljen az erkölcs” [Long live good morals] in Szabadság [Nagyvárad], 7 November 1900, p. 3. – Ady Endre összes prózai mûvei. Újságcikkek, tanulmányok. I [The complete prose of Endre Ady. Newspaper articles and essays], 2nd abridged edition, compiled by Erzsébet Vezér. Budapest, 1990 pp. 378–379 and notes: pp. 812–815. Ödön Márffy: “Csapongás Ady Endre emléke körül” [A flight of fancy around the memory of Endre Ady] in Emlékezések Ady Endrérôl [Recollections about Endre Ady] V, collected, compiled and annotated by Miklós Kovalovszky, Budapest, 1993, p. 692. Márffy told the story many times. Ibid., p. 693. Bölöni 1978, op. cit., p. 431; Márffy op. cit., p. 693. About a visit to the wine cellars at Nyergesújfalu by Ady, Kernstok and Czóbel: Károly Kernstok: “Emlékezés Ady Endrére” [1930] [Remembering Endre Ady] in Kernstok Károly írásaiból. A kutató mûvészettôl a Vallomásig 1911–1939 [The selected writings of Károly Kernstok. From Inquisitive art to Confession, 1911–1939], collected and compiled by Ferenc Bodri, Tatabánya, 1997, pp. 90–91; Czigány painted a portrait of Ady while drinking wine, see Attila Rum: Czigány Dezsô, Budapest, 2004, pp. 54–57; Ady, Bölöni and Márffy cut off Tihanyi’s moustache, see Bölöni 1978, op. cit., p. 359; Ady and Márffy exchange ties at the Three Ravens, see Márffy op. cit., p. 692; Ady’s joke about Dezsô Orban, see: Krisztina Passuth: Orbán Dezsô, Budapest, 1977, p. 5. etc. Seven are listed by Béla Horváth: Czigány Dezsô Ady képei. [Dezsô Czigány’s Ady portraits], Budapest, 1977 – there is another oil painting at the József Katona Museum in Kecskemét. Ibid., pp. 23., 30.

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Bölöni 1978, p. 146. Béla Horváth: “Ady Kernstok-lovasa” [Ady’s Kernstok horseman] in Béla Horváth: Kernstok Károly. Tanulmányok, [Károly Kernstok. Studies], Budapest, 1997, pp. 173–192. Bölöni’s letter to Itóka, Paris, 20 July 1909 – published in Párizstól pocsolyavárosig. Bölöni György és Itóka levélnaplója 1906–1912 [From Paris to Puddletown. A diary in letters of György Bölöni and Itóka, 1906–1912], compiled and intro by Csaba Nagy, Budapest, 2005, p. 54. Itóka [Mrs. György Bölöni]: Ady Párizsban [Ady in Paris], compiled and intro. by Imre Robotos, Bucharest, 1977, pp. 61–62. Világ, 9 May 1911, p. 12. – Az Utak [The rods parted], III, p. 157. Bölöni 1978, op. cit., p. 360. Ibid., pp. 359–360. László Bányász: “Képkiállítások” [Exhibition of pictures] in Ország-Világ, 16 January 1910, p. 59. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, p. 298. F. K. [Ferenc Kanizsai]: “Neoimpresszionisták tárlata” [The exhibition of the neo-Impressionists] in Magyar Hirlap, 31 December 1909, p. 14 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, p. 229. György Bölöni: “Berény Róbert” in Aurora, 15 April 1911, pp. 63–66 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 96. Eszter Balázs: Az intellektualitás vezérei. Viták az irodalmi autonómiáról a Nyugatban és a Nyugatról 1908–1914 [The leaders of intellectualism. Debates about literary autonomy in and about Nyugat 1908–1914], Budapest, 2009, about the names “sub-Nyugats” and “counter-Nyugats” see ibid., p. ff. In greater detail about this issue, ibid., pp. 165–177. Géza Lengyel: “Tárlatok és képraktárak” [Exhibitions and picture repositories] in Nyugat, 1, 1908, p. 16–19; Géza Lengyel: “Téli kiállítás a Mûcsarnokban” [Winter exhibition at the Mûcsarnok] in Nyugat, 1, 1908, I, pp. 49–51 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], I, pp. 311–312. István Tisza: “20000 korona” [20 thousand crowns] in Magyar Figyelô, 1, 1911, pp. 256–259 – republished by Valéria Vanília Majoros: Tihanyi Lajos. A mûvész és mûvészete [Lajos Tihanyi, the man and his art], Budapest, 2004, pp. 388–389. István Tisza: “Andrássy Gyula a mûvészetrôl” [Gyula Andrássy] in Magyar Figyelô, 1, 1911, p. 439. Ignotus: “Húszezer korona” [Twenty thousand crowns] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, I, pp. 321–324. Aladár Bálint: “Szinyei Merse Pál mérlege” [Pál Szinyei Merse in the balance] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, I, pp 409–410. Lajos Hatvany: “Tisza István a Majálisról” [István Tisza on May Day] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, I, p. 411. Ignotus: “Természet és mûvészet” [Nature and art] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, I, p. 608; Dezsô Szabó: “Válasz Gróf Tisza Istvánnak” [Reply to István Tisza] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, I, pp. 809-812. For a more detailed discussion of the issue in the context of the Eight, see Rockenbauer 2006, op. cit., pp. 53–54. Nyugat, 3, 1910, I, pp. 95–99, 190–193. In his recollections Lukács makes no secret of the fact that his criticism of Impressionism was (also) targeted against Ignotus. See György Lukács: Megélt gondolkodás. Életrajz magnószalagon [Experiencing thinking. A taped biography.] The interviews were conducted by István Eörsi and Erzsébet Vezér, Budapest, 1989, p. 110. Károly Kernstok: “A kutató mûvészet” [Inquisitive art] in Nyugat, 3, 1910, I, p. 95 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, p. 288. György Lukács: “Az Utak elváltak” [The Roads Parted] in Nyugat, 3, 1910, I, pp. 190–193 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, p. 320. Ignotus: “A Nyolcak esete” [The case of the Eight] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, I, p. 990 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 180. György Eisemann: “A modernitás médiuma” [The medium of modernity] in Nyugat népe. Tanulmányok a Nyugatról és koráról [The people of the Nyugat. Studies on the Nyugat and its age], eds. Gergely Angyalosi et al., Budapest, 2009, p. 58. About the limits of Nyugat’s modernity, see also in the same volume: András Kappanyos: “A Nyugat és az avantgárd” [Nyugat and the avant-garde] – ibid., pp. 200–210; and József Szili József: “A Nyugat modernsége” [The modernity of Nyugat] in Kalligram, 2008, 4, pp. 50–68. For example, in his essay about the second exhibition of the Eight, Géza Lengyel only mentions by name Kernstok by and Berény (who had on display a separate collection of his own works): Géza Lengyel: “Új képekrôl” [On new pictures] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, I, pp. 843–850 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, pp. 142–147 – Writings dedicated to Kernstok in Nyugat, e.g. Artúr Bárdos: “Kernstock” in Nyugat, 3, 1910, I, pp. 142–144;

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Géza Feleky: “Széljegyzetek Kernstok képeihez” [Notes on Kernstok’s pictures] in Nyugat, 3, 1910, I, pp. 195–198; Géza Lengyel: “Károly Kernstok” in Nyugat, 4, 1911, II, pp. 1068–1070; Aladár Bálint: “Kernstok Károly új üvegfestményei” [Károly Kernstok’s new glass paintings] in Nyugat, 5, 1912, II, pp. 465–466 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, pp. 295–298, 323–326; III, pp. 292–293, 437–438. Aladár Bálint: “Pór Bertalan csoportos képe” [A group portrait by Bertalan Pór] in Nyugat, 3, 1910, I, pp. 141–142; [Three articles: I. Jenô Tersánszky Józsi; II. Vilmos Fémes Beck; III. Róbert Berény.]: “Pór Bertalan kiállítása a ‘Könyves Kálmán’ban” [The exhibition of Bertalan Pór at the “Kálmán Könyves”] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, I, pp. 406–409; Géza Lengyel: “Pór Bertalan freskója” [Bertalan Pór’s freso] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, II, p. 1111 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, pp. 294–295; III, pp. 44–47, 293–294. Egyetértés, 10 February 1911, p. 18 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 41. Egyetértés, 14 February 1911, p. 17 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 42. A detailed description of the case can be read at: Aurora, 20 May 1911, pp. 258–259 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 190. (e. sz.) [Ernô Szép]: “A nyolcak” [The Eight] in Az Est, 28 May 1911, p. 4 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 203. Ödön Gerô: “Az Új mûvészet és a közönség. Részlet egy elôadásból” [New art and the audience. Excerpt from a talk] in Aurora, 5 August 1911, pp. 355–359 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 213–216. “Estély a Nyolcaknál” [A soirée at the Eight] in Világ, 26 May 1911, p. 8 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, p. 200. See among other writings, Magyarország, 28 November 1912, p. 12; Pesti Hirlap, 29 November 1912, p. 26. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, pp. 495–496. We have no knowledge of Endre Nagy’s participation. Frigyes Karinthy: “Magyar képkritika. A ‘Kergék’ képkiállítása” [A critique of Hungarian paintings. The exhibition of paintings of the ‘Crazy’] in Frigyes Karinthy: Így írtok ti [That’s how you write], Budapest, 1979, II, pp. 267–270. Mihály Babits: “Futurizmus” in Nyugat, 3, 1910, I, pp. 487–488 – Mihály Babits: Esszék, tanulmányok [Essays, studies], Budapest, 1978, I, pp. 112–113. Endre Ady: “La Fanciulla del West” in Nyugat, 4, 1911, II, p. 248 – Ady Endre összes prózai mûvei. Újságcikkek, tanulmányok. X. [The complete prose works of Endre Ady. Newspaper articles and essays], compiled by József Láng and Erzsébet Vezér, Budapest, 1973, pp. 136–137 and notes: pp. 411–412 – He had seen the opera in Rome in the company of Artúr Ele. Béla Balázs: “Futuristák” in Nyugat, 5, 1912, I, pp. 645–646. Róbert Berény: “A Nemzeti Szalonbeli képekrôl” [The pictures at the National Salon] in Nyugat, 6, 1913, I, pp. 197–198. Aladár Bálint: “Csavargás közben” [While I was wandering] in Nyugat, 3, 1910, II, pp. 1529–1534. “Which is why and how what Picasso is doing is a style, and the Cubism of his followers moronic”. Géza Feleky: “Egy falkép a huszadik század elejérôl” [A wall painting from the beginning of the twentieth century] in Nyugat, 5, 1912, I, pp. 73–76 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, pp. 415–416. Ferenc Kende: “A XI-es terem” [Room no. XI] in Nyugat, 5, 1912, II, p. 610; Mária Pásztor-Freund: “A kubizmus térproblémája” [The issue of space in Cubism] in Nyugat, 5, 1912, I, pp. 773–774. Zoltán Felvinczi Takács: “Négyen a nyolcak közül. Glosszák egy modern mûvészeti kiállításhoz” [Four of the Eight. Feuilletons on a modern art exhibition] in Nyugat, 5, 1912, II, pp. 763–768 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 484. Rusticus [István Tisza]: “Levél a szerkesztôhöz” [Letter to the editor] in Magyar Figyelô, 1, 1911, pp. 423–424 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], III, p. 208. István Lengyel: “Magyarország ‘nagy öregjei’. Márffy Ödön” [Hungary’a “great oldies”. Ödön Márffy] in Népszabadság, 12 October 1958, p. 8; He expressed the same idea in various forms in the Fifties. See “Márffy Ödön beszél kortársairól és a korról. Somogyi Árpád kikérdezése” [Ödön Márffy talks about his contemporaries and the age. An interview with Árpád Somogyi], 18 April 1951 – HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MDK–C–11–26. 8; Endre Murányi-Kovács: “Márffy Ödön mûvészetérôl” [The art of Ödön Márffy] in Hétfôi Hírek, 22 July 1957, p. 7. “Beszélgetés Orbán Dezsôvel. Riporter: Siklós István” [An interview with Dezsô Orban by István Siklós] 14 June 1980, Hungarian Radio Prose Archives, inv. no.: 155917

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“Zeneest a Mûvészházban” [A musical soirée at Mûvészház] in Pesti Napló, 4 June 1910, p. 12 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted], II, p. 405. Antal Molnár: Magamról, másokról [About myself and others], Budapest, 1974, pp. 98–99. Géza Csáth: “Bartók Béla” in Nyugat, 1, 1908, I, pp. 513–515 – Géza Csáth: Ismeretlen házban. II. Kritikák, tanulmányok, cikkek [In an unknown house. II. Critiques, studies, articles], compiled by Zoltán Dér, Újvidék, 1977, pp. 76–77. Imre Ormay: Megbukott zenekritikák [Failed music critiques], Budapest, 1963, pp. 150, 153–154. Antal Molnár: “A ‘Blaue Reiter’ zenemellékletérôl” [The musical supplement of “Blaue Reiter”] in Nyugat, 6, 1913, II, pp. 321–322 – Zenei írások a Nyugatban [Musical writings in Nyugat] ed. and intro. János Breuer, Budapest, 1978, pp. 98–100. Nyugat, 6, 1913, II, pp. 57–69. The first founding of UMZE was announced on 15 April 1911 in Zeneközlöny, it gave its first concert on 27 November, the last on 22 March 1912. It was re-founded with the same name in the autumn of 1997 by Zolyán Rácz. Letter of Dezsô Orban to Iván Dévényi, Sydney, 17 April 1962, completed on 25 April – HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MKCS–C–I–159/1136. Cf.: Béla Horváth: “Bartók és a Nyolcak” [Bartók and the Eight] in Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 23, 1974, p, 328. Béla Bartók’s letter to his mother, the widowed Mrs Béla Bartók, Paris, 25 December 1909, Bartók Béla családi levelei [The family letters of Béla Bartók], ed. Béla Bartók Jnr., Budapest, 1981, p. 193. Béla Horváth: “Márffy Ödön – Egisto Tango” in Mûvészet, 4, 1962, 7, pp. 10–11. See, among other writings, Iván Dévényi: “Márffy Ödön levele a Nyolcak törekvésérôl” [Letter of Ödön Márffy about the efforts of the Eight] in Mûvészet, 10, 1969, 8, p. 10. Horváth 1974, op. cit., p. 330. About Berény’s musical interests, among other writings, Béla Szíj: “La vie de Róbert Berény, de son enfance à son émigration à Berlin. / Berény Róbert életútja gyermekévitôl a berlini emigrációig” in Bulletin de la Galerie Nationale Hongroise. / A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Közleményei, 4, Budapest, 1963, pp. 113–124; Bertalan Pór talked about his violin studies himself in Pór Bertalan festômûvész a zenérôl, 1959 [Painter Bertalan Pór on music], Hungarian Radio Prose Archives, inv. no.: D 1834/1/4. About Orbán’s piano playing and his rivalry with Tihanyi, see Zoltán Rockenbauer: “A muzikális Nyolcak. Múzsák randevúja a pesti kávéházakban” [The musical Eight. A rendezvous of muses in the Pest coffee houses] in Magyar zene és kép. Zene, ritmus, hangzás, kép, fotó, látvány [Hungarian music and image. Music, rhythm, sonority, image, photograph, prospect], Tamás Kieselbach (ed.), Budapest, 2007, pp. 58–71. Cf.: Horváth 1977, op. cit., pp. 18–23; Rum 2004, op. cit., p. 152–153. Béla Horváth: “Czigány Dezsô ismeretlen Casals-portréja” [An unknown portraot of Casals by Dezsô Czigány] in Mûvészet, 5, 1963, 3, p. 8. “Pór Bertalan festômûvész a zenérôl” [Painter Bertalan Pór on music], 1959, op. cit. Ibid. – “The original cartoon of the fresco for the Folk Opera, 1911” was item no. 69/a in the catalogue of the exhibition of Bertalan Pór’s estate hosted at the Hungarian National Gallery in 1966. The present whereabouts of the 296 – 1090 tempera on card picture is also unknown. Whether this is the original panel painting or its tempera version requires further research. About the origin and subsequent fate of the painting, see Gergely Barki: Berény Róbert Bartók-portréja [Róbert Berény’s portrait of Bartók], talk given at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 23 February 2004 [manuscript] and Zoltán Rockenbauer: “Berény Róbert Bartók portréja – a magyar mûvészet csillagórája” [The portrait of Bartók by Róbert Berény – the stellar moment of Hungarian art] in Múzeumcafé, 4, No 18, 2010, pp. 46–48. Béla Bartók Jnr.: Apám életének krónikája [Chronicle of my father’s life], Budapest, 2006, p. 135. Aladár Bálint: “Három kiállítás. Posztimpresszinisták” [Three exhibitions. The post-Impressionists] Nyugat, 6, 1913, I, p. 787. Róbert Berény: “Bartók Béla esete” [The case of Béla Bartók] in Nyugat, 4, 1911, I, pp. 1081–1082 – Zenei írások a Nyugatban [Musical writings in Nyugat], op. cit., p. 71–72. György Bölöni: “Három magyar festô” [Three Hungarian painters] in Nyugat, 7, 1914, I, p. 497.

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M O L N O S

BEHIND THE EIGHT THE SOCIAL BASIS FOR THE NEW HUNGARIAN PAINTING

‘It’s damned hard for an artist to make a living if he’s not a dauber and not a Jew.’1

In a letter dated autumn 1921 and sent to Ferenc Wilde from Rózsahegy, by then inside Czechoslovakia, Béni Ferenczy illuminated, with a terseness recalling that of proverbs, a dilemma long approached in art history with a sheepish circumlocution or under the cover afforded by coded language. ‘I’ve never been anti-Semitic, but one has to admit that if someone’s a Jew, he’s somehow got it made,’ wrote the young sculptor in conclusion, subsequently noting with sadness and pain (for lack of sales): ‘There goes my beautiful life.’2 Ferenczy’s remark, occurring among tirades bemoaning his lack of money, was not simply a spontaneous outburst of pent-up envy: on the basis of his experiences in previous decades, as well as on those of his father, the painter Károly Ferenczy, he could justly feel that the cause of Hungarian modernism, and with it his own life, was closely linked with the art patronage inclinations of Hungary’s Jews, Budapest’s in particular. For a long time, the sculptor’s statement did not receive the emphasis it deserved. Regarding antiSemitic manifestations with disgust and in most cases adhering to modernism, researchers were unwilling to give it. They feared that by doing so they would, regardless of the issue in question, put themselves on the same platform as the racially-based cultural criticism of the far right that had always existed but which after the Hungarian Soviet Republic made waves bigger than any wit-

nessed before. This fear was justified, since the fermentative, modernising attitude of Budapest Jewry and its undeniable dominance in the economic and cultural life of Hungary were – at the same time as the easily visible failure of the desired assimilation that for many decades seemed possible – interpreted in numerous forums as ominous symptoms of national death.3 Ady’s somewhat pathos-laden vision in his ‘Korrobori’, a love-dance of the two peoples motivated by hatred and desire which by creating a new strain could offer a chance for the survival of the dying Hungarian race, appeared to a significant part of public opinion in these years already in an anti-Semitic light.4 Regarding turn-of-the-century Budapest culture as a Jewish creation (not without reason), aggressive anti-Semitism – overt or combined with antipathy towards the capital city – was found all the way from militant pamphleteers to writers active in the field of high culture.5 Of the very many examples, here it will be enough to cite Katalin Homolay, a supporting character in the tellingly entitled Renée Erdôs novel ‘The Queen of Life’ published in 1920, in order to obtain a typical report concerning the ‘Judaicisation’ of Budapest and the antiSemitic dialectic of the period. Homolay, a lesbian noblewoman from Transylvania, asserts: ‘There are so many Jews there that if a young and beautiful lady-poet wants to fall in love with someone, she’ll find only Jews. They’re everywhere. They

inundate everything. They write all the books and all the newspapers. They paint all the pictures and perform all the plays. They fill all the concert halls and are at all the exhibitions. The place is full of them. It’s an abomination.’6 It would be too easy to think that this negative interpretation, which shines forth most blindingly, perhaps, in Emma Ritoók’s long novel ‘Adventurers of the Intellect’, which deals in a radical way with her own past also, was merely caused by the shock of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and only became dominant after this trauma, which showed all earlier events in another light.7 By contrast, the truth is that doubts concerning the cultural role of Hungary’s Jewish population strengthened to an ominous degree during the years of the First World War. In connection with the 1917 public-opinion poll conducted by the periodical Huszadik Század, Jenô Cholnoky, a geographer of enormous erudition and a professor at the University of Kolozsvár, condemned in the following words those ‘Jews dressed up as Hungarians’ who, in his opinion, were incapable of real assimilation: ‘Those of our writers and artists who, casting aside all tradition and jumping through today, flaunt the art of “tomorrow” and, obscuring their lack of talent with fatuous affectation, heap abuse on everything we have hitherto considered beautiful, great, and sacred, come for the most part from the ranks of the Jews. [...] Next, such people will happen upon the art of “tomorB ARON S ÁNDOR H ATVANY -D EUTSCH WITH HIS SONS , THE PAINTER F ERENC AND THE WRITER L AJOS , 1901

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IN HIS STUDY AT THE PALACE IN

FÔ

row” by using small letters where capitals have so far been the rule, and vice versa. They introduce the ugly into art by paving over the sky in a painting or by scribbling unsightly lines onto copybook paper and getting many to believe that this is “beautiful”.’8 There can be little doubt that Cholnoky wished to draw attention to Ady, a Protestant, and his associates in the Holnap (‘Tomorrow’) Literary Society as being behind those proclaiming the art of ‘tomorrow’ ‘with fatuous affectation’, although up until his last sentence what he wrote was directed at the one-time members of the Eight. In the light of all this, it is understandable that it was a foreign author who first broke through the inhibitions counselling caution. William McCagg’s volume on the social history of Hungarian intellectuals of Jewish descent and the inevitable role of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie brought about a decisive shift primarily in the international historiography, under the influence of which the dominance of Jews in the cultural life of Budapest around the turn of the twentieth century became almost a commonplace in scientific circles abroad within a short time.9 Without overlooking Zoltán Horváth’s summary work ‘Hungary Around’ 1900, an heroic achievement (despite its inaccuracies) that came out as early as 1961, the subject became an inspiration in Hungary, in broad circles even, only after 1988, with the pub-

UTCA ,

1914

lication of Péter Hanák’s volume of studies ‘The Garden and the Workshop’. The essays, which were revelatory, and the changeover in the political and economic system that was taking place at this time, played a huge role in the production over scarcely two decades of enough literature in this field of research to fill a library.10 But while a succession of studies, and separate volumes even, have discussed the dominant role of Jewry in the creation of modern Hungarian philosophy, literature, and music, conspicuously little has been said about the role it played in the field of fine art. To indicate this role it is enough to quote a letter written by Emma Ritoók in the summer of 1924, in which Jenô Remsey, a ‘wild Hungarian, Turanian even’ painter and a moderately talented representative of the Gödöllô school, says, ‘Don’t kill the Jews, because if you do, who’ll buy our pictures?’11

A RT C OLLECTORS The decades that followed the Compromise of 1867 were a golden age in Hungarian history and one that was long mourned. It was a time in which the optimistic world-view of classical liberalism and the promising illusion of full assimilation silenced critical voices, bringing with it an economic boom of an intensity never experienced in

the country before. An ideal political and financial environment combined with the unexpected upsurge of Hungarian capitalism (which started late) resulted in an almost explosion-like enrichment of the Jewish-descended urban middle class, which in the meantime had been emancipated.12 Along with a demand for culture connected with studies abroad, wealth accumulated over two or three generations in most cases – and which in time amply exceeded the capital required by companies – led more and more members of the haute bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth century towards the noble passion for art collecting, one which promoted the establishment of profitable social contacts into the bargain and successful assimilation, too. The spectacular increase in the number of Jewish people in burgeoning Hungarian capitalism’s most important branches, primarily in commerce and the banking sector, as well as among those members of the intelligentsia employed in the so-called free professions, produced a situation whereby in the years around 1900 art collecting went from being a privilege of the aristocracy indicating wealth and good family to being a popular pastime of the upper middle class. The character and size of the shift first became clear in 1902, at a private collections exhibition organised under the patronage of Budapest’s Physicians Association.13 Only a very small percentage of the approximately 900 works displayed on this occasion in the rooms of Mûcsarnok were lent by counts and landowners bearing historic names. Count Gyula Andrássy, a representative of this declining class who himself contributed a significant amount of material almost as the ‘Last of the Mohicans’, must have noticed with surprise that the urban upper middle class (the great majority of whose members were of Jewish descent) had already taken over the leading role among the wealthy friends of art. Of course, for him this was not particularly problematical, since as a politician, publicist, and head of numerous art associations he was perhaps the most influential promoter of the fruitful co-operation between the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of money. It is a telling fact that of the owners of the pictures exhibited, forty-five bore the title doctor and only eleven the title count. (Representatives of the traditional landowning class, the eleven were from five great families only.) The degree of the change in the elite is more striking still when we take into account the size and quality of individual collections: next to pieces from the collections belonging to Adolf Kohner (who had extensive interests in agriculture and industry), Gyula Bischitz (who had amassed great wealth as a lawyer), Gusztáv Gerhardt (the top investor in railways in Hungary), or Henrik Fellner (who directed the Hungarian Bank for Commerce),

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S IMON M ELLER , 1910

the treasures lent by Lajos Batthyány and Tibor Károlyi, aristocrats from old and famous families, seemed modest, as did Count István Tisza’s one Géza Mészöly painting. The owners of the greatest wealth also blessed with art patronage ambitions were Adolf Kohner, who was equally at home in music, the natural sciences, and literature; Ferenc Hatvany, who financed his purchases of pictures from that part of the legendary family firm that fell to him and who was an excellent painter in his own right; and Mór Lipót Herzog, a banker who amassed huge wealth from the tobacco monopoly. However, despite the fact that Manets, Cézannes, and Van Goghs were not seldom to be found in their picture galleries (along with other works representative of the most modern endeavours of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century in France), they were much more cautious when choosing from the field of Hungarian painting.14 Around 1910, RipplRónai represented for all of them the end point of modernism, even if now and then a Kernstok picture speaking in a newer voice ‘slipped in’. Presumably, they did not sympathise with the artistic ambitions of the Eight, nor – if there were any – with their social ones. Just as in politics they were linked unequivocally to the Liberal Party and to Count István Tisza, so in art they were tied to the impressionist tradition, or were under the

A DOLF K OHNER , C . 1910

influence of the ‘classic moderns’ Szinyei, Ferenczy, Fényes, and Rippl-Rónai, who were closely connected to the legacy of Nagybánya. This older, already more-or-less arrived generation of artists – cherishing real or imagined slights – from 1909 onwards distanced itself from the young radicals group, primarily because of the latter’s conspiratorial break with the MIÉNK. These more established artists viewed the ‘business activity’ surrounding this group’s first exhibition if not with angry disappointment then with disdain. Elek Petrovics, later on a renowned director of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, remembered the moment when in early 1910, in the days during which the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition was on display, Szinyei, oozing sarcasm, called over to Kernstok who was making for the tables on the terrace of the café Japán Kávéház: ‘“I used to be angry with you all, but now that I’ve seen the exhibition I’m not angry any more,” – [...] and burst out in laughter choked by stifled coughing.’15 In his memoirs, Béni Ferenczy, the sculptor quoted at the beginning of this study, remarks – with reference to his father Károly, a leading master of Nagybánya painting – that ‘my father said to me more than once that had there been no rich Jews, he would never have sold a single picture in Budapest. [...] At that time, pictures by “progressive” painters were bought only by the rich

bankers, industrialists, and snobs of Lipótváros. [District in Budapest inhabited primarily by Jewish families. Trans.]’16 Ferenczy’s slightly slapdash but fundamentally sound list more or less covers all those who purchased pictures from members of the Eight around 1910. The list of names, which can be reconstructed (alas, only fragmentarily) with the help first and foremost of the National Salon’s Almanac17 and an article from the time,18 indicates that this circle of support was motivated much more by family or friendly feelings (and in some cases by a desire to encourage ‘fellow-warriors’) than it was by purely art collecting ambitions. In this respect, Geyza Moskovitz, the father of Anna Lesznai, who exhibited together with the Eight, can be described as typical. As the abovementioned Almanac tells us, he purchased a penand-ink drawing from Dezsô Orbán and a medal from Vilmos Fémes (‘the Metalworker’) Beck at the group’s 1911 exhibition.19 Geyza Moskovitz’s house in Budapest (it was in Bálvány utca) and his manor-house at Alsókörtvélyes, which was run as a warm family home, were popular meeting places for writers, sociologists, and painters imbued with the modern spirit.20 The leading figure in this circle, Oszkár Jászi, described the dazzling personality of the master of the house in the following words: ‘Geyza Moskovitz de Zemplén, trusted advi-

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A LSÓKÖRTVÉLYES , 1900 S

sor to Gyula Andrássy the Younger, highly cultured gentleman, man of wealth, and lovable causeur, was reminiscent of Disraeli in personality. A moderate liberal hostile to big capital (although his charming and charitable wife came from a big capital family, his financial battles with his brother-inlaw strengthened this antipathy), Geyza Moskovitz kept open house in Budapest and any of our friends could go there for supper uninvited. It filled him with great happiness that in his house people of the most various party political and ideological views would meet, discussing literary and political questions until midnight. His conservative liberalism rejected extremes, but he welcomed every well mannered person from the younger age groups; to his young friends he explained the meaning and the importance of Hungary’s national struggle in the spirit of Gyula Andrássy and Albert Apponyi. Of course, he didn’t convince those of us in the “jungle”, but only increased our opposition to the country’s masters.’21 The best of the progressive intelligentsia from Jászi to Ady, and from Dezsô Orbán to Elek Petrovics, put in appearances in this house, enjoying the lively discussions of a company whose members had different tastes politically but who were always ready to listen to one another. Petrovics was the ‘master of the house’s favourite’; when he ‘appeared, uncle Geyza would always plant a kiss on his forehead as a sign of his fatherly feelings’.22 Petrovics was of especial importance because by virtue of his indisputable

knowledge of art, his harmonious personality that everyone liked, and his excellent taste he counted as an arbiter for those Jews who cherished art collecting ambitions.23 This advisory role – and at the same time the host’s conservative taste in art – stand out in an exchange that is fictional but probably typical. Occurring in a key novel by Anna Lesznai, it takes place between Petrovics (featuring as Péterfy in the novel) on his arrival at the Moskovitz house from the Eight’s 1911 exhibition and the master of the house himself (István Berkovits): ‘Having come back to the drawing room, István turned to Péterfy: ‘“Well, how was the exhibition? I shalln’t ask my daughter, because she’ll only speak up for her friends. It’s your opinion that I’m keen to hear.” ‘“Lizó already knows my opinion. I told it to her while we were in the cab. I had thought that I could accommodate a little to modern art, but I must confess, I can’t keep up with these youngsters.” ‘“So they’re not worth a rap,” said István. ‘“I wouldn’t say that, sir. Some of them do have talent... Delman, and a few others. Little Kutas isn’t entirely bad either. But they really do take pleasure in unrecognisable distortion.” Péterfy glanced towards Lizó, who smiled back gratefully. “Perhaps in time they’ll grow out of this adolescent affectation,” he added soothingly.’24 This imagined dialogue, albeit one based on real experience, authentically illuminates the ambivalent relationship which bound this art patron stratum to the radical representatives of the new painting: some of those buying work by members of the Eight regarded their purchasing of the pictures as an easily visible and selfless patronage, a covert support for children and their friends. Accordingly, most did not count as conscious collectors. A few, however, were in time able to step beyond their initial antipathy and recognise the undeniable merits of the innovators. It was not by chance that within a short while Petrovics acquired what is perhaps Kernstok’s finest painting, his 1909 work Boy Leaning Against a Tree,25 which is loosely fauvist rather than dry in the manner of the Eight. A hedonistic Jewish landowner with idiosyncrasies that lent him charm, Geyza Moskovitz, who spent most of his time on the 5500-acre Alsókörtvélyes estate left to him by his father, personal physician to Gyula Andrássy the Elder, was, through his wife Hermina, closely connected to Baron Sándor Hatvany, another important purchaser of work by the Eight. Both Sándor and Hermina were children of József Deutsch, sugar manufacturer and founder of the Hatvany-Deutsch dynasty: for them money never mattered, to put it mildly.26 Sándor Hatvany, a baron from 1910 onwards and the hugely wealthy owner of banks,

K ÁROLY F ERENCZY : P ORTRAIT

OF J ÓZSEF

L UKÁCS , 1905

sugar refineries, steam-powered flour mills, and enormous tracts of land, did not belong to the extremely small group of art collectors whose tastes were bold: in the Almanac, which tells of his purchases, before 1910 we find not only the names of Adolf Fényes, Károly Ferenczy, Iványi Grünwald, and István Csók (contemporaries who slowly grew into classics), but also the composition A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Lajos Márk,27 a portraitist favoured by the ladies of the Lipótváros and the producer of highly popular kitsch. In view of this, the fact that it was Hatvany who purchased Still Life with Pitcher,28 perhaps Orbán’s finest work, as well as a still life by Lajos Tihanyi,29 which was no less splendid and which – like Orbán’s creation – was reproduced in the periodical Auróra,30 might seem surprising. The intense nature of this art patronage circle and the close – not simply family – ties that can be pointed out between the patrons underscore the fact that among the purchasers on the list of collectors in the National Salon’s Almanac from 1912 we find not only the name of Albert Hirsch, Sándor Hatvany’s son-in-law and subsequently the director of his business empire,31 but also that of Ferenc Chorin the Younger. Starting out as a lawyer and possessing an excellent command of German, French, and Latin, Chorin was liberal in his political sentiments, pro-American, and likewise closely connected with the Hatvany family.32 Jointly with Sándor Hatvany, he had in 1902 founded the National Association of

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Industrialists, an interest-protection group for manufacturers in Hungary which for decades provided Miksa Fenyô with a job and therefore a livelihood. He himself had acquired undying merit as the first significant supporter of the periodical Nyugat, along with Lajos Hatvany and Móric Kornfeld.33 The younger Chorin – who in the 1910s was also active on the board of directors of the Nyugat Publishing House – was, thanks to the fabled economic and political career of his father, a wealthy man, but his financial position was very much improved by his marriage in 1921 to a daughter of Manfréd Weiss. By virtue of this, he counted as one of Hungary’s most influential industrial magnates. His attraction to art collecting was – if we are to believe Antal Géber, who knew his collection and its creator personally – in all likelihood prompted by this role first and foremost: ‘As a collector, he endeavoured mainly to have a beautiful home appropriate to his high position in society. The hall was furnished with Italian Renaissance pieces, and the salon and dining room with beautiful examples from the time of Maria Theresa. The so-called Pozsony Room contained especially fine Biedermeier furniture, each piece of which was inlaid with a scene from the coronation in Pozsony [Preßburg, now Bratislava, SK] of Ferdinand V in 1836.’34 Géber’s information tells of the state of affairs in the 1930s already, about the splendid, grand milieu of the palace on Andrássy út, mentioning a few classic pieces from the collection, works by Ruysdael, Daubigny, Millet, and Sisley purchased on the basis of recommendations by Elek Petrovics, as well as Kupeczky, Munkácsy, Paál, Szinyei, and Mészöly pictures. From these art objects, and from the pride of the collection, Ferenczy’s ‘October’ painting acquired at the famous Kohner auction in 1934, it is difficult to make out Chorin’s reasons for purchasing a conspicuously cautious, symmetrical still life by Orbán.35 Perhaps we shall approach nearer to the truth if in his case we wish to discover behind the act of purchasing not the primary reason of liking, but the manifestation of an inclination to patronise culture, by virtue of which he saw the supporting of modern artists as a natural thing to do, independently of any conservative intellectual orientation and taste as a collector. Similarly to the solid Jewish citizens of Budapest, in the case of the two famous financiers Fülöp Weiss,36 who was known for his modest way of life and his vast wealth, and who was general director and subsequently president of the Hungarian Commercial Bank of Budapest, and József Lukács, who was ennobled in 1899, acquiring the right to add ‘de Szeged’ after his name, this kind of modernist attitude can be formulated as a habit of patronising the new trends on principle. József Lukács, a fiercely pro-Tisza bank director who

B ARON S ÁNDOR H ATVANY -D EUTSCH , C . 1910

G YÖRGY L UKÁCS , B ÉLA B ALÁZS

F ÜLÖP W EISS , 1920 S

AND

A NNA H AMVASSY

sent his children to Lutheran secondary schools and who donned Hungarian gala attire for festive events, initially ‘did violence’ to his basically conservative taste, clearly at the insistence of his son. The director of the Anglo-Austrian Bank and later of the Hungarian General Credit Bank, he continued to support his son György [George Lukács],

B ÉLA B ALÁZS ’ S

FLAT IN

N APHEGY

UTCA , C .

1915

who was undertaking philosophical studies, although he was probably increasingly concerned on account of the son’s social and political views.37 The distance between the two could not have been greater: the father ‘had received noble status and the title of the court counsellor from Francis Joseph. Why, or why not, on the other hand, he

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A BOVE : A ROOM IN THE L UKÁCS VILLA WITH K ÁROLY F ERENCZY ’ S PAINTING B EFORE BATHING , 1920 S B ELOW : I NTERIOR OF THE SALON OF THE L UKÁCS VILLA WITH AMONG OTHERS D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY ’ S T HE P AINTRESS , AND A SKETCH BY N OÉMI F ERENCZY , 1920 S

nevertheless did not make it to the front rank of the new nobility, to the world of the Hatvanys, Kornfelds, Kohners, Herzogs, and Ullmans, although intellectually he surpassed all of them. They, for their part, were a good deal richer than he, and politically more influential. [...] On one

occasion, Francis Joseph even received him in person, while on a number of occasions István Tisza asked economic advice from him. He admired Tisza not as a feudal magnate, but for his belief, his resilience, and his honesty, which, it seems, were qualities not always to be expected in his

own circles at that time.’38 The author of the quotation, Albert Gyergyai, who worked as a tutor in the Lukács household between 1920 and 1926, gave more than just a portrait of the undoubtedly much respected master of the villa in Gyopár utca, also telling of his tastes and his interests regarding the arts in his memoir ‘The Story of a Friendly House.’ ‘He did not understand music, but, under his daughter’s influence, often attended concerts; fine art and its development in Hungary at that time he was very familiar with, under the influence partly of his children and partly of his friends, such as Ferenczy and Petrovics. He had five beautiful Ferenczy works [...]. Scattered around the house were pictures one more beautiful than the next, by Rippl-Rónai, Szinyei-Merse, a childhood portrait of the lady of the house from Philip de László’s best period, sculptures by Béni Ferenczy, and tapestry cartoons by Nóemi Ferenczy.’39 Just as his daughter, Mici Lukács (Mrs. Popper), endeavoured to lead her father’s old-fashioned taste towards the new trends, so in the sphere of fine arts his son, György Lukács, influenced him. György was inspired by Leó Popper, who was probably his best friend. In this field, Popper was capable of value judgments much more sophisticated than his own, and in Paris had even frequented the circles around Matisse.40 Probably referring to the big Gauguin show staged in the National Salon in 1907, Mici Lukács recalled the highly effective mechanism of ‘inoculation’: ‘Gyuri persuaded me to accompany him to a lovely French exhibition in Budapest, at which wonderful paintings by Gauguin, Cézanne, and Renoir were on display. And when our father confessed that he did not understand the beauty of these pictures, Gyuri explained the significance of the painters to him. Gyuri brought my father together with the best painters of the time, the “Eight”, that is, with Dezsô Czigány, Márffy, and Kernstok.’41 The contacts thus built up and the exhibition visits jointly arranged on more than one occasion probably led in a good number of cases to purchases. György Lukács acquired (‘on papa’s money’,42 naturally) a picture from Márffy in 1907 already, at his exhibition debut staged at the Uránia, while Kernstok’s Horseman at Dawn, one of Lesznai’s pillowcase embroideries, and a still-unidentified oil painting by Berény were acquired at the 1911 exhibition of the Eight.43 Dezsô Czigány became one of József Lukács’s favourites: an interior photograph shows that his The Paintress, displayed at the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition of 1909 but now lost, once embellished the salon of the Gyopár utca villa.44 A letter dated spring 1911 and sent to his son proves József Lukács’s sympathies. ‘The Vedres exhibition by the Eight was very fine. Kernstok’s pictures made a big impact on me, likewise Czigány’s self-portrait, which is a standard work, of which I for my part did

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C IACLAN V IRGIL IN HIS STUDY IN N AGYVÁRAD WITH SCULPTURES S ELF P ORTRAIT OF D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY , 1922.

V ILMOS F ÉMES B ECK ,

A DRAWING BY

L AJOS T IHANYI

AND THE

not think him capable. The others are for the time being beyond my taste.’45 Moving cautiously towards the most modern trends, the bank director was spurred on to acknowledgement by Czigány’s composition Self Portrait with Book, which is today lost and known merely from a reproduction in the periodical Auróra.46 The painting, which suggests conversion to the classical, Rembrantian tradition, was already very far from the earlier self-portrait, the ‘monster with green hair’47 shown eighteen months before at the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition and the cause of significant commotion in the newspapers. This last-mentioned work was purchased by Virgil Ciaclan, a lawyer in Budapest in the 1910s and one of the most interesting figures in the history of Hungarian art collecting. Born at Ópécska near Arad (now Romania) and operating a successful lawyers’ office at 5 Rudolf Square (today Jászai Mari tér) in Budapest before the First World War, Ciaclan was from a family that was completely Romanian.48 With regard to the beginnings of his connection with the Eight we know almost nothing, merely that he bought from them at the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition in 1909 and that within a few years he put together a very comprehensive collection of works by the group’s members. The first picture selected by him was Dezsô Czigány’s abovementioned Self Portrait, the circumstances of the acquisition of which can be reconstructed from a

C IACLAN V IRGIL PAINTING

press statement made in 1938 in connection with the terrible tragedy that befell the artist and his family: ‘When I came up to Budapest – it must have been in 1909 –, I wandered into an exhibition of pictures by the Eight. Straightaway, I liked the pictures very much. Later, I went along to the exhibition on a number of occasions, after which I bought one of the pictures, namely Dezsô Czigány’s Self Portrait. Not one picture in the entire exhibition had been sold; this was the first one that was. Naturally, they hung a “Sold” sign on it. Ignotus, who was an everyday guest with them, was absolutely astonished. To him it seemed incomprehensible. Had someone actually bought a picture from the Eight? He began to ask about me, but even they could tell him nothing. We were introduced, became acquainted, and began to talk. During our talk, I mentioned who I was. Ignotus laughed bitterly: ‘One person in the whole of Hungary buys a picture from the Eight – and that person’s a Romanian.’49 Ciaclan, who maintained close connections with Berény, Pór, and Tihanyi, as well as with the Beck brothers (who were sculptors), built up a collection of works purchased from members of the Eight during the 1910s which was not large, nevertheless it does tell of a fundamental commitment. The small but very fresh sketch for Pór’s monumental Sermon on the Mount he must have seen for himself at the group’s 1911 exhibition;50 it was probably at that time that he acquired Berény’s

INT HE 1930 S WITH L AJOS T IHANYI ’ S L ANDSCAPE WITH A W INDING R OAD

Nude Sitting in an Armchair,51 too. He had an especially close friendship with Tihanyi, the painter of a very fine portrait of him in 1914. As well as their correspondence over several decades,52 three works – Landscape with Winding Road, a small but very monumental-looking nude, and a sketch version of Wrestlers – bear witness to this connection, which was fruitful for both of them.53 Of Ödön Márffy’s work, in all probability just an equestrian composition – a preparatory sketch for a fresco painted on a wall at the school in Kiscell – reached Ciaclan.54 On the other hand, a veritable small collection of work by Vilmos Fémes Beck embellished the study of the lawyer, who later on moved to Nagyvárad. We can form an idea of this office on the basis of a photograph taken in 1922: the figure of the lawyer, shown behind his desk, is framed by works produced by members of the one-time Eight,55 radiating, almost, the monumental symmetry of an ‘altar of friendship’. Czigány’s ‘monster with green hair’, the Tihanyi sketch for Wrestlers, and bronze busts by Fémes Beck (which are reminiscent of Ancient Egypt and Messerschmidt at one and the same time) emphasise with frightening force the mysterious figure of the Romanian lawyer, an enigmatic pioneer in the history of modern Hungarian art collecting.56 Among the supporters of the Eight, a special group is constituted by those architects and building contractors who, by means of purchases or

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J ÓZSEF V ÁGÓ , C . 1920 ( PHOTOGRAPH

O LGA M ÁTÉ )

orders for paintings and sculptures connected with their planned buildings, declared their sympathy for individual artists and for new art. The role of Dezsô Jakab or József Vágó was much more than the fact that each purchased a work from Bertalan Pór, Berény, and Fémes Beck at the 1911 exhibition. Much more important was the acknowledgment represented by Jakab’s decision to order from Pór a gigantic fresco for his plans for the Folk Opera building, and by Vágó’s to commission stained-glass window designs from Kernstock for the villa he was designing for Miksa Schiffer, along with numerous sculptural works from Fémes Beck.57 Vágó – who, like Ady, Jászi, Bölöni, Vedres, and Kernstok – was a member of the Martinovics masonic lodge founded in 1908,58 recommended the two artists – fellow-members of the lodge – to Mór Grünwald, Miksa Schiffer’s father-in-law and business partner. The mosaic and sculptural embellishments of the villa built for this fabulously wealthy entrepreneur were made by Kernstok and Vedres, among others. In a tragic twist of fate, the mosaic (entitled Peace and Work’s Horror of War), which was designed by Kernstok and constructed

in the villa’s bathroom, fell victim to armed conflict (along with the entire furniture and fittings of the sumptuous Grünwald villa) during the siege of Budapest in 1944–45.59

C OMRADES - IN -A RMS On 18 February, the Budapest newspaper 8 Órai Ujság reported (on page 4 of its number that day) that a photograph of a self-portrait by Lajos Tihanyi that had been sent to the imperial capital for reproduction had been intercepted by the censorship, which, understandably, was then operating with increased alacrity on account of the war.60 According to the author of the article, the censors’ office ‘did not understand the picture, since in Vienna Lajos Tihanyi and the other painters in the Eight are not known. For a long time, they wondered what the picture could depict, before finally concluding that it could be nothing other than a bird’s-eye view of the city’s ramparts and other fortifications.’ Although further expert investigation of the subject of the work uncovered

the truth, the story – which Tihanyi himself shared with the author of the article – entertained the Budapest public for days as an item of news from the popular press. Furthermore, the painter – probably in the hope of greater publicity and a degree of recompense – sued the author for defamation, with the result that the matter came before the Budapest Central Court. A civil case, it eventually ended with the rejection of Tihanyi’s claim for damages, but the surviving documents are to some extent instructive regarding the reception of the Eight at that time.61 In the explanation of the verdict, we can read the following: ‘The plaintiff [...] is an adherent of an excessively modern trend in painting, being a member of the so-called Eight. This trend is subject to ongoing attacks on the part of critics supportive of the official art, as well as to ongoing mockery on the part of public opinion. Accordingly, when the plaintiff joined the trend indicated, he was aware that as an artist living from publicity he would be obliged to contend with constant attack and mockery.’62 The art historian Dr. Zoltán Takács, called upon to testify as an expert, summed up the critics’ judgement of the above-mentioned in a more nuanced manner: ‘It is beyond doubt that critics in the press are always writing in a strong – one may even say harsh – tone about the trend represented by the artist, or, to be more precise, some of these critics, since others, on the other hand, remember the so-called Eight with approbation and see them as pioneers.’63 On the basis of Takács’s statement, and of an examination of reports connected with the Eight in the newspapers at this time, it can clearly be seen that a significant part of the Budapest press was sympathetic to the most radical representatives of the new painting: around 1910, the most important allies of the Eight were from among Budapest journalists, a significant percentage of whom were of Jewish descent.64 ‘I believe that I’m not mistaken in thinking that the social soil for the Eight, and for the phenomena akin to them, was mostly that stratum which belonged to the Galileo Circle, or at least sympathised with it, and that connected itself, with an interest that was more and more excited, with the currents of Freudism, Bergsonism, Machism, and, in literature, the Nyugat grouping. If we recall only the last mentioned, we see how heterogeneous this whole phalanx was; it reminds us of how heterogeneous, too, the whole of progressivism was at this time.’65 When little more than a child, Máriusz Rabinovszky had observed, with an interest in art that was already very keen, the intellectual waves that formed around the Eight. Bearing witness with irony to the irony the group’s supporters in the summer of 1949: ‘It was a certain section of the public that included big industrialists, socialist lawyers, semi-bourgeois

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T HE EDITORS OF B UDAPESTI N APLÓ . L EFT : G YULA E RÔS , I GNÁC P FEIFFER , G ÉZA L ENGYEL , M IKLÓS R ÓZSA , L AJOS B ÍRÓ , E DE K ABOS , G ÉZA C SÁTH , G YULA H EGEDÛS , D EZSÔ K OSZTOLÁNYI , 1907 ( PHOTOGRAPH BY L IPÓT S TRELISKY )

peasants, Jewish journalists, secondary-school teachers of the lower nobility with restricted means, etc. who were opposed to the blind and deaf Tisza régime. To this company belonged beauties who were fans of Debussy and who cheated on their husbands, girl students who practised free love with syphilitic poets, and pedantic, “emancipated” women who gave their maids a wash down in their own bathrooms.’66 From a distance of approximately forty years, and in the shadow of a dictatorship then taking shape, Rabinovszky’s assertions, which draw a perceptive conclusion, give an almost perfect description of the real state of affairs. In the great scene, which scarcely lasted a decade, that witnessed the

creation of ‘progressivism’, the most important roles were played by the figures he listed. After the picture-purchasing industrialists and bankers, it is time to make mention of the succession of ‘Jewish journalists’ and adherents of ‘political radicalism’. László Kézdi-Kovács, a modestly talented painter of forests shrouded in half-light who, in the columns of the newspaper Pesti Hírlap, waged a tireless war against the representatives of modern trends, launched, in the January of 1908, an ironical attack against the newly formed MIÉNK, which had selected among its exhibitors Czóbel, Márffy, Kernstok, and Czigány, who were subsequently members of the Eight. ‘There are base defamers,’ he wrote, ‘who qualified the form-

ing of the MIÉNK simply as sensation-seeking, desperation to put on exhibitions, a business stunt, and an interest group. [...] There are base slanderers who are putting it about that the MIÉNK has been created merely by Budapest art critics, solely for the purpose of having beaten down every kind of art all the way from Mûcsarnok to the Uránia Cultural Centre, there would be one group of artists at least that they can elevate to Mount Olympus for themselves. [...] There are wrongheaded individuals who directly accuse Lipótváros of creating the MIÉNK. Namely the inhabitants of Lipótváros always need to have something which others do not have, and so have created a separate group of artists, for home use.’67

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E NDRE A DY , 1913. ( PHOTOGRAPH

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A LADÁR S ZÉKELY )

Kézdi-Kovács’s cautiously suggestive charges can be easily ranked as a tiresome mixture of artistic jealousy nourished on existential fears and the discreet, ‘respectable’ criticism of Jews that was often broached in this era. Nevertheless, the enthusiastic cheer that went up in a significant percentage of contemporary articles and a few lines from the 1912 Almanac much quoted above permit the conclusion that the sudden career of ‘New Pictures’ and later on that of the Eight were grounded in a deliberate ‘conspiracy’ between the artists participating and journalists entering into alliance with them. In short biographies of Jenô Miklós and Pál Relle, two art critics for the daily newspaper Egyetértés, the Almanac does not neglect to say that both ‘had an active part in the creation of the ‘New Pictures’ group of artists’.68 Reference to Relle’s leading role is also made by the following remark of Dezsô Orbán in a letter he wrote in 1967: ‘It was in my studio that Pál Relle and I first

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spoke about the need to collect into one group some of the painters who had been in Paris and who produced works appropriate to the spirit of the age.’69 The list of supporters among newspapers, editors, writers, and journalists could go on and on: among them we find Aladár Bálint, who ‘delivered’ art criticism to the publication Magyar Nyomdászat; Artúr Elek, who wrote for the newspaper Az Újság; Géza Feleky and Jenô Bálint, who purchased works by Berény shown at the 1911 exhibition; Géza Lengyel, who worked for the periodical Nyugat and the newspaper Pesti Napló; György Bölöni, who acquired Kernstok’s iconic Youths picture, among others; Ede Kabos, who supported Czigány by commissioning him to paint numerous portraits; Ignotus, who sat to Róbert Berény; and, of course, Ady, who was painted many times by Dezsô Czigány and who was in these years already much more than a ‘backwoods’

writer: he was regarded on both sides as a symbol of the new intelligentsia that wanted revolutionary change.70 ‘Even from the hill to which Ady led them they have been pushed back and scattered,’ wrote a bitter Béni Ferenczy, who was quoted at the beginning of this study, in a letter of 1921.71 The young sculptor could justly feel that the Protestant Hungarian poet, who had died two years previously, had at one time taken up the standard behind which, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the ‘new intelligentsia ’ had lined up, seeking new roles for itself and wishing to alter the old arrangements.72 Numbering scarcely 2000 persons,73 the narrow circles of progressivism were very diverse, but were driven alike by aversion to the ‘persecutor aesthetic’ and by a desire to achieve. Their apparent strength was many times greater than their numerical strength suggested, multiplied by those forums through which

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they made their voice heard and which could place their modernising views before the public: the journal Huszadik Század, founded in the first year of the new century; the Social Sciences Association, organised around this periodical and cherishing reform goals; the highly heterogeneous Hungarian freemasonry movement (which in time Kernstok, Márffy, Vedres, and Berény all joined); young philosophers making common cause with the antiimpressionism of the Eight and with the group’s opposition to art for art’s sake; liberal editors working for the Budapest press; the Galileo Circle brought into existence by anxieties over freedom of study; the Holnap supporters; and the Nyugat supporters and pseudo-supporters; – in other words, by all those who – like Itóka in a consoling letter sent from Paris to her future husband György Bölöni – hoped that ‘From the Hungarian fallow there will yet be good arable land. [...] From loathsome Today there will be a beautiful Tomorrow.’74 When we look at the list of those who made purchases from the Eight or at those sections of the Hungarian intelligentsia at the turn of the twentieth century who wanted change, we can easily see that members of Budapest’s Jewish community were present among the supporters and propagators of the period’s most modern grouping in strikingly large number. Of course, this does not mean that Budapest Jewry – which was extraordinarily heterogeneous and divided a thousand times over with regard to taste and judgment in art, political sympathies, and worldview – could be reduced to a single common denominator. However, this much is certain, that the unexpected career of modernity was in some way connected to the ever strengthening role of this social circle, and to its increasing activity in the economic, political, and cultural fields alike in the years after 1900. Some of the reasons for this are completely obvious: the urban Jews of Hungary (the overwhelming majority of whom wished to assimilate, for historical and sociological reasons) ‘flowed’ with conspicuous attraction into precisely those branches of employment which yielded supporters of art in every modern country in Europe.75 When discussing the issue in an unbiased way, it should be remembered that in the average collection of the homes in Lipótváros at this time it was rather the kitsch-inclined ‘delicacies’ of Lajos Márk or Fülöp Szenes that featured. In good cases, the tone was set by the cautious impressionism of the Nagybánya painters, and not by the Eight’s ultramodern creations, which scandalised many. In this connection, too, analysis of the contemporary reception enjoyed by Endre Ady, along with analysis of his supporters and readers, brings results well worth considering. So, too, does investigation of the social history connections between the periodical Nyugat and Budapest Jewry. From János

G YÖRGY B ÖLÖNI

Horváth, who criticised the epoch-creating journal from a conservative perspective, came the charge (which in time became almost a commonplace) that Ady was often used as ‘a battering ram against his nation and against his own Hungarian race’, and that in those years when comprehending the poet’s verses represented an insoluble task for a great part of Hungarian society, ‘every educated Jew woke up and retired to bed with volumes of Ady’s poetry’.76 Aladár Schöpflin, the author of a 1934 study of Ady, agrees with Horváth in that ‘Ady’s first public consisted largely of Jews’, on the other hand hastens to clarify his statement by adding, ‘But then, today the public of every Hungarian writer, even the most conservative, consists largely of Jews.’77 Of course, the question cannot be settled by means of such reasoning, insistence on which gives an opportunity for discreet and risk-free avoidance of the problem at most. Since McCagg’s 1972 analysis (the liberationist volume mentioned at the beginning of this study) and Schorske’s writings focusing on Viennese modernism, it has become almost universally accepted that in the background of every modernist movement in Central Europe stood the problematic assimilation of an intelligentsia that was overwhelmingly of Jewish descent, a particular cultural crisis of that intelligentsia, and a tension – generating a psychic sensitivity – in the Jewish population that stemmed from identity crisis and alienation accompanied by marginalisation.78 Critics of the above view – including Péter Hanák – have called attention to the necessarily simplistic nature of this sociological and psychological approach, while – perhaps referring to a warning in a letter written by Jászi in 1928 that ‘more modesty is called for’,79 and bearing in mind the towering oeuvres of

WITH AN UNKNOWN LADY ,

1910 S

the Christians Ady, Babits, Móricz, Bartók, Kodály, and, indeed, Ferenczy, Rippl-Rónai, and Csontváry – feeling the need to note that the Hungarians’ ‘great artists [...] came from the nation’s traditional elite, but their editors and readers in large part came from the ranks of the educated and art-appreciating Jewish intelligentsia’.80 When we examine the early history of the new Hungarian literature published in the journal Nyugat, or the first period of modern Hungarian painting, the emerging talents of the years around 1900, Péter Hanák’s assertions, which can be abbreviated as the formula ‘Hungarian geniuses – Jewish hinterland’ seems to be true. According to this, whilst ‘the most original creative talents could be found among the decayed and marginalised gentry’, among the social supporters of the new art a clear leading role was taken by the urban middle class which was overwhelmingly of Jewish descent.81 Nevertheless, when we investigate our period in the strict sense of the term, namely one decade around 1910, we may conclude that in these years it was not just among supporters, collectors, and patrons that the dominance of Jews was unusually large, but also among innovating painters and sculptors. Of the members of the Eight, only Márffy and Kernstok were not from this milieu, and even guest exhibitors entering into ad hoc associations with the group were almost invariably from it, too. This conspicuous overrepresentation is also worthy of note because neither before nor subsequently did artists of Jewish descent struggle in such high number in the forefront of Hungarian modernism: among the most important masters at the Nagybánya colony the leading role had been taken by déclassé members of the gentry, while in the avant-garde in the mid-1910s this role was taken by Christian proletarians and

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B ÉLA B ARTÓK AT G YERGYÓSZENTMIKLÓS , 1907 ( PHOTOGRAPH BY I STVÁN K OVÁTS )

almost property-less members of the lower middle class embarking upon an artistic career.82 A question naturally emerges: did Jewish identity count for the members of the Eight at all? Each of them believed in assimilation, and their families – without exception non-orthodox and endeavouring to adjust to the Christian majority – had earlier on already magyarised their Germansounding surnames, and by the 1910s not one of these artists had officially abandoned the Jewish religion. Moreover, a clear majority of middle-class, radical Jews sympathetic to left-wing, socialist opinions looked on the spread of the new ideas as a means that held out the prospect of assimilation: they hoped that in the movement every member

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would lose his old identity, and that poisonous conflicts would dissolve in the ideal community that would come into being later on. However, seductive desires and painful reality have rarely diverged from one another so sharply. When we survey the literature of the period, primarily that of the 1910s, we have to agree with Katalin Fenyves, who placed in the focus of her newly published book the problems connected with assimilation, claiming that ‘At the turn of the twentieth century already, Jewishness was not something that could be shed simply through full psychological identification with non-Jews.’83 Péter Hanák came to a similar conclusion when he quoted the bitter words of Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese writer who was partly of Hungarian descent: ‘It was not possible for Jews, especially those in the public eye, to disregard the fact that they were Jews, since others did not do this: the Christians did not do it, and the Jews did it even less.’84 To prove all this, it is enough to survey the correspondence of Béla Bartók, all the more so since of his one-time patrons among the protagonists of these letters more than one purchaser of work by the Eight is to be found. ‘Who are the Lukácses? Jews and well to do. That’s all I know,’ wrote Bartók to his mother on 5 October 1901,85 following his introduction to a family which provided patronage for him for decades. Then at the beginning of his career, the composer taught piano and harmony to József Lukács’s children, among others. For years, he supported himself by teaching the daughters of the Budapest Jewish middle class and by taking part in chamber music evenings held for the most part in the homes of such families. It was no coincidence that he sometimes – half in jest – dubbed himself at the end of his letters ‘Honorary and Working Teacher of Music to the Jews of Budapest’.86 Passed almost from hand to hand in the salons of Lipótváros, the young talent drew a clear conclusion from his newly acquired experiences: ‘I owe my entire existence to Jews’.87 Of course, it is not merely a sociology of art approach that can justify the raising of the ‘Jewish question’, namely that the influence of the Jews in the creation of the new Hungarian art appeared not merely in a transferential way, through their support for – and hence their involuntary shaping of – modern culture. In connection with this, it should be enough to cite the opinions of two authors especially relevant from the point of view of our theme. Róbert Berény, one of the Eight’s youngest members who with his celebrated Self Portrait in a Top Hat gave splendid proof of a rare talent for self-analysis tending towards self-mockery, characterised a piece of music – by Antal Molnár, viola player in the Kerpely-Waldbauer Quartet that performed at the Eight’s first exhibition – premiered in 1913 in the following words:

‘His music says everything, about race, temperament, about walks on moonlit evenings taken by a sorrowful, lovesick Jew along the banks of a meandering stream in some unknown Jewish village, sobbing out his woes to the night. There is a Jewish race and a Jewish racial character, and it’s not just the fact that the non-Jews of Europe hate them. And if there is this racial character, then there is a racial music also, the music of slowly rising or quickly falling waves of sound.’88 The daughter of Geyza Moskovitz, ‘Jewish landowner’ at Alsókörtvélyes, Anna Lesznai exhibited her embroidery to the public at the 1911 exhibition staged by the Eight and cultivated close links with the members of the group (and, perhaps, amorous ties with one or the other of them). She framed her opinion with particular sensitivity for the above-mentioned public-opinion poll staged by the journal Huszadik Század, which sought an answer to the question, among others, ‘Is there a Jewish question in Hungary and, if so, what lies at the heart of it?’ Lesznai, whose work as writer as well as painter has proved eternal, in her essay, suffused with touching personal experiences and a faint racial self-hatred not uncommon at this time makes a categorical statement: ‘The Jewish question exists also then, when someone of Jewish origin is sitting at home by himself behind closed doors. It does not only feature in an individual’s relationship to the community; a fateful seriousness is also given by the fact that a Jew is a Jew for himself, too.’89 The eternal seeking, not feeling at home in a society, and the painful feeling of the lack of an accepting community had – in Lesznai’s view – led to a state of affairs in which to be a Jew did not mean belonging to a particular denomination or religious community, an association determined by traditions and patterns that one could leave on the basis of individual decision, but rather ‘a special, pathologically agitated nervous condition’.90 These lines accord surprisingly well with a statement made by the American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, namely that the disproportionately large role of Jews in the intellectual life of modern civilisation, and especially in the iconoclastic, paradigm-changing scientific and artistic vanguard, is connected with their release from ghetto life, with their stepping out of old, Jewish traditions, and with their experiences of failure to achieve harmonious and full assimilation into a new community.91 In the case of the Eight, this model serves as a satisfactory explanation: on the threshold of the assimilation desired by Hungary’s Jews and in the ominous shadow of the already suspected failure of this assimilation, these young talents, casting off the faith of their forebears and their commitment to their own people, wrote perhaps the most powerful chapter in the story of Hungarian modernism.

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Notes

29 30

2 3

6 7

9 10 11 12

16 17

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

27 28

Letter from Béni Ferenczy to Ferenc Wilde. Mailed from Rózsahegy, it arrived on 5 October 1921. – MNG Adattár, ltsz.: 20151.1979.14. Ibid. For a summary of the earlier literature, see Gyurgyák, János: A zsidókérdés Magyarországon. [Jewish question in Hungary] Budapest, 2001. For the ‘Korrobori’ piece, written by Ady in June 1917 but published in Nyugat only on 3 January 1924, see Ady Endre összes prózai mûvei. Újságcikkek, tanulmányok. [Collected prose by Endre Ady, Newspaper articles, studies] XI. Ed. Láng, József. Budapest, 1982. 136–138, 601–605. As well as Gyurgyák’s above-mentioned volume, another work, too, surveys the issue: Fenyves, Katalin: Képzelt asszimiláció? Négy zsidó értelmiségi nemzedék önképe. [Imagined assimilation? The self view of four generations of Jewish intellectuals] Budapest, 2010. 213–264. Quoted in Fenyves 2010. Op. cit. 252. For Ritoók’s novel, see Markója, Csilla: ‘Három kulcsregény és három sorsába zárt “vasárnapos” – Lesznai Anna, Ritoók Emma és Kaffka Margit találkozása a válaszúton’. [Three key novels and three Sundayists “locked” in their fates. The encounter of A. L., R. and M. K. at the crossroads] In: ‘Lesznai Anna élete és mûvészete II.’ [The life and art of A. L.] Enigma, 14. no. 52. 2007. 67–108. ‘A zsidókérdés Magyarországon. A Huszadik Század körkérdése’. [The Jewish question in Hungary. Pole of H.Sz.] Huszadik Század, 18. 1917. II.: 72. McCagg, William: Jewish Nobles and Geniuses in Modern Hungary. New York, 1972. For a recent summary of the literature connected with Hungary Jewry, see Gyurgyák 2001. Op. cit. 603–648. Emma Ritoók to ‘Nil’, 17 June 1924. Published in Kovács, M. Mária, Budapesti Negyed, 3, 1995, 2. 162. Highly interesting parallels are drawn by Ignotus between industrialisation in Hungary in the nineteenth century and the upturn in cultural life: idem: Ignotus: ‘Új mûvészet’ [New art]. Nyugat, 2. 1909. I.: 411–415. A budapesti Orvos-szövetség védnöksége mellett rendezett Mû-kiállítás. Kiállítási katalógus. [Art exhibition under the patronage of the Budapest Physicians Association. Catalogue] Budapest, Mûcsarnok, 1902. Molnos, Péter – Geskó, Judit: ‘The works of van Gogh in Hungary’. Van Gogh in Budapest. ed.: Geskó, Judit; Gosztonyi, Ferenc. Budapest, 2006. 105–129. Petrovics, Elek: ‘Töredékes feljegyzések Szinyeirôl’. [Fragmentary notes on Szinyey.] Manuscript. Published in Molnos, Péter: Petropvics Elek (1873–1945) az ember [P.E. the man] ‘Emberek, és nem frakkok’. A magyar mûvészettörténetírás nagy alakjai. Tudománytörténeti esszégyûjtemény. Szerk. Markója Csilla, Bardoly István. Budapest, 2007. 239. Ferenczy, Béni: Írás és kép. Utószó: Genthon István [Word and image. Epilogue: G. I.]. Budapest, 1961. 13–14. ‘Mûvásárlók és eladott mûvek lexikona 1894–1911’ [List of buyers and sold works]. Almanach. (Képzômûvészeti lexikon). Szerk. Déry Béla, Bányász László, Margitay Ernô. Budapest, 1912. 255–292. ‘A “Nyolcak”’. [The Eight] Világ, 1911. May 9 issue. 12. – Az Utak III.: 157. Almanach 1912. Op. cit. 279. Regarding Lesznai, the artists’ circle that formed around her, and the manor-house at Alsókörtvélyes, see Lesznai Anna élete és mûvészete I–II. [The life and art of A. L.] Szerk. Török Petra, Szilágyi Judit, Markója Csilla. Enigma, 14. no. 51–52. 2007. Vezér, Erzsébet: Lesznai Anna élete. [The life of A. L.] Budapest, 1979. 27–28. Ibid., 28. Molnos 2006. 218-242 Lesznai, Anna: Kezdetben volt a kert [In the beginning was the garden] II. Budapest, 1966. 257. – The author would like to thank Csilla Markója for drawing his attention to the novel. Molnos, Péter: ‘Petrovics Elek, a gyûjtô’ [E. P. The art collector]. Nulla dies sine linea. Tanulmányok Passuth Krisztina hetvenedik születésnapjára. [Studies on the seventieth birthday of K. P.] ed. Berecz Ágnes, L. Molnár Mária, Tatai Erzsébet. Budapest: Praesens, 2007. 114–121. Kövér, György: ‘Deutsch Ig. és fia’. A Hatvanyak emlékezete. [I.D and his sons. The memory of the Hatvanys] Szerk. Horváth László. Hatvan, 2003. 13–22.; Halmos Károly: ‘A Hatvany-Deutsch dinasztia’. Sokszínû kapitalizmus: pályaképek a magyar tôkés fejlôdés aranykorából. [The H-D dynasty. Multicoloured capitalism. Careers from the golden age of developing capitalism in Hungary] Szerk. Sebôk Marcell. Budapest, 2004. 84–97. Almanach 1912. Op. cit. 269. Reproduced: 337

35 36 37

39 40

43 44

45 46 47

50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57

Reproduced: 409 Aurora 1911 According to data in the ‘National Salon Almanac’, Albert Hirsch, who married Irén Hatvany, the sister of Lajos and Ferenc, purchased a Dezsô Czigány painting and a Fémes Beck bronze medallion at the Eight’s 1911 show. Strasserné Chorin, Daisy – Bán, D. András: Az Andrássy úttól a Park Avenue-ig. Fejezetek Chorin Ferenc életébôl (1879–1964). [From Andrássy Street to Park Avenue. Chapters from the life of F. Ch.] Budapest, 1999. Fenyves, Katalin: ‘A Nyugat “zsidósága” Farkas Lujza és Fenyô Mario könyvében’. [The ‘Jewishness’ of Nyugat in the book of L. F. and M. F.] Múlt és Jövô, 19, 2008, 4. 99–102. Géber, Antal: ‘Magyar mûgyûjtôk I–II.’ [Hungarian art collectors] MS. ed. Tóth, Melinda. Szépmûvészeti Múzeum könyvtára. Budapest, 1970. Reproduced: 355 Vécsey, Miklós: Száz értékes magyar. [Hundred valuable Hungarians] Budapest, 1931. 298–301. For József Lukács and his family, see Bendl, Júlia: Lukács György élete a századfordulótól 1918-ig [The life of Gy. L. from the turn of the century until 1918]. Budapest, 1994. Gyergyai, Albert: ‘Egy barátságos ház története’ [The history of a friendly household]. Magyar Zenetörténeti Tanulmányok, 4. Kodály Zoltán emlékére. ed. Bónis Ferenc. Budapest, 1977. 415. – Quoted in Markója, Csilla: ‘Popper Leó (1886–1911)’. ‘Emberek, és nem frakkok’ 2007. Op. cit. 267. Ibid. 416. For the links between Popper and Lukács see Lukács György levelezése (1902–1917). [The correspondence of Gy. L.] ed. Fekete Éva, Karádi Éva. Budapest, 1981; Bendl 1994. Op. cit.; Markója 2007. Op. cit. 263–284. Popperné Lukács, Mici: ‘Emlékeim Bartókról, Lukács Györgyrôl és a régi Budapestrôl’ [My memories of B., Gy. L., and Budapest anno] . Magyar Zenetörténeti Tanulmányok, 4. Kodály Zoltán emlékére. Szerk. Bónis Ferenc. Budapest, 1977. 381–382. The interview with Márffy conducted by Béla Horváth in 1957 in which the purchase is mentioned is quoted in Rockenbauer, Zoltán: ‘Márffy Ödön (monográfia és életmû-katalógus)’[Ö.M. (a monography and oeuvre catalogue]. Ph.D. dissertation. MS. ELTE Bölcsészettudományi Kar. Budapest, 2008. 37. Almanach 1912. Op. cit. 277. Along with many other photographs of the rooms of the Gyopár utca villa, this particular one is to be found in the Lukács Archive of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The present author would like to thank Gergely Barki for calling his attention to its existence. – A photograph of the villa with Kernstock’s Horseman at Dawn was already published in Lukács György élete képekben és dokumentumokban. [The life of Gy. L. in pictures and documents] ed. Fekete Éva, Karádi Éva. Budapest, 1980. 39. Letter from József Lukács to Gyöngy Lukács, 1 May 1911. – Quoted in Bendl 1994. Op. cit. 81. Reproduced: 211 ‘The good portrait by him, the one which critics hostile to him considered simply as a monster with green hair, now hangs in the home of a genuine middle-class family.’ Bölöni, György: ‘Czigány Dezsô’. Szombat, 1910, 9. – Az Utak II.: 381. Nagy, Ildikó: ‘Tersánszky Józsi Jenô és Tihanyi Lajos portréja Fémes Beck Vilmostól (Adatok egy mûgyûjtô arcképéhez)’ [Portraits of J.J.T. and L. T. by V. F. B. (Data on the portrait of an art collector)]. Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 42. 1993. 40–47. Török, Tibor: ‘Egy meghasonlott lélek tragédiája. Dr. Ciaclan Virgil nagyváradi ügyvéd, aki lakásán ôrzi a családírtó Cigány Dezsô önarcképét, beszél a “nyolcak”-ról és a különös életû festômûvész egyéniségérôl’ [The tragedy of an unbalanced soul. Dr. C. V., lawyer in Nagyvárad speaks about the family murderer D. C.] Friss Ujság, 6 January 1938 issue. 3. Reproduced: 386. (Cat. no. 367) Reproduced: 187. The letters in the Hungarian National Gallery Archive are published in Majoros, Valéria: Tihanyi Lajos írásai és dokumentumok. [The writings of L. T. and documents]. Budapest, 2002. Additional letters can be found in the collection of Dr. Péter Antal, for whose assistance the author is grateful. Reproduced: 418, 437 Virgil Ciaclan with Márffy’s drawing: 429 MNG Adattár, ltsz.: 23279/1991. Reproduced: 218, 470, 471 Gábor, Eszter – Nagy, Ildikó – Sármány, Ilona: ‘A budapesti Schiffer-villa (Egy késô szecessziós villa rekonstrukciója)’ [The Sch. Villa in Budapest. (Reconstruction of a late Secessionist villa)]. Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 31. 1982. 4–88.; Lambrichs, Anne: Vágó József. Budapest, 2005. 77–85. For the freemasonry ties of the Eight and their supporters, see Rockenbauer, Zoltán: Márffy. Életmûkatalógus. [M. Complete works] Budapest – Párizs, 2006. 54. Lambrichs 2005. 106–113.

61 62 63 64

65 66 67

68 69 70

75 76 77 78

80 81 82

83 84 85

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‘Magyar festô képe a bécsi rendôrségen’ [The work of a Hungarian painter at the police in Vienna] 8 Órai Ujság, 18 February 1916 issue. 4. (From the court documents it turned out that the writer of the piece was Árpád Juhász.) Budapest City Archives, Budapest Central Court, Court and Non-court Documents. HU BFL – VII. 12. b.-1916-2245. Ibid., Original court document: 27.P.3348/6/1916. (21 September 1916) Ibid., Original court document: P. V. 2245/3/1916. (3 June 1916) In 1910, 48.4 per cent of Budapest editors and newspaper journalists were Jews. See Zeke, Gyula: ‘A nagyvárosi kultúra új formái és a zsidóság’ [New forms of metropolitan culture and the Jews]. Budapesti Negyed, 3, 1995, 2. 95–96. Letter from Máriusz Rabinovszky to Ferenc Redô, 14 June 1949. – MTA MKI Adattár, ltsz.: MKCS–C–I–64/38–1. Ibid. Kézdi Kovács, László: ‘A “Miénk” csoportkiállítása a Nemzeti Szalonban’ [Group exhibcition of ‘MIÉNK’ in the National Salon]. Pesti Hirlap, 11 Jaunary 1908 issue. 6–7. – Az Utak II.: 324. Almanach 1912. Op. cit. 242, 248. Letter from Dezsô Orbán to Iván Dévényi, 25 April 1967. – MTA MKI Adattár, ltsz.: MKCS–C–I–159/1136.2 It speaks volumes that Gyula Szegfû in his book Three generations, a key work in spite of its incongruity, juxtaposes in one chapter [Two Hungarian Lives in an Era of Decline] the two key figures of the decade and a half following the turn of the twentieth century: Endre Ady and István Tisza. See Szekfû, Gyula: Három nemzedék. Budapest, 1920. 362–377. Letter from Béni Ferenczy to Ferenc Wilde. Mailed from Rózsahegy, it arrived on 5 October 1921. – MNG Adattár, ltsz.: 20151.1979.14. For the development and role of the ‘new intelligentsia’, see Balázs, Eszter: Az intellektualitás vezérei. Viták az irodalmi autonómiáról a Nyugatban és a Nyugatról 1908–1914. [The leaders of intellectualism. Debates on literary autonomy in and about Nyugat ] Budapest, 2009. Fenyô, D. Mario: A Nyugat hôskora és háttere. [The heroic age of Ny. and the background] Debrecen, 2001. Fenyô puts the number of those who were active members of progressive groups of various kinds between 1900 and 1918 at approximately 3000. For the different formations in progressivism, primarily in connection with Anna Lesznai’s contacts, see Gantner Brigitta, Eszter: ‘Lesznai Anna és szellemi köre’ [The intellectual circle of A.L.] In: ‘Lesznai Anna élete és mûvészete [The life and art of A. L.] I. Szerk. Török Petra, Szilágyi Judit, Markója Csilla. Enigma, 14. no. 51. 2007. 135–143. Letter from Itóka (Otília Marchis¸ius) to György Bölöni, 12 January 1909. Párizstól pocsolyavárosig. Bölöni György és Itóka levélnaplója 1906–1912. [From Paris to puddletown. Letter diary of Gy. B. and I.] Ed. And introduced by Nagy, Csaba. Budapest, 2005. 61. For the proportions of Jews in the different branches of employment, see Gyurgyák 2001. Op. cit. 80–87. Horváth, János: Aranytól Adyig. [From Arany to Ady] Budapest, n.d. [1921]. – Quoted in Fenyves 2008. 100. Schöpflin, Aladár: Ady Endre. Budapest, 1934. – Quoted in Fenyves 2008. 99–102. For a summary of the issue and the related literature, see Gyáni, Gábor: ‘Modernitás, modernizmus és identitásválság: a fin de siècle Budapest’ [Modernity, modernism and identity: Budapest at the fin de siècle] Aetas, 19, 2004, 1. 131–143. ‘In Hungarian literature, art, and science, the greatest figures (Petôfi, Vörösmarty, Kemény, Eötvös, and other eminent representatives of the Reform Age) were not Jews, and today also the greatest names are not Jews (Ady, Babits, Móricz, Bartók, Kodály). [...] Consequently, more modesty is called for.’ Letter from Oszkár Jászi to Herbert Solow, April 1928. – Quoted by Gyurgyák 2001. 508. Hanák 1999. Op. cit. 228–229. Ibid., 258. It is sufficient to refer merely to Károly Ferenczy, János Thorma, and István Réti on the one hand and to Kassák, Bortnyik, Nemes Lampérth, and Kmetty on the other. Fenyves 2010. Op. cit. 253. Hanák 1999. Op. cit. 226. Quoted in Junger, Ervin: Bartók és a zsidó diaszpóra. Adatok Bartók Béla mûvészi és társadalmi kapcsolataihoz. [Bartók and Jewish diaspor. Some data on B.B.’s artistic and social contacts]. Budapest, 1997. 71. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 71. Berény, Róbert: ‘A Thoman–Szigeti–Son trió’. [The Th. – Sz. – S. trio] Nyugat, 6. 1913. I.: 568. ‘A zsidókérdés Magyarországon’ [The Jewish question in Hungary] 1917. Op. cit. 104. Ibid., 105. Veblen’s theory is quoted by Hanák: Hanák 1999. Op. cit. 261.

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APPROACHES TO THE EIGHT THROUGH PICTURES The goal of this study, in order to summarize the manifold stylistic features of the Eight, is to uncover the peculiarities in their individual synthesis-creating experiments – in comparison with their aesthetic sources – while they were developing their style. An art history approach is not of foremost importance here. We would much rather shed light upon experimental solutions to certain pictorial problems from the aspect of painterly practice, so the illumination of concepts makes not only the similarities apparent, but the conspicuous differences as well. Besides emblematic works of art, we also draw into our sphere of investigation a few open-ended, trend-inspired painterly experiments where, in their raw conception, we may grasp with fewer obstacles the ‘original’ painterly thought. From this standpoint, we can chart a more comprehensive trajectory of the journey ‘from A to B.’ We will approach these artistic aspirations, which assume the shape of modernist endeavours, from the context of concepts under formation.

P RECEDENTS L ANGUAGE

F ORMAL

We cannot trace the spiritual genesis of the Eight back to that event on 31 December 1909, when a group of ‘seekers’ opened their ‘New Pictures’ exhibition at the Könyves Kálmán Salon. The eight painters formed an alliance not only due to the effective urging of the very influential Károly Kernstok,1 but also due to antecedents who became intellectually ‘in tune’ over the course of years.

Seeing that Kernstok recruited the bulk of this fellowship with common artistic interests from the leading figures of the Hungarian Fauves, we must recognize that the formation of the future Eight’s image, the honing of its multifaceted stylistic make-up – its previous life, so to speak, up until 1909 – is none other than the maturation process of the Hungarian Fauves. Thus, by analyzing the circumstances and the synthesis-seeking experiments attendant upon the Fauves’ ‘arrival,’ we will have trodden the actual route leading to the Eight. Works appearing between 1907 and 1909 demonstrate that the Hungarian Fauve’s vision – with its emphasis on contouring and enclosed bodies of mass – differed from standard Fauvism and exerted a decisive influence on the succeeding Eight’s use of techniques. Two factors fundamentally defined the distinctive character of Hungarian versus French Fauvism. The first, arising from our visual culture, is a palpable attitude, a determinedly plastic-based approach to the subject. The second has to do with the progressives’ selective adaptation with regard to its chronological phases. Thirdly, we will touch upon formsolidifying effects. A brief summary of these topics is justified here, since it is made up of integral precedents to the Eight’s efforts.

1. P LASTIC -B ASED A PPROACH TO VISION A significant difference, manifest in the interpretation of colour, was already codified in the runup to Fauvism. Unlike the French, Hungarian plein

air painters were not interested in the expression of light that had the ability to dissolve and dematerialize masses of form. Quite the contrary, they used Expressionist tools – the play of light and shadow with complementary colours – to reform their thoroughly plastic vision through colour interpretation. (Previously, it had been built upon tone-based local colour.) Consider, for example, the change that occurred in the painting of the art instructors who established a painting school in Nagybánya after leaving art academies in Paris and Munich. Strong complementary colours succeeded exquisite naturalism in the interpretation of spatiality. Even in the work of Károly Ferenczy, the tangibility of presented matter was practically borne by light. Instead of light poetry based upon the Impressionists’ decomposition of colour, in Hungarian plein air painting, the portrayal of light was tantamount to a dramatic depiction of illumination. In the pictorial elements, the illuminated bodies of mass and the interplay of patches of light and shadow retained their spatiality. The rhythm of light contrasts essentially organized the composition. The Hungarian Fauves inherited the depiction of space expressible in terms of colour scale. They could not free themselves from a physical perception of the world either, and as a result, they did not even reject the plastic interpretation of objects. Nevertheless, as a mode of seeing, this increased enthusiasm for modelling, in connection with the interpretation of a plastic experience, stood in stark contrast to a main principle of the fauves, who broke away from all illusory conventions of presentation. For the Hungarian Fauves, the tempestuous and joyous formation of lush masses of paint so specifically manifested N UDE S ITTING IN AN A RMCHAIR , 1911 (D ETAIL ) • C AT . N O .: 23

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itself in the factura as an erotic gesture that Ernô Kállai cheerfully identified it as a gift resulting from the natural history of the Hungarian character in his ‘species-specific study.’2 Béla Czóbel presents an exception, as his painting is closest to French Fauvism. He went beyond the depiction of light and imitative representation. In his compositions Painters Outdoors (1906) and Man in a Straw Hat (c. 1907), he expressed the ability of light to dissolve the bodyvolume. Spread over a plane, the freely-dissolved decorative colour patches and brushstrokes are combined in a loose texture, floating the formal and objective contents, so the human figure and the landscape environment are presented in the same manner, vibrating in scattered light.

circumstances, it is natural that the intensity of colour and energy on Hungarian fauve canvases became more subdued, and spontaneity was replaced by speculative approaches. In integrating and synthesis-seeking experiments, colour became an element of aesthetic consideration. It is a meaningful difference compared to French Fauvism, where colour bore artistic content. Neither is it an accident that, from this time period, we encounter a significant number of canvases painted on both sides.4 Seemingly underestimating the worth of their earlier experiments, the Hungarian Fauves painted new pictures on the reverse side of a host of excellent fauve-inspired compositions. In fact, in some cases, they cut their earlier works into pieces.5 These gestures (placed in parentheses) truly display an alteration in their relationship to Fauvism.

2. B ELATED P HASES In the synthesis-seeking experiments of young painters bouncing between Paris, Budapest, and Nagybánya, the simultaneous application of different style elements reveals the visual channels whereby the Hungarian Fauves were driven first towards Fauvism and then beyond it. Strictly speaking, it seems as if Hungarian painting during the period in question is summarized by experiments that approached Fauvism and then departed from it, while par excellence Fauvism itself is missing. If we compare the output of Hungarian versus French Fauvism using a more differentiated approach, in a cross-section of the appropriate levels of time, we are bound to appreciate a significant circumstance – namely, that the evolution of the Hungarian Fauves (as a self-aware movement) began after 1907, when the appearance of Cubism relegated Fauvism to a passing trend, and the priority of colour gave way to that of form. In the buzzing intellectual medium of competing movements, confronted with the relativity of “lasting values,” Hungarian painters no longer wanted to be followers of Fauvism. It is important to note that the Hungarian Fauves did not even exist as an organized group. Posterity bestowed this collective name upon them for the sake of bringing together and classifying these divergent progressive experiments that did not fit any category.3 Cubism, as a cult of form bent on conquering space, literally encouraged a refreshment in the plastic-centred culture of seeing. The direction of this progressive movement was further cemented after 1907, when Master Matisse, deconstructing his own Fauvism, emphasized the importance of concept over instinct, and his students also began to think in terms of a well-structured visual field. Taking into consideration these

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3. C ONDENSATION AND S OLIDIFICATION OF F ORM We must highlight two methods of form solidification and condensation which the Eight clung to in their painterly practice. The first has to do with contouring flat, decorative patches of colour projected on a plane. This was (and continued to be) a practical tool in the applied arts, such as mosaic and glass window genres. Still, in the medium of painting, the ‘Neos’6 used contours with particular relish as a summarizing tool. They alloyed Gauguin’s “cloisonnism” with the Nabi colour palette and the beautifully undulating line culture of Hungarian Art Nouveau – represented by Vaszary, Ferenczy, and primarily Rippl-Rónai. The fact that stylistic techniques were the aspect of tradition that most interested the progressive artists at painting colonies in the countryside also helped ferment this illusionist nature-principled vision. They enlivened elements from their native legacy of visual rhetoric (fixed patches and the linearly-ordered formal elements from Art Nouveau), refreshing them and integrating them into a new synthesis. Secondly, there was the integration of planes and space – that is, a concept organizing spatial forms and matter – which mainly appealed to the progressive artists nourished on the roots of Cézanne. Among them, Lajos Tihanyi, Róbert Berény, Dezsô Orbán, Ödön Márffy, and Dezsô Czigány preferred the bustle and stimulation of the big city. They represented the ‘urban’ wing of the Fauves, and their constructive stylistic ideals modified the Fauve’s aesthetic profile. They departed

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from the more provincial outlook of the ‘Neos’ in Nagybánya and Kecskemét, and their ‘shades of intellect’ eventually brought greater depth to the style make-up of the nascent Eight.7 Looking back from a sufficient perspective, we can clearly see a preparation for summary and renewal lying dormant beneath the disparate progressive painterly experiments. A couple of years later, Károly Kernstok would try to bring this about with the Eight, organized from the Fauves and propagating the Cézanne illusion of “lasting value.”

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K ERNSTOK ’ S “C LASSICAL ” I DEAL Q UARRELLING WITH I MPRESSIONISM IN TERMS OF CÉZANNE AND MATISSE The relatedness of Károly Kernstok’s and Cézanne’s concepts is not striking at a glance, rather upon reading. In any case, it is not on the painted surface, but in their thoughts, formulated on the printed page, that we begin to discover similarities.

Cézanne wrote to Émile Bernard, “We must become classical again, through nature, through perceptive observation […] looking at nature to reacquire those techniques that four or five great Venetians used.” In his study entitled “The Inquisitive Art,”8 Kernstok seems to continue this thought, writing, “It is true the different schools taught us to see nature.”9 In order for the creative artist to thrive with the aid of nature, though, he had to arm himself with a skill that, when standing before nature, “would be equivalent [to the schools] in its significance, and this is our reason.”10 The painter’s reason, however, is displayed in “what artistic, painterly value he is able to mine from nature’s great eternal lode.”11 While Kernstok’s artistic philosophy was akin to the French master’s notion, what he drew from this concept – nude youths on horseback – was indebted to Hans von Marées’ classical world of motifs for its backing and inspiration (R: 65, 106, 111). Kernstok was additionally related to Marées, insofar as he was “the type of artist who selected freely from tradition.”12 Nevertheless, it seems that Kernstok, while searching for “classical values,” had an ambivalent attitude towards German art. In his writing “Short Epilogue to an Exhibition,”13 he warned his peers, “[We should] make ourselves independent of German art,” which, since Dürer, “only errs in reactions,” and where its aesthetic is typically “overturned every ten years and every inch disavows its predecessors.”14 Instead, he recommended that, “while we are dependent on no traditions, we should look for what to study where skill is conscious, where the strongest innovation grows organically out of its antecedents.”15 He highly esteemed the “chain reaction” in French painting that embraced decades, pointing out, “The only route for us, […] if we wish to embark on the direct path, is the French.”16 They could reach that point with Cézanne. “In Cézanne’s paintings, the formal richness, the arrangement of space, and the colour relations point out where we should investigate and experiment.”17 In reference to Cézanne, let us see if the Eight’s guru was able to adapt in his own artwork everything he drew their attention to. Cézanne advocated the primacy of thought in the composition, which – like a tenet worthy of the classics – he regarded as evidence of lasting value. Kernstok also set his sights on the discovery of an a priori principle of composition that would overwrite an empirical vision, and to this end, he rallied the “painter’s reason” in his declaration. However, Cézanne’s painterly concept was more organically linked to precedents. It is in the organization’s structure-creating elements that the difference between the two painters is especially meaningful. Whereas Cézanne began by trying to assimilate into a new order of composition the accomplish-

ments Impressionism had achieved with valeur analysis, Kernstok became the sworn enemy of Impressionism. He disavowed the legacy that, with its light-conducting complementary colours, had made his 1906 Portrait of Béla Czóbel such a dazzling success (R: 256). With the thrust of his aesthetic intolerance, Kernstok made the discrepancy between his role model and his own painterly conception ever more apparent. The result: Kernstok’s work was closed, whereas Cézanne’s organically constructed paintings offered opportunities, even for future generations, to make large forwards strides. For proof of this, we need only compare the two differing notions’ immanent progress in terms of the development of a painterly language. While Cézanne organized his matter formation technique, the valeur, into a tectonic fabric of colour, he always made sure to leave the component elements of his painting free and open to future development. That way, Cézanne’s work became easily accessible for both Fauves and Cubists alike. Cézanne’s component elements are dual-natured, both bound and unbound. When the valeur is bound, it works as a subordinate tool in the representation, as a “vital structural cell”18 within the picture body’s fabric of colour. Unbound, let it be understood, is when the component element itself bears a pleasurable artistic value. In this case, we can say the ‘colour forms’ (read: valeur) are just as much representational subjects as the picture’s motifs. Thus, when the painterly tools take on the significance of a motif, a similar homogeneity is also established on the level of structural elements. It is the same uniformity of meaning when Cézanne fixed all “living and non-living matter’s existence at the very same state of still life.”19 The uniform significance of tool and motif was already encoded in Impressionist painting when, thanks to Matisse’s interpretation of Cézanne’s concept, it became applicable to Fauvism, too. “The real substance of the painting – that is to say, the ensemble of painted marks that both presents itself as itself and purports to represent something else – unites subject and form in a new entity. This entity, which could be called the depictive entity, simultaneously evokes and transcends the physical object it depicts.”20 With Kernstok, who endorsed the primacy of reason, we do not find experiments in abstraction that move in this direction. In spite of his endless individual trial and error in these contrary directions, he only managed to limit his own work to a closed field of developmental possibility. What the above example intended to show, in relation to Cézanne and Fauvism, is that while this very source meant freedom to Matisse, it meant duty and law to Kernstok. A reckoning of colouration, though timely, was no longer warranted. Beside the cult of form

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generated by Cubism, deliberate ‘colour deprivation’ was the characteristic typical of the time’s visual rhetoric. In his account of the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition, Géza Lengyel wrote regarding Kernstok, “This renunciation, this self-imposed poverty is rather unusual after his colourist period […] However, these puritan human bodies, divested of all their customary decoration, tellingly demonstrate the construction.”21 In his drawing, Kernstok found his work’s most valuable range. The dynamic command of line in his single-minded pen drawings – displaying the process of creation – endows them with a notion of completion, even when they merely consist of a few exact and expressive lines. This all serves as proof that “drawing is an art of omission.”22 Nonetheless, Kernstok was unable to bring the virtue of his drawing into synch with his painterly concept. “If someone renders a person only in lines, then where does one put the body that exists between those lines?”23 asked the painter, and he gave an answer to this in his largescale horse-riding pictures. With the aid of extremely chiselled and polished, bulging and curving forms, he took the composition’s colour formation in the direction of naturalist execution. Though meant as a summation, his main work Horsemen at the Water (1910) (R: 108) gives the impression, as we look the details viewed in closeup, of being painted in a truly ‘uncorrected’ alla prima style, as though the large composition were made of a drawn fabric of gestures preserved in

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their very first touch. Kernstok intended that the overall effect of his sketchy solutions should in no way resemble the Impressionists' l’art pour l’art rough outlines. The overdevelopment, giving rise to the illusion of naturalism, stands out more emphatically in the scenic environment’s representation. At this point, Kernstok does away with the most meaningful aspect of Cézanne's concept, which warns that the mechanical execution of completion should not force the picture’s construction into the background. Leaving open the picture’s possibilities for development, its becoming something, is more important than its fulfilment. In the end, Kernstok tried to absolve the overdeveloped composition’s massive, static quality by filling it with action. On the vast canvas, he shows his athletic youths assembled on the shore in a calm state of anticipation. Yet, in another picture, Composition with Horses (1912) (R: 65), they are galloping like the wind in every direction within the picture field – as though these searching (?) youths banded together in pursuit of the lost collective ideal. In the large classical composition’s lack of theme – indeed, the aimlessness of the visible action was, involuntarily so, indicative of a longknown crisis – the picture presents a parable of loss. Still, in line with his constructive intention, Kernstok was striving for something else. With the classical demand for completion and the analogous reminiscences upon form, he desired to make the “broken whole” complete again, a whole which he presumed the Impressionists had dam-

aged. Impressionist painting induced an awakening to knowledge of one’s own tools. It banished story from the picture, and with “colour for its own sake,” it opened a route for painterly tools to become autonomous, elevating them from means to goal. Kernstok raised his voice against this and sued for the recovery of painting’s means. “But neither drawing nor tone is distinct, something whole in itself; instead, they are features of the subject, tools to help us in the depiction of that subject,” wrote Kernstok in his study “The Inquisitive Art.”24 With this standpoint, he quickly garnered solidarity from young philosopher and aesthetician György Lukács. In his essay “The Paths Parted,” which appeared in Nyugat, he struck out at Impressionism with the force of an indictment, seeking to bolster Kernstok's “declaration of war” with the appropriate intellectual tailwind and ‘might of pen.’ At the same time, he heartily welcomed the art coming to light at the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition: “The new art is architectonic in the true old sense,”25 and “their means of expression are now purely means, not goals or arrivals. […] Art of this order must obliterate all the anarchy over sensation and atmosphere. […] It is a declaration of war against all Impressionists.”26 The Impressionists’ main crime was the dissolution of form and the breakdown of the composition into fragments. Contemporary Hungarian criticism also found this most grievous. It followed from our culture of seeing, which was based upon a plastic vision and strongly rooted in tradition. Any attempts to ‘rub out’ closed masses of form tended to stir up the most lively indignation. (Among the French, too, prisoners of convention protested in the face of innovation, only not in the defence of plasticity, but that of colour.)27 In Kernstok’s work, behind the scenic descriptions citing topographical features where the Danube rungs along Nyergesújfalu, there also lurks a local patriotic ambition, that his own territory would be canonized as the cradle of the new formal ideal – just as Matisse did with his main Southern France-inspired, epoch-defining, summarizing works Le Bonheur de vivre and Luxe, calme et volupté. We can trace the series of shoreline scenes back in time from Cézanne, through Puvis de Chavannes, all the way to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The shore with its open horizon, with its promise of the new, has taken on such meaning that it has become an evergreen metaphor, both for purification and rebirth – that is, we have strayed into the realm of arrivals and new beginnings. The nude has served as a useful device in every age for the artist to display a picture of humanity from his own time, expressing his relationship to it, in a motif stripped to a pure aesthetic construction, omitting the idealized or idealiza-

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tion. And what is this assembly of slender athletes seeking in this Dionysian land on the banks of the Danube? The answer presents itself: the new construction built upon reason with which Károly Kernstock composed them in the name of order. The monumentally manifested in Kernstok’s classical compositions also poses the question of its genre affiliations. On this score, contemporaries who appreciated Kernstok’s painting chimed in, expressing their opinions in apt remarks. According to Ödön Gerô’s view, “Kernstok’s pictures cry out for a mural; the panel picture is not his territory.”28 Artúr Bárdos recognized the same when he shed light upon Kernstok’s temperament as a painter of murals above all else. “He certainly has a talent for frescoes,” Bárdos writes, “even without the occasion of a fresco.”29 We may accept this factual statement even beyond its practical implications if we apply this assertion to the period under examination, when the lack of any community-building ideal left behind a time without opportunities for frescoes. Paradoxically, it was this very lack that generated intellectual ferment and the necessity of bringing into existence lasting values, which grew into the strength of a movement. Its primary conditions were further shored up by an economic boom combined with a burgeoning intellectual self-awareness. The apparent anachronism of Kernstok’s undertaking and sense of mission raises questions of timelessness and modernity, precisely with regard to the classical reminiscences in his works. Kernstok’s references must be interpreted in the same sense as Matisse’s main Arcadia-themed summarizing works, where the artist refers to a completeness both lost and regained. Anymore, completeness found only means the whole constructed by the individual, which is identical to the creation of an autonomous picture structure visible on the canvas. Looking for some experience of completion (which, in the relation of man and nature, as well as the individual and society, is capable of recreating the key to homogeneity in a new mythos incorporating a “collective soul”) proves futile in this ever-atomizing modern time, free of opportunities for frescoes. Perhaps not frescoes, but the equivalent drywalls, mosaics, panels, and glass windows were being constructed for schools and other public institutions.30 The Eight compensated for a lack of a collective ideal with an artistic program that crossed disciplines – an analogy to the classical style-creating times – and reached beyond applied decorative arts to material culture as well. Anna Lesznai and Róbert Berény enriched the prospects of exhibitions with a new genre, sewn and embroidered handicrafts. With their patchwork compositions, which met the requirements of pictures, they immediately pushed the bound-

aries of genre (especially Berény), stepping over into traditions of ornamental-style decorative art. In this Gesamtkunstwerk that embraced different genres, there was no unity of style, but this was not the aim. The Eight were rather defined by their openness and their unbound quality. Where they were more united was in their disregard for Art Nouveau style conventions. While they did inherit total art ambitions, built upon a respect for handicrafts, from Art Nouveau; still, they excluded Art Nouveau patterns and stylistic reflexes, which had already been ‘carried beyond term’ in the applied arts. The Eight’s rational manner of thinking and constructive formal world was not compatible with the embellishments of Art Nouveau, its overpowering atmosphere and decadent worldview. The most picturesque breakthrough in drawing appeared in Art Nouveau’s delicate handling of line and wavy calligraphy, which avoided straight lines broken into angles. This bears a stark contrast to Tihanyi, Berény, Márffy, and Kernstok, where the order of lines intersecting with dynamic brio was a structural element in their graphic constructions. The new spirit, championing the primacy of reason, did not shoulder the sweet-sad burden of melancholy – very pithily expressed in the Art Nouveau culture of line, conducted in a graceful arch upward, only to plunge dramatically in a veritable parable of flourishing and withering. At the same time, artists building upon rationalism did not entirely disown the practical tools of this ornamental art. For example, the appearance of the closed, curving silhouette line as a stylized means of reduction offered a solution in the depiction of figural picture elements applied on a plane. In Bertalan Pór’s, Ödön Márffy’s, and Károly Kernstok’s representative works for public institutes, these techniques proved especially useful, since they were conducive to the look of these monumental works that were both decorative and appropriate for flat surfaces.

T HE M ONUMENTAL ‘B ODY A PPROACH ’ S YMMETRIC O RDERING E LEMENTS (P ÓR , K ERNSTOK , O RBÁN , M ÁRFFY ) The formation of Bertalan Pór’s painterly philosophy is most closely related to Kernstok’s. In his change of concept, from dissolution to binding, he described a similar arch, and they came to

monumental painting that demanded bound forms at the same time. In the years directly preceding the Eight’s formation, both their paintings were characterized by relaxed brush handling and spontaneous drawing-painting. For both Pór and Kernstok, the application of their dissolved and bound painterly modes was primarily a matter of genre; therefore, in their cases, we do not spark of an ‘irreversible’ development in style. Simply, the two different genres – whether panel painting that allowed for an unbound and dissolved style or representative monumental painting that called for binding and restriction – bore different practical requirements. Pór and Kernstok exploited the opportunities of both genres – where either reason or emotion prevailed. In his written introduction to Bertalan Pór’s monumental painting, Aladár Bálint wrote, “It is the full-blooded desire of painters in every age to populate large surfaces.”31 Giant canvas surfaces offered appropriate space for the fulfilment of Pór’s “grand art desires,”32 where he could effect a large-scale synthesis in his classical compositions. The synthesis was the accumulation of painterly expertise, whereby Pór was able to integrate into his own undertakings the monumental artwork of contemporary classics as well as Renaissance forerunners. If we dissect the structure-establishing elements in the massive compositions Yearning for Pure Love and Sermon on the Mount in terms of the interdependence of part and whole, in the organization of part (the drawn formation of the figures) into whole (the composition), it is simple to unravel what tableaux vivants provided him with inspiration. Pór’s drawing structure, “the sober way it strips everything bare in its search for meaning,”33 is analogous to the rational philosophy of quattrocento drawing. Quickly tracing back in time its visual lineage, through Michelangelo and Luca Signorella, we arrive all the way to Antonio del Pollaiuolo. The monumentality of form is from Michelangelo. From Pollaiuolo's drawing, he acquired the analytic inclination, the delight in the details of ‘vivisection,’ with its brilliant, virtuoso anatomic illustration. Besides inheriting the virtues of Pollaiuolo’s drawing, Pór also looked into how Signorelli arranged plastically modelled nude figures into a crowd, building them into the composition. (See Last Judgement, Orvieto Cathedral.) We can better understand his method of arranging parts into a whole, the singularities and construction of the grand composition, if we place it alongside the monumental painting of Ferdinand Hodler, one of the time’s most celebrated artists. In order to shed light upon the differences and similarities, the analysis will be exclusively confined to how they took possession of the vast flat surfaces with respect to organizing elements and

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T OP : F ERDINAND H ODLER : T HE C HOSEN O NE , 1893–1894 B OTTOM : B ERTALAN P ÓR : S ERMON ON THE M OUNT , 1911

what painterly solutions were born to address the given challenges in two dimensions. We must stress, in the relationship of the two painters, it is only the manner in which they conquered large surfaces that interests us. We do not wish to link Hodler’s symbolism, which bordered on mysticism, with Bertalan Pór’s painting.

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In his monumental works, Bertalan Pór made Hodlerian structural elements his own – the lining up of elements one after another, the rhythm and the symmetry, captured in an ornamental frame. In his large composition Sermon on the Mount (R: 110), his Biblical-themed vision, the use of frontal reflection symmetry manages to avoid the incidental,

anecdotal quality typical of genre pictures. Between the stylized landscape depiction projected on the flat surface and the characters formulated with strong plasticity, there arises a resolution-seeking tension. Pór resolves it by cultivating an objective attitude towards his realistically drawn figures, remarkable insofar as he arranges these muscular edifices into an ornamentally organized group composition. In the rendering of these colossal human forms, who are three times larger than life in their proportions, it is as though the artist were prompted by a fear of emptiness or horror vacui. With forced volubility, he amasses a formulation out of the muscular studies of his models. This is more apparent in its relation to the flat, tranquil surfaces in the background. At the same time, with his meticulous and palpable analysis in the detailing, he distances himself from his anatomic formations, which are polished to a finish. This horror vacui significantly distinguishes him from Hodler, who generally wrapped his figures in consistent, placidly-surfaced drapery that reached to their soles or their ankles (The Choosen One (R: 110), Eurythmia, Holy Hour, and View into Infinity). He emphasized the sameness of his uniformly scaled and uniformly clad figures by placing them one after another in a row. Appropriate to his principle of parallelism,34 a coordinating relation prevails. The plastic figures of identical stature in Sermon on the Mount are lined up just as closely in the foreground, parallel with the flat plane surfaces in the stylized background. Pór also uses classic reflection symmetry and a mirror arrangement (4+1+4) in the human assembly, but unlike Hodler’s coordinating structure, he creates a clear relationship of super- and subordination among his characters. Hodler constructs his large figural compositions’ rhythm and unity upon sameness and uniformity. With Pór, the unity and calmness arise from the variety, in the balance and orderly rhythm of variations on classical counterpost, which creates a dialectical power game wherein the guiding lines appear to address each other as they depart from the horizontal and vertical axes. Hodler’s and Pór’s structural concepts correspond in their emphasis on formal rhythm; however, the rhythm can only be perceived as such if the artist gathers together the subject or figure in an assembly of lines and fashions the pictorial components of different sexes into a homogenous rhythmic formula projected on the surface. As a result of this abstract process, Sermon on the Mount succeeds in having a single essence – or, if you please, parallelism – created in an analogy of drawing and form, in the harmony of musical drapery, segmented drawings of muscle, and the desert terrain divided into curves. In the transposed projection of the symmetrically arranged human assembly on the plane, component elements arise from the figuration that emphasizes the ornamental arrangement.

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This effect is heightened by a tone contrast wherein the light, cool shades of the background make the assembly, lined-up in terra-cotta-coloured relief, stand out in silhouette. The bodies the colour of terra-cotta refer to a technique found in Signorelli (the aforementioned Last Judgement), where he emphasizes plasticity through monochrome tone interpretation. There is even a Renaissance precedent for the posing of the figures, arranging forms with ‘rhyming’ motions on the basis of the principle of reflection symmetry. In the two figures who have sunk to their knees in the foreground, he shows us the very same posture from the front and from behind, similar to Antonio Pollaiuolo’s engraving entitled The Battle of Naked Men. The synthesis of Sermon on the Mount became a large summary of “New Word” propaganda (addressed to the present) alongside the prominence of classical formal roots. Taking into consideration the number of characters in the composition, it is perhaps no accident that eight figures are arranged before the central prophet. Pór built up the number as an arithmetic analogy to the Beatitudes in the Bible’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 1–7, 29). Nevertheless, it would prove a hopeless undertaking to determine precisely which figures embody the different traits in the allegorical depiction. Moreover, it would be unnecessary. Pór did not take up the theme expressly on account of the merciful, the poor in spirit, or the clean of heart. The depiction betrays a particular duality with its dominant physical approach. It is simultaneously the desacralization of the theme and the spiritualization of form. The manifestation of individual will in form engenders a mythos and simply makes us of the Gospel, because it is appropriate. To use Berény’s terminology, the artist, “with an intense intuition of form,” transforms the anatomical construction into an “erotic” formal vision. Further, the artist “does not wish to express the form’s spatiality with shading. Instead, he expresses them through the eroticism of form.”35 Meanwhile, this formal erotica desacralizes the Biblical theme. This mentality, spiritualizing the baroque anatomical construction so rich in form, creates the New Mankind. The synthesis of Sermon on the Mount makes an appeal to our reason, that we should understand our souls through our body and our bodies through our soul. The work proffers a “total experience” in this dialectic interrelation. There are further points of comparison between Pór's painting and that of Hodler. For example, we can find allegorical prototypes for the theme of Yearning for Pure Love (R: 387, 389) in the Swiss artist's Spring series. There, however, Hodler endows a young girl with the expression of the sensation of love, the embodiment of longing – not a young boy, as Pór would later do. What is striking, though, in the comparison is not

K ÁROLY K ERNSTOK : Y OUTHS , 1909

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only how Pór changed the roles, but how the gesture in his work is a mirror image of the female figure’s in Spring. In Pór’s and Hodler’s work alike, the expression “cult of body” arises, the lifestyle and physical reforms, popular at the time, with the aim of creating the New Man. Additionally, the colour universe in the two painters’ depiction of scenery is related. The colour tuning of Pór’s landscape, painted in Szepesség – for example, the raw, light flesh tones contrasted with harsh greens and purples in Sunlit Landscape with Bridge (1909) (R: 376) – bear alls the atmospheric qualities of Hodlers’s high-altitude Alpine scenery with its penetrating light and keen fresh air.

T HE F AMILY (1909) Pór made his first significant step towards a synthesis when he painted The Family in 1909 (R: 365). The contemporary press, with well-orchestrated hype, generated massive interest in the work, which arrived late and was displayed unfinished at the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition. This ‘happening’ crowned Pór’s work as one of the most emblematic of the Eight’s appearance on the art scene. Enthusiastic and supportive analyses appeared, but the inconsistency in their narrativebased rhetoric made it clear that while they honoured the family tableau’s unadorned expressive manner, which strove for classical simplicity, the critics themselves could not resist the inappropriate impulse to ‘set the work to music.’ Primarily

HANS

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LANDSCAPE, 1875–1883

appealing to emotion, they plastered Pór’s The Family with tales of sad fate. Imre Déri drew attention to its virtue of “saying much with few words.” Still, from beneath the “calm of this canvas’s puritan simplicity,” even he was able to unearth “the complete anatomy of an extinct species of desire, life-worn and battle-weary.”36 It was the concept, though, that gave rise to his rhetoric’s unconvincing syntax. With the young artist’s reduced colour scale, he relied purely on the strength of line and drawing to render the family tableau on canvas. This palpable approach, with the quietude of still life, made no appeals for sympathy, seeking so little compassion that Ödön Gerô became carried away. In his words, “They are not sad; they only make us sad. Their ignorance of the meaninglessness and futility of life wrings our hearts.”37 Moreover, Imre Déri’s interpretation was out of historical context. At that time, through voluntary assimilation, the Christian-Jewish citizenry had positioned itself well, rising to an influential role in economic and intellectual life. Thus, there is not a scintilla of “lost hope” in Pór’s The Family. As Julianna P. Szûcs put so well, while polemicizing Imre Déri’s writing, “They belong to the highest, easily activated stratum of the bourgeoisie.”38 If we are to abide by the notion of ‘setting it to music,’ a musical (!) analogy would be in better harmony with our theme. Arnold Schönberg’s opera Moses und Aron (composed 1930–1932) confronts the eternal question of Jewish destiny with pitiless self-knowledge. The drama closes with Moses’ oration addressed to the masses: “[…] whensoever you had abandoned the wasteland’s

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renunciation and your gifts had led you to the highest summit, then as a result of that misuse you were ever hurled back into the wasteland. […] But even in the wasteland you shall be victorious and achieve the goal: unity with God.”39 This pillar of thought offers itself as a buttress to Pór’s two works made twenty years earlier – the family forming a binding fellowship, gathering strength through renunciation. The picture’s expressive strength lies in the puritan painterly means, manifest in the organizational order of contour (like Sermon on the Mount), proving with its syntax how people are capable of rebirth, even in the desert wasteland, out of the strength of their self-sustaining faith.

Y OUTHS (1909) The other great sensation at the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition was Kernstok’s creation entitled Youths (1909) (R: 109), which fulfilled Cézanne's requirements for picture development. Possibilities for the work’s development are left open, so we can practically see the drawn construction forming and the new style ideal finding expression before our eyes. However, when he reached this point with his large Horsemen at the Water, codifying his own style characteristics, he managed to ‘academicize’ himself at the same time. In his too polished completeness, it was primarily the blooming freshness of the drawing solutions (a virtue which Youths possesses) that fell victim. Unfortunately, some critics encouraged Kernstok in this academic direction. For example, Géza Lengyel wrote, “The painter gives us everything he has when he becomes a universal artist, when he lyrically transcends the tangible in the creation of an organic, complete object.”40 In the compositional construction of Youths, Kernstok used a solution analogous to Hodler’s structural principles. As Ödön Gerô put it, “Everything is just ornament, and he expresses the ornamentation’s total rhythmic beauty. Kernstok sees the beauty of rhythm in the grandiose, the grand movement, and its resulting monumentality.”41 The picture's device is reflection symmetry (bilateral),42 which emphasizes the ornamentality, built upon the translation symmetry of elements lined up one after the other. All this arises from the two counterposts (which practically fill the picture’s field, configured on the basis of mirror symmetry and reinforcing the sameness) and the odd-numbered line of three hills in the background. On the horizon, the three hills, pulled apart and arranged in an orderly rhythm, assert their presence with the simplicity of stylized elements on a coat of arms. In its arithmetic context (2 youths + 3 hilltops = 5 odd-numbered picture elements), it embodies the Hodlerian tenet, accord-

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ÖDÖN MÁRFFY : THREE N UDES, 1911. (DETAIL )

H ANS VON M ARÉES : T HE H ESPERIDES , 1884–1885. (D ETAIL ) M ÜNCHEN , N EUE P INAKOTHEK © B LAUEL /G NAMM - ARTOTHEK

ing to which “odd numbers intensify the picture’s order” and strengthen its concept of stability. The background landscape, drawn with a central perspective, barely lessens the decidedly relief-like nature of the figures, which are applied on a plane, so the middle ground is missing. The vanishing point not only determines the depth of space and the height of the horizon, it also marks the composition’s axis of symmetry. Space and plane are components of equal value in the work. By projecting them against each other, Kernstok reveals,

in the contrast of space illusion and perception of planes, how reason can imbue landscape painting with intellectual content. His painting demonstrates that “an understanding of form and the formation of nature are akin to a consciousness of rhythm.”43 Thus, Ödön Gerô completed the thought found in Kernstok’s “The Inquisitive Art,” which can be taken as his summarized ars poetica: “Art cannot be the mirror of nature, although it is true that, insofar as art is able to draw new meaning from nature, it is the mirror of intellect.”44

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T HREE N UDES (1911) In the rank of monumental compositions, we cannot leave unmentioned Ödön Márffy’s 1911 work entitled Three Nudes (R: 113), which the artist later cut apart, repainting the fragments. The projection onto planes solution of the original version (known only in archive photo reproductions) is related to Orbán’s Decorative Composition. The picture’s constructive device – identical to the compositions of Pór and Kernstok just treated – is characterized by the binding of a flat ornamental motif and reflection symmetry. The mythology-inspired classical theme gives us a chance to relate the drawn formation in Three Nudes to the careful, calligraphic handling of line in Etruscan vase drawings. If, however, we only highlight the style elements in the drawing, it is not sufficient to cover the multilayered analogies and parallels. It is not only because Márffy’s handling is more angular, but primarily because, in Three Nudes the drawing and bodies of mass create an organic union. It would be unjustified to submit the welded structural elements to a piecemeal analysis. Examining the work in its entirety, the composition’s rhythmic formulation, especially in the refined play of limbs, is unquestionably reminiscent of vase drawing. At the same time, the construction of body masses in relief style, with their tin-plate thinness, marks the 20th-century rebirth of figurative depiction found mostly in primitive Italian icon outlines. Márffy later formulated the pieces of the fragmented Three Nudes along the lines of a new concept and further developed the myth-inspired female forms, a beauty ideal he shared with Hans von Marées. The slim-built anatomic constructions with long conically-broadening thighs can be recognized in the counterpost of female form in both Márffy's incarnation of Salome (1911–1912) and Marées’ The Praise of Modesty (1885) (R: 113). Márffy rewrites the figure’s earlier device of angular lines with dynamic, magnificently curving contours. Banishing the metallic light contrasts, he softens the plastic effect with translucent, cool colours on the body parts in shadow (similar to Marées) and warm Neapolitan rose in the reflected light. The original version of the composition with three nudes also confirms Márffy’s involvement with Marées. Indeed, the entire form on the right, presented looking off to one side, is practically lifted from Marées. It is the central figure in a triptych, one of the graces in his main work The Hesperides (1884, Neue Pinakothek, Munich) (R: 160). If we place the two nudes side by side, and we compare their glances, it is clear that we are dealing with a true quotation (R: 112). If we take up the picture’s argument, we are obliged to make a further correction. We must

clear up the mythological pedigree of Three Nudes. It seems logical that, together with the figure lifted from Marées, the mythological framework was also adapted into Márffy’s work. Hence, in the following, we will not equate the characters in Three Nudes with Hera, Aphrodite, and Pallas Athena – who competed for Paris’ apple45 – but with the triad of nymphs that Marées selected – Aegle (“dazzling light”), Erytheia (“the red one”), and Hespereia (“the shaded”). It is easy to get confused on the basis of attribution. After all, the legend of the Hesperides is also an ‘apple’ tale. These nymphs with wonderful voices were charged with the care and guarding of the apple tree that Gaia gave to Hera as a wedding present when she was united in matrimony with Zeus. On the tree grew the golden apples of youth and eternal life. Heracles was the only one who succeeded in stealing apples from the Hesperides’ garden (with the aid of Atlas), and Athena later had them restored. Nevertheless, we need not endow the identification of the exact mythological allusion with so much importance, since the Eight tended not to give their pictures titles, or only designations which revealed nothing – like Three Nudes or Decorative Composition. As noted in Zoltán Rockenbauer’s monograph on Márffy, “by omitting the title, they intended to minimize the narrative and foreground the pure act of painting.”46 Moreover, the precise explanation for Márffy's breaking down the composition may be due to the ‘incriminatingly scaled’ agreement between the motifs. After some time, this adaptation was insupportable for the artist committed to originality. Rather, Márffy intended to liberate his female form from its tell-tale body parts, the identifiable legs, so he cut it off at the waistline. All things considered, however, we can nail down the fact that, beyond the visual quotation, we cannot accuse Márffy of making Marées’ style his own. After all, he was not primarily interested in the painterly language, only the composition and rhythmic techniques.

H ANS

VON

M ARÉES : T HE P RAISE

M ODESTY , 1885.

H ANS VON M ARÉES : T HE H ESPERIDES , 1884–1885, M ÜNCHEN , N EUE P INAKOTHEK © B LAUEL /G NAMM - ARTOTHEK Ö DÖN M ÁRFFY : T HREE N UDES , 1911 ( DETAIL )

D ECORATIVE C OMPOSITION (1912) With Dezsô Orbán’s Decorative Composition (R: 340), we can demonstrate a third type of symmetric organizational principal: rotational symmetry, which arranges the figures in an oval or semi-circular formation. Orbán combines the elliptical arrangement with an emphasized axis of symmetry, a role bestowed upon the nude figure in the centre. We find this technique’s prototype in

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Hodler’s variations on Day (1899–1900), while the patchy rhythm of forceful contouring and tonal contrasts quotes Matisse’s Dance compositions from 1909–1910, also projected on a plane. According to the evidence of a few later still lifes, from time to time, Orbán would return to the use of refection symmetry (Gloxia, 1914–1915; and Still Life in the second half of the 1910s). Yet, in Orbán’s most significant still lifes from the Eight period (Still Life with Kettle, 1910; Large Still Life, 1912), asymmetry and an ordering principle with a diagonal axis prevail. His composition Large Nude (c. 1911) is also built along and arranged in a sloping direction. Among the Eight members who had a predilection for painting series of compositions with a diagonal axis are Berény (Girl Sitting in an Armchair, 1911; Golgotha, 1912), Márffy (Reclining Nude, 1913; Constructive Self Portrait, 1914), and Tihanyi (Still Life with Large Yellow Tablecloth, 1909; Small Nude, 1911; and Portrait of Lajos Fülep, 1915).

TECHNIQUES FOR M ONUMENTAL E FFECTS IN PAINTINGS So far, we have equated monumentality primarily with expansive, large-scale, grandiose undertakings in their respective mediums. However, the monumental effect does not rely so much on size, but much rather upon an ambitious cohesion in the establishment of form. In the works of some of the Eight painters, we find examples of visions with monumental effect, each finding expression with different painterly tools: colour, drawing, plastic modelling, or simply vehemence of gesture. For example, Pór was able to increase monumental effect (in his smaller formatted self-portraits as well) using a well-known technique from Daumier’s toolbox, the hero-making pose as seen from a vantage point slightly below. What further strengthens the effect is the energy that flares up in the gesture, which, in this scale, defies the disciplining power of closed contours, which tend to foster cohesion in large compositions. Additionally, the free and spontaneous brushwork functions as a seismograph for both spiritual and intellectual energy (Self Portrait, 1912) (R: 391).

THE REAL EIGHTH: CZÓBEL The above heading aims to take issue with the thoughtful title of Péter Molnos’ monograph, “The Eighth: Dezsô Orbán,” which can be read in

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the present catalogue. We would deny Orbán the title of last, in favor of Béla Czóbel. This change of place is obviously not due to picture format; rather, it is justified in terms of activity. Béla Czóbel, who a few years earlier had been the leading figure of the Hungarian Fauves, contributed barely more than his name to the Eight movement. By 1909, it appeared that he had played himself out. In need of change, his phase of recharging and gathering strength happened to coincide with the Eight’s most active period. Out of their three exhibits, he participated in only one, with a total of three pictures. Of this batch, two still lifes have recently popped up at Sotheby's Auction (R: 250, 251). Based on these, we can, for the time being, get a sense of this transitory period in his painting. Already in these two smallscale compositions, we find a monumental summarizing power and a striving for simplicity. A couple of years later, once the artist found himself again, these would become more typical of the unique voice in his work. Czóbel, too, made use of the technique originating with Gauguin, of encircling a surface of colour with contour, which Cézanne famously termed a “gross mistake.” This critical remark aside, the technique did not give Czóbel direction, just as Cézanne’s painting had not. Czóbel did not use his dark Paris blue (inclining to black) contours with mechanical uniformity as a ‘loquacious’ narrative tool – as we come across, for instance, with Tibor Boromisza or the ‘Neos’. Quite the contrary, with Czóbel, the contour is a means of condensing form and colour. This is what brings about the monumental effect. With the pictures’ tight focus, the swelling forms – the fat blossoms and leaves of potted plants with their freed-up colour patches – jostle against each other’s flung ribs and outlines. Like lead figures on stained-glass windows, the contour raises every colour to the surface of the canvas, emphasizing the composition’s two-dimensional expanse.

is spiritualized to such a degree that it completely extricates her from the realm of sensuality, elevating the object of desire to an object of rapture. The level of monumentality spans the world of materially expressed objects and reaches another dimension. To quote the gothic paradox, a rational construction developed to perfection offers up an ideal that transcends the rational. In Márffy’s landscapes, among the tools used to express a monumental effect, the summarizing power of deep-toned contours plays an emphatic role. The meeting of colour surfaces with these wide, curving, melting contours, in Paris blue or crimsonblack, is always a ceremonious act in Márffy’s pictures. His speciality is placing a thick, straightstalked contour at the border of two adjacent colour surfaces so that the contour always blends into the darker-toned field. Meanwhile, along the lightertoned surface, it retains a razor-sharp tone contrast (Old Vác Customs, 1910) (R: 323). This method of simultaneous freeing and binding is just one of Márffy’s varied methods that we will return to later. When Márffy painted the small-scale, but all the more monumental Constructive Landscape in 1913, he was already foreshadowing his later large synthesis, the wedding of light and colour. The spirited variation in his energy-filled, differentlycoloured lines of force enmesh the composition, bringing about such a fluidity in the picture elements that it structures the work on many different levels. These dynamic lines of force, piling up at sharp angles, give off a great degree of energy, as though the painter were capable of taking possession of the universe outside the borders of the picture field. Finally, in the fusion of vectorial elements colliding with each other, a majestic explosion of light ensues in the phantom of a vast cobalt blue crack that breaks up the sky into a crystalline, kaleidoscopic vision (R: 318).

T IHANYI M ÁRFFY In Ödön Márffy’s painting, we can illustrate the different forms of monumental expression with both his nude drawings and his landscapes. Cut from his earlier Three Nudes (1911), he refashioned the nymph into his Salome (1911–1912) (R: 304). Formed to classical perfection, it is one of the most monumental figurative works in the Eight’s repertoire. Whereas the picture promises Salome, at least in title, whose role requires her to excite erotic desire with her body, Márffy’s interpretation defies this expectation. Like a nude vierge dorée posted on gothic architecture, the “slender girl’s body bathed in rainbow-coloured velvet tones”47

Like we find with Márffy, the vertically-directed gothic structure lends Tihanyi’s compositions their monumental effect. The directions of the composition's lines of force hint at opposing poles outside the border of the picture field. In Tihanyi’s monumental “gothic- baroque vision,” the forms with “lengthened angles,” conjuring up his “El Greco influence,”48 arouse this sensation, as though material and spirit were united in the webbing of vectors arising from earthly and heavenly gravitation. In “Revision,” addressed to and contending with Ernô Kállai, Tihanyi clearly formulates the point of his synthesis, which we can also take as his ars poetica: “For me, spirit and matter are one and indivisible; they belong together. […]

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My pictures are not just pictures of objects, nor are they the dynamic effect that forms have upon each other thanks to their placement in space. (Not a ‘laboured construction’!) Instead, they are the organic life of object, space, and man.”49 The picture formation of his 1914 work Self Portrait (R: 433) took this thought to its most direct and beautiful conclusion. We can detect reminiscences of El Greco in the portrait – not only in its gothic tectonics, but in its colour quotations as well. The shading of yellow light, which makes the olive green shirt gleam, is similar to the technique we find on the robe in Apostle St Andrew (Herzog Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest). For Tihanyi, experiments with abstract picture construction occurring alongside figurative representation did not always lead to such masterpieces. His nude paintings which appeared at the Eight’s last exhibit in 1912, each one entitled Compositional Sketch (R: 452, 453), drew criticism even from their circle of supporters. As Aladár Bálint wrote, “We find his compositional plan illconceived, where its balancing act is so exaggerated that his figures are distorted.”50 Tihanyi himself cited “structural imperatives” as the reason for “such consistent and justifiable deformations.”51 Lajos Fülep communicated the painter’s intentions in a more matter-of-fact interpretation, “He started from nature, like Cézanne, using all his power to focus and tighten the matter's intensity, but then strives to make it submit to the compositional theory.”52 In his multiple Compositional Sketch works, the very opposition in the mutual antagonism between abstract picture construction and naturalistic picture elements generates tension. We will return to a more detailed analysis of this in another chapter.

C ZIGÁNY In relation to the tools used to express monumental effects, there is a fundamental difference between the painting of Czigány and the artists treated so far. Czóbel, Márffy, Berény, and Tihanyi, with outward spreading ambition, conjure up dimensions beyond the borders of the picture field. Czigány’s monumentality, on the other hand, is directed inward. His tools are compression and condensation. This holds true in both his forms and colours. In the interests of a strict order and transparency in the spatial relationships, he begins by eliminating from space any atmosphere-saturated, ethereal effects. The law of air perspective does not apply in the airless space; there are no soft contours or blurred colours. In a medium free of atmospheric influence, we see forms, outlined with uniform sharpness and clarity, independent of the place that the objects occupy in space. This sterile

D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : S TILL L IFE

medium is reduced, demanding a substance-summarizing, stylized format. Appropriately, Czigány – following Cézanne’s invention – depicts the objects as simplified geometric forms, emphasizing their enduring qualities. It is precisely in this reductive process that the monumental power we find in Czigány can be understood, as though a powerful vacuum force gripped and tightened the mantles of forms. He condenses and compresses the inner cohesion of formal masses – his fruit and pitchers – with such force that the orderly outline of their outer surfaces bursts into somewhat angular, irregular forms. Yet, this cohesive strength is not only in the isolated forms; Czigány renders this effect in the assembly of formal masses, too – for example, orderly-shaped ellipses are deformed to suit the contents of the fruit tray. Besides Czigány, Tihanyi, and Berény, Orbán most often used these features of effect, which originated with Cézanne, in his still lifes from this period. An excerpt of Lajos Fülep’s Cézanne analysis on the strength of portrayal seems apt here: “Everything is at rest, and yet in motion; everything is pulled away, and yet takes root. […] His baroque drive whips the objects into one substance of uniform vitality, like a storm which paints everything consistently, bending and twirling all in one direction.”53

WITH A

P ICTURE

N APOLEON , 1912–1913

Three versions of the colour thickening method are demonstrated below. We encounter these solutions most often in Czigány’s works. The first example illustrates how the shading of the diverse objects – drapery, pitcher, and fruit – and the shadows they cast are similar. Thus, the patches of shading on the lemon and the white pitcher gravitate equally toward the cool Veronese green. This method of colour union is quite apparent in his Still Life with a Pitcher from around 1910 (R: 224), which was Lot No. 53 in the Eight’s 1911 exhibit. Dezsô Czigány constantly kept the fashionable Veronese green on his palette, and he often worked it into the background of his portraits and still lifes as an unbroken colour surface (Self Portrait, 1913; and Still Life, c. 1910). The broken cool green-toned vision appears in the next example, Still Life with a Picture of Napoleon (1912–1913) (R: 115). This still life, smouldering in cool colours, is remarkable insofar as the colour fabric of complementary, iridescent valeur does not break up form; rather, it condenses it. The objects’ polished tension is developed in the play of purple-green valeur. At the very same time, in the reductive process, this makes the gradual solidification of the base green tone spectacularly clear. Like molten metal losing its glowing sheen

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as it stiffens, the composition’s colour character gravitates towards a cool oxide green. The purple and green tones, one hiding within the other, cast before us a sensory vision of a cooling hue. The colour dramaturgy of Funeral of a Child (1907 ?) fundamentally turns aside from this sensual approach. This composition (reduced to strong contrasts of yellow and blue, white and anthracite) is the summation of an everyday tragedy, rivalling Zsigmond Móricz’ short stories in its succinctness. Czigány, with telling reticence, presents the child’s burial in the ‘funeral procession’ of the two orphaned parents. Only the tin Christ on the trail-side crucifix, his silhouette in a chalk-white colour patch stretched across the deep cobalt blue sky, seems to commiserate with the deprived family in mourning. In return, the cross’s decorative arched ribbon acquires the harvest wheat’s golden yellow. In the picture’s dramaturgy, built upon light and dark colour contrasts without shading, the silent gestures’ meaningful simplicity and terseness remove it from any sort of narration. It is as though the painter, standing firmly against any softening, did not create his rough-cut, angular forms with a paintbrush, but simply carved them, like a wooden grave marker. A BOVE , U PPER R IGHT AND L OWER C ENTER BOTTOM : R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : C OMPOSITION WITH S ILHOUETTE , 1911 (D ETAIL )

B ERÉNY A variety of monumental effects condensed to an intimate scale – as expressed in colour, drawing, and plastics – can be examined in Róbert Berény’s nudes. For example, in Reclining Nude (1907) (R: 165), he uses colour enhancement to mould the body’s mass into a valeur construction of interlocking yellow shades. The form’s monumentality arises from the linear spread of abundant valeur. In the composition Montparnasse Nude (1907) (R: 175), multiple forces strain against each other, while the monumental effect is generated by the artist’s choice of a rather close virtual angle of view. This poses a particular challenge, as the artist must simultaneously display the monumental visual experience as well as his creative power’s mastery over it. This close point of view gives rise to such fish-eye lens distortion that it bends the model’s body mass in several directions of overdimensional foreshortening. For instance, the legs, drawn from a strong overhead perspective, make it seem as though the model is standing in the vanishing point of her own bulk. Nonetheless, the vitality, the vehemence of gesture appears in the play of contrapost axes at steep opposite angels. Berény increases the tension in the composition further with its focus, tight in comparison with the nude form’s spatial demands. In contrast with the model’s strong plastic formation,

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the flat, decorative planes of colour in the background further emphasize the body mass’s spacecommanding pose. We come across a similar experiment, a game between surface and space, in Berény’s Nude of an Italian Girl (1907) (R:144). The early nudes constituted part of the “Berény collection,” which amounted to about half the material at the Eight’s 1911 exhibit. At this exhibition, the painter’s freshest ambitions were represented by the monumental Composition with Silhouette (1911) (R: 146). Berény had already painted the archetype for this work, Ball Players, in 1907–1908, and the composition is made up of similar elements. In the foreground, a Goliath adheres to the yellow wall like a large dark spot, while living figures like arabesques adorn the background. In the middle ground, the ruby red patch is a lolling nude. Compositionally, the characters in the foreground and background are connected by an arched line of cloud that virtually demonstrates the flying ball’s trajectory on the horizontal plane (R: 147). In the opposition of figural elements dominating the various spatial planes in Composition with Silhouette, Cézanne’s concept (the “everything at rest and everything in motion” formula) is manifest in the tension where matter’s proportions and directions reach the breaking point. Playing with extremes, Berény structures his work along the following lines:

H ENRI DE T OULOUSE -L AUTREC : M OULIN R OUGE , 1891. ( DETAIL )

1. Figural elements bending in crosswinds extend the compositional tension in the picture field to a practically unsustainable point. 2. The figural elements in the foreground, middle ground, and background are lined up behind each other in over-dimensioned foreshortening, while the silhouette’s dark mass on the left side stretches to the upper corner, casting a look toward his own opposite extreme, focussing on the stylized stick figure proceeding along the horizon. The curving horizon itself also conjures up the spirit of monumental

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Revolt, 1911 (R: 117); and Otakar Kubín’s Postava, 1912–1914.) 4. In the metaphysical spatial construction, the figural units, organized over three divided planes of space, could also be references to modernism’s polyphonic history of style. The foreground figure alludes to the large silhouette technique found on Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters (Moulin Rouge and La Goulue, 1891), those in the middle ground are clearly reminiscent of Cézanne (Large Bathers, 1894–1905), while the dynamic, dashing arabesque in the background heralds the future (i.e., Futurism). In connection with the different planes of time, the figural elements are frozen in a powerful metaphysical still. In the overlapping of time and spatial planes, Berény ‘puts us in the picture’ with his projection of a new time-related monumental effect (R: 116, 117). The small-scale, but all the more monumental Idyll (1911) (R: 185) also contains references. We can regard the base motif, composed in a classic Cézanne-like triangle, as a metaphysical paraphrase of Manet’s principle epoch-making piece Le déjeuner sur l’herbe from1863.

O RBÁN

C ENTER : L UIGI R USSOLO : T HE R EVOLT , 1911 ( DETAIL ) B ELOW : P AUL C ÉZANNE : L ES G RANDES B AIGNEUSES , 1898–1905 ( DETAIL )

space, suggesting an infinite area beyond the picture’s borders. 3. Within the spreading vectors (like an open pair of scissors) created by the figures bound in opposite directions, he places the group of nudes in the middle ground. Their angle, drifting strongly to the right, seems to give rise to a powerful gravitational field symbolized by the reduced focus of energy, the magnetic and matter-attracting stick figure. This is the mark that became the symbol of force, impetus, and struggle among the Futurists. (See Luigi Russolo’s

Dezsô Orbán’s marvellous Still Life with Kettle (1910) (R: 337) presents us with references embracing an even wider interval of time. This ambitious synthesis of emblematic importance is not merely a summary of painting heritage from Matisse and Cézanne. Seeking the sources for the still life’s singularly delicate colour universe along a chain of visual predecessors, the trail leads us first to Manet and through his refined culture of colour to Velázquez, Goya, and the formal strictness of Zurbaran’s still lifes. The shades in the background (warm greys spiced with umbers and sepia) beside the anthracite-green colour field (deepened down to its very conceivable limit) present an eminent tone cluster. In this medium, the clear and crackling colour patches of the objects (iridescent drapery in pearly-white valeur, the bowl, the king blue-toned kettle tastefully formed in a mass of paint the consistency of cream) pop with masculine solemnity, like blinding shirt collars. Perhaps only a wine connoisseur could properly sing the praises of the colour flavours that make up this still life. The colour relationships are so clean and simple, and the formulation so elegantly grandiose, that the objects take on a truly existential dignity. While in Composition with Silhouette the future dawned in the arabesque form reduced to a concept; in the background of Still Life with Kettle, halfcovered, there lurks the base idea Matisse’s most abstract composition, Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (1914).

We need only pull the table out of the picture field, and the open door, its depiction reduced to lines and colour surfaces, gapes before us.

F ROM B OUND TO U NBOUND With the many-layered approaches to this sphere of artistic problems, we can perhaps modify the emergent, generalizing assessment which, ever since the Hungarian Fauve exhibit of 2006, regards the Eight’s art (in relation to its antecedents) as a canonizing tendency that gave up on progress in favour of a solidification of form. This turn in a classical direction, replacing the Fauves’ unbound playfulness with exact forms, was, in the long run, in terms of art history, a cyclical return and necessary for renewal. The process itself fits neatly into the dialectic of bound and unbound or free. In the following, we will examine style- and structure-establishing elements in the Eight’s paintings from different aspects of bound and unbound: 1. The method of using binding and freeing simultaneously becomes clear on the level of structure-establishing elements. By zooming in, we can analyze this process in close-up. 2. Within certain creative periods, we may discuss style-seeking experiments in terms of binding and freeing methods. 3. Finally, we can appreciate the ‘big picture’ of alternating phases in freeing and binding as directions in style development delineated by the experimental process.

1. STRUCTURE-ESTABLISHING ELEMENTS IN CLOSE-UP When analyzing the question of bound and unbound on the level of structural elements, Cézanne provides us with some helpful guidelines. Here we present a representative sampling, to give a taste of who in the Eight learned what from Cézanne paintings, which techniques they were able to adapt in the methods of binding and freeing, and what combination of these methods they applied.

C ÉZANNE – B ERÉNY First, seeking out appropriate works by Berény in relation to binding, we will break down his early nudes (displayed also at the Eight’s 1911 exhibition), comparing his method with Cézanne’s tech-

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : M ONTPARNASSE N UDE , 1907 ( DETAIL ) • C AT . NO . 8

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niques, emphasizing their similar and dissimilar traits. Róbert Berény begins painting his Reclining Nude (1907) (R: 165) on the basis of Cézanne’s concept. He assembles the tone construction tectonically, applying the yellow patches of colour next to each other, building an organic unit from the balancing act of colour and mass. He uses the technique of colour enhancement when he interprets volume with some twenty kinds (!) of wellsegmented shades of the colour yellow. This unbelievably rich, linearly-spreading abundance of valeur – as we have pointed out before – results in the monumentality of form. To sum it up in Cézanne’s words, “where there is plenty of colour, form is complete.”54 A solution typical of Berény is when, in the richly-dosed system of a certain colour – in this case, yellow – with an unexpected twist, he performs a huge leap along the scale of tonal grades, surprising us with the cold contrast of a deep Veronese green. With this green hue, he emphasizes the form’s plasticity. He places stress

upon the barely decomposed green colour by drawing up close beside it the complementary, a small but intense amount of vermillion. We see this same solution in Nude of an Italian Girl (1907) (R: 144). He selects the colour of the shadow not on the basis of natural light’s chromatic harmony; it is not blue or purple that appears next to yellow, but green – the complementary of another basic colour, red. He does away with the light-shadow interpretation of the Impressionist tradition, preserving the solidity of form by withdrawing it from the dissolving, dematerializing effect of light. The green-red colour contrast – unexpectedly entering the harmonious order of the yellow tone construction that moulds the Italian model’s curvaceous figure – plays a joke on our conditioned concept of form, which is based on conventional tone interpretation. With the painterly dramaturgy so typical of him, Berény misleads us. First, he lets our eyes, lingering on the body mass’s valeur construction, begin

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : N UDE • C AT . NO . 10

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : R ECLINING N UDE , C . 1907 ( DETAIL ) • C AT . NO . 11

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OF AN I TALIAN GIRL ,

1907 ( DETAIL )

Ö DÖN M ÁRFFY : G IRL C AT . NO . 260

FROM

N YERGES , 1908 ( DETAIL )

processing the form in the usual way. Then, with a surprising dodge, he breaks the thread of our concept of form (rooted in standard tone transition) by unexpectedly deviating from the linearlyordered rich yellow colour enhancement in the interpretation of the body volume in shadow where it changes into a red-green contrast. This way, by emphasizing the mutual stimulation between red and green, Berény transforms the plastic experience found in the full-figured female form into a colour sensation. In Berény’s own terminology, this is the meeting place of “colour eroticism’ and the “erotica of form,” aroused in “the sensation of tension.”55 When Berény places this ‘mark’ of the new trend at the shadow boundary of a just protruding-turning form – for instance, under the belly – where this red-green pair of colours, with its brutal freshness, serves to express the plastic form about to emerge, to come to life, we can catch the moment of becoming something, the Fauvean solution! Márffy, too, used this vermillion effect under the eye sockets of his Girl from Nyerges, and we encounter the same joke in Berény’s Montparnasse Nude (R: 118). Through a blend of Fauvean and Cézanne techniques, he creates a subjective and markedly original version of spatial and plastic presentation that flies in the face of Fauve doctrine, which completely banished plastic forms. This not only widens our concept of Fauve ‘irregularity,’ but where his unique solutions differed from par excellence Fauvism, it also opened up a path to a new trend in experimentation dissecting the relationship between planes and space.

C ÉZANNE – M ÁRFFY We can study the interrelation between tectonic rhythm of line and valeur adapted in a distinctive style in Márffy’s Portrait of Jenô Kerpely (c. 1913) and Self Portrait (1914) (R: 324, 85). Márffy observed well how Cézanne did not blur the colours in the fabric of valeur with his brushstrokes, but left traces of overlapping surfaces. Yet, while Cézanne’s painted material bore a homogeneous, creamy consistency, Márffy was characterized by a loosely-textured surface – the combination of a layer of paint, spread translucently thin, and a chalk-like porous colour surface rubbed in with a dry brush. The diagonal, intersecting brushstrokes give rise to a grating effect that stretches and maintains this relaxed colour texture (of various factura) on a two-dimensional plane. Márffy uses this net-like device, a drawn construction, to instil a high level of solidity into the picture’s structure of planes. The vertical pull of his lines, intersecting at sharp angles, gives his composition a somewhat ‘gothic’ build, like we find in Tihanyi’s Self Portrait. In the

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lively game of binding and freeing, a plastic depiction of the face takes form. Essentially, Márffy builds from the face one construction broken into flat sheets. Márffy binds the geometric spatial forms’ shadow borders to these plane’s sharp fault lines, while he relaxes the geometric severity with unbound, light-saturated fields of colour. On the web of airily interlocking valeur, the translucent priming – that is, the light spots left without paint – become the colour texture’s breathing pores. Here it is appropriate to touch upon Cézanne’s concept of picture development. In essence, it consists of floating the picture’s incompleteness and preserving possibilities for future formation. We are thinking in particular of solutions

2. B INDING AND F REEING IN THE S EARCH FOR S TYLE We find this alternating cycle of binding and freeing among all the artists in the Eight, although the intensity of this process varies, and the drifting of the painters is not in synch. What tendency proved more defining depended upon the individual’s artistic temperament. For example, Márffy found himself with an unbound technique, culminating in his great light-painting synthesis. Czigány’s work, though, tended in the opposite direction, dominated by form-solidifying summaries. Even more intriguing was the brief period,

Tihanyi’s Compositional Sketch varieties from 1911–1912, Self Portrait and Portrait of Virgil Ciaclan (R: 433, 429), both from 1914.) While Berény dissolved the borders of form, Márffy’s reduction approached a crystalline order (Constructive Landscape, 1913), rather building his translucent, geometric structure to create homogeneity in plane surfaces and body mass, a uniform etherealism (Portrait of Mrs Dezsô Kosztolányi (R: 318) from 1913 and Danube Mills (R: 312) from 1914). On their canvases, Tihanyi and Berény transplanted a different Cézanne method for shoring up plane structure. In Tihanyi’s still lifes, he drew the different layers of space closer to the picture’s surface without sacrificing spatial tension or solidity of form. His compositions were not characterized

C ZIGÁNY : W OMAN AMONG T REES , 1909–1910 ( DETAIL ) • C AT . NO . 99

Ö DÖN M ÁRFFY : G IRL • C AT . NO . 260

where the form-seeking (or form-accompanying) outlines assume the rhythm of the breezily overlapping valeur, in small strokes drawn just whispers apart (Les Grands Arbes from 1902–1904 and La Montagne Sainte-Victoire from1900–1902). Out of the order of these stick-like lines – following fast in each other’s footsteps, finding out their positions – form is dissolved into a breathing surface construction. Cézanne’s landscape depictions demonstrate well how, out of the sixes and sevens of disorderly nature motifs, an intelligible and discernible construction of tree trunks and limbs can become clear and take shape. Similarly, in Portrait of Jenô Kerpely, in the play of loose factura and the bundle of lines and stripes of colour that meld and melt into each other, dividing the surface into bands, the synergy of picture elements becomes clear in both process and form. Unlike Márffy’s breathing surfaces, Czigány created compact colour cohesion in his fabric of hues, where the gapless weave of valeur precludes the surface’s ability to be permeated with light.

around 1909, when both painters loosened up their formal strictures to the same degree, and these pictures even betray a stylistic kinship. All this can be explained by Kernstok’s early influential role. He often played host to Márffy and Czigány in Nyergesújfalu. If we project Kernstok’s emblematic work Nude of a Boy Leaning against a Tree alongside Márffy’s Girl from Nyerges or Boy and Girl Seated on a Green Bench – not to mention Czigány’s work Woman among the Trees – all three artists plainly show a formerly freed-up brush handling launched from the coat of paint in a forceful, twisting diagonal direction (R: 119). Later, beginning in 1912, in paintings from a different line-up of three artists – Márffy, Berény, and Tihanyi – more intricate, far-reaching experiments appeared again on the loosened surface where the formal order of free-ranging planes and diverse objective elements broke down. The definitive, restrictive unity in bodies of mass began to dissolve. (See Berény’s Woman Sitting in an Armchair and Portrait of Ignotus (R: 155, 148), both from 1912; as well as

EZSÔ

FROM

N YERGES , 1908 ( DETAIL )

K ÁROLY K ERNSTOK : N UDE OF A B OY L EANING T REE , 1909 ( DETAIL ) • C AT . NO . 164

AGAINST

by depth, but by swings in the horizontal or vertical direction. Along the principles of flattening and multiple points of view, with his 1909 Still Life with a Large Yellow Tablecloth he raises the tabletop to the surface of the picture and tips it severely in another direction (R: 122). The drapery on the table towers vertically into the air, like in Cézanne’s still lifes. (See Tihanyi’s Still Life with Blue Bottle (R: 411), c. 1909.) We encounter the same solutions in Berény’s and Orbán’s still lifes, too (Berény’s Still Life with Pitcher and Fruit (1910), and Orbán’s Still Life with Kettle, both 1910).

3.B INDING AND F REEING IN M ÁRFFY ’ S & C ZIGÁNY ’ S S TYLE D EVELOPMENT With the Eight, the unbound approach was mainly a question of technique or methodology. Only in Márffy’s painting did it take on a distinct style-

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E MILE O THON F RIESZ :. S PRING (G OLDEN A GE ), 1908

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establishing power. His painterly use of various freeing methods unlocked a treasure trove of boundless opportunity. Arranged in a smooth evolution of style developments, these solutions marked the way for a large synthesis, already predestined by Márffy’s painterly attitude. We can easily follow the path whereby the loosening of surface (Girl from Nyerges (R: 296) and Coloured Female Nude (R: 298), both 1908) – preserving Matisse’s “colour for colour’s sake” principle, but freed from the material burden of thick paint matter – became a translucent, fluctuating colour tissue (Bathing Women (R: 299), 1909). Later, while retaining the thin, translucent colour layer, he organized the pool-like patches of colours (floating beside and even melting into each other) in a more disciplined, crystalline-ordered geometric structure (Constructive Landscape (R: 318), 1913; Reclining Nude (R: 325), 1913; and Self-portrait (R: 324), 1914). This organic, stylistic lead-up, with each element build-

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ing upon the last, prepared the way for a summation that resulted in the synthesis of colour and light. This, however, falls outside the Eight period. At that time, Márffy already eschewed painting motifs on account of their intrinsic beauty. He offered up his models and subjects to light, to satisfy its dematerializing appetite. In the context of this balance, his synthesis was complete when the subject became translucent through the reflecting power of light, whereas the light became palpable via the subject. Thus, the two different states – subject and light – fused in an ethereal medium. On a radio programme in 1958, Márffy related a fateful visual experience he had had in his childhood: “If I were to tell you how I became a painter, I would have to turn back to the distant past. I must have been ten or twelve, at home with my father, who was an official. In his spare time, he liked to mix and play with colours. He would put seven or eight glasses of water on the table

and mix some colours with the others. I was thrilled to no end when he put red into blue, and the glass suddenly turned purple.”56 This revelation refers to how the artist, who found himself through freeing, accomplished a reproduction of that powerfully defining childhood impression in his original style. It is as though Márffy, as an adult artist, subconsciously sought out that experience, which enchanted him and made him a painter. In his Bathing Women composition, we undoubtedly recognize the archetype for the colour relationships – shades of dark green, blue, and purple bleeding into each other, gently embracing – in his father’s glasses of water. What Lajos Fülep wrote about Tihanyi is more applicable to Dezsô Czigány: “He need only start something once, and he carries on to this day […] His is not an outward development in several directions, but rather an inward journey of immersion. […] He builds his new accomplish-

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ments in layers upon the old, disowning nothing in his quest for simplicity.”57 While Márffy established his own light-bathed painterly language, eventually sampling the broadest spectrum of unbound formations; Czigány did the same, employing a vast arsenal of binding methods, practically committed to an ascetic crusade for the ideally simple closed from. Nevertheless, in the period between 1907 and 1909, his path-seeking experiments do not betray the organic cohesion we encounter with Márffy. Czigány attempted his first painterly summaries in 1907. The thick paint matter and large meltingly-modelled decorative colour mass – found in Portrait of a Woman, 1907; Portrait of Irén Jakab (R: 220), 1908; and Self Portrait, 1907–1908 – testify to his artistic birthright from Ferenczy and Rippl-Rónai. At the same time, he launched a series of monochrome, brown-toned portraits with a thin layer of paint – chiefly Endre Ady (R: 70, 76, 77 – five times between 1907 and 1908!), self-portraits (1908 and 1910), and Pablo Casals (R: 204 – 1911). These portraits painted with sepia accompany Czigány to the end of his period in the Eight. (For the sake of curiosity, I add here that Eugène Carrière also painted Casals’ portrait with the very same technique.) In 1909, the French influence appeared in Czigány’s painting in two extreme forms. While local tones in the compositions Female Nude with a Mirror (1908–1909) (R: 203) and Woman Combing Hair (1909) (R: 207) lead us to Félix Vallotton, Portrait of Two Women (R: 212) betrays a definite affinity for Fauvism. In his green-haired Self Portrait (1909) (R: 218), the plasticity, expressed with the Fauvean green-red colour pair, differs in concept from the formulation of bodies of mass with Vallotton’s reduced local tones. Czigány stood by plastic interpretation through tones until 1912–1914, when he switched to sharp light-shadow contrast. This is when he painted his series of “laughing” self-portraits, which already alludes to the noble traditions of Spanish genre painting. On this topic, however, more interesting than authenticating these allusions is uncovering what could lie behind Czigány’s ‘unwavering fidelity,’ his attachment to the subjects and motifs in this picture series. He began painting the laughing self-portraits soon after the appearance of Henri Louis Bergson’s study entitled Laughter, which Mihály Babits reviewed in the columns of Nyugat.58 We do not know if Czigány read this philosophical work, popular at the time, having appeared first in Hungarian in 1913, in a translation by Valéria Dienes. In any case, these laughing portraits’ relationship-forging power is in tune with Bergson’s text: “Laughter needs an echo […] it is something that wishes to continue endlessly in reverberation […] I could even say behind laughter there always

lies some agreement. Conspiracy is different, with either real or fictive partners in laughter.”59 From another angle, it is a strange paradox that, in Czigány’s career, he set about the laughing portraits not long after or within a year (in 1911) of the suicide of three personal female acquaintances, one being his first wife.60 Later, from 1913, he began a new, ‘complementary’ selfportrait series, this time tonsured like a monk. This was later completed when he donned Gulacsy’s discarded cardinal and monastic costumes – an identity both embittered and disguised. It seems that Dezsô Czigány’s temperament was most closely related to Van Gogh’s, independent of their paintings’ stylistic differences. Both his still lifes (with their maniacally strict cult of form) and his self-portrait series (with the painter always keeping himself under control) seem to show that his painterly tools are also marks of confirmation in a program of self-appraisal. ‘Written in the material’ are the artist’s powers of observation and condensation (symbolic inner balance) and a visually verifiable tool to evaluate the compensatory state. The brush handling found in Van Gogh’s pictures is similarly informative. Under threat of a permanent collapse of the psyche, his effective artistic weapon in the battle waged to maintain his compensative state was the concentrated power of picture organization. Present within the swirling energy fields arranged into brushstrokes are a vast tension and the power to keep it in check. In the case of both painters, though – subconsciously as well – the continual resistance holding back the fulfilment of their fateful instincts generated this inner tension, which can be measured in their works’ spectacular concentrated quality.

B ETWEEN C ÉZANNE AND F UTURISM (B ERÉNY AND T IHANYI ) Portraits by Berény and Tihanyi illustrate yet another method for reinforcing picture structure. Essentially, at the motif’s perimeter zone – at the meeting of the body and the background plane – the painter softens the colours to avoid creating a sharp boundary line between them. In his Portrait of Ignotus (R: 148), beside the line around the face, Berény established colour-permeable zones, generating fluidity in the disparate picture elements. This ensured a uniform quality in the picture’s order of planes. This is where Berény came closest to the Futurists’ concept, stimulated by the possibility of a ‘passage’ between flat and shapely elements.

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Futurism was not his goal, but he saw in their painterly means “expanded opportunities” – together with vindication of his own ambitions at the time. In his account written about the Futurist exhibit organized at the National Salon, he nearly touched upon the essence of the new direction, along lines closely related to his own painterly notion: “The picture surface conception of each of the different memory pictures has been concentrated to an actual display on the picture surface.”61 He did without fundamentals of Futurism such as impetus, dynamism, and velocity, which is how motion is expressed and written in ‘Futurist language.’ Berény did not seize the process as an active event; instead, he interpreted it as an accumulation of memory pictures arranged side by side. Out of the Futurist program – what Béla Balázs reported on from Paris for Nyugat – Berény distilled the notion that concerned him as well. “[…] The picture’s synthesis should be what we could see and what we recall.”62 Interestingly, Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, who took issue with Berény and disdained Futurism,63 appreciated Berény’s Portrait of Ignotus on the basis of criteria identical to Futurist objectives: “The picture […] depicts this man, […] who appeared before him in thought as a memory of the deepest impressions. I stand by the paradoxical statement that this memory picture is more credible than

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the most objective delineation. The pursuit, abstraction, and emphasis of colour and form built upon simple impression would not achieve as much value as a unification of impressions garnered at different times.”64 In the subsequent period of Berény’s oeuvre, we encounter his motion experiments (taken in the Futurist sense) when he crafted Scene (1912), Capri Vision (1913), and Golgotha (1912) (R: 193, 121, 60). A typical formal feature of these compositions is the appearance of the objective contents from different points of view. The spatial shapes become a flat plane, which breaks down into colour material, later further dematerialized by light. Berény shows the transformation and its stages at the same time. The Futurists’ colour decomposition was seemingly identical to the Divisionists’ aesthetic method, but between them lay a fundamental difference in concept. While the Divisionists dealt with optical colour mixing, the Futurists speak of putting colour in motion. On Divisionist painters’ canvases, blue was the colour of concrete reality; the optical blending of yellow and blue resulted in the illusory image of a third colour, green. The Futurists’ goal, however, was to

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make viewers experience the process – when, for example, the blue colour field evolves into green, or the yellow into red. We find similar experiments in Berény’s aforementioned pictorial visions. In the end, though, his intentions to incorporate Futurist techniques into his synthesis proved to be a dead end. Within his oeuvre, works conceived in the spirit of freeing were to remain impasses he could not proceed beyond. Due to his painterly temperament, he was fated to return to the world of closed form and colour masses. Simple knowledge of Cézanne’s compositional principles is not sufficient to interpret certain techniques in Tihanyi’s portraits and Compositional Sketch varieties. Tihanyi’s autonomous picture choreographies depart so relatively far from the French master’s concepts that they begin to approach Futurism. The over-dimensional presentation of his figural constructions tease out such key Futurist terms as strength, impetus, bold, struggle, and peril. We may note without irony that the two figures sizing each other up are remarkably bold and perilous picture elements. In Tihanyi’s compositions, the shoulders twist out with brutal violence, commandeering vast

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spaces from the background. Or just the opposite, when the tight proportions of the picture practically warp the lower extremities into a circle, distorting the nude into an anatomic formation made of plasma (Compositional Sketch, Two Forms, 1912 and Compositional Sketch, 1911–1912) (R: 453, 452). In these compositions, Tihanyi did not avail himself of the more refined and articulated solutions found in his Self-portrait of 1914 (R: 433), where both objective contents (head and background) share the colour texture (with loosened outlines in the perimeter zone) in peace. The figures in Compositional Sketch seem as though they want to occupy the entire picture field alone, and vice versa. The intermediate zones plague the body, just as the group in the famous Laocoon statue are beset by snakes – an image that easily comes to mind given the anaconda-like proportions of the limbs (Compositional Sketch, Two Forms). Tihanyi did not experiment with light’s power to decompose and dematerialize. He even remarked, “In the eternal struggle between matter and life for superiority, matter came out on top long ago.”65 He clung to material so firmly that he

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was not at all capable of sacrificing it to light. His figures appear to give rise to the notion that natural proportions place fetters on the human body, which would do anything to break free. Nevertheless, while the painter strives mightily to make the human body conform to the compositional order, the figures cannot free themselves from their material imprisonment. In the end, the plentiful material buries the composition. The reason for this is that Tihanyi did not use recopied, but re-tailored picture elements to build the composition, which, in this form, could not incorporate abstracted body figures as homogenous elements. We are also confronted with inconsistency of form in the way the painter tried to reconcile the autonomously deformed body with the head that conforms to the rules of portraiture (Compositional Sketch (R.: 452.), 1911–1912). Tihanyi misunderstood Cézanne when primarily the freedom of “organizational absolutism” appealed to him in Large Bathers – namely, how the master “forced” his figures into pyramid-shaped shaped bundles for the sake of the classical triangular composition. Tihanyi could have drawn further encouragement from the fact that the composition was full of anatomical impossibilities, and even more could have found its way onto Cézanne’s canvas if the master’s visual intelligence had not ordered it otherwise. For example, the nude crouching in the foreground (missing a knee) and the other figure’s face were left in a ‘silenced’ or ‘unfinished’ state (R: 117). These motifs were not accidentally forgotten. In the interest of his composition, Cézanne rather dropped or did not express certain things so his motifs would nestle into the homogenous fabric. Remaining with our example, Cézanne’s ethereally pure valeur texture and flawless plane structure were capable of healing any wounds that the sight of a missing knee would evoke. Completing the distortion would have given rise to real wounds – not just because it would have presented a clumsily-proportioned body mass (like with Tihanyi), but it also would have violated the rule of a highly-ordered architecture of colour patches. According to this, the space between the figures should bear just as much of the composition’s ‘interest’ as the nudes. Ergo, from the aspect of composition, every picture element is equal. Charles Moris wrote the most perceptive and palpable metaphor for this Cézanne concept in 1907, stating, “It is the book of a writer no so much focussed on the meaning of words as their beautiful ring, who does not finish every sentence or who – because his most personal interests are vested in the ‘copulation of syllables’ (Mallarmé’s expression) – from time to time leaves a subject or object out of a sentence, but never spoils the harmony.”66

Q UESTIONS OF D ESECRATION AND S PIRITUALIZATION Before we summarize the Eight’s artwork as a “painterly direction reducing every form to its essence” and apply to them the title of “artists of form,” we should add some shading to the total picture and approach this proselytizing painterly mission from another angle, that of “human selfunderstanding.” This side to their art is also fascinating, because an emphatic search for identity settled differently among the Eight artists – not purely in the sense of aesthetic direction or belonging to a group with common interests, but taking into account the question of ideological ties. External circumstances (complex in and of themselves) made imperative a search for identity and contemporary self-understanding. For one thing, the awakening to intellectual self-awareness was decisive, engraved on the cross-section of that given time. Yet, just as significant was a general worldview that embraced a broader interval of time and inspired crisis, triggered by the “end of determinism” and the lack of any fixed point of orientation in a “world deprived of God.” Modern artists “condemned to freedom” compensated for the incipient conceptual void and the lack of any complete experience by redefining themselves and their relationship to the world in terms of an individual value system. Freed from the constraints of a hierarchical view of the world, they took creation in their own hands, paradoxically de-sanctifying and de-mythologizing, all the while yearning ceaselessly for a homogeneous vision of the world and a stable value system to signify completion. In the time’s lack of an allencompassing ideal, the individual artist created totality himself, in the artwork’s constructed whole. Absolutism of the individual revelled in limitless freedom,67 so it is only appropriate that, among the Eight, we find vastly different versions of human self-understanding, both exalted and ignoble. Whereas Kernstok, Márffy, and Pór created the New Man alongside allusions to classical style, Berény and Tihanyi flaunted outspoken ugliness, abandoning the classical ideal of beauty. In Berény’s aesthetic self-interpretation, we find no room for praising human God-granted beauty. In the new age, man is his own creation. Accordingly, he paints Self Portrait with a Top Hat (1907) (R: 167) with cruel self-irony. “I may do so!” suggests the arrogant, conceited visage, because Berény is presenting us with an individual whose identity is a matter of his own will. Berény proclaims with pagan self-knowledge that he is indeed no longer a product of the Creator.

An early composition by Tihany from the same time as Berény’s portrait, Adam and Eve (c. 1907), also takes a provocative stance against Divine Creation – or more precisely, the creation myth. Up until now, it has only been discussed in terms of an underdeveloped experiment, but it is precisely in this isolated quality where its underestimated significance lies. We find this composition on the back of the picture entitled Pont St Michel from 1908. The work in question, presumably painted one year before, may have been inspired by the fresh experience of Gauguin’s exhibitions in Paris or Budapest at that time. Although, in its execution, the work does not transcend its experimental nature – which is probably why Tihanyi turned the canvas – nevertheless, it is still unique in the sense that it is the only known experiment from the Hungarian Fauve repertoire where the painter treats the Holy Scripture freely. He updates and degrades The Fall to the level of an everyday narrative. Clothing his paraphrase with sarcastic content, he rewrites the Biblical scene with background symbolism built into the formal elements. He changes and swaps the roles of The Fall. The most striking motif is the metaphor for seduction: the yellow path of temptation, modelled on the surface in rough yellow scales, ‘snaking’ into infinity. The first human pair appears on this yellow strip, and the Tree of Forbidden Fruit, from which Adam (!) plucks an apple, grows out of it, is rooted in it. As though this fruit were the price of Woman, a gift with which he can bribe Eve, the woman reveals her nakedness, offering herself, but covers her face, enveloping herself in anonymity. With his profane, autocratic interpretation, Tihanyi desecrates the Biblical theme, altering its message for the new age. Then, with the provincial round flowerbed formation (popular at the beginning of the century), he sets his modern morality tale in contemporary time. By virtue of its sheer existence, this work is a metaphor for The Fall itself, not only because the painter had the audacity to ‘relativize’ a creation myth of abiding value, but from an aesthetic point of view as well. The original sin here – playing with barbaric, primitive spontaneity and a complete lack of precedent (a Fauve-like attitude!) – is disavowing the classical, traditional Greco-Latin ideal of beauty once and for all. Later, a twist occurred during his period in the Eight. Berény wrote that Tihanyi painted his vision of objects with a taste “nourished by the Latin race of painters.”68 This is borne out reminiscences of Cézanne and El Greco in Tihanyi’s work. Even in his later figural compositions, Tihanyi did not give up the immediacy of primitive expressive power. His forms’ rotund awkwardness was reborn in a more angular construction in his Compositional Sketch (1911). The formal idea behind the raw-worked nudes etched in sharp angles is

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a far cry from Cézanne’s “brooding hand.” Their archetypes can probably be found in Picasso’s 1907 work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, impressive on account of its singular burst of spontaneity. In his evaluation of the Eight’s last exhibit, Zoltán Felvinczi Takács especially emphasized the decisive importance of “primitiveness.” While he was mostly thinking of Italian primitives, his statements also apply to the primitive discoveries of Matisse and Picasso: “The greatest military coup in the great, continuing battle over art has been the conquest of mysterious sources of power hidden in primitiveness. […] The nature of the matter is, therefore, that the impression of primitive forms is inherently deeper and more direct. […] I detect evidence of remarkable viability in its intellectual aims, since we are seeking this great directness in everything nowadays.”69 Tihanyi’s own individualism follows from his attitude toward the world. He measured his firm conviction against pre-Renaissance painters, who “considered painting an occasion for manifesting the spirit that arose from their faith.”70 Still, he dissociated himself from their dualistic philosophies: “While my faith is not Nazarine, I accept god unconditionally – a god that is out of circulation, out of our thoughts, and dead in mankind, but that lives on in the faith that believes in everything […] and avows the affinity and immutability of spirit and material – who is in things and not behind them.”71 This idea’s manifestation suits what we have already disclosed in connection with Pór’s Sermon on the Mount, where the Gospel was simply a ‘springboard,’ an appropriate tool adapted to the individual’s will. The artist desacralizes a “great narrative,” but in the reinterpretation, he spiritualizes the material at his subjective bidding. He ‘redeems’ the mythos with his individually transfigured forms. Nonetheless, the artistic autocrat

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always makes certain not to nullify the narrative, so it remains recognizable. In fact, it is in terms of this relation that we may reckon the freedom and daring in the work’s ‘artistic flight.’ That said, spiritualization does not always go hand in hand with desecration. It is through this very transfiguration that the artist himself ‘sanctifies’ when he leaves clues or uses colour quotations and formal references that account for the original transfiguring power of their sources. We need not leap to ‘grand themes.’ This may even occur within an everyday still life. For instance, in Tihanyi’s Still Life with Large Yellow Tablecloth (1909) (R: 409), traces are borne in the drapery, which is creased and folded according to the gothic cannon and carries a gold-ochre colour quotation, giving the impression that El Greco’s St. Peter misplaced his robe on the table (R: 122). Thus, El Greco’s spirit steals in, and Tihanyi makes good use of his ‘evergreen sta-

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tus.’ In his compositions’ gothic-baroque construction, direct reference is made to earthly and heavenly dimensions, which are not just tensionbuilding gravitational points. With Tihanyi, these dimensions are fitting symbols for material and spirit, which are united between these two virtual poles – precisely on the canvas! – in a work of art.

O THER P ECULIARITIES OF F ORM C OLOUR C OMBINATIONS AND T RENDS Pink and sulphur yellow – in combination with blue, green, and purple – became part of the Hungarian Fauve and ‘Neo’ visual rhetoric. For

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the painters haunting Nyergesújfalu (Kernstok, Márffy, and Czóbel), it remained a characteristic colour assembly on their palettes. We encounter these flat patches of exceptional, decorative pink spread over a plane first on canvases by Gauguin, as well as in works by the Nabis. The Nabis, however, drew the archetype for this abstract, ‘universal’ local colour from the colour world of primitive, early Renaissance panel pictures, where the pink shade dominated interior and architectural elements. (A good example of this is the small panel picture by Sassetta, St Thomas Aquinas Kneeling before the Virgin Mary’s Altar, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.) This colour, used freely, irrespective of the environment, was capable of lifting the shades it accompanied from their natural implications. Any picture element – earth, sky, water, tress, figures – could appear in this hue, and instantly the motifs would become rewritten ele-

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ments in the composition. As far as its temperature is concerned, it is equidistant from cold and warm colours. Thus, it was able to adapt itself to neighbouring colours, and by forming a decorative texture with them, it spread them over a twodimensional plane. They further inherited the pink shade’s ‘jolly joker’ function from Matisse (La Bonheur de vivre – R: 56). Then, after 1909, inspired by the colour culture of Islamic decorative arts, it was combined in cool colour harmonies with blue, green, and purple.72 This characteristic colour combination held a decisive reign, where the cool shades of blue, green, and purple (used in combination with pinks and yellows in a ratio of approximately two-thirds) dominated. Nearly all of the members of the former Hungarian Fauves and ‘Neos,’ shuttling between Paris and Budapest, made this cool-tuned colour assembly their own and carried it on their palettes to Nagybánya, Kecskemét, and Nyeregújfalu. Correspondences include Matisse’s Pastorale from 1905 and Pór’s Yearning for Pure Love (Sketch), (R: 387) from 1908, as well as Matisse’s Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra from 1907 and Kernstok’s Standing Female Nude from 1908 (R: 273). With the exception of Tihanyi, this fashionable pink shade was gradually pushed into the background, and three other colours took its place – fuschia, cool green, and blue – which altered the entire colour character of compositions. Besides finding use in expressly tight interior spaces – in combination with the colour of raw meat, with white, or with cool blue- or green-tinged grey – fuschia (alizarin krapplack) also emphasized closed bodies of mass with prominent decorative tone contrasts. (See Berény’s Nude Sitting in Armchair (R: 187) and Portrait of Leo Weiner (R: 151), both from 1911; as well as Tihanyi’s Portrait of a Girl (R: 445), 1914 and

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Orbán’s Small Nude (R: 355), 1910.) This colour assembly eliminated the tool of plein air painting – the system of complementary colours which, as a coordination principle, helped the Impressionists dematerialize and demote everything (including people) to the level of atmospheric chance, woven out of fluttering light in a world of pure phenomenon. The second characteristic colour grouping on the Eight’s palette was made up of varying shades of cool green. We have already mentioned Veronese green (popular on account of Van Gogh) in connection with Czigány (Still Life, 1910 and Self Portrait (R: 232), 1913). Similarly, we find varieties of green inclining toward turquoise most often in Czigány’s pictures (Portrait of Irén Jakab (R: 220), 1908 and Still Life with a Homespun Rug (R: 221), c. 1911–1912). Fiery oxide green banished from the Eight’s palettes the warm dark green tones (inclining to Barbizon School earth tones) that were generally mixed from black and yellows. As needed, the shade was either ‘heated’ with umbers or ‘cooled’ with Prussian blue. On landscapes by Tihanyi, Berény, Márffy, Czigány, and Orbán, cool green of an intense, deep tone dominated. Spread in the vicinity of cold greens, the assembly of purples and blues lent the composition an even cooler mood (Ödön Márffy: Pines, 1913) (R: 321). Cézanne-inspired blue hues mainly dominate the works of Tihanyi and Márffy. This is verified by Tihanyi’s freshly cleaned-up Portrait of Jenô Miklós (1911) (R: 442) and Portrait of György Bölöni (1912) (R: 426). Rounding out the series are Portrait of a Boy (1910) (R: 441) and Portrait of Lajos Fülep (1915) (R: 434), as well as Still Life with Blue Bottle (1909) (R: 411) and Still Life with Blue Vase (1911) (R: 408). We may also cite here Márffy’s

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Salome (1911–1921) (R: 304), Village on a Hillside (1912) (R: 301), Portrait of Mrs Dezsô Kosztolányi (c. 1913) (R: 312), and Danube Mills (1914) (R: 315). Later, among the Constructivists, the base blue tone would become definitive.

capabilities of the bowl’s rim. As Ernô Kállai characterized Berény’s Still Life with a Jug (1910) (R: 180), “There is misdrawing in it, balance shoved to one side – in short, the modern disposition to deform, warp, and strain.”73

“T ROPICS ”

A CUTE A NGLES

Thanks to the layered style of painting, we can appreciate the process of realization as the picture developed. The method’s essence lies in the colour layers, not completely covering each other, leaving something from the previous phase exposed. We find this, for example, in Kernstok’s Landscape, 1910 (R: 279) when he corrects the house’s wall (originally shaded with cool blue) using ochre nuances, in the interest of the picture’s consistent colour harmony. Orbán did the very same in his Still Life with Kettle 1910 (R: 337). One part of the green cover on the table’s surface is left in a previous phase with considerably cooler shading. Manifest in this process of self-correction are the painter’s intentions overwriting each other, making the work an intellectual accomplishment, and behind this, we can discover the thinking artist. This type of art is a hallmark of such painters as Cézanne and Matisse. It is by no means an accident that they became role models for the Eight, propagating the primacy of reason.

Similarly, speculative thinking shows in the autocratically constructed picture elements broken into sharp acute angles and in the placement of extremities in nudes as well (Orbán: Large Nude, c. 1911 (R: 361); Tihanyi: Compositional Sketch, 1911 (R: 431); Czigány: Two Female Nudes, 1911 (R: 206); and Márffy: Reclinging Nude, 1913 (R: 325). Still, in Tihanyi’s Portrait of Lajos Fülep, we encounter the dynamic effect of angularity in the formation of joints – the shoulder and elbow. This solution in the geometric construction of his Self Portrait (1914) strikes us as less refined. We also often find drapery constructions fragmented in acute angles in Berény’s still lifes – for instance, in Still Life with Pitcher and Fruit (1910) (R: 182). Among the Eight, Czóbel experimented the most often with the rhythm of acute elbows when he painted La Moulin de la Galette, c.1907–1908 (R: 239). (Unfortunately, the picture is only known from an archive reproduction.) Presumably, Czóbel saw Picasso’s work from that time and could have drawn inspiration from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907). This is suggested primarily by the way Czóbel’s work is commanded by a ‘primitive’ expressive power, the same power from the tribal art of distant continents that Picasso adapted into his ambitious work. Nonetheless, ‘constructivism’ among painters in the Eight was less abstract, much rather aesthetic. They do not belong to the line Picasso represents, although perhaps Tihanyi represents an exception with his brutal rawness at times.

D EFORMATION It is precisely the same painterly thinking mode that is responsible for continuous corrections to colour surface, bringing about intentionally imperfect forms, since it is more exciting – an intellectual exertion! – to proceed along the route to perfection than to proclaim concrete orderliness. The simplest example of imperfect from, already mentioned, is the warped ellipse. All those who painted still lifes – Berény, Czigány, Márffy, Orbán, and Tihanyi – experimented with askew ellipses (R: 411, 408). Bowls in still lifes, together with their content or fruit, would not entirely become an organic form with one essence. The irregular quality of the ellipses on dishes rendered the form dynamic. The dishes practically twirl, as though the torque of some powerful centrifugal force were testing the elastic

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S UMMARY To use a graphic simile, the Group of Eight, as an artistic unit, is like an eight-sided octahedron where everyone occupies his own surface area, and yet they still link up organically, together comprising a whole that encompasses the synthesizing aims of Hungarian modernism. Departing

from each other at the angles of refraction, they meet again at shared boundaries along the lines of the individuals’ similar painterly ambitions. What makes up these varied and congruent experiments, we have endeavoured to summarize in this study. Naturally, it is revealed that their disparate aims were never at any point as orderly as our illustrative tool of comparison. They left to posterity the very same questions as their legitimate intellectual predecessors, the Hungarian Fauves. Although the culture of form in Cubism favoured a plastic-based culture of seeing, the Hungarian artists were incapable of exploiting the unlimited freedom of abstraction. Similarly, as Hungarian Fauves, they were unable – even unwilling – to uproot themselves from their material-grounded approach. Just as they did not venture into the terrain of autonomous colour, so they flirted only tangentially with Cubism. Their synthesis-creating aspirations were based upon a respect for traditions, and they wished to elevate their art to the classical level with the illusion of lasting values. This respect for traditions and the classical raises a valid question: How far may we apply the notion of avant-garde to the Eight? Indeed, what is distinctive about the avant-garde movement is its repudiation of tradition and its lack of overlapping references to the past. In pursuit of a paradigmatic shift, “their reckoning of time originated with their own appearance.”74 The linking of avant-garde to the Eight for ‘strategic reasons’ is also risky, because it relegates Hungarian modernist endeavours to second-tier status in the context of an international avant-garde movement. This prevents us from discovering on its own merits a new entity that distinctly and stubbornly distances itself from the international trend.75 From this aspect, the Eight’s modernity, released from avant-garde’s orbit, is exposed in a more worthy light. What distinguishes the Eight movement’s unique cultural history is how it made a name for itself, with the well-organized media support of the Nyugat periodical. Arm in arm with related arts, its exhibitions were advertised alongside literary and music programmes. Its pioneering importance lay in its management – conducted in radical, intellectual, public circles – which handled it as a realizable project. To use a contemporary metaphor, the Eight was a publicized band ‘created in the studio’ that made good.

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Notes

19 20

9 10 11 12

14 15 16 17 18

Members of the group were Dezsô Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Ödön Márffy, Dezsô Orbán, Bertalan Pór, Lajos Tihanyi, and their guiding spirit Károly Kernstok. This remark refers to the rhetoric and argumentation in the incomparably tangible art analyses that Ernô Kállai (1890–1954) wrote between the two world wars. See Kállai, Ernô: Új Magyar piktúra 1900–1925 [New Hungarian Pictures, 1900–1925]. In: Összegyûjtött írások. Magyar nyelvû cikkek, tanulmányok 1912–1925 [Collected Writings: Hungarian Articles and Studies, 1912–1925]. Collected and edited by Árpád Timár. Budapest, 1999. 126. “Hungarian Fauves” was coined as a designative name for the sake of the first comprehensive exhibit of their work at theHungarian National Gallery, 2006. A team assembled by Krisztina Passuth and Gergely Barki wrote the catalogue for the exhibition, along with György Szücs and Ferenc Gosztonyi. The list of two-sided pictures found thus far (front side – back side): Vilmos Perlrott Csaba: Reclining Nude, 1907 – Laundry Hangers, 1905; András Mikola (?): Still Life – Street in Paris, 1906; Lajos Tihanyi: Pont St. Michel, 1908 – Adam and Eve, c. 1907; Dezsô Orbán: Houses in Charenton, 1908 – Female Nude, c. 1908; Lajos Tihanyi: Still Life with Flower Pot, 1909 – Chapel of the Virgin Mary in Nagybánya, 1908; Sándor Ziffer: Bank of the Zazar at the Old Bridge in Nagybánya, 1908 – Dining Room, c. 1907–1908; Ödön Márffy: Reaper, 1910 – Female Nude on Sofa, 1909; Lajos Tihanyi: Klauzál Square, 1909 – Rowers, (Winter View of Street), 1909; Tibor Boromisza: Small Market in Nagybánya, 1910 – Portrait of His Wife (Mária Torday), 1910; Béla Czóbel: Fauve Still Life, 1907 – Cabaret Theatre in Paris, c. 1906–1907. An example of this is the fragment of Ödön Márffy’s Female Nude on Sofa a that survived on the back of his picture entitled Reaper, 1910. The Hungarian Fauves and the ‘Neos’ were such intellectuallyrelated, overlapping groups that they were represented mostly by the same painters: Béla Czóbel, Dezsô Czigány, Lajos Tihanyi, Dezsô Orbán, Géza Bornemisza, Tibor Boromisza, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, Sándor Ziffer, Vilmos Huszár, Sándor Galimberti, Valéria Dénes, Béla Iványi Grünwald, András Mikola, and Béla Balla. Also belonging to the unorganized Fauve camp were the artists committed to progress who shunned Nagybánya: Károly Kernstok, Róbert Berény, Ödön Márffy, and Bertalan Pór. Regarding their organization, there was a significant difference between the Hungarian Fauves’ presence in Paris and at home. In Paris, they were scattered, gathering painterly experience independently. Later, returning home to provincial colonies – to Nagybánya, Kecskemét, and Kernstok’s estate in Nyerges – they formed alliances to reform the culture of seeing. Matisse’s two pupils, Géza Bornemisza and Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, did not become members of the fellowship under Kernstok’s direction, even though their painterly pasts and the kindred spirit of their work seemed to presage it. From 1907 on, Béla Czóbel did not maintain ties to the ‘Neos’ of Nagybánya. Formerly the leading figure of the Hungarian Fauves, Czóbel gradually faded into the background. He was the most inactive participant in the Group of Eight. This period was his time to recharge. His unique path-scouting experiments were independent of any Cézanne-based or Matisse-based synthesis, which formed the backbone of the Eight’s intellectual program. Kernstok, Károly: “A kutató mûvészet” [The Inquisitive Art]. Nyugat, 3. 1910.II.: 95-99. – Az Utak II.: 288. Ibid, 289. Ibid, 290. Ibid, 290. Feleky, Géza and Julius Meier-Graefe: Hans von Marées. Nyugat, 4. 1911. II.: 950-952. Kernstock, Károly: Rövid epilógus egy kiállításról [Short Epilogue to an Exhibition]. Huszadik Század, 12. 1911. I.: 723–724. Reissued in Kernstok Károly írásaiból. A kutató mûvészettôl a Vallomásig, 1911–1939 [Selected writings of K. K. from The Inquisitive Art to Confession] Collected and distributed by Ferenc Bodri. Tatabánya, 1997, 33-34. Ibid, 33. Ibid, 33. Ibid, 33. Ibid, 34. The quoted definition comes from Werner Hofmann: Grundlagen der modernen Kunst: Eine Einführung in ihre symbolischen Formen. Hungarian edition: Budapest, 1974, 182..

23 24 25

26 27

32 33

43 44 45

Ibid, Flam, Jack: Fauvism, Cubism, and European Modernism. Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya, 1904–1914 Edited by Krisztina Passuth and György Szücs. Budapest, Hungarian National Galery, 2006, 38. Lengyel, Géza: Új Képek [New Pictures]. Nyugat, 3. 1910. I.: 134–137. Az Utak II.: 239. Feleky, Géza: Széljegyzetek Kernstok képeihez [Annotations to Kernstok’s pictures]. Nyugat, 3. 1910. I-: 195–198. – Az Utak II.: 325. Kernstok, 1910. op. cit. 95-99. – Az Utak II.: 290. Ibid, 290. Lukács, György: Az Utak elváltak [The Roads Parted]. Nyugat, 3. 1910. I.: 190–193. – Az Utak II.: p 322. Ibid, 290. Signac, Paul: Delacroix-tól a neoimpresszionizmusig [From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism]. Budapest, 1978, 75. Gerô, Ödön: Újszerûek kiallítása [Modern Exhibition]. Pesti Napló, 31 December 1909, 5-6. – Az Utak II.: 233. Bárdos, Artúr: Kernstok. Nyugat, 3. 1910. I.: 142–144. – Az Utak II.: 296. Károly Kerstock did glass windows for the Schiffer Villa and the new County Hall in Debrecen, Bertalan Pór made panel pictures and works on cardboard for the Folk Opera and mosaics for the school on Váci Street, Ödön Márffy made drywalls for the school on Kiscelli Road, and Dezsô Czigány created drywalls for the Park Sanitorium. Bálint, Aladár: Pór Bertalan csoportos képe [Bertalan Pór’s Group Picture]. Nyugat, 3. 1910. I.: 141–142. – Az Utak II.: 294. Ibid, 294. Tersánszky, Józsi Jenô: Pór Bertalan kiállítása a Könyves Kálmán-ban I. [Bertalan Pór’s exhibit at the Könyves Kálmán, I.]. Nyugat, 4. 1911. I.: 406–409. – Az Utak III.: 44. Hodler considered every such repetition parallelism, which created unity in the picture. For him, parallelism was did not just mean reiteration of a form, but the relationship between a body or the landscape and the intellectual content. Berény, Róbert: Pór Bertalan kiállítása a Könyves Kálmán-ban III.” [Bertalan Pór’s exhibition at the Könyves Kálmán, III]. Nyugat, 4. 1911. I.: 406–409. – Az Utak III.: 46. Déri, Imre: Pór Bertalan képe [Bertalan Pór’s Picture]. Egyetértés, 6 January 1910, 11. – Az Utak II.: 244. Gerô, Ödön: Az újszerûek körül [Among the Modern]. Pesti Napló, 6 January 1910, 6-7. – Az Utak II.: 247. Szûcs, Julianna P.: Pór Bertalan igazi hazatérése [Bertalan Pór’s True Homecoming]. Népszabadság, 4 November 1980. Schönberg, Arnold: Moses und Aron. This is an excerpt from Moses’ closing oratory, his recitative, to the masses: “immer, wenn ihr die Wunschlosigkeit der Wüste verlaßt und eure Gaben euch zur höchsten Höhe geführt haben, immer, werdet ihr wieder heruntergestürzt werden vom Erflog des Mißbrauches, zurück in die Wüste. […] Aber in der Wüste seid ihr unüberwindlich und werdet das Ziel erreichen: Vereint mit Gott.” Lengyel, Géza: Kernstok Károly [Károly Kernstok]. Nyugat, 4. 1911. II.: 1068–1070. – Az Utak III.: 292. Gerô, Ödön: Kernstok Károly [Károly Kernsok]. Kultúra, 25 November 1911, 697–700. – Az Utak III.: 248. The designation of these three types of symmetry (bilateral, translative, and rotative) is linked to the name of Oskar Bätschmann, whom Werner Busch also cited in his study entitled Hodler and Romanticism. See Ferdinand Hodler. Egy szimbolista látomás [Ferdinand Hodler: A Symbolist Vision]. Edited by Katharina Schmidt and Péter Ujvári. Budapest, Fine Arts Museum, 2008, 39. Gerô, 1911. op. cit. – Az Utak III.: 248. Kernstok, 1910. op. cit. – Az Utak II.: 292. In his exceptional study entitled “Three Nudes, or Is Ödön Márffy’s Early Masterpiece Lost?”, Zoltán Rockenbauer argues for The Judgment of Paris when he reveals that “posterity has erroneously christened the picture ‘The Three Graces.’” Rockenbauer, Zoltán: Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 54. 2005. 310. Rockenbauer, Zoltán: Márffy. Életmûkatalógus [M. Complete works]. Budapest-Paris, 2006, 56. The quoted expression was written by Ferenc Lehel in 1921. Rockenbauer, 2006. 76. Berény, Róbert: Tihanyi Lajos [Lajos Tihanyi]. Bécsi Magyar Újság, 28 March 1920, 5. – Reissued by Valéria Vanília Majoros: Tihanyi Lajos írásaí és dokumentok [Writings and documents of L. T.]. Budapest, 2002, 405.

51 52

53 54

57 58

62 63

65 66

68 69 70 71 72

73 74

Tihanyi, Lajos: Revizió [Revision]. These were Lajos Tihanyi’s remarks upon Ernô Kállai’s book entitled Új Magyar piktúra [New Hungarian painting]. OSzK Kézirattár, Bölöni-Tihanyi-fond, inv. no.: 198/12, p 6. My gratitude to Gergely Barki for bringing this document to my attention. Bálint, Aladár: A ‘Nyolcak’ kiállítása [The ‘Eight’ Exhibition]. Népszava, 24 November 1912, 11. – Az Utak III.: 493. Tihanyi. op. cit. 4. Fülep, Lajos. Tihanyi. Az arckép a festôjérôl [Tihanyi: The Portrait of its Painter]. Nyugat, 11. 1918. II.: 692–696. – Reissued in Fülep Lajos egybegyûjtött írások . III. Cikkek, tanulmányok 1917 – 1930 [Assembled Writings of Lajos Fülep, Articles and Studies, Volume III: 1917–1930]. Collected and edited by Árpád Timár. Budapest, 1998, 130–134, quoted from 133. Ibid, 132. Émile Bernard quotes Cézanne, as recorded by Maurice Denis. See A szimbolizmustól a klasszicizmusig. Maurice Denis elméleti írásai [From Symbolism to Classicism: The Analytical Writings of Maurice Denis]. Translated by Péter Balabán. Budapest, 1983, 137. The terminology which Róbert Berény applied to the artwork of Bertalan Pór stands for his own painting as well. Berény, Róbert: Pór Bertalan kiállítása a Könyves Kálmán-ban III.” [Bertalan Pór’s exhibit at the Könyves Kálmán, III. Nyugat, 4. 1911. I.: 406–409. – Az Utak III.: 46. Radio programme with Ödön Márffy. Reporter: Edit Tetinszky. Broadcast 28 April 1958 – Magyar Rádió Zrt. Prózai Hangarchívum. inv. no.: D 1277. Fülep, 1918. (op. cit.) – Fülep, 1989. (op. cit.) p 131. Babits, Mihály: Bergson filozófiája [Bergson’s Philosophy]. Nyugat, 3. 1910. II.: 945–961. Bergson, Henri Louis: A nevetés [Laughter]. Translated by Nándor Szávai. Budapest, 1986, 38. According of Attila Rum, the three women were Mária Trebitzky (Czigány’s first wife), Irma Seidler, and Vera Okányi Swarcz. Attila Rum: Dezsô Czigány. Budapest, 2004, 109–112. Berény, Róbert: A Nemzeti Szalonbeli képekrôl [Pictures in the National Salon]. Nyugat, 6. 1913. I.: 97–98. Balázs, Béla: Futuristák [Futurists]. Nyugat, 5. 1912. II.: 645–647. Takács, Zoltán Felvinczi: “A futurista mûvészet értékeléséhez” [An Evaluation of Futurist Art]. Nyugat, 6. 1913. I.: 325–326. Felvinczi considered Berény a Futurist and attacked the group with the very same principles: “Besides these painters’ elementary flaws, they fall prey to the greatest inconsistencies when they mix what they see with open and closed eyes without making a distinction between the picture features that they convey directly and those they draw from recollection.” Takács, Zoltán Felvinczi: Négyen a Nyolcak közül. Glosszák egy modern mûvészeti kiállításhoz [Four out of the Group of Eight: Comments on a Modern Art Exhibit]. Nyugat, 5. 1912. II.: 763–768. – Az Utak III.: 485. Tihanyi: “Revizió” [Revision]. op. cit. 8. Morice, Charles: Les Aquarelles de Cézanne [Aquarelles by Cézanne]. Mercure de France, 1 July 1907, 134. Henceforth, this would be the measure of worth – namely, how capable they were of exploiting their freedom to produce something original. Berény, 1920. op.cit. – Majoros, 2002. op. cit. 405. Takács, 1912. op. cit. – Az Utak III.: 481. Tihanyi: Revizió [Revision]. op. cit. 3. Ibid, 4–5. Arabesques of interlocking Islamic tiles reduced to three colours (blue, green, and pink) actually serve as the prototype for Matisse’s large Dance composition. Common qualities: the stylized, arabesque drawing and the decorative colour patches spread over two dimensions. The vision found in Islamic decorative arts appealed to Matisse, because it did not present its spiritual content, but referred to it. Zoltán Felvinczi Takács formulated a similar lesson in his comments on the Eight’s last exhibit: “In fact, the artist’s work is truly pure when he instinctually decorates with the line rhythms and colours that emerge from the chaotic fluctuations in his soul – that is, when he does not illustrate and does not use approximations to express his emotions.” Takács, 1912. op. cit. – Az Utak III.: 482. Kállai, 1999. op. cit. 153. Németh, Lajos: Avantgarde és hagyomány [Avant-Garde and Tradition]. Ars Hungarica, 16. 1988, 86. My gratitude to Attila Rum for drawing this article to my attention. Éva Forgács has already put forth this idea in connection with the Hungarian Fauves and Fauvism in her study Fauves or Colourists? Holmi, 19. 2007, 313.

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V O J T Eˇ C H

L A H O D A

SEEKERS, PREACHERS AND WARRIORS: THE EIGHT IN PRAGUE AND BUDAPEST O SMA (THE E IGHT ) 1 The figure eight does not have as significant position in the symbolism of numbers as the preceding number seven. It is nevertheless linked with meaning, which might explain the mania for “eights” in artistic circles at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, especially in Prague and Budapest, but also in New York.2 The eighth day is the first day after the Sabbath; it is the beginning of a further week and can therefore mean the beginning of a new and perhaps better time (of art, in our case). Eight is also a lucky number – after all, eight people were saved in the Flood (Gen. 8, 16; 1P 3, 20). Augustine considered eight to be the number symbolising the Resurrection (in our story we might add: of new art). We do not know whether the young Prague or Hungarian painters knew this, but they would certainly not object to being identified with such symbolism. Let us try to identify some elements, facts, realia or questions, which might be common or close to both the Eight groups, both Czech and Hungarian, and which are in harmony with the wider context of modernism in Central Europe.

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A LLTEIG (“ GENERAL DOUGH ”) AND THE “C ARPET THEORY ”

G YÖRGY L UKÁCS , 1910 S

Common to both groups might be the somewhat neglected concept, most aptly formulated by the Hungarian philosopher and essayist Leo Popper, a close friend of Gyorgy Lukács, as Allteig (general substance, literally general dough), which young Lukács also used in his philosophy of art and later developed with the concept of “homogenous medium”.3 Allteig can be understood as “the principle of the formation of an individual thing, which means the joint weight of a thing, the weight of a work, the weight of material and form, which becomes at one and the same time both an expression of the difference and the unity of things.”4 Allteig was a metaphysical philosophical concept, “...how the diverse, the qualitatively different and the incommensurable can be seen, felt and experienced as homogeneous…“5 It linked the physical and corporeal with the immaterial and spiritual. It was the expression of the hidden homogenous unity of

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material, which is the basis of the creativity of the true artist, whose work should not lose contact with nature and at the same time should avoid copying it. Leo Popper developed the theory of “Allteig” in an article on Breughel the Elder and on Cézanne. He wrote that both artists, whom he linked just as courageously as the Czech painter Bohumil Kubisˇta linked El Greco and Cézanne6, adopted the air and enabled the physical to be combined with the air in the picture. In other words they found a kind of primal material, Hyle, which combines all the elements and things of the area of the painting. Each element is bound to the other by a kind of plasmatic connection as the universal basic material of painting. “A tree has something from water, water from the road, ore from heaven, and nothing would exist that had not used to be something else. This is how the ancient matter (Urstoff) of this painting arises.”7 The principle of “Urstoff” was connected with Popper’s carpet theory. In the text on Breughel he states that the painter who uses a theme only in order to create the form of his colourful, densely structured fantasy vision is no longer a mere ‘genre painter’ for us: he is the creator of “animated ornaments” who arranges nature according the “the beat of his own blood”8 until these ornaments become nature itself. Here there is clearly formulated the requirement for the painting as a part of nature, as newly created nature, which also agreed with the theories of Frantisˇek Kupka, who emphasised that the painting is parallel to nature and is a part of it, in other words not its imitation. Popper’s opinion is near to the idea of the Czech painter Antonín Slavícˇek, who was close to the Prague Osma group in artistic opinion and expression. According to Slavícˇek a painting is “the life of those spots of paint ... the fluttering of light and – the fluttering of colours and light.9 In 1908 Slavícˇek writes in a letter: “... One observes and forgets everything – one does not see either forms or lines – one sees only something like the phantoms of colours, - they bend closer to him, - they gather together and at that moment a tree has neither branches nor leaves, but has only fiery patches – in some kind of – hitherto never unfamiliar ornaments.“10 Such “unfamiliar ornaments" were also created in the same year by members of the Czech Osma. Popper summarises the thesis of “animated ornaments”: Breughel “sought the idea of nature only to reach in the end the idea of the carpet.”11 A number of the realisations of Central European artists in the second half of the first decade could quite well have corresponded to such a concept. Of the Hungarians one might mention the painting of the Seated Man (1906) by Béla Czóbel, who sees him as the contrast of the closed form of the figure and the open, unquiet

B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : I N

and vibrant form of the background, including the carpet. We can also comprehend Czóbel’s picture In the Square (c. 1905–1906) as “animated ornaments” and the painting as a carpet. In both cases the pictures are painted as though the painter were not working with reality, but with Allteig, which does contain elements of reality in its live and pulsing matter, but simultaneously exceeds them with a unifying “liquid” formation. In other words Allteig sets itself between the world and the painter and becomes the objective world of the canvas, literally the life of the picture. At the first exhibition of the Osma in 1907 Filla exhibited, among other things, several landscapes. He was captivated by the individual plains or strips of the fields, small fields and hedgerows, which formed a kind of carpet-like, irregular and somewhat “wild” ornament.12

THE

S QUARE , 1905–1906

According to Popper the painter seeks shape and form in nature, but because he does not wish to copy it, he arrives at matter, which links the bodies of the figures with the greenery of vegetation, with the air and the clouds. The colours of this Allteig, this “original dough”, mingle: thus the nude picture of a woman may be partly green (Márffy), just like the nose on a head (Kernstok). Perhaps Popper’s concept of the Allteig might with a certain degree of simplification be described through the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, so popular in Bohemia. Filla was fascinated by Meier-Graefe’s concept of “painterly painting” (“malerische Malerei“).13 In a letter to Antonín Procházka in 1908 Emil Filla explained in detail his concept of the “principle of colour” with references to Meier-Graefe’s ideas. For Filla

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colour is the “measure of the quality of matter”. When he studies a picture, then he first looks to see if it is “plastic” and lastly whether it is “material”, i.e. “stofflich”.14 Colour must not become a “means of decoration”. Colour must be made “plastic”. From the tension between the various opposites in a picture arise “vibration” and life. The concept of “vibration” appears in Filla’s quoted diary of 1907 in considerations about colour. In places he writes about Bergson-like coloured “vitalistic vibration”, which is not a passive means to enliven the canvas. An apt example of such an attitude is Filla’s note on the paintings of Francisco Goya. “It is interesting how much force Goya uses and how he seeks, regardless of any laws, chiefly to imprint a piece of life in the entire picture, somewhat similarly to the way in which Gogh models trees by force so that it can be seen how they grow out of the earth, how they are rooted. I feel that every master can safely be recognised according to this very effort, the fact that he tries to smuggle life into a picture by force.”15 Is not Allteig, then, an expression of the life of universal matter, which the painter has “smuggled” into the painting? Does this not refer to Bergson's vitalistic principle, which was so topical at the time?

M ATRIX : A CADEMIES , E XHIBITIONS , TRAVELS The Czech artists who participated in the two exhibitions of the Osma group in 1907–1908 studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the years 1903–1908 under Professors Franz Thiele and Vlaho Bukovac. Also studying under Thiele were those who did not become members of the group, but whose work was nonetheless not far distant from the creative language of this group. In particular these were the painters Max Oppenheimer, who was born in Vienna, and Wenzel Hablik from North Bohemia. Oppenheimer, with his paintings following the completion of the Academy in Prague from the years 1909–1914, came close to the work of the members of the Prague Osma both in theme (The Flagellation of Christ, 1913) and in painting method. Wenzel Hablik was a painter of great ability who’s lively and thick coloured oil pastes can be compared with the work of the Osma.16 In 1907, however, Hablik left his native region – he was born in Most (Brux) in North Bohemia – and joined his patron in Itzeohe in North Germany, where he spent the rest of his artistically rich life. Contact with fellow students was more important for the students of the Academy than

130

M AX O PPENHEIMER : T HE F LAGELLATION

C HRIST , 1913

the school itself, as painter Vincenc Benesˇ, a member of Osma, wrote later. The young painters had a direct example at the exhibitions of the Mánes Association of Graphic Artists, the most important modernist art association in Bohemia. Although there were no sculptors among the members of the Osma group, some of them were nevertheless strongly impressed by the exhibition of the French sculptor August Rodin in Prague in 1902.17 A true milestone in Bohemia was the exhibition of Edvard Munch in Prague in 1905, the 15th exhibition of the Mánes association. This influenced almost an entire generation of artists and “exploded like a firecracker”, as Filla wrote. This was well discerned by the important literary and art critic Frantisˇek Xaver Sˇalda in his article The Dream Violator. According to him Munch “paints something harrowing: half old world, half A NDRÉ D ERAIN : B ATHERS , 1907

new hell, something that has been disinterred from the graves of the millennia, and something that boiled up only yesterday and is still hot and does not have settled and solid forms...”18 In 1905 at the Paris Salon d’Autumn the exhibitors included, among others, André Derain, Henri Matisse and Maurice Vlaminck in the famous Hall VII, on the basis of which the “group” was described as fauvist. At the same salon in Hall XV the Hungarian painter Béla Czóbel exhibited together with Kandinsky and Valtat. Later, in 1927, Czóbel exhibited at the commemorative exhibition in the Galerie Bing et cie in Paris, which presented the eleven most important fauvists. In spite of participating in the exhibition Czóbel found it a problem that his work was not, especially in Paris, automatically identified with the heroic period of Fauvism. On the occasion of the exhibition in the Galerie Zak in Paris in 1956 Czóbel asked his friend from the 1910’s, Pablo Picasso, whether he would write a few words in the catalogue for him.19 He probably agreed and so Czóbel defined what Picasso should write in the catalogue: that he exhibited with the Fauves.20 On 27 January 1956 Czóbel received this reply from Picasso: “Mon cher Béla Czóbel, je me souviens de tes toiles du Salon d´Automne et des Independants dans la salle des fauves. Je te souhaite maintenant ton succés d´ahors. Comment ne fuit il que aucune de tes toiles de cette epoque ne te represente parmi les Fauves. Bien a toi avec mes meilleurs souhaits. Poignée de main, Picasso.”21 In 1905 further Hungarian painters, Berény and Mikola, visited Paris for the first time. The year 1906 was marked by the great art trip, a kind of apprentices’ Grand Tour, of three artists of the future Czech Osma (Friedrich Feigl, Antonín Procházka, and Emil Filla): through Germany, Holland and Belgium they travelled to France, to Paris, and from there to Italy and back through Vienna to Brno and Prague.22 They were fascinated by the works of the Old Masters, especially Rembrandt, Jan Van Goyen, Tintoretto, Rubens and also Daumier. They had a look at the legacy of Vincent Van Gogh, made accessible to them by the painter’s nephew. In the autumn of 1906 Károly Kernstok arrived in Paris and stayed there until 1908. At the end of the year Ziffer, Boromisza and Perlrott-Csaba also arrived. These artists were then able to see the great exhibition of Paul Gauguin at the Salon d’Autumn in the Grand Palais. In 1907 a large collection of Paul Gauguin (72 works) was exhibited together with other modern French painters in the Miethke Gallery in Vienna. This exhibition was seen by Kubisˇta. In Budapest a large exhibition opened with the works of Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse, among

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others. Antonín Slavícˇek came to Paris. In the autumn an extensive exhibition of French Impressionists opened in Prague, where Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh also exhibited. The idol of the young Czechs and Hungarians, Cézanne, had a great posthumous exhibition at the Autumn Salon in Paris. In Budapest in October MIÉNK (Magyar Impreszionisták és Naturalisták Köre) was established, the Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists, the members of which were Rippl-Rónai, Czóbel, Márffy, Pór, Czigány, Tihanyi, Orbán and Kernstok. The purchaser of the first work of the group was György Lukács.23 From 1907 the Czech painter Marie Galimbertiová24 began her studies at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, the Academie Russe and under Ferdinand Léger. A year before this she probably became acquainted with the Hungarian painter Sándor Galimberti in Paris. They were married in 1907 and in 1911 they parted. Galimbertiová exhibited at the Independents’ Salon in G YÖRGY L UKÁCS , C . 1910 B ELOW : E MIL F ILLA : R EADER

D OSTOEVSKY , 1907

1908 and at the Autumn Salon in 1911. It was probably in Paris that she painted the picture Rouget and Mackerel from 1910.25 In May 1908 the first exhibition of the Kunstschau group began in Vienna, where the works of the painter Oskar Kokoschka caused a scandal. Olomouc native Adolf Holzel also exhibited there - pictures with the motif of the Adoration. In idea and theme they were very close to the Osma. In Gruz near Dubrovnik Filla painted a series of pictures in 1908 in which he verified the relaxing of colour and simultaneously also its saturation with psychic tension in a number of scenes from the harbour and bay. In the spring of 1909 Bohumil Kubisˇta travelled to Paris for two months, where he met Henri Matisse, among others, and then returned for six months in December. At the beginning of 1910 Henri Matisse exhibited in the Tannhauser Gallery in Munich. The fundamental exhibition, however, appeared in Prague: at the 31st exhibition of the Mánes association Les Indépendants were exhibited, including Bonnard, Braque, Derain, Matisse and Vlaminck. In the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition Antonín Mateˇjcˇek, befriended with many of the members of the Prague Osma, used, for the first time, term “expressionism”. From the exhibition Derain’s painting Bathing (Prague, National Gallery) was purchased through a collection among artists and friends of modern art. In the spring of 1910 Friedrich Feigl moved to Berlin. In September the second exhibition of Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen opened in the Tannhauser Gallery in Munich. In October Josef Cˇapek paid a visit of over three months to Paris and Filla also went to Paris for the first time, meeting Béla Czóbel there. After the declaration of the First World War both Filla and Czóbel had to leave France and thus reached the Netherlands after a dramatic flight.26 Filla lived in Amsterdam until 1920. In 1921 Czóbel, who lived in Dutch Bergen during the war and was in contact with Filla, returned to Paris.

E LEMENTAL S TRENGTH AND THE M ETAPHYSICS OF TRAGEDY The model picture of the Czech Osma is Filla’s Reader of Dostoevsky (1907). An ordinary genre scene became a symbol, precisely in the spirit of Filla’s words about Munch, who could, it was said “make an event into a ballad, a genre into a symbol, a phenomenon into a revelation, a ges-

E DVARD M UNCH : M ELANCHOLIE (L AURA ), 1899

ture into an apparition, a colour into an exclamation, a line into a horror and chance into an irrevocable fate.”27 As if Filla wished to pile into the picture the entire conglomerate of questions that Dostoevsky’s supreme works ask their readers: what is man, what is God, what is fate, is it possible to resist fate, what role is played by morals in society,28 what is the role of the victim (see Filla The Good Samaritan, 1910). Is there any use changing man and society? The reader is overcome by a strange, heavy energy, the equivocal and tragic “elemental Karamazov force”, “elemental and wild, uncontrollable”.29 A force, which may do good, just as it may kill. A force that is in the earth, in matter. As though the spiritual process generated in material, in matter, as Dostoevsky puts it, literally in the earth. Finally the Czech philosopher and writer Ladislav Klima in his book The World as Consciousness and Nothing (Sveˇt jako veˇdomí a nic, 1905) understood matter as a spiritual state, “spiritual units acting upon us”. Are not these concepts of “elemental force” and matter as “spiritual units” correlative to Popper’s already mentioned metaphysical concept of Allteig? And finally – is not Filla here relatively close to Lukács’s concept of the metaphysically tragic as a paradigm of modern art, as described in the case of dramatist Paul Ernst in the text Metaphysik der Tragedie: Paul Ernst, published in Lélek és forma (Soul and Form, 1910)? Life is, for Lukács, in this essay “an anarchy of light and dark” where nothing is fulfilled and where nothing ends. "Everything flows, everything merges into something else, and the mixture is uncontrolled and impure; everything is destroyed, everything is smashed, nothing ever flowers into real life. To live is to live something through to the end: but life means that nothing is ever fully and completely lived through to the end. Life is the most unreal and unliving of all

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F OLK R EGIONALISM

I RMA S EIDLER , 1900 S

conceivable existences; one can describe it only negatively – by saying that something always happens to disturb and interrupt the flow.... ".30 Loneliness, isolation and alienation will rule the world after God has deserted it, and as a result “the transcendental topography of human orientation has fallen into disorder.”31 “It is exactly in this historical situation or constellation that modern drama now arises: the birth of tragedy after the death of God!”32 The birth of tragedy from the death of God is a theme, by which Lukács describes similar sentiments to those experienced by Filla when he painted his Reader of Dostoevsky. Where it concerns a ballad, horror, apparition or illusion, there tragedy is born. In any case Filla composed his reader in a somewhat theatrical role, as if it were a scene from a tragic theme on the stage. It is the magic of the unintended that Lukács’s photograph from 1913, where he is sitting in his library helplessly bent with a dangling hand in which there might be a book, looks like a variation of Filla’s painting. The photograph expresses the extent of the tragedy and melancholy that Lukács experienced in that year, when his beloved Irma Seidler committed suicide and his closest friend, Leo Popper, died.33

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Filla’s interest in folk art was linked with his Moravian roots. Antonín Mateˇjcˇek emphasised that Filla “in his student years walked on foot through the whole of Moravian Silesia and a great part of Hungarian Slovakia”.34 It is no coincidence that for Filla the acme of folk art was the Moravian and Slovak folksong. In the diary for 1907 (II) we read an entry about the book of Frantisˇek Bartosˇ, a Moravian linguist and ethnographer, Národní písneˇ moravské, noveˇ nasbírané (Moravian National Songs, newly collected, Brno, 1889). Filla’s cycle of songs from the thirties and forties thus has its genealogy, given by the painter’s interest in folklore, which had developed and strengthened since the beginning of the century. Filla’s painting Child by the Forest (1907, National Gallery, Prague) repeats themes from the collection of reproductions of the architect Dusˇan Jurkovicˇ, Práce lidu nasˇeho (The Work of our People, Vienna, 1906), which the painter noted in his diary. On Filla’s canvas there is both the motif of the Detva folk cross with its roof and the little girl, who in the photograph from Jurkovicˇ’s portfolio is not sitting by the forest, but by a cottage. Filla later admitted that as a student he had gone on foot to Detva so that he could see with his own eyes the Slovak wooden folk crosses with decorative roofs. I STVÁN C SÓK : S HOKAC F UNERAL , 1909

For the Hungarian Eight the folklore or regional heritages were also important, whether direct or indirect. Comparable to Filla’s canvas is the painting by Dezsô Czigány Funeral of a Child (1910), in a landscape with a cross and semi-circular roof. The existential folklorism of some of the members of the Hungarian Eight is well demonstrated by Tihányi’s Gypsy Woman with her Child (1906) which is a good example of the mingling of the social context, important to Hungarians, with the regional “exoticism” of the gypsy men and women, so characteristic of the German expressionist Otto Mueller. Antonín Procházka projected his country origins and his love of the countryside into the painting Wedding in Haná (1906). A far more significant mingling of the ideas of rustic primitivism and modern expression was introduced by Bartók, who was interested in the work of the Hungarian Eight.35 László Somfai stated that in 1911 Bartók “honoured a Budapest exhibition of the Eight, a group of progressive painters, with the premières of Four Dirges and Three Burlesques,“36 The cover of Four Dirges37 was designed by a member of the group, the painter Anna Lesznai, in 1911. The countryside, folk music and folk culture were areas for the seeking of the natural, archaic world, which in the eyes of the young artists was to revive the shapeless and formless bourgeois culture. Country life was understood

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as an area of specific spiritual mood, even sadness and isolation, as was written by the Hungarian writer and essayist of the periodical ‘Nyugat’, Dezsô Kosztolányi, in 1913: “What interests me is the Hungarian countryside (...). It is the land of miracles. Those who are born there will have a wider horizon than anybody brought up in a highly industrialized capital. (...) In a world where nothing happens and life is dominated by drinking wine, playing cards, sadness, and solitude, the soul will have an inner dimension, a strange compression and intensity of emotion. Provincial life is always of psychic character. “38 Neither the Czech nor the Hungarian Eight was alone in this search for new spiritual space: the artists surrounding Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, associated in the group known as Der Blaue Reiter, also exhibited and reproduced folk pictures painted on glass and the anonymous pietas of folk artists. Similar interest in crude folk culture was also shown by Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova and other Russian or Baltic artists in the years 1907–1910.

S EARCHING , S YNTHESIS AND NEW “F ORM ”: THE E SSAY According to Filla, around 1907, “today’s work must and should be higher, more synthetic, more polyphonic and may even take into account, apart from the eye, also psychic, mythical, mood and imaginative qualities.”39 Such a painting should, of course, be visual, but at the same time it should be strongly psychological and even, although Filla did not write this expressly, one may imagine that also philosophical. Filla, like his friends from the Czech Osma and also from Hungary, sought another type of painting than that with the heritage of which he had grown up and with which he was linked at the Academy of Fine Arts. This searching linked the two groups. It is no coincidence that in 1909 Karoly Kernstok formulated his notion of “investigative art”, by which he characterised the works of the first exhibition of the Eight in 1909. In his paper ‘The Inquisitive Art’, which he read at the 9 January 1910 session of the Galileo Circle and which he subsequently published in ‘Nyugat’,40 Kernstok referred to the tradition of art history, to Japanese art, to Buddhist sculpture, Greek sculpture, Giotto, Michelangelo, Courbet, Monet, Manet and Cézanne, just as Emil Filla frequently referred to art history, most strikingly in his article Zˇivot a dílo (Life and Work, 1912). Both were probably attracted by the same muse-

D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : F UNERAL

ums in Paris – apart from the Louvre, this was chiefly the Musée Guimet, which Kernstok refers to and which also became a source of knowledge for Filla in his exposé of the principles of contemporary art through past ages (Egypt, Buddhist art, etc.). In his key text Kernstok sees contemporary art in general as “a vast process of purification”.41 He explains the progress of Cézanne as a process of searching: Cézanne “... went into hiding from the world in order to seek its forms and colours, to seek the materiality of the human figure, the landscape, the still-life.”42 Kernstok also wishes to be such a seeker of the colours and lines of nature, but he is aware that finding a colour in nature is not the same as re-evaluating it artistically. He appeals to the artists (of the Eight) to cut loose from what they have learnt so far, to put aside all the isms and lose awareness of their paintings. Artists should approach nature directly and carefully study the head, which may be round, but the painter must transfer it to a two-dimensional surface: “... and between the flat surface and the round head is where the entire history of painting occurs, and all the anguish of the painter.”43 Painting is the seeking of the relationship between the visual code of nature and the code of the painted picture, which is not, then, a repli-

OF A

C HILD , 1907

ca of nature. The ‘Art in Search’ is definitely not weighted by ideology, which according to Kernstok is harmful and following it is a bad example of a contradictory tendency, so-called “opportunistic art.” Theoretically the outlines of this new art, exhibited for the first time under the title ‘New Pictures’ at the Könyves Kálmán Salon at the end of 1909, were more strikingly presented by György Lukács, who was highly interested in the work of the young “seekers”. Lukács read his ‘The roads parted.’ in the Galileo Circle and later published it in ‘Nyugat’.44 Lukács makes a criticism of superficial, “fluid”, shapeless and formless modernity, referring to impressionism and more deeply to the art of the turn of the century. This is art without matter, without form, in which the ego and its moods dominate. In contrast to this come Kernstok and his group, artists who come as the messengers of the new Weltanschauung, messengers of the art of order and values, the “art of the constructed”. And finally the fundamental thesis: “The new art is the art of the creation of the whole, that of going the whole way, of profundity.” This “completeness”, Lukács’s holism of the new art, is very close to the ideas of the Czech artists and theorists.

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B OHUMIL K UBISˇ TA : P ORTRAIT

A RTHUR S CHOPENHAUER , 1908

So how should “today’s” synthetic, holistic work look according to Filla? Such a painting should have both a purely artistic solution – synthesis, plastic treatment of colour, in spite of the apparent gesticity and lightness of the painting the hidden and clear compositional order must be evident, the architectonics of the picture, as Lukács would say. Not narration and literature, but the synthesis of the psychic, the mythical and the imaginary, all this based on the emphasis on plasticity, in other words on the internal construction of the painting.

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But it is still not completely clear how to imagine such a picture and how it differs from a post-impressionist painting. Perhaps György Lukács could help us, paradoxically by comparison of his concept of the essay. He published his ‘Soul and Form’ in 1911 in German, too. In one of the texts he touches on the role of the medium of the critic and deals with the essay form. In a letter to Leo Popper entitled ‘On the basis and form of the essay’, Lukács presents the significance and value of the transitional form of the essay, which is something between philoso-

phy and literature. After the great philosophical systems reached their end, the essay replaced philosophy until the appearance of a new great philosophical system. Who is this essayist who is the intermediary between the great philosophical construction of the past, the philosophically empty present and the great systems of the future? According to Lukács it is Arthur Schopenhauer.45 The thesis of the essay as the intermediary between philosophy and literature and on the form of the essay as a process of evaluation and not the final judgement, embodied by Schopenhauer,46 might suit the Prague Osma as an analogy. In particular, both Filla and Kubisˇta knew Schopenhauer and referred to his ideas. At the same time their concept of the work of art tried to grasp both constructive elements (plasticity, inner cohesion, order, the opposite of "lawlessness") and also psychological (effectiveness, activation of the onlooker) and philosophical elements (the picture as part of the concept of the “transformation” of humanity). With reference to Lukács’s concept we might, then, say with a certain degree of literary licence that the Prague Osma’s concept of a painting was a kind of “painterly essay”: a clearly constructed painting, regulated, but filled with life, not enclosed, “vibrant” and vital. Something between painting and philosophy. Perhaps Kernstok’s idea of “art in search” was described in other words by the Prague writer Franz Kafka, who knew the reviewer of the exhibition of the Prague Osma well – the writer Max Brod, the only one to write a positive review. One member of the Prague Osma, Willy Nowak, painted a portrait of Max Brod (1911). In 1911 Max Brod visited Nowak in his studio together with Franz Kafka. The latter wrote in his diary of the visit to the studio, where he saw the unfinished portrait of Max Brod. “... he constantly tried to avoid the natural appearance, but at the same time, stroke by stroke, to come close to the integral form.” The integral form comes close to Kernstok’s idea that the most fundamental part of painting takes place in the space between the observed natural form and its transfer and transformation to the painting. Is not the integral form perhaps a variation and different expression of Popper's Allteig, “homogenous unit”, which expresses the synthetic efforts of the artistic generation at the end of the first decade before the First World War? Not an imitation of nature, not pure abstraction, but the purification of painters’ means and the creation of a kind of intermediary level (medium) between the painter and nature, Allteig. With the term “integral form” Kafka captured not only the synthetism of the Czech Osma, but also the cleansing efforts of the Hungarian

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Eight. Both positions sometimes had traits that were more expressionist, at other times fauvist, sometimes even, in the case of the Hungarians, neo-classicist, but their basic principle was the effort to create form on the borderline between material sign and spiritual shape, exceeding the concepts of expressionism, Fauvism or even Cézanne-ism. However unclear and in places metaphysical such concepts as Allteig, “organic totality”, “vitalistic vibration”, “animated ornament”, “the original matter of painting” or “integral form” are, they correspond to the contemporary philosophical understanding of the theory of art and its laws. It is in these places, archaic links that make it possible to trace both Eights in the cross-section of the philosophical-theoretical discourse of the time far more effectively than by using concepts such as post-impressionism, expressionism, fauvism or primitivism.

THE A RTIST AS P REACHER Károly Kernstok dealt, like Bohumil Kubisˇta, with the role of the artist in society. In 1912, he published a text in which outlined the idea of the artist of “new” art. He would no longer be the “mercenary of the priesthood” or of any other class, but would become “... the high priest of the aesthetics that will replace the ethical dogmas. The artist will occupy the highest rung of the ladder where, even if he will not be conversing with gods, he will provide direction for the mass psyche. His work will be the ray of light that will penetrate the vast jungle of society, to convey light and shade, depth and splendour.”47 Kernstok’s rhetoric is similar to that of Bohumil Kubisˇta, which characterised the effort of the modern artist: “To penetrate further and further (...), to penetrate even where no-one else had ever been, to create where no-one else had ever created...“48 Kernstok’s requirement of the supreme position of the artist in the social hierarchy corresponds to some extent to the work of Bertalan Pór, such as the Sermon on the Mount (1911). The biblical theme so prevalent in the Czech milieu (Filla, The Good Samaritan, 1910; Antonín Procházka, Expulsion of the Money-lenders from the Temple, 1909, Christ and the Pharisees, 1909; Bohumil Kubisˇta, The Carrying of the Cross, 1910; Willy Nowak, Bathsheba, 1909) appeared only exceptionally in the framework of Hungarian “new” art. Pór’s painting “was interpreted by critics as a work of social reform, wherein the chief figure was depicted as a street agitator.”49 András Zwickl50 pointed out the difference of the

E L G RECO : P RAYER

IN THE

G ARDEN

G ETHSEMANE , 1610

expression of Pór’s paintings from the majority of the members of the Hungarian Eight: in contrast to the fauvist colour there is here statuesque, renaissance (Luca Signorelli) stylisation with weak terracotta colouring.51 This painting

thus documents the connection to the Old Masters, a connection which Lukács also wrote about in connection with the relationship of the “new” art to the old, and which was so important to the Czech artists.

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and Franz Marc published the Almanach der Blaue Reiter, at the beginning of 1912, they did not neglect to reproduce the paintings of El Greco also alongside other examples of world art. The projection of the Old Masters into the concept of the Czech and Hungarian Eights within the framework of the establishment of “new” art was part of the equipment of the artist-preacher, artist-seeker and artist-warrior.56

H ISTORY OF THE O SMA IN P RAGUE B ETWEEN 1907–1910 1907 E L G RECO : T HE I MMACULATE C ONCEPTION , 1605–1610

An example of this might be the relationship to El Greco. Julius Meier Graefe popularised the work of El Greco by publishing the book Spanische Reise (Munich 1910). The direct copy of Greco’s Laocoon by the Czech artist Jindrˇich Prucha of 1911 shows how this artist generation of “colour phantoms” found a path to the bizarre mannerism of the Spanish master. Emil Filla went to see the great exhibition of the works of Greco in Munich in 1911.52 Many of the works came from the collection of Marcell von Nemes in Budapest. This immense collection, which was sold in Paris in 1913, included 83 paintings by Old Masters and 38 by French artists of the 19th century, including, for instance, ten outstanding Courbets.53 The El Greco from the Nemes collection was of key significance for Filla; the meeting with El Greco fired the painter’s desire to leap into the uncertain waters of acceptance of cubism. El Greco also influenced Antonín Procházka and other painters of the future Osma. It may be assumed that not only El Greco, but also other works from the Nemes Collection were accessible to the members of the Hungarian Eight. The original re-evaluation of El Greco by Lajos Tihányi could be clearly distinguished in his first period, when the artist was also interested in Gauguin, Matisse and Cézanne.54 Nothing, of course, is black-andwhite: at the same time as Tihányi was interested in El Greco he was also inspired by the work of Oskar Kokoschka.55 The Hungarians were thus able, like the Czechs, to relate to the Old Masters and more or less “modernise” them. When Vassily Kandinsky

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After the return of Emil Filla, Antonín Procházka and Friedrich Feigl from their trip around Europe at the beginning of 1907, the painters met in the Union Cafe in Prague.57 The headwaiter lent them the bible of modern painting, the two-volume Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst by Julius Meier-Graefe.58 The decision was made to embark on a joint group exhibition under the laconic title of Osma (Eight). The first exhibition of the Osma was realised in Prague in Královodvorská Street behind the Powder Tower. The participants were the painters Emil Filla, Antonín Procházka, Bohumil Kubisˇta, Otokar Kubín and the Czech Germans Willy Nowak, Friedrich Feigl and Max Horb. The eighth, Artur Pittermann, had his paintings exhibited in an alcove behind a curtain and these could only be viewed on request because he was still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts. The catalogue, a sheet of paper with the heading Vy’stava 8 Kunstaustellung, was written in two languages, Czech and German. The first positive reaction was published by Max Brod in the Leipzig Der Gegenwart. He saw the exhibition as a celebration of the spring of new art and the essential sensuality of the artists’ temperament. The other reviews, however, were thoroughly negative.

1908 The second exhibition of the Osma took place in June and July 1908 in the Topicˇ Salon in Prague, in an Art Nouveau building on the other side of the road and within view of the National Theatre. No longer a participant was Max Horb, who died in December of the preceding year, a painter who came close to the fresh sensual

Impressionism of Max Liebermann. Horb’s friend, the painter Georg Kars,59 published a folder of reproductions for him in 1908.60 Another artist who did not participate in the second Osma exhibition was Otakar Kubín,61 very sharply criticised in the first exhibition for his “barbaric chaos” of dots. Kubín’s work represents a marked reflection in particular of the work of Vincent van Gogh, partly also of Gauguin, which was a mode very much alive for many of the young artists of the Osma. New exhibitors with the Osma were Vincenc Benesˇ and the future wife of Antonín Procházka, Linka Scheithauerová. The reception of the exhibition was even more negative than the year before. The exhibition was strongly criticised even by members of the same generation, the brothers Josef and Karel Cˇapek.62 They condemned the amorphous nature of the world “without forms and semblance”63 of the painters of the Osma, through which they worked with similar concepts to those with which Popper interpreted his concept of the “universal material” and “homogenous medium” (“allteig”). However, the Cˇapeks saw it in a negative light, whilst Popper saw it as the essential basis for quality artistic work.

1909 – 1910 In 1909 part of the Osma joined the Mánes Association of Graphic Artists, which was the first step towards the young ones beginning to make themselves felt in the institutional world of art. Benesˇ, Filla and Václav Sˇpála, whose work was close to that of the Osma, although he did not exhibit with them, became members of Mánes. In 1910 further members of the Osma – Kubisˇta and Procházka – were admitted to Mánes. Those who were already working there were very active: Filla and Kubín were elected to the committee of the association and Filla, with the art historian Antonín Mateˇjcˇek, who followed the efforts of the Osma painters with sympathy and stayed in Paris with Kubisˇta, were given the opportunity to edit the most important modernist periodical in Bohemia, published by Mánes, entitled Volné smeˇry. Filla in particular utilised this opportunity for the publication of “expressionist” art in the periodical, including some examples of the work of the Osma. The new strategy of the magazine aroused repugnance both among the subscribers and also in the majority of members of the committee of the association. At the General Meeting of Mánes at the end of February there was a sharp conflict between Filla’s wing (the former Osma and supporters) and the opinions of the older members

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of Mánes. After the holding of elections the entire younger generation left Mánes. Participants in the secession were: Benesˇ, Filla, Kubín, Kubisˇta, Procházka, i.e. the former Osma, and

other artists, including the painter Václav Sˇpála, architects Josef Gocˇár, Josef Chochol, Pavel Janák and art historian Antonín Mateˇjcˇek. With their departure from Mánes in 1910 the activity

of the Osma group and its supporters ended. 1911 was already marked by the building of a new Skupina vy’tvarny’ch umeˇlcu˚ (The Group of Graphic Artists) with new goals.

Notes 1

6 7

8 9 10 11

19 20 21

I would like to thank to Gergely Barki to help me understand certain nuances in the history of Hungarian Eight. The American group The Eight exhibited only once in New York in 1908, but it signified an important impulse for the development of American modernism; it utilised artistic expressions from realism to the Nabi aesthetic. György Lukács: Die Eigenart des Ästhethischen. Neuwied; Berlin: Luchterhand, 1963 “Als Prinzip der Gestaltung der einzelnen Dinge bedeutet dies die gemeinsame schwere der Dinge, die Schwere des Werks, des Material der Form, das simultan zur Ausdruck der Verschiedenheit wie der Einheit der Dinge Wird.“ Gyorgy Lukács quotes Leo Popper, in: Georg Lukács, Heidelberger Philosophie der Kunst. Darmstadt 1974, p. 131, cit in: Árpád Timár, The Young Lukács and the Fine Arts, Acta Historiae Artium, XXXIV, 1989, fasc. 1–2, p. 31. Judith Marcus – Zoltán Tar (eds.), Georg Lukács Selected Correspondence 1902–1920. Budapest: Corvina 1986, pp. 135–138, cit in: Árpád Timár, ibidem. Bohumil Kubisˇta, Paul Cézanne, Novina III, 1910, pp. xx Leo Popper, Pieter Brueghel der Altere 1520(?)–1569, Kunst und Kunstler,VIII, 1910, pp. 599-606, reprinted in: Acta Historiea Artium, XVII, 1971, p. 6. Ibid. p. 81. Antonín Slavícˇek, Dopisy (Letters), Praha 1954, p. 88. Ibid. p. 95. Leo Popper, Pieter Breughel der Altere, in: Leo Popper, Swchere und Abstraktion. Versuche, Berlin 1987, p. 42, cit. in: Árpád Timár, note 4, p. 32. Field by the forest, 1907, National Gallery in Prague, Inv. No. 0 13156. The same Popper´s term „malerische Malerei“ is used by Charles de Tolnay in describing Popper‘s theory of the homogenity of matter in the work of art, cf. Charles de Tolnay, Leó Popper und die Kunstgeschichte, Acta Historiea Artium, XVII, 1971, p. 4. E. Filla in a letter to Antonín Procházka after the exhibition of the Osma at Topicˇ Gallery, summer 1908, in: Marcela Macharácˇková – Antonín Slavícˇek, Antonín Procházka 1882–1945. Museum of the city of Brno – Moravian Gallery in Brno 2002, pp. 245–251. Letter from E. Filla to Antonín Procházka, around 1906–1908, in: Macharácˇková – Slavícˇek 2002, p. 246. Oppenheimer’s work was compared to the work of the Prague Eight by Elizabeth Clegg, Art, Design and Architecture in Central Europe 1890–1920, Yale University Press, New Haven – London, p. 152. The reviewer of the first exhibition of the Osma, the writer Max Brod, wrote a favourable review of Oppenheimer in 1908: Max Brod, Max Oppenheimer, Der Erdgeist: Illustrierte Wochenschrift, III (1908), pp. 696–700. Rodin appeared also to be important to Leo Popper, Die Bildhauerei, Rodin und Maillol, Die Fackel, XIII, 29.IV.1911, Nr. 321/322, pp. 33–41, reprint Acta Historiea Artium, XVII, 1971, pp. 11–15. F. X. Sˇalda, Násilník snu. Neˇkolik glos k dílu Munchovu (The Dream Violator. Some Notes n the work of Munch), Volné smeˇry IX, 1904-05, pp. 103–104. Letter to Picasso of 7.1. 1956, C-14. Muséee Picasso, Paris. Letter to Picasso of 22.1. 1956, C-14. Muséee Picasso, Paris. Letter from Picasso to Czóbel of 27.1.1956, C-14. Muséee Picasso, Paris. The letter was published in 2001 by Mimi Kratochvil, Czóbel Béla élete és mûvészete (The Life and Work of B.C.), Veszprém-Budapest, Magyar Képek, 2001, p. 51.

32 33

34 35

Marie Rakusˇanová, Cesta Emila Filly, Antonína Procházky a Friedricha Feigla v roce 1906 po Evropeˇ (The travels through Europe of E.F., A.P. and F.F. in 1906), Umeˇní LII, 2004, pp. 75–87. Fauves hongrois 1904–1914, exhibition catalogue, Céret, Musée d´Art moderne, Chateau-Cambrésis, Musée Departemental Matisse, Dijon, Musée des Beaux Arts, 2008, p. 257. Julie Weissová, Marie Galimberti Provázková v kontextu eského ˇ vy’tvarného umeˇní pocˇátku 20. století. Diploma thesis. Institute of Art History of the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague 2009, pp. 16–17, http://www.zenyvumeni.cz/assets/files/ Galimberti-diplomova%20prace-Julie%20Weissova.pdf Museum in Jindrˇichu˚v Hradec. So little was preserved of the work of Galimbertiová that it is impossible to gain a more accurate impression of the nature of her work. If, however, we are to judge by the mentioned still-life, then her work might fit in with the circle of both the Prague Osma and the Hungarian Eight. In Paris she was also acquainted with Béla Czóbel, who evidently met the Czech painter in the Hungarian colony of Nagybánya, which Galimbertiová visited in 1901 with the pupils of Simon Hollosy, under whom she was studying at the Munich Academy. Cf. J. Weissová, note 21. On the joint flight of Filla and Czóbel from Paris in 1914 see Jan Hajsˇman – Emil Filla, Hlídka cˇeské mafie v Holandsku (Patrol of the Czech Mafia in Holland). Praha: Orbis 1934. Emil Filla, Edvard Munch a nasˇe generace (1938), in: E. Filla, O vy’tvarném umeˇní. Praha 1948, p. 72. The relationship of aesthetics and ethics is of key importance also for Gyorgy Lukács in his work Soul and Form (1910). Around 1915 Dostojevsky becomes one of the most influential authors for the young Hungarian thinker. Fiodor Michailovicˇ Dostojevskij, Bratrˇi Karamazovi (Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov). Praha: Academia 2004, p. 243. Georg Lukacs, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostok, London: New Left Books, 1974, p. 153. Werner Jung, The Early Aesthetic Theories of Bloch and Lukács Author, New German Critique, No. 45, Special Issue on Bloch and Heidegger (Autumn, 1988), p. 47. Ibidem, p. 48. Cf. Levee Blanc, Georg Lukács: The antinomies of Melancholy, Other Voices, Vol. I, No. 1 (March 1997), http://othervoices.org/blevee/lukacs.php, looked up on 18.4. 2010. Antonín Mateˇjcˇek, Emil Filla. Praha: Prameny 1938, unpaged. There is extensive literature on Bartók, here I mention the book by Judit Frigyesi: Bela Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1998, and the excellent review of Mihály Szegedy Mihály Maszák Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 41, Fasc. 4 (2000), pp. 457–465 László Somfai, Bartók New Series. Works for Piano Solo (2), http://www.bartoknewseries.com/english.asp?id=8 (looked up on 16.4. 2010) Béla Bartók, Four Dirges. Budapest, 1911. – the cover is reproduced in: Krisztina Passuth, A Nyolcak festészete. (The painting of the Eight). Budapest: Corvina1967, p. 77. Dezsô Kosztolányi: Írók, festôk, tudósok: Tanulmányok magyar kortársakról. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó, 1958, Vol. II, 333–334, cit in: Mihály Szegedy - Mihály Maszák, Judit Frigyesi: Bela Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest. (review), Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 41, Fasc. 4 (2000), p. 464. Diary probably for 1907, p. 19. Archives of Emil Filla, private collection, Prague.

42 43 44

50 51 52

58 59

60 61

A kutató mûvészet, Nyugat I., 1910, published in English under the title Investigative Art (trans. John Bátki), in: Timothy O. Benson –Eva Forgács, Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930, Los Angeles County Museum of Art – The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. – London, 2002, pp. 121–125. Karoly Kernstok, Investigative Art, in: Ibidem, p. 123. Ibidem, p. 122. Ibidem, p. 124. Gyorgy Lukács, The Ways have Parted, original version Az utak elváltak, Nyugat, vol. 1 (1910), translation in: Timothy O. Benson –Eva Forgács, pp. 125–129. Georg Lukacs, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostok, London: New Left Books, 1974, p. 16. Ibidem, p. 18. Cf. also Tom Huhn, Lukács and the Essay Form, New German Critique, No. 78, Special Issue on German Media Studies (Autumn, 1999), pp. 183–192. Károly Kernstok, The Role of the Artist in Society, original text A mûvész társadalmi szerepe, Huszadik század, vol. 1, 1912, in: Timothy O. Benson –Eva Forgács, Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930, Los Angeles County Museum of Art – The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. – London, 2002, pp. 129–132. Bohumil Kubisˇta, O duchovní podstateˇ moderní doby (1914), in: B. Kubisˇta, Prˇedpoklady slohu, Praha: Otto Girgal, p. 124. András Zwickl, The Eight: The Beginnings of the Avant-Garde, in: Gábor Andrási – Gábor Pataki – György Szücs – András Zwickl, The History of Hungarian Art in The Twentieth Century. Budapest: Corvina 1999, p. 49. Ibidem. Passuth 1967. op. Cit. 84 The result was Filla’s article Domenico Theotocopuli El Greco, Umeˇlecky’ meˇsícˇník I, 1911, p. xxx. R. E. D., Art in France, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 23, No. 123 (June., 1913), p. 170. Béla Horváth, Károly Kernstok (1873–1940), Acta Historiae Artium, XIII, 1967, pp. 353–387. Krisztina Passuth, La carriere de Lajos Tihanyi, Acta Historiae Artium, XX, 1974, pp. 125–149. These were the roles in which Bohumil Kubisˇta stylised himself in Triple-portrait (1907), which can be interpreted as a challenge to a duel with the viewer (the challenger is the painter Kubisˇta with his seconds, members of the Osma, Feigl and Pittermann). The Union Cafe was on the corner of what is now Národní trˇída and Na Persˇty’neˇ Street; the originally baroque building was demolished in the sixties, replaced today by the building of Cˇeská sporˇitelna. First edition in 1904. Georg Kars, after assimilation in France known as Georges Kars. Publisher Karl Bellmann, Prague. After moving to France during the First World War Kubín signed himself as Othon Coubine. Josef Cˇapek was a painter and writer, after 1912 he variously adapted Cubism in his work; his brother Karel Cˇapek was a writer who became famous especially in the twenties through plays such as R.U.R., where the word “robot” was used for the first time. Bratrˇi Cˇapkové: Syntéza a vy’stava Osmi. Snahaa 21.7. 1908, in: Karel Cˇapek, Spisy XVII. O umeˇní a kulturˇe. (On Art and Culture.) Prague 1984, pp. 42–46.

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THE

EIGHT

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G E R G E L Y

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B A R K I

RÓBERT BERÉNY “Oh, I’ve so much talent to burn, If I wished it, genius to match, But I haven’t the time to learn, For my ear I’m dying to scratch.” (Reworded by Róbert Berény, and sung to the popular melody beginning “Nem vagyok én úri leánynak való”)1

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY

WITH HIS MOTHER AND SIBLING ,

1907

Károly Kernstok once observed of his younger colleague, Róbert Berény (1887–1953): “If he wasn’t so terribly lazy, he’d be among the greatests. So who knows whether his name will be known some day.”2 Dezsô Orbán often spoke of both the extraordinary versatility and laziness of Berény, while Lajos Tihanyi observed his effortless self-assurance with similar envy. Moreover, the painter’s rare talent was noticed not only by friends and colleagues but also by sympathetic critics. Indeed, even many journalists who otherwise attacked the Eight were

compelled to admit that Berény was among the most talented of this particular group of young artists. Contemporary critical opinion of Berény was shared by the scholar Krisztina Passuth in her assessment of the Eight,3 and today it is the general view that he was the most attractive, versatile and experimentally minded personality in the group. Despite his outstanding abilities, Berény was unable to assume a leading role within the Eight. The leadership of Kernstok, who would tolerate no rivals, was accepted by Berény as the “Benjamin”

(or youngest) of the group. There was no open rivalry between them, as Berény chose a more subtle way of asserting himself. His friend, the sociologist István Varró, characterised their manners and attitudes as sharply different: “They socialised, although not much. The interests of Kernstock [sic] tended to be political, but this was of less concern to Berény. Kernstock was obstinate and stand-offish, and didn’t like to be contradicted. Berény was more flexible, but too indolent to stand up for himself. They had very different natures, Kernstock being overbearing while Berény was more yielding. As an artist, K. was one-sided. They were also complete opposites in terms of social background milieu. K. was the son of a Swabian peasant smallholder who remained rooted to his small ancestral land, while B. was the urban son of a stockbroker.”4 Within the Eight, Berény relied on his own means in attempting to influence, shape and control the activity of the group. Right from its official beginnings, he proved one of the most dynamic members of the Eight and a key participant and defining personality in its exhibitions. According to his first monographer, Imre Oltványi-Ártinger5: “He worked in Budapest from 1911, taking the role of a frontline soldier in the revolutionary movement of ‘the Eight,’ and its formation and struggles as a group. Even the name of the group sprung from him.”6 Until the end of his life, Berény himself believed that his cooperation with the Eight was one of the high points and defining phases in his development as a painter: “In the 1910s, when still young painters, a few of us made our own artistic revolution. There were eight of us, and this was the name of our endeavour: the Eight. […] We held that memorable exhibition in the National Salon in 1911. […] The intellectual impulses which proved R ÓBERT B ERÉNY

WITH HIS WIFE IN THE COMPANY OF

UNKNOWN PEOPLE ON THE I SLAND OF

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father not only launched Pór’s career,10 but also secured his own son both a friend for life and an excellent private tutor into the bargain, for it would be Pór – as the first master of Berény junior (then still going by the name of Backofen11) – who would induct the young artist into the secrets of drawing and painting. It was also at this time that Berény met Lajos Tihanyi, who lived nearby, while Berény’s father was a regular patron of the Tihanyi familyowned Balaton Café, where Pór – as private tutor of Tihanyi as well – would likewise often be found.12 Berény’s path led from Pór to the Drawing School (now the University of Fine Arts), where he studied under Tivadar Zemplényi. At this time Rembrandt and Munkácsy were still his ideals, and with this under his belt he set off for Paris in early 1905, where fate once more brought him in contact with Bertalan Pór. They roomed together and, presumably on the recommendation of his elder colleague, Berény enrolled at the renowned Académie Julian, where Jean-Paul Laurens – a particularly popular figure among the Hungarian community – became his supervising instructor. He quickly became a fine draughtsman, but left the institution after only four months, spending his time – in his own words – “outside of school thereafter.”13 In a conversation with Lajos Kassák, he characterised his early development as “what might be termed

decisive in shaping the image of our work at the time remain valid to this day.”7 Of the total of 169 paintings shown in three exhibitions of the group, some 62 – or more than one third – were the work of Berény, not to mention several dozen of his drawings and embroideries. It is no wonder that examples of contemporary press criticism8 collected in recent years reflect this dominant position, revealing that Berény’s name was mentioned almost as often as that of the group’s leader Károly Kernstok or that of the artist most acceptable to conservative critics, Bertalan Pór. This statistic is all the more worthy of note in the knowledge that critics at the time were also keen followers of the separate, individual shows of both Kernstok and Pór.

CONTACTS

AND

DEPARTURE

The members of the Eight had come into contact with each other years before the formation of the group.9 As a pupil of secondary school, Berény became acquainted with Bertalan Pór, then six years his senior, after Berény’s father had “discovered” him at a school ceremony to unveil Pór’s portrait of the headmaster. Subsequently, with a commission to paint a portrait of himself and his wife, Berény’s B ERTALAN P ÓR : L YING M AN (R ÓBERT B ERÉNY ), 1907

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : P ORTRAIT

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F ATHER , 1906.

autodidactic, rather than systematically schooled.”14 Berény was more attracted by the living and evolving art scene of Paris, and he was in the right place at the right time in this respect. The Fauve group which debuted in autumn of 1905 made a deep impression on him, and it was under their influence that he painted Houses in Monaco at the end of the same year and the particularly noteable Woman with Glass, which – primarily through its still life details – was the first Fauvist work par excellence in the history of Hungarian painting. In this way, Berény understood and became a devotee of the newest artistic tendencies almost immediately, although he was not limited to exploring only in the direction of the Fauvists. At the beginning of the following year the work of Vallotton exercised a greater influence on the artist for a while, before his paintings once again moved closer to the Fauvist approach, though this time incorporating lessons from the art of Cézanne. A discussion of these early works from Berény’s formative years in Paris is important from the point of view of the Eight given that a good number of paintings bearing the date 1906 were also displayed in the latter group’s exhibition of 1911.15 It can be assumed that the pictures Berény exhibited at the National Salon in Budapest were those first shown at the Salon d’Automne exhibition in 1906, but it is quite certain that the Hungarian show also featured a self-portrait from 1906, finished exactly at the time of the autumnal show in Paris.16 Of the artists that would become the Eight, Berény already also knew Ödön Márffy by this time, having first met him a year earlier in a Patéphon

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A BOVE : R ÓBERT B ERÉNY BY HIS PAINTING : I N A P ARIS B ROTHEL , C . 1906 O N THE RIGHT : R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : W OMAN WITH G LASS , 1905.

gramophone record shop in Paris,17 and he also probably encountered Dezsô Czigány in the French capital as both men lived in the same studio apartment building. Dezsô Orbán also visited Berény in his independently rented studio during this period, renewing an acquaintance already begun in Budapest, reputedly through Orbán’s musically trained sister. The meeting made a definitive impression on the older Orbán, whose younger colleague introduced him to the bohemian art scene of Paris. Berény introduced him to the Vollard gallery, where he explained the roots of the latest artistic tendencies through the paintings of Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin, and later also took him to Gertrude Stein’s salon, where he was able to view the work of cutting-edge contemporary artists such as Matisse and Picasso. Even so, Orbán confesses in his memoirs that it was mainly the art of Berény himself which influenced and taught him the most. At the same time, he would also tell of the endless sessions at the billiards table and complained that for a good half year they barely worked, Berény himself producing all of one self-portrait in this time.18 Although we cannot know exactly which self-portrait Orbán had in mind, it is probable that he meant a yet unknown work featuring a bearded Berény, mentioned in both criticism of the Eight’s exhibition19 and in the recollections of István Varró.20 It is likely that Berény first met with Kernstok and Czóbel only in Paris in 1906. Of the artists who would later become the Eight, Czóbel formed a close friendship with Berény: they attended evening drawing classes at the Humbert studio

and were the only two of their Hungarian contemporaries to display their works in Parisian salons together with the French Fauvists. “They christened us Fauves then, or wild beasts, and we got what we deserved for it,”recalled Berény of this period.21 Parisian critics took notice of his work as early as the exhibition of Le Salon des Indépendants in 1907, so that Louis Vauxcelles, the “godfather” of the movement who was the first to list and classify the Fauves in his much-quoted criticism, cited Berény as an “apprentice Fauve.”22 Six of the his paintings were shown at this exhibition, half of which we can now identify,23 and these same works were probably also featured at the representative exhibition of the Eight in 1911.24 With respect to this particular period, it is worthwhile repeating a contemporary recollection of Max Weber, one of the first pupils of Matisse who would go one to pioneer American modernism. In 1906–1907, Weber became acquainted with a number of Hungarian artists, becoming closest to Czóbel and Berény, but may also have had a close relationship with the writer György Bölöni, who was living in the same studio apartment building as Berény. “A lifelong affection and fond memory of Róbert Berény was implanted in me in the spring of 1906 in Paris. We met through mutual Hungarian friends who were my classmates in the workshop of Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian. Berény did not attend any of the life drawing classes, unlike most of the generations of artists from all over of the world studying there. From his early youth he opposed the academic disciplines. He

conveyed an impression of maturity beyond his twenty years, and had an understanding of fundamental aesthetic principles one might have presumed from a much older person. His conversation was amusing and entertaining, dogmatic and drily professional but at the same time interesting and humorous. He worked alone in the spacious studio at Campagne Première 9. Though his studio was neat and clean, a number of both serious and playful, grotesque drawings and sketches would be haphazardly strewn about the place. One day he would paint pictures on the wall of his studio using various media so that he could later strip them off to make room for other eccentric technical exercises or experiments. He understood and deeply admired Cézanne, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and the primitives […] He loved music and, at the most unexpected moments, would take up his violin and improvise with oriental passion in an expansive and softly resonant tone. Sheet music for his own compositions or the classics was always lying on his table. Avoiding the pain of deprivation or self-denial, he lived comfortably and was usually well dressed. His parents were wealthy and provided for him well. He received financial support and provisions from home in Budapest at almost equal intervals, which he would generally share with his less fortu-

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nate Hungarian friends at celebratory get-togethers in his studio. I was always made welcome.”25 As 1906 became 1907, Berény began to take an increasing interest in the human form, painting an entire series of female nudes, primarily searching for a new means of visualizing the third dimension and sense of space by employing a variety of settings and extreme perspectives for the standing female nude. In one of his drawings from around 1906–1907 can be seen a small statue, possibly of plaster, and it is possible that at this time he followed a number of his colleagues in experimenting with sculpture, even if only at the level of making maquettes to be used for paintings.26 His early female nudes painted in Paris were also presented at the Eight’s exhibition four years later in 1911. Berény explained to visitors and journalists the phenomenon by which his sense of space was stimulated by human forms. Putting Berény’s words into the mouths of his nudes – presumably in reference to the Montparnasse Nude – Nándor Gyöngyösi commented: “The scholarly and proud nude has fallen silent, and just as I want to slip out of the room, another nude cries out to me in a loud voice: Hey, hey! Aren’t you even going to look at me, sir?! But I know some interesting things too. Can’t you see how much I turn out my unmentionable part?! – Well, why are you doing that? – I ask naively. – So you can better visualise the spatiality, the three dimensions, dear friend.”27 Of the aforementioned nude “studies,” the work which Berény entitled Nude of an Italian Girl helped bolster his reputation, capturing the attention of one of his French colleagues, Maurice Denis, who singled out this small study from an ocean of a thousand paintings for special praise in the pages of La Grande Revue.28 Denis also highlighted Berény’s Self-portrait with a Top Hat in his essay, primarily due to its psychically charged character,29 and later this same self-portrait would become one of the stumbling-blocks of the Eight’s exhibition of 1911.

FIRST APPEARANCE AT HOME Following the 1908 Salon des Indépendants, Berény spent a further two years in the French capital, although he did not take part in any further exhibitions there. That he continued to work in 1908 and the following year is certain as five paintings from each year were displayed in the Eight’s show in 1911. Today, however, we know of no surviving painting bearing the date 1908. The bulk of sketches for the Montparnasse Nude which emerged a few years ago are dated 1907, and consequently the painting was previously dated to that year. However, another study has since surfaced dated 1908, permitting us to conclude that the painting itself was only completed in 1908. We can identify R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : N UDE

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reminiscent of Cézanne, was nevertheless also acceptable to eyes accustomed to Hungarian naturalistic painting. At the same time, contemporary press reviews lead us to conclude that some Parisian street scenes and seaside vistas were probably also included.32 Unfortunately we cannot positively identify any of the latter, although Berény had already submitted two seaside views of Monaco to the 1907 Salon des Indépendants, while a recently re-examined seaside landscape – earlier supplied with a forged Vaszary signature – may also have been displayed in Bölöni’s touring exhibition. In light of contemporary criticism, however, it is certain that the little landscape entitled In Park (R: 176), painted in his family’s Városmajor garden in Budapest, did feature in the exhibition series. R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : F EMALE N UDE L YING IN A B ED WITH A P LASTER S CULPTURE , 1906–1907 • C AT . NO . 81

a number of Berény’s 1909 paintings shown at the exhibitions of the Eight, such as the still life (R. 163.) reproduced in the periodical Aurora and today preserved in Miskolc. The date 1909 can clearly be made out on the pin-sharp glass negative of one work that may be intended as a portrait, and in all likelihood it is this work to which the following scornful criticism refers: “He showed four selfportraits at the exhibition […] one showing how he will look in 60 years time (let him live to be 120), with a green beard, blue hair and red ochre nose, with the pitiful sadness of Ahasverus beneath his eyes and between his nostrils.”30 The year 1909 also brought an opportunity for Berény to make his debut at home. In the spring and summer of that year, György Bölöni organised a touring exhibition under the title “New Hungarian Painters,” visiting Kolozsvár (Cluj), Nagyvárad (Oradea) and Arad and featuring primarily the work of artists who had spent time in Paris. The contemporary press and later scholarly literature alike recorded Bölöni’s undertaking as a provincial introduction of the Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists (MIÉNK), although MIÉNK took no official part in organizing the tour and Bölöni himself held no function within it; moreover, Berény himself was neither a member nor even an exhibiting guest artist of the artistic association. Given that Bölöni was familiar with Berény’s Parisian activities, he asked the artist to contribute pictures to the wandering exhibition. Instead of the nudes that caused such consternation even among the bourgeois of Paris, Berény strived to create a favourable impression on the domestic audience by choosing some of the more easily digestible (and sellable) landscapes painted during his summer sojourns in Hungary. The pictures exhibited probably included the small landscape entitled Garden House which he painted in Tahitótfalu in 1906 (R: 510),31 and which, although somewhat

A Q UIET D EBUT A MONG THE “N EW P ICTURES ” It was with this single small landscape shown on Bölöni’s provincial tour that Berény made his debut at the first exhibition of the group that would later become famous as the Eight, a show entitled “New Pictures” at the Könyves Kálmán Salon. He was in Paris at the time of the exhibition, and probably did not have the means to dispatch more works to the hastily assembled show. Beyond the odd mention of his name in critical reviews, he thus remained almost unnoticed by the press and the general public at this time. Berény’s sunlit landscape blending Fauvist gestures with Cézanne-like devices also featured at a representative exhibition opened some months later in the halls of the Berlin Secession.33 Although the appearance of Hungarian artists was followed very closely in the press, Berény was naturally still unable to draw greater attention on this occasion.

A L OUD E XPLOSION ONTO THE S CENE Berény was the only member of the Eight who remained virtually unknown in domestic artistic circles in the spring of 1911, though his successes in Paris meant that his fate would not remain thus for long. He was also the only one not to be introduced at exhibitions of the MIÉNK group, precursor to the Eight, so that the Pest public – though they may have heard his name mentioned – certainly could not have known him through his pictures. The force of his explosion onto the scene was therefore all the greater at the second exhibition of the Eight (but the first under this name), held in the halls of the National Salon, where Berény alone was represented by 49 oil paintings, more than the total number of works of the other seven members

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : N UDE , M IRROR , A TELIER , 1906–1907 • C AT . NO . 33.

of the group put together. This dynamic entry immediately placed the still very young painter at the centre of attention. From one day to the next he found himself at the vanguard of artistic innovation, and within a few months his name was being mentioned in the same breath as that of Kernstok or Rippl-Rónai as a synonym for progressiveness.34 The conservative press also played its part in this. With the public mood inflamed and stretched to bursting point primarily by the politician István Tisza, the conservative tendency would have felt vindicated at the sight of Berény’s works, which appeared eccentric and hypermodern in the extreme compared to anything they had seen before. The Berény paintings used to illustrate the opening article on “the Eight series”35 by György Bölöni in the periodical Aurora served only to pour oil on the flames, and the campaign against the Eight – and particularly Berény – began in earnest weeks before the vernissage of the exhibition. The journal Budapesti Napló, seizing reproductions of Bölöni’s article in praise of Berény, held up the “repulsive” works of the scandal-making painter as a deterrent to its readers. The Self-portrait with a Top Hat, for example, which Berény had intended anyway to ruffle the feathers of the bourgeoisie, was belittled with the caption “ecce homo” and seasoned with veiled anti-Semitic remarks by the article’s anonymous author.36 It is no wonder that after all this a curious public “hungry for scandal” flooded through the doors

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even then he will be decades ahead of them,” wrote Aladár Bálint in the pages of Népszava.37 Without a doubt we can assume that this was a period of conscious ambition and great activity for Berény compared to his dissolute years in Paris. It was at this time that he also began to publish critical articles – firstly on music, and then on fine art – in the pages of the periodical Nyugat. The sources also show that he took an active part in the organisation of social and collaborative artistic events centred around the Eight.

B ERÉNY W ORKS F EATURED AT THE 1911 E XHIBITION

A BOVE : C ARICATURES OF PAINTINGS BY R ÓBERT B ERÉNY (M OST OF THEM MISSING ), 1911 A BOVE RIGHT : C OMPOSITION WITH S ILHOUETTE , 1911 (M ISSING ) B ELOW : R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : S KETCH FOR C OMPOSITION WITH S ILHOUETTE , 1911 • C AT . NO . 56

of the National Salon. Despite the obvious scandal, Berény greatly profited from his sudden celebrity and emerged as the defining figure in the most radically inclined movement of the age, eclipsing even

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Kernstok’s progressivity. “The pictures he has now displayed – of which there are around 50 – elevate him to the vanguard at one fell swoop. He has begun where many will only finish in 20 years, and

Proof of the special significance that set Berény apart from his colleagues could be seen in the decision to hang his Silhouetted Composition, a monumental work featuring several figures, on the main wall facing the entrance of the exhibition, a key location in terms of creating an initial impression on visitors. This principal work summarizing Berény’s aspirations of the time is currently known only from a contemporary reproduction or from newspaper reports and other descriptions, and its fate following the 1911 exhibition remains a mystery. Its influence is demonstrated by the fact that we know of five caricatures of this painting alone.38 Károly Lyka39 saw in the composition a reinterpretation of Renaissance traditions, primarily of the pyramidal compositions of Leonardo.40 The Silhouetted Composition is a masterwork demanding complex interpretation, constructed from striking stylistic references to both predecessors and contemporaries and yet brilliantly reflecting Berény’s own individuality.41 The dark silhouetted figure employed as a repoussoir motif – at once a selfportrait and an emblematic imitation of a virtual visitor to the exhibition – magically transforms the canvas into a modern metaphysical vision. However, Berény himself interpreted this picture puzzle-like work merely as a summation of his painterly intentions: “The large picture is intended

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : B ALL P LAYERS , 1907–1908

as an expression of certain tendencies and of opposing, complementary tendencies – that’s the explanation.”42 According to Géza Lengyel, Berény exhibited the standing nudes painted during his Fauve period – and particularly one reclining female nude (R: 164) – as similarly clear demonstrations of his ambitions as a painter: “The nude of a woman resting on a divan is one of the prides of the exhibition. Once in a conversation, Berény gave a precise name to a thus far nameless or only approximately identified concept, also designating the complementary tendency. As incisive and explicit this label is for this artistic medium, Berény handles the medium itself with the same

sure touch. The large nude is essentially nothing other than a complementary arrangement of the mass of head, torso, arms and legs according to the axis of their movement and equilibrium. A totality of existence and calm is the result.”43 The word calm as a synonym for constancy – and as one of the key elements of the Eight’s manifesto – has been heard often in relation to Berény’s images, commonly coupled with the concept of materiality, of remaining true to the material used. Among the aphoristic notes of the pre-eminent aesthetician of the age, Leó Popper, can be found an enigmatic remark in this regard: “Cézanne binds atmospheric style and material, while B[erény]

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gives more as he unites two eternal essentials: splendour and material.”44 It is impossible not to think of these two principles when contemplating Berény’s still lifes exhibited at this time. This is particularly true of the Still Life with a Jug now preserved in the National Gallery, as well as of a large representative still life which only recently emerged during preparations for the exhibition. (R: 180, 183) A reconstruction of the one-time collection of 49 Berény paintings and several dozen drawings will have to wait for now, given that the whereabouts of around half of the works once exhibited is unknown. Moreover, identification of the available paintings is made more difficult due to the

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lack of titles in the original exhibition catalogue, leaving scholarly research to rely primarily on contemporary criticism, photographs and caricatures. These sources also help to determine the identity of numerous missing works, the most important visual information being provided by the reproductions of Berény works published in the art periodical Aurora by Aladár Székely, as well as by the caricatures that appeared in contemporary satirical magazines. Some caricatures can even be regarded as the sole visual reference with respect to certain lost Berény works.45 Numerous hidden Berény paintings have re-emerged as a consequence of the recently launched WANTED project,46 while background research in other areas has succeeded in bringing previously unknown works to the surface, helping us gain an increasingly clear understanding of the great impact this body of work once had as a whole. The generally held belief is that only a few works changed hands at the exhibition of the Eight – barring the decoratively embroidered cushions of Anna Lesznai. This assertion is only partly true, however, since at least a dozen of Berény’s works were sold.47

UNDER THE SPELL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE BERÉNY–FERENCZI–IGNOTUS INTELLECTUAL TRIANGLE Berény’s relationship with Dr Sándor Ferenczi, one of Sigmund Freud’s closest colleagues, is no mere marginal episode in the life of the artist, as their acquaintance had an impact on Berény’s vision and approach as a painter. The first concrete documentary evidence that Berény had thoroughly studied the new discipline, and within it primarily the writings of Freud, was an article he published in the periodical Népmûvelés in 1911.48 It was presumably through Ferenczi that he became acquainted with Freud’s ideas and the latest developments in psychoanalysis.49 However, it was in truth more than a friendship between two men but extended to a somewhat wider circle, with a strong intellectual triangle at its centre consisting of Berény, Ferenczi, and the editor and writer Ignotus. Looking back on this period in an obituary written following the death of Ferenczi, Ignotus wrote: “After the publication of Ferenczi’s first writings, he and I, the Freudian and the Nyugat editor, met day after day at the exhibition of the Eight and in the studio and garden of the likewise newly emerged painter Róbert Berény on Városmajor, together with Doctor Halle, a Viennese industrialist and chemist, and the young Doctor Radó, who was then a lawyer but later became a medic and is

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today one of America’s leading analysts. Through afternoons and evenings that stretched into the morning, we discussed Ferenczi’s astonishing observations and conclusions, together with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which was turning the world on its head during that same period.”50 These gettogethers in the garden of the Berény family’s Városmajor villa followed the model of the Wednesday psychoanalytical gatherings that took place in Freud’s Viennese apartment from 190251: on one occasion

Freud himself was a guest in the house.52 Similar meetings were held in the home of Margit Kaffka, although these were less scientific and may have more resembled séances with occult elements,53 some of which were attended by Berény with his wife and her sister. Ferenczi’s recollections likewise reveal how much the surroundings on Városmajor and the painter’s friendship meant to him: “In this way you [Ignotus] and a young painter friend of ours, Róbert Berény, represented a veritable insti-

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tution for me, making my exclusion from university, academic and other scientific circles easy to bear.”54 As an interesting contribution to this intellectual triangle, Lajos Bálint recalls an occasion when he listened through a conversation between Ferenczi and Ignotus about the artist: “Sándor Ferenczi related with great appreciation the arresting perception and erudition with which our friend Róbert Berény sought Freudian connections between the painter and his choice of theme. This wasn’t an ingenious theory plucked from thin air, said Ferenczi, but a thorough and well thought-out diagnosis. Individual examples hold water, and I believe it’s worth continuing on this path.”55 Elma Pálos, Ferenczi’s adopted daughter, made a similar observation when she wrote: “Long ago when Sándor was still unmarried, I recall that sometimes five of us dined together in summer restaurants in Buda: mama, Róbert and his first wife, Sándor and I. Sándor and Róbert had a right royal time together, and I don’t recall a word of profound or important conversation between them. If the two of them had been alone, they would surely have got down to serious matters, because I remember Sándor saying what a wonderfully clever person Róbert was and how well they understood each other. One might even say they were ‘thick as thieves’ as there was a good deal of likeable mischief in both of them as well. [...] And now in hindsight a sentence springs to my mind (and I see before me Sándor’s enthusiastic, beaming face) which Sándor said about Berény after a long spell of chit-chat between them: This Róbert is marvellous, no one understands things (psych. anal.) like he does. He was delighted to explain it to him! At that time psychoanalysis was not yet fair game for everyone. [...] Sándor regarded Róbert as a genius and called him so often. He

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : R IDING

C OACH

WITH I GNOTUS ,

1912 I GNOTUS

WITH HIS WIFE ,

L ILI S OMLÓ 1920 S

IN THE COMPANY OF TWO STRANGERS ,

enthused about him and had a great fondness for him.”56 In one of Ferenczi’s notebooks, among his eccentric drawings of associative and telepathic experiments, the handwriting and drawing style of Berény appears on a number of pages.57 Berény’s relationship with Ignotus, who was the only non-medical founder of the Hungarian Association of Psychoanalysis established in 1913, was not merely friendly, but familial. The second wife of the writer, poet and editor was the painter Lily Somló, the sister of Berény’s first wife.58 It is striking that while little written documentation survives of the relationship between Berény and Ignotus, and while Berény produced very few portraits of Ferenczi (none that we know of in oils, and only a handful of caricatures), there remain several drawings of Ignotus, as well as one important oil painting. Describing the presentation of this latter work at the exhibition of the Eight in 1912, Zoltán Felvinczi Takács wrote in Nyugat: “Of the portraits, the one of Ignotus stands out as a fascinating artistic phenomenon. The inspiration of Kokoschka can be felt in the entire spirit of the painting, exercising a fertile influence on our artist’s approach. [...] Artistic potential has by no means gone to waste on the Ignotus portrait, and yet I feel that the

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L EÓ W EINER

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY , C . 1907 O CTOBER 1956 ISSUE OF

FRONT PAGE OF THE

painter might have had more psychological insights than those he could apprehend in an artistic context. Even so, the picture does not portray the person posing before the artist as he works, but rather the remembered image of the person whose impression is stamped most deeply in his mind’s eye.”59

M USIC , WRITING AND P ICTURES Like a kind of 20th century Renaissance man, Berény also proved very talented in music, which, like psychoanalysis, took the role of an “accessory” to his life’s work as a painter. He played superbly on the violin, viola and piano, and composed pieces from a very young age. His childhood friend Leó Weiner was his musical mentor and the two men’s relationship became particularly close right around the time of the Eight’s emergence.60 Weiner was a frequent guest at the Berény residence, regularly playing chess and chamber music, and thus felt very much at home between the walls of the villa. This informality was one of the most conspicuous features of the portrait Berény painted of Weiner in 1911, which was made after the opening of the Eight’s exhibition in April. This portrait ranks among the most outstanding artistic achievements of Berény’s career, and the artist himself likewise regarded it as one of his best works.61 The work defies the traditional rules of portrait painting: not only is the horizontal format out of the ordinary, but, more unconventional still and contrary to traditional portraiture, Berény has depicted his composer friend in an ostentatiously noncha-

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lant pose. The subject’s chest hair protrudes from his unbuttoned shirt, his face covered in several days’ growth of stubble. In painting the slumbering face, the painter has not grasped a mere momentary impression, but has attempted instead to subtly capture the model’s psyche. In the strictest sense of the word he has analysed his model, and in a paradoxical manner – while blanketing the mirror into the soul by having the eyes closed – has striven to render the invisible visible. The man gaping into the void on the right hand side of his face is a bravura visual depiction of an unknown, unconscious world waiting to be discovered. Berény renders the process of dreaming visible by a similar par excellence painterly means – moreover, with a gesture analogous with the Futurists. With the vacant, blurred smudge of the forehead, this process becomes almost tangibly perceptible. Berény painted another important portrait of a musician linked to his period with the Eight, and this was his portrait of Béla Bartók, although this work was only completed in the months after the last exhibition of the group. Like Weiner, he knew Bartók in childhood, and the young painter spent the Christmas of 1909 with the composer in Paris.62 A few years later, Berény became an enthusiastic supporter of UMZE, an association created by Bartók and devoted to new Hungarian music, writing critical reviews of the group’s activities and Bartók’s music. Given that Berény enjoyed the closest relationship with Bartók of the members of the Eight, it is highly likely that it was he who requested the composer’s participation in a musical event to accompany the group’s exhibition, and he undoubtedly had a hand in the concert’s organisation as well.

B ERÉNY ’ S P ORTRAIT

B ARTÓK

ON THE

Beyond his connection to the world of music through his criticism, portraits of musicians and organisation of concerts during this period, Berény also composed music himself. His first wife would later recall: “Pali Relle and Lajos Magyar (with Blanka Pécsi) visited us often together at that time. […] At the time Róbert fancied writing an operetta to a libretto by Pali Relle, they started on it and even finished a few numbers.”63 The violinist Ivor Kármán not only mentioned this same operetta project, but even noted down Berény’s music as he played it from memory, and given that the original score is lost, these few pages of jotted musical annotation remain the only memento of Berény’s activity as a composer at the time of the Eight in around 1911–1912.64

PRINTS AND ARTISTIC EMBROIDERY: COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE OR PIONEERING INNOVATION? “P RINTS

BY SIX

H UNGARIAN

PAINTERS ”

Berény ended the exhibition of the Eight in spring 1911 with a comparatively favourable bank balance, bringing in income by selling a quarter of his exhibited works. Nevertheless, in a concession to his anxious need to stand on his own two feet, he soon began to rack his brains for potentially profitable new enterprises. A letter he wrote to József Rippl-Rónai reveals that the idea for the venture which later came to be known as “Prints by six

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Hungarian painters” was motivated primarily by financial considerations.65 In November 1911 several daily papers in Budapest carried the same advertisement as follows: “Prints by six Hungarian painters. Six Hungarian artists – Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Adolf Fényes, Károly Kernstok, Bertalan Pór and József Rippl-Rónai – offer an annual subscription for six original prints (copper etchings, lithographs), to be published in pairs in the first half of the months of January, May and September. One personally signed print from each artist will feature in the collection. The minimum subscription is for one year.”66 A journalist of the periodical Magyar Nyomdászat sympathetic to modern endeavours added that “until now there has been no association or enterprise

that has methodically engaged in the distribution of artists’ graphic works. Finally the artists themselves have joined forces. Six Hungarian painters – and, we might add, six of the most outstanding talents in Hungarian painting – have decided to publish six prints a year (copper etchings, lithographs) at an annual subscription rate of sixty crowns.”67 Subscriptions were received at Róbert Berény’s address on Városmajor street, with publication of the first two prints promised by Christmas. Due to increasing orders, subscribers were warned that a total of only 250 copies would be made of each print.68 However, the first two prints, of works by Károly Kernstok and Bertalan Pór, reached customers only in January of the following year. Contemporary reports reveal that it was the first

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venture into graphic reproduction by either artist. In his memoirs, Pór also reveals that Berény assisted him with the required technique: “Copper etching. I made this one. Róbert decided to make some business. He brought a copper plate for me to draw anything I wanted. I drew this.”69 Berény’s initiative was probably not merely driven by “the idea of making money,” however, as the endeavour mobilised an entire group which only partially matched the membership of the Eight and included a parallel number of “associated” artists. It is interesting to note the participation in the venture of Béla Czóbel, who by then was connected to the Eight in name only, but Berény’s burgeoning relationship to Rippl-Rónai and particularly to Adolf Fényes is also noteworthy.70 Subsequent reports do not confirm

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : C IRCUS S CENE , 1912–1914 • C AT . NO . 83.

whether prints by Czóbel, Fényes and Rippl-Rónai were actually dispatched to subscribers, but research so far indicates that all three artists completed at least one work each.71 There are also no surviving reports on the publication of Berény’s first print, although we do know of several copies of a copper etching of his nude wife with their dog Pluto (R: 512) which even appeared as a picture supplement in Nyugat. Another etching, likewise dated 1912, depicts a group of embroiderers beneath the shade of trees in a garden. In an etching made in July 1912 in the garden of the Berény villa on Városmajor, later known under the title of Women Around the table,72 we can recognise the artist’s mother and wife, as well as two servants working at the house who staffed the small handicrafts workshop established by the Berény family. Berény displayed these etchings at the last exhibition of the Eight opened in November 1912. R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : E MBROIDERY , 1912

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : V ILLAGE C IRCUS S CENE , 1912 C AT . NO . 72.

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : L ÉNI ' S B AG (E MBROIDERY ), C . 1912 C AT . NO . 82

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elsewhere, at a fashion exhibition in the Hohenzollern house of applied arts.76 Like Lesznai, he managed to sell a great many objects of applied art (bags, wall coverings, cushions, portfolios, etc.) in Berlin. From reactions in the contemporary press it is clearly apparent that Berény’s embroideries were entirely unlike the needlework of Lesznai or other noted Hungarian or European embroiderers of the period: “Bold harmonies of colour, still bolder forms,” wrote Aladár Bálint. “They are proud advertisements of the designing artist’s strong decorative sense. They bear no relation to other embroideries, rejecting everything that is conventional or commonplace.”77 Descriptions of the work confirm that Berény turned to Japanese art as his primary source of inspiration, and not to the treasure of Hungarian folk art fashionable at the time, though critics also mentioned the influence of Gauguin: “Berlin critics see Berény as the Gauguin of the needle, often able to create the impression of the finest Japanese needlework with his sense of colour, naïve stylizing ability and surprising use of surface effects.”78 The works were manufactured by Berény’s wife, assisted by a small workshop team.79 As Berény expected, the embroideries proved the best-sellers at the third exhibition of the Eight. The paintings he showed at this time, reflecting fresh changes in his style, provoked a similar scandal to that of the previous exhibition, although his collection of some 25 embroidered pieces won universal praise, their success sealed not only by the number of sales but by the excellent reviews penned even by conservative critics.80 Some years ago an original example was provided by the descendants of the Berény family living in America: this handbag, once belonging to Berény’s first wife Léni Somló, had been preserved by the artist’s grandchild. At present it is the sole entirely intact example of Berény’s embroidery and is physically available for study. From black-and-white reproductions we also know of a wall decoration, now lost, that was also

The copper etching portraying the group of embroiderers is one of the few documents that relate to the most unusual and unfortunately least known of Berény’s endeavours. We do not know exactly when he began to design embroidery patterns, but his enthusiasm for more serious work in this area, to the level of wanting to exhibit his efforts, probably began only on witnessing the success of Anna Lesznai as a guest artist at the Eight’s exhibition of 1911. Lesznai’s embroideries sold relatively well, and – similarly to the print enterprise – Berény was likely spurred on by the opportunities for financial success inherent in an activity he described as a “playful pastime.”74 The next year Berény exhibited his own embroideries in the Keller und Reiner Salon in Berlin,75 while Lesznai’s cushions were being shown

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reproduced in the Eight’s 1912 catalogue. Recently another embroidery emerged, albeit in a worn and largely frayed condition, from the collection bequeathed by art historian Béla Horváth, which the legacy’s owner revealed was made by the wife of Károly Kernstok. Based on the style of the work, it can be stated with certainty that this was among a number of Berény-designed cushions made around 1912.81 The theme of the piece also permits us to assume that this may be the same embroidered cushion that was exhibited at the San Francisco world’s fair under the title Circus Scene.82

S ONDERBUND For the Sonderbund international exhibition in Cologne, a representative Hungarian collection was assembled by Zoltán Felvinczi Takács. As an already great admirer of Berény’s art, Felvinczi Takács was bound to include some of his latest works in this prestigious intenational show. Although only two paintings were exhibited in the show, which was talked about as the first significant overview of expressionism, Berény held his own while drawing the attention of already established foreign contemporaries: “Berény’s latest experiments, depending on the intelligence of the viewer, provoke either sympathetic solidarity or fierce opposition, but they do not remain unnoticed,” reported Felvinczi Takács from the scene.83 In a certain sense, Berény himself believed he belonged among this international vanguard. One year after the exhibition, he wrote: “As far as I know, there are three of us that take a similar but entirely independent path and approach to creating the perception of space: Kokoschka, the Frenchman Delaunay and I: Kokoschka with lines of sight and Delaunay by aligning parts of the objects portrayed in different directions, while I use colours passing into or spreading away from each other in certain directions. What we share is a strong sense of directions in space, something which presents new opportunities in composition.”84 One work by Berény featured at the Cologne exhibition and entitled Frau im Sessel was in all likelihood the same painting that has recently emerged under the name Woman Sitting in an Armchair. (P155) Compared to the canvases displayed at the 1911 show of the Eight, this represents a marked change in stylistic direction, and at the same time one of the most vivid embodiments of the innovative process expounded by Berény. Although Berény’s paintings at this time can be most readily compared to the Orphism of Delaunay, his experiments are not traceable to the latter’s influence, but rather to his continuing parallel efforts to find a new solution taking Cézanne as its starting point, diverging from Cubism but simultaneously apply-

ing its achievements and his own earlier training in Fauvism. The dynamic illuminated patches of “colours passing into or spreading away from each other” are further enforced by the simultaneous play of contrasting hues in the rhythmically positioned, homogeneous cubes of colour and the spatial structure determined by the lines of force within the composition. In this way, Berény’s work is related in spirit, though decidedly different in execution from the painting of the Futurists which he himself held in such high regard. Through the use of multiple, transparent layers of paint applied at accentuated points of the composition, he achieves a dynamic effect similar to that of photographs taken by the long-exposure process, surprising the viewer with the sensation of fantastic light effects. This metaphysical pursuit, skirting temporal questions and raising the problem of space and time, can be recognised in Berény’s manifesto-like foreword written for the third exhibition catalogue of the Eight: “The sense of “All, together – at once’ – to embrace the cosmos, to be able to hold it in my arms – was always the feeling that moved me to work. I am ceaselessly seeking to express this. [...] Everything is interdependent, and – in reality – one, the universe is oneness within me.”85

T HE L AST E XHIBITION OF THE E IGHT The original core of the Eight was halved for the third group exhibition in November 1912, held

RÓBERT BERÉNY: WOMAN EMBROIDERING, 1912 BELOW: RÓBERT BERÉNY: IN THE GARDEN, 1912

• •

CAT. NO. 67 CAT. NO. 71

again in the National Salon, as the works of only four artists – Berény, Orbán, Pór and Tihanyi – were displayed, though they were joined this time by a number of guest sculptors. The most drastic change was the absence of the group’s one-time leader Károly Kernstok, so that the overall image of the exhibition was of a more united front in terms of the absolute progression of the group in the direction primarily represented by Tihanyi and

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : W OMAN R EADING OF A V ILLA , 1912 • C AT . NO . 78

IN THE

G ARDEN

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY ’ S OF THEIR VILLA IN

L ÉNI S OMLÓ IN THE V ÁROSMAJOR , C . 1912

WIFE

GARDEN

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY VILLA IN

Berény, and in parallel with the latest international artistic trends. Looking at the response from reviewers, it appears that the exhibition was once again dominated by the extravagant style of Berény, so that it was he, too, who remained the principal target of criticism. Anticipating this incomprehension, Berény attempted to interpret his own innovations in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, but was thrown by the fierce level of antipathy exceeding even the attacks to which he was subjected during the previous exhibition. In response, he published a declaration in the pages of Magyar Hírlap entitled “Némely szidalmazóimhoz” (To some of my abusers), focusing on his rejection of insinuations of plagiarism of modern trends and emphasizing his sovereign individuality against the influence of various “-isms”: “There will be other opportunities for me to show all the pictures I have completed so far, and, if you can move beyond spreading the a priori opinions you conveniently carry in your pockets and try to see what is actually in the pictures, you may understand the slow process of development that has resulted in the way I paint today. If you are able to ascertain this, then you may manage the terrible achievement of recognizing me as Róbert Berény.”86 Unwavering supporters of Berény such as György Bölöni agreed with the painter in regarding his latest endeavours as “entirely deliberate, logically constructed paintings.”87 Berény attempted to demonstrate this “line of development” by displaying the works at the exhibition in the order of their creation. In this way, it became easy to dis-

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cern the path that led from the Cézanne-like brushwork that reached its pinnacle in Berény’s last work of the 1911 exhibition (R: 187), through his brief flirtation with Cubism, devices akin to the spirit of Futurism and the transparencies of Orphism, to his increasingly psychical and even downright mystically charged, brightly hazy visions and expressive portraits. The first pieces in the collection, such as Still Life with a Blue Jug and Portrait of Leó Weiner (R: 181, 151) still preserved much of Cézanne’s visual approach, but in each gesture was already planted the seed of expressive experimentation aimed at tackling new spatial problems while simultaneously focusing on spiritual content. In contrast to these works, the Cubo-Futurist Orphism of Woman Sitting in an Armchair also indicated a change in direction, as to an even greater extent did the conspicuously expressive Scene series, which even Berény’s contemporaries saw as a parallel to the work of the Der Blaue Reiter group.88 The work entitled Scene IV, also reproduced in the exhibition catalogue, recalls the structure of Silhouetted Composition – the previous exhibition’s main work – in its composition of many figures, but embodies a radically different painterly approach. By parading the fruit of some 18 months’ work in one exhibition, in the form of ten oil paintings and a number of pastels, Berény succeeded in presenting a series of stylistic changes that followed one another in logical succession. In addition, he dazzled the public with his scintillatingly imaginative and colourful embroideries, and – to

WITH HIS WIFE , FATHER , AN UNKNOWN

P LUTO V ÁROSMAJOR , C . 1912

PERSON AND THEIR DOG

IN THE GARDEN OF THEIR

demonstrate his familiarity with various genres and techniques – displayed additional copper etchings and other graphic work. He worked on resolving several painterly problems at once, striving to reconcile ornamentation with “representational painting” and to create uniform space, while at the same time continuing to think in terms of “expressing everything with colour.”89 The Cubist effects in Berény’s work entirely differ from the monochromatic technique of the Cubists, and are in fact entirely their opposite. His experiments with enhancing colour went as far as the development of his own paints to achieve his aims, new materials which he used on half of the works displayed at the third exhibition of the Eight. His intention in using these self-developed paints was to achieve an effect whereby the individual layers, while retaining their coating properties, would appear almost transparent like glass. For this he needed quick-drying materials so that the successively applied layers of colour would not mingle during painting, but would instead be superimposed transparently upon one another to produce a hallunicatory effect. Besides the rich stylistic palette and broad spectrum of experiments with various paints, a rare phenomenon worthy of special attention in the case of the Eight is the emphasis on Christian iconography. Berény presented two crucifixion scenes at the exhibition (R: 60, 192) and it is certain that more may be divined behind the artist’s choice of subject than a mere search for adequate motifs in his new, expressive direction.90

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“Either at the end of 1912 or beginning of 1913, Róbert had a one-man show of pictures and embroideries at Hugo Heller’s gallery in Vienna.” The Viennese publisher primarily dealt in the dissemination of the works of Sigmund Freud and other books and periodicals related to psychoanalysis. Berény’s expressive, diabolical portrait of Bartók was also completed in April 1913, and proved one of the most important examples of his life’s oeuvre. From a certain perspective, this impressive portrait, besides condensing Berény’s aspirations that took shape during the era of the Eight in a complex manner that embraces both psychoanalytical observation and experimentation with colours and paints, can also be linked to the Austrian capital, since in Vienna and Budapest alike, it was the artist’s Austrian contemporary Kokoschka who tended to be mentioned in connection with the work at that time. The painting made its debut appearance at the International Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Artist House in Budapest, providing an opportunity for it to be measured against the works of Kokoschka.

During a visiting exhibition of the Artist House at the Vienna Künstlerhaus in 1914, the hosts excluded the works of Róbert Berény and Lajos Tihanyi from among the invited artists. The rejected artists organised a separate exhibition at a then scarcely frequented exhibition space known as the Kunst Salon “Brüko.” The second exhibition of the Kohn brothers’ salon opened under the title “Ausstellung von Werken der 3 Künstler” on 23 March 1914. The modern “counter-exhibition” had serious reverberations in both the Austrian and Hungarian press. Besides some earlier works, Berény mostly showed paintings from the third show of the Eight at this exhibition, together with some of the more significant works produced since that time and his popular embroideries. The internal split within the Eight was already clearly discernible at this time, with only Pór maintaining solidarity with Berény and Tihanyi, while the other members of the group exhibited their works at the conservative-minded Künstlerhaus. At the world’s fair in San Francisco held one year later, the works of the Eight were still exhibited together. However, in contrast to the Futurists then making their debut in America, they did not

use their group name, and the only mention of the Eight as the most radical Hungarian group of the age was in Bölöni’s foreword to the exhibition catalogue. Local organisers christened the company the “Hungarian Cubists” and placed the works of the core members in one hall, but this was not a decision of the artists themselves, who were no longer exhibiting as a group by this time and were only presented together due to the connections between their respective works. Berény wrote off the American exhibition as a setback, despite having sold a number of his embroideries. Two significant works, the crucifixion scene and the portrait of Bartók, were retained by the exhibition organiser John Nilsen Laurvik and never returned to the artist. From the outbreak of war onwards, the power of Berény’s painting was greatly diminished, although it sparked again during the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Attempts to revive the group were unsuccessful, however. The dispersal of the artistic collective brought significant change in Berény’s own painting, and a genuine revival would follow only on his return from exile in Berlin in the late 1920s.

Notes 1

2 3 4

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

17 18

THE

From the notes of István Varró. I take this opportunity to thank Lívia Orbán, with whose help a hitherto unregistered portfolio bequeathed by Béla Szíj was retrieved from the Archive of the Hungarian National Gallery, containing mainly correspondence and accumulated data of the sociologist István Varró in relation to Róbert Berény. Hereinafter: MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. Recollection of István Varró, MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. Krisztina Passuth, A Nyolcak festészete [The painting of the Eight], Budapest 1967, p. 29. Recollection of István Varró, MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. (Kernstok’s father was not a peasant smallholder, but a master builder.) Imre Oltványi-Ártinger’s planned book on Berény is announced on the last page of the monograph on Kernstok by András Körmendi, published in the Ars Hungarica series in 1936. However, the Berény book never materialised. Imre Oltványi-Ártinger, “Róbert Berény” in Magyar Mûvészet, no. 12, 1936, p. 67. He may have gleaned this information from Jenô Bálint in Mûvészfejek, Budapest 1929, p. 78. From a rough draft of Róbert Berény’s question-and-answer autobiography, dated around 1947, property of Lídia Szajkó, San Francisco. (A somewhat different version of the manuscript is in private hands in Budapest.) Az Utak I, II, III. For the first detailed treatment of this topic, see Zoltán Rockenbauer, “A Nyolcak egymás közt” [The Eight among themselves] in Nulla dies sine linea. Tanulmányok Passuth Krisztina hetvenedik születésnapjára [Studies on the seventieth birthday of Krisztina Passuth], Ágnes Berecz, Mária L. Molnár, Erzsébet Tatai (eds.), Budapest 2007, pp. 82–89. The money brought in from the portrait commission helped Pór continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. The name was Hungarianised sometime around 1900–1902. Recollection of Bertalan Pór, MNG Archive, inv. no. 19174/1975. Autobiography of Róbert Berény, MNG Archive, inv. no. 23306/I/1992. Lajos Kassák, Vallomás tizenöt mûvészrôl [Confessions about fifteen artists], Budapest 1942, p. 323. According to the catalogue of the Eight’s 1911 exhibition, ten works of Berény painted in 1906 were shown, of which only four were for sale. The autographed inscription on the rear of the painting entitled Self-portrait with a Straw Hat reads: 1906. 15/X Paris. The work is mentioned in contemporary criticism. Róbert Berény, “A hetvenéves Márffy Ödön” [Ödön Márffy is seventy] in Magyar Mûvészet, no. 16, 1949, pp. 24–27. Dezsô Orbán’s letter to István Varró, Sydney, 23 April 1961? – MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents.

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21 22 23

29 30 31

“He showed four self-portraits at the exhibition. One depicts him as a small boy at the moment of failing at algebra, another as a bearded Parisian student.” L.L. [László Lakatos], “A Nyolcasok – Tárlati ítélôbírálat” [The Eight – An exhibition critique] in Pesti Napló, 21 May 1911, pp. 8–9; Az Utak III, p. 195. “The bearded picture made a big impression on me as well.” Comment of István Varró on the letter received from Dezsô Orbán, MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. Róbert Berény, “A kezdeményezés szerepérôl” [On the role of iniating] Manuscript in MNG Archive, inv. no. 23306/IX/29/1992. Louis Vauxcelles, “Le Salon des Indépendants” in Gil Blas, 20 March 1907. For more on this, see Gergely Barki, “Róbert Berény, the apprentice Fauve” in Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914. Edited by Krisztina Passuth, György Szücs. Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery, 2006, p. 227. Five of his works from 1907 were featured at the 1911 show of the Eight, but only three can be positively identified as paintings completed in 1907. Max Weber’s letter to István Varró, New York, 19 May 1958, MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. Certain details of the letter were published by Béla Szíj in “La vie de Róbert Berény, de son enfance à son émigration à Berlin / Berény Róbert életútja gyermekévitôl a berlini emigrációig” in Bulletin de la Galerie Nationale Hongroise / A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Közleményei, no. 4, Budapest 1963, pp. 114–115. His experiments with sculpture were also recalled by István Varró, whose portrait in clay was modelled by Berény in the spring of 1917 – as seen in Varró’s notes with details from his earlier diary, MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. Likewise in Paris at this time, Géza Bornemisza was also making clay sculptures on the advice of his master Matisse. Nándor Gyöngyösi, “Rebellis képek – A Nyolcak kiállítása” [Rebellious pictures – The exhibition of the Eight] in A Jövendô [Hódmezôvásárhely], 15 May 1911, pp. 130–132; Az Utak III, pp. 174–175. “Il y a plus de simplicité chez Bérény [sic]. Malgré d’étranges apparences, sa bizarre petite femme aux jambes boudinées est assez vivante et coloré.” Maurice Denis, “Liberté épuisante et sterile” in La Grande Revue, 10 April 1908. See Philippe Dagen, Pour ou contre le Fauvisme, Paris 1994, p. 157. “Le portrait est peint, et ce qui est mieux, il est dessiné: la laideur en est expressive,” ibid. Lakatos 1911, Az Utak III, p. 195. Image see p. 198. Berény’s painting House in Felvidék is mentioned in “A Miénk tárlata” [Exhibition of MIÉNK] in Aradi Közlöny, 1 July 1909, p. 5; Az Utak II, p. 131. “Az új magyar festôk – Megnyílt a kiállítás” [The new Hungarian painters – The exhibition has opened] in Kolozsvári Hirlap, 30 May 1909, p. 7; Az Utak II, pp. 95–96.

35 36

37 38

39 40

Ausstellung Ungarischer Maler im Ausstellungsgebäude, Kurfürstendamm 208/209, Berlin, 5 February – 3 March 1910. “János Vaszary [...] has now kicked the Hungarian soil from beneath his feet and joined the ultraprimitives. He has grown envious of Károly Kernstok, Rippl-Rónai and Róbert Berény” – (k. k. l.) [Kézdi-Kovács László], “Vaszary János új piktúrája” [The new painting of János Vaszary] in Pesti Hírlap, 24 March 1912, p. 10; Az Utak III, p. 337. György Bölöni, “Berény Róbert,” Aurora, 15 April 1911, pp. 63–66; Az Utak III, pp. 94–96. “Modern festészet, avagy mennyire nincs igaza Tisza Istvánnak” in Budapesti Napló, 23 April 1911, pp. 5–6; Az Utak III, pp. 108–110. Aladár Bálint, “Nyolcak kiállítása” [The exhibition of the Eight] in Népszava, 10 May 1911, pp. 1–2; Az Utak III, p. 160. Three of these appeared in the printed press of the time, while the fourth can be seen on an oft-mentioned postcard addressed to István Réti, bearing the monogram B. K. The most unusual caricature was the one I discovered on the reverse of one of Tibor Pólya’s paintings kept in Kecskemét, on which a caricature-like outline of the Silhouetted Composition can be seen alongside a sketch of Nude of an Italian Girl. Károly Lyka, “A Nyolcak” [The Eight] in Új Idôk, 7 May 1911, pp. 470–472; Az Utak III, pp. 152–155. György Fenyô, a pupil of Berény in 1918, recalled that “there was only one master about whom he genuinely enthused – Leonardo da Vinci. He was very familiar with his pictures, but what excited him even more was Leonardo’s ‘Trattato della pittura.’ He was reading this book constantly (in German translation).” From György Fenyô’s letter to István Varró, 21 June [year unknown], MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. Beyond Gyula Kemény’s pertinent analysis of the work that can be read in the present publication, it is worth mentioning Georges Seurat’s canvas La Grande Jatte and Cézanne’s Sunday in Summer among the important monumental archetypes inspiring Berény’s composition, primarily due to similarities in the tripartite division of space and the use of repoussoire figures, as well as the metaphysical content of the works. In the case of the latter inspiration, another work by Cézanne entitled Badende vor einem Zelt (Bathers in front of a Tent), today housed in Stuttgart, also deserves further attention. One of the seated figures in this painting, which the artist may once have seen at Vollard’s gallery, in fact appears in reflection in Berény’s composition. We find a similar mirror-like adoption of motifs in the case of Berény’s Idyll and the familiar work of the same name by Cézanne. L. G. [Lengyel Géza], “A Nyolcak kiállítása – Bemutató a Nemzeti Szalonban” [The exhibition of the Eight – A début in the National Salon] in Pesti Napló, 29 April 1911, pp. 10–11; Az Utak III, p. 131. From the foreword by Géza Feleky; see “Nyolcak” kiállítása a Nemzeti Szalonban [The exhibition of the Eight in the National Salon], introd. Géza Feleky, Budapest 1911, p. 11.

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By splendour, Popper probably meant lustre. “Dialogue on Art – Writings of Leó Popper – Correspondence of Leó Popper with György Lukács,” MTA Lukács Archive, T-Twins Publishing, 1993, p. 223. A total of five Berény works featured at the Eight exhibition can be seen in caricature in the issue of 7 May 1911 of periodical Borsszem Jankó, four of which remain hidden. In the case of three of these, a single caricature provides the only visual information. Bernadett Kovács drew attention to the caricatures; see “Képek a ‘nevetôkabinetbôl,’ avagy a Nyolcak festészete a karikatúrák tükrében” [Pictures from the “laughing cabinet” or the painting of the Eight in the light of caricatures] in Artmagazin, 4, 2006, 2. pp. 54–59. The WANTED column was launched by the author of these lines in the periodical Artmagazin in 2005. It has carried a total of eight articles so far, four of them dealing with lost works of the Eight. The series of articles was followed by a series of exhibitions entitled WANTED – Lost Works of the Eight (Kieselbach Gallery, Judit Virág Gallery, Gyôr Municipal Museum). The names of eleven buyers were listed in the 9 May 1911 issue of Világ, cf. Almanach (Képzômûvészeti lexikon), ed. Béla Déry, László Bányász, Ernô Margitay, Budapest 1912. Among them were József Szegedi Lukács, father of the philosopher György Lukács, the architect József Vágó, the theatre manager Ferenc Rajna, the composer Jenô Pártos, and the critics Géza Feleky, Ignác Nágel and Jenô Miklós, the latter an active participant in the formation of the Eight. Typically their circle sympathised with bourgeois radicals. Another buyer, the underwear maker Ferenc Brachfeld, certainly did not belong in this group, though he did sew the underwear of the poet Endre Ady among others. It is difficult to imagine that at least one work by Berény would not have entered the possession of, for example, Pál Relle or György Bölöni, but contemporary sources also fail to mention the likes of Béla Krisztinkovics, who purchased Berény’s Idyll (R. 185.), and later several embroideries: see Béla Horváth’s interview with Bélá Krisztinkovics [year unknown], legacy of Béla Horváth, HAS RIA Archive, inv. no. MDK–C–I–217. There is also no word in the sources of the Eight’s first buyer Virgil Ciaclan, who bought the most recently finished piece in the exhibited Berény collection (R. 187.), and neither is there any mention of the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, though he bought a number of works as one of Berény’s closest friends: “If I remember correctly, over the years Sándor bought at least three pictures from Róbert: a self-portrait (in oil), which we all loved very much though in the style of a caricature, and later an Italian landscape, I don’t know whether it was of Capri or Napoli,” recalled Elma Pálos in a letter to István Varró, 4 May 1958, MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. The self-portrait was probably the aforementioned lost bearded version, or perhaps the Self-portrait with Top Hat. Ferenczi also owned a portrait drawing of Ignotus, which was displayed at the World’s Fair in San Francisco in 1915. Róbert Berény, “Mûvészi nevelés az iskolában” [Art education in schools] in Népmûvelés, 15 April 1911, p. 27. The text of a postcard addressed to the painter, signed by Leó Weiner and Berény’s future wife Léni Somló, reveals that Berény and Ferenczi holidayed together at Lake Csorba in the summer of 1911: see Ferenczi’s letter to Sigmund Freud, 3 August 1911. Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi I/1 (1908–1911), ed. Eva Brabant et al, Budapest 2000, p. 429. Ignotus, “Búcsúztató” [A “farewell” to Ignotus] in Magyar Hírlap, 28 May 1933. Judit Mészáros, “Emlékezés Ferenczire. Két nekrológ” [Remembering Ferebczi. Two obituaries] in Thalassa, 10, 1999, 1. pp. 148–150. Barnabás Vajda, Sigmund Freud és a XX. század eleji magyar irodalom. Tanulmányok magyar írók és a freudi pszichoanalízis kapcsolatáról [Sigmund Freud and early 20th-century Hungarian literature. Studies on the relationship of Hungarian writers and Freudian psychoanalysis], Budapest 2005, pp. 38–39. Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi II/2 (1917–1919), ed. Eva Brabant et al, Budapest 2003, p. 251. Ibid. Sándor Ferenczi, “Ignotus – a megértô” [Ignotus, the one who undertands] in Nyugat, 17. 1924. II, pp. 713–714. Lajos Bálint, Ecset és vésô, Budapest 1973, p. 136. Elma Pálos’ letter to István Varró, 4 May 1958, MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. Reproductions of a few pages from the still unpublished notebook, presumed to be in the possession of Judith Dupont, have been published on a Spanish psychoanalytical website: www.psicoterapiarelacional.es/Homenajes/SándorFerenczi/Álb umfotográfico Although they were married only in January 1916, they already lived together earlier. Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, “Négyen a nyolcak közül – Glosszák egy modern mûvészeti kiállításhoz” [Four of the Eight. Notes on a modern art exhibition] in Nyugat, 5. 1912. II, pp. 763–768; Az Utak III, pp. 481–485.

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : C APRI , 1913

60 61

63 64

66 67 68 69 70

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C AT .

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Béla Horváth’s interview with Bertalan Pór, June 1963; legacy of Béla Horváth, HAS RIA Archive, inv. no. MDK–C–I–217. Béla Horváth refers to remarks spoken by Mrs. Milán Füst, the one-time owner of the painting: “Weiner Leó arcképe Berény Róberttôl” in Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, no. 16, 1967, pp. 116–121. A letter of Béla Bartók to his mother (özv. Bartók Béláné) refers to this: Paris, 25 December 1909, Bartók Béla családi levelei, ed. Béla Bartók Jnr., Budapest, 1981, p. 193. Letter of Mrs Jenô Kassai (born Ilona Somló [Spitzer]), Berény’s first wife, to István Varró, 3 May 1958 (Varró-Szíj documents). In an enclosed supplement to a letter written by Ivor Kármán to István Varró, dated 10 May 1958, the following text appears on one of the sheets of music: “Berény Róbert 1911–12-ben tervezett operett zenéjének »valar« [?]-ja. (Már ahogy én emlékszem rá ahogy játszotta )” [The “valar” (?) of the music of Róbert Berény’s operetta planned for 1911–12] – MNG Archive, Varró–Szíj documents. Róbert Berény’s letter to József Rippl-Rónai, MNG Archive, Rippl-Rónai press volume III. 67 – pasted in among newspaper clippings from 1912. My attention was drawn to the letter by Ferenc Zsákovics, who has conducted scholarly research into this subject, for which I take this opportunity to express my thanks. Az Ujság, 17 November 1911, p. 17; Az Utak III, p. 236. The version here is the longer one published in Egyetértés. “Új grafikai vállalkozás” [A new graphic enterprise] in Magyar Nyomdászat, 24, 1911, 11. pp. 307–308; Az Utak III, pp. 236–237. “Prints by Hungarian painters” in Világ, 20 December 1911, p. 14; Az Utak III, p. 295. Béla Horváth’s interview with Bertalan Pór, op. cit. In the above-mentioned letter to Rippl-Rónai, Berény also brought up the name of Béla Iványi Grünwald as a possible associate party. Identification of the works was carried out by Ferenc Zsákovics, whose work on the subject was being prepared for publication at time of writing. The work appeared under this title at the Sáros art lottery exhibition in 1915–1916 as a gift from Arnold Löwenstein. I thank Ferenc Zsákovics for calling my attention to this fact. For more on the subject, see Gergely Barki, “A tû Gauguinje. Berény Róbert hímzései” in A Gödöllôi szônyeg 100 éve. Tanulmányok a 20. századi magyar textilmûvészet történetéhez, ed. Cecília Nagy Ôri, Gödöllô 2009, pp. 86–90. In his foreword to the catalogue of the third exhibition of the Eight, Berény says: “My embroideries were the product of a playful pastime.” A Nyolcak harmadik tárlatának katalógusa, November–December 1912, Budapest, National Salon, 1912, p. 11. We know of no catalogue, and have no knowledge of the whereabouts of the works sold.

76 77

81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89

“Magyar iparmûvészet Berlinben” in Világ, 11 October 1912, p. 12. Republished in Az Utak III, p. 444–445. B-t. [Aladár Bálint], “A ‘Nyolcak’ kiállítása” [The exhibition of “The Eight”] in Népszava, 24 November 1912, p. 11; Az Utak III, pp. 492–493. The review of the last exhibition of the Eight in Budapest appeared a few months after the show in Berlin. Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, “Magyar hímzések: Berény Róbert kiállítása Berlinben” [Hungarian embroidery: Róbert Berény’s exhibition in Berlin] in Nyugat, 5. 1912. II, pp. 608–610; Az Utak III, pp. 448–449. Berény’s first wife recalled: “At the second show of the Eight [in reality the third] we also exhibited needlework, designed by Róbert and made under my supervision in our own little workshop. We sold an awful lot of these.” Excerpt from a letter of Mrs Jenô Kassai quoted by Béla Szíj in “La vie de Róbert Berény, de son enfance à son émigration à Berlin,” op. cit., pp. 114–115. Research so far has succeeded in revealing the identity of only one buyer: Béla Krisztinkovics, who bought three cushions at the third exhibition of the Eight. Unfortunately, however, we are unable to identify these works; see Béla Horváth’s interview with Béla Krisztinkovics, op. cit. It is conceivable that this was one of the three aforementioned cushions in the possession of Béla Krisztinkovics. For more on the subject, see Gergely Barki, “The PanamaPacific International Exposition: Hungarian Art’s American Debut or its Bermuda Triangle?” in Centropa, 10.2010,3. 259–271. Dr Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, “A Sonderbund nemzetközi kiállítása” in Világ, 6 June 1912, p. 4; Az Utak III, pp. 406–407. Róbert Berény, “Oesterreichische Künstler” in Nyugat, 6. 1913. I, pp. 501–502. A Nyolcak harmadik tárlatának katalógusa [Catalogue of the third exhibition of the Eight],1912, op. cit., p. 9. Declaration of Róbert Berény [Némely szidalmazóimhoz], Magyar Hírlap, 27 November 1912, p. 10; Az Utak III, p. 495. György Bölöni, “A Nyolcak” in Világ, 15 November 1912; Az Utak III, pp. 480–481. Jean Preux [Sztrakoniczky Károly], “Nyolcak” in A Hét, 17 November 1912, p. 743; Az Utak III, p. 487. Róbert Berény, “A festôi közlés” in Nyugat, 6. 1913. I, pp. 528–530; cf. “Berény Róbert hozzászólása. A mûvészek és Tisza István – Interjú” [Contribution by Róbert Berény. The artists and István Tisza. An interview.] in Pesti Napló, 16 April 1911, p. 40; Az Utak III, pp. 100–101. According to family recollections, Berény had a “Christ mania,” grounded in a very complex and as yet undiscovered philosophical attitude. His daughter Anna and grandson Dr Tamás Sós have provided useful information in this regard. Letter of Mrs Jenô Kassai (born Ilona Somló [Spitzer]), Berény’s first wife, to István Varró, 3 May 1958 (Varró-Szíj documents).

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : P ARISIAN S TILL L IFE , C . 1909

•

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NO .

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WITH A

B OTTLE , 1908

•

C AT .

NO .

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : S TILL L IFE

WITH A

B LUE K ETTLE , 1911

•

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : S TILL L IFE

WITH

F RUIT , 1910

•

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NO .

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : T HE G ARDEN (L ANDSCAPE

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WITH A

H OUSE ), 1911

•

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NO .

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N UDE S ITTING

IN AN

A RMCHAIR , 1911

•

C AT .

NO .

•

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FOR I DYLL ,

1911

•

C AT .

NO .

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : N UDE S ITTING

IN AN

A RMCHAIR , 1911

•

C AT .

NO .

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : F EMALE N UDE , 1911

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C AT .

NO .

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : F EMALE T ORSO , C . 1911

•

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NO .

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A RMS S PREAD

OUT ,

1911

•

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NO .

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : F EMALE N UDE

WITH HER

H ANDS F OLDED

BEHIND HER

B ACK , 1907–1908

•

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NO .

191

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C ROSS (S CENE ), 1912

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NO .

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•

C AT .

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : F EMALE P ORTRAIT S TUDY , 1911

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : S ELF P ORTRAIT , 1912

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : P ORTRAIT

L ÉNI S OMLÓ , 1913

•

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THE EIGHT

RÓBERT BERÉNY MISSING PAINTINGS

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : S ELF P ORTRAIT , C . 1906

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OF A

B OY , C . 1911

•

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : P ORTRAIT , 1909

•

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : P ORTRAIT

A NTONIO T OROSSI , C . 1912

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : L YING F EMALE N UDE , 1911

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R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : L EANING N UDE , 1908

•

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : S KETCH

FOR

N UDE S ITTING

IN AN

A RMCHAIR , 1911

•

R ÓBERT B ERÉNY : S TUDY

OF A

N UDE , 1910

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A T T I L A

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R U M

DEZSÔ CZIGÁNY

D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : S ELF P ORTRAIT , 1902

“Dezsô Czigány is a very young and very prepotent man, and will perhaps appeal to those who like to see pride not only in the Spanish, but in a painter too. Under the title of “Me” he exhibited a self-portrait in brown tones in the style of Bertalan Pór, and is asking a round one thousand crowns for this little study of a head”, wrote an incredulous József Nyitray in his review of the

1902 spring international exhibition of the National Hungarian Fine Arts Society.1 Also at this time in another newspaper, regarding the same picture, Nyitray commented that for such a price “one could have two Mannheimers or Ferenczys”.2 It was with an aura of such unbounded self-confidence that this completely unknown young artist (1883–1938) introduced himself to the Hungarian public. Czigány was originally born under the name of Wimmer in 1883, in Budapest. His father Ignác Wimmer worked as a tinsmith, so a settled financial background was only something that the two-child family could long for. Little information is available about Czigány’s youth, and this too mainly comprises the accoutrements of the standard artist’s mythology: a series of anecdotes revealing an irrepressible desire to draw, paint and sculpt.3 According to the information sources the young man, who had wished to pursue an artistic career since his childhood, was accepted in 1898 to the decorative painting department of the School of Applied Arts. He only spent a few months here, since by the second half of the academic year he was already an outstanding student at the School of Graphic Design and Art Teacher Training College. In Autumn 1899, with a subsidy of 300 crowns from the painter Antal Zilzer, he travelled to Munich. At that time he was still following the traditional artistic career path, and so enrolled at the Academy where he continued his studies in the class of Nikolaos Gysis; but at the beginning of 1900 he was working in Simon Hollósy’s private school in Munich, and in summer of that year followed his mentor to the painting school in

Nagybánya [today Baia Mare, Romania]. The surviving letters bear witness to the fact that Hollósy judged his young protégé to be highly talented, and was exceedingly fond of him, but regarded him as having an unmanageably difficult nature.4 It also emerges from these letters that in the second half of 1900 Dezsô Wimmer changed his name to Czigány. The practice of “Hungarianising” names was a widespread assimilation strategy among Jews in Hungary, but the young artist rebelliously chose the name of an even more disdained minority (Czigány = Gypsy), occupying the lowest rung of the Hungarian social hierarchy, as if to demonstrate his nonconformity. In 1901, with Hollósy’s intermediation, a 600-crown state scholarship enabled him to continue his studies, and thus he spent the summer of that year back with his mentor in Nagybánya.5 In 1902 he spent much of the year in Munich again, with Hollósy.6 In summer 1903 he worked at the free school in Nagybánya, together with Béla Czóbel. Clear evidence of their close relationship is provided by the portraits in which they immortalised the same male model from Nagybánya, in similar poses.7 With regard to two of his pastels exhibited at the first graphic art exhibition at the National Salon in spring 1904, one of the critics commented that Czigány is “the strongest and most individual member of the young generation of artists”.8 In autumn 1904 he travelled to Paris, where he first worked at the Julian Academy under the guidance of Jean Paul Laurens, then later “alongside Jacques Émile Blanche he gained admission to the exclusive company of an international group of painters.”9 On the strength of the success D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY , C . 1920

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C AT . N O . 95

of his works displayed at the 1906 exhibition of Salon des Indépendants in Paris, the Société des Artistes Indépendants made him an honorary member.10 The art critic György Bölöni reflected thus on the collection exhibited here: “Once, in Paris [...] among six portraits with an alluring, painted face and shadowy eye sockets he stared brashly out at the world from a Rembrandt-

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flavoured portrait, unknown.”11 In February 1906 Czigány must have still been in Paris, because it was here that Bölöni introduced him, and Czóbel, Berény and Gulácsy, who were also staying in Paris, to Endre Ady’s recently published book entitled “New Poems” [Új versek].12 In summer 1906, however, he was back in Nagybánya but working independently of the free school. In the

autumn he embarked on his college studies for the second time, as an outstanding first-year student at the Mintarajziskola.13 He attended Károly Ferenczy’s figure drawing and painting classes, albeit presumably only for a few weeks, as in December he “flunked” all of the subjects he had taken. In Nagybánya in the summer of 1906 Czigány got to know his future first wife, Mária Trebitzky, who was then a student of the free school and then in autumn of the same year was also accepted to the college. Czigány exhibited a few of the pictures he had painted in Paris, as well as portraits and landscapes from the months following his return, at the Mûcsarnok in spring 1907 and at the Könyves Kálmán Salon in June. At the collection entitled “Youth”, showcasing the work of pioneering young modern Hungarian painters, besides him Ödön Márffy was the only other future member of the Eight to be featured, but from among their circle of friends Gulácsy and Viktor Erdei also exhibited there. The works displayed by Czigány at this time were praised by Bölöni in the columns of the daily broadsheet Népszava.14 Through Ady – who he had befriended by this time – and Bölöni, he became acquainted with the writer Ede Kabos, who as a selfless patron secured him numerous commissions for portraits from among his extensive circle of friends. Besides this, Kabos invited Czigány to sit at the same table as the most outstanding Hungarian writers of the era, including Dezsô Kosztolányi, Ernô Szép and Lajos Bíró.15 It was this company, this cultural environment, which primarily determined the young artist’s intellectual development, and also ensured a livelihood for Czigány and his wife. They were betrothed in the summer of 1907. A few weeks before the marriage, Czigány converted to the Protestant faith. His bond of friendship with Ady is presumed to have been a factor in this decision.16 Czigány immortalised the poet on at least four occasions in 1907 under commission from the Franklin publishing house, but also painted other portraits of him later on. In the following year Czigány and Mária Trebitzky had their first child, László Czigány. Czigány took part in the first exhibition organised by MIÉNK, in January 1908. Of the future members of the Eight, Czóbel, Kernstok, Márffy and Pór also featured in this exhibition. In April Czigány also displayed his work at the Hungarian Art Dealers’ exhibition in Nagyvárad. Endre Ady wrote the following on this exhibition: “I read their roster, and one or two names give almost full cadence in pictures to my life in verse. I sat together with the likes of them in the beautiful, forlorn afternoons in a corner of St-Michel and St-Germain. There is one who regaled me with his fiery plans as we wandered

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V IKTOR W OLLEMANN : C ARICATURE OF MIÉNK IN Ü STÖKÖS , 1909

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OF THE EXHIBITION

lost in the clamour of the Grand Boulevard. [...] A beautiful roster: Pretty names, and it does not even pain my radicalism, which finds peace and dwindles with my receding youth, to note that old crones, gloomy art teachers, pictorial dandies and painter versions of [the poet] Szabolcska are also to be found alongside my struggling kindred. This makes it right, and makes it complete, and makes it into an exhibition the likes of which Nagyvárad has never seen. [...] I envy [...] those who will first notice Dezsô Czigány, this great young depicter of souls.”17 In the early spring of 1909 Czigány also participated in the second exhibition organised by MIÉNK. His painting Female nude with a mirror, displayed at this event, was reproduced in the March issue of the representative interdisciplinary periodical entitled A Ház. Czigány later cut this work in two, and painted another portrait on the back of each of the recycled canvasses.18 Bölöni organised a touring exhibition lasting from the end of April to the beginning of July in 1909 under the title of “New Hungarian Painters”, stopping in Kolozsvár [today ClujNapoca, Romania], Nagyvárad and Arad, in which Czigány and the future members of the Eight also took part. After this, at the turn of 1909–1910, the “New Pictures” exhibition was held at the Könyves Kálmán Salon in Budapest, with the great majority of the works selected from among the paintings displayed at the summer touring exhibition. All the future members of the Eight were represented at this event. In his reading at the Galilean Circle functioning as a student’s organisation within the Social Sciences

D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY ’ S

PAINTING

F EMALE N UDE

WITH A

M IRROR

ON A PHOTOGRAPH FROM

• Association, in January 1910 Kernstok expressed their shared ars poetica as follows: “taking traditions as our starting point we move forward, in order to seek and find those new great values that will essentially be very much akin to the good art of all times.”19 This counter avant-garde stance, which was undeniably pioneering in spirit yet also respected traditions, accompanied the Eight throughout their brief spell of cooperation, which lasted only a few years. During an exhibition that sparked outrage among a portion of the critics and public, the philosopher György Lukács [George Lukács], in another reading at the Galilean Circle, welcomed the re-emergence of the “true” art of all times, and in his essay accepted the works of Kernstok at al as “old”, that

1909 AND IN ITS PRESENT STATE C AT . N O . 93 • C AT . N O . 94

is lasting art, which he contrasted to the works of the mass of “modern” impressionism-plagiarists.20 Immediately after the close of the “New Pictures” exhibition, the Berlin-based art dealer Paul Cassirer held a representative exhibition of the works of Hungarian painters, organised by Simon Meller, Lajos Hatvany and József Vészi. The collection, put on display in FebruaryMarch of 1910, was the first large-scale foreign exhibition of modern Hungarian painting. The works of the future members of the Eight, and Béla Iványi Grünwald, billed as the Hungarian “neo-impressionists”, were displayed in the main hall directly alongside those of Károly Ferenczy. A separate hall was devoted to Pál Szinyei Merse, who was also a guest of honour at the celebrato-

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D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : P ORTRAIT

P ABLO C ASALS , 1911

•

C AT .

ry feast held by the Baron Lajos Hatvany, himself an accomplished painter. The press coverage in Berlin testified to an overwhelming success, only tempered by dissenting voices back home. Czigány, who had personally attended the event in Berlin, sent a lengthy report on the exhibition and its superlative reception to the Pesti Napló newspaper.21 The Pesti Napló’s correspondent added his own commentary to Czigány’s report from Berlin, in which he mentioned that Kernstok at al exhibited in the neo-impressionists' hall as the “group of eight” despite the fact that “Béla Iványi Grünwald's works too – at the

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artist's request – were displayed among the works of this group of eight.”22 Following his return from Berlin, Czigány gave an interview to his friend Bölöni, who published it together with his own recollections and praise for the painter’s art. This was the first relatively long review acclaiming Czigány's work.23 It was also in 1910 that the painter and Mária Trebitzky had their second child, Jutka. During the 1910–1911 theatrical and vocal concert season, the cellist Pablo Casals, who had by then achieved worldwide acclaim, was guest-performing in Budapest, and probably got to know

Czigány through Leó Weiner. During his time in Budapest Casals stayed with Ernô Murányi, and on one of his evenings off Czigány managed to paint a beautiful, inspired portrait of him. On 29 April 1911 the Eight’s second exhibition, albeit the first to be given under that name, was held at the National Salon.24 On 16 April 1911 the Pesti Napló reported the news of the company’s official formation: “New artistic group. The group of artists led by Károly Kernstok, who exhibited their works together last year, was inaugurated at a meeting held on Thursday, and since eight persons were present at the time they took the name of the Eight. The first exhibition of this, the youngest of artistic groups, will be held at the National Salon in two weeks time. Among the founding members, the following artists will take part in the first exhibition: the painters Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Dezsô Czigány, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezsô Orbán, Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi. Guest artists: the sculptors Vilmos Fémes Beck and Márk Vedres, the painter Anna Lesznai.”25 Besides these, a few works by Mária Lehel were also featured, and thus in 1911 a total of 12 fine artists displayed work at the Eight’s exhibition at the National Salon. The group's 1911 show was clearly regarded as their second appearance as the “Eight”, since the catalogue for their next exhibition of NovemberDecember 1912, also held at the National Salon, bears the heading “The Third Exhibition of the Eight”. The top of page three of the catalogue contains a list of the members of the Eight, and underneath it the following words: “Due to other artistic commitments, Béla Czóbel, Dezsô Czigány, Károly Kernstok, Anna Lesznai and Ödön Márffy were unable to participate in this third exhibition.”26 Berény, Orbán, Pór, Tihanyi and Fémes Beck, however, did feature in the exhibition, making up five of the artists that jointly exhibited in 1911. It emerges from all of this that all the members of the artistic group the Eight only displayed their works together on two occasions, at the turn of 1909 and 1910, when the name the “Eight” was still only in currency within a narrow circle of friends. By that time they, and the above-mentioned artists in their entourage, were already publicly perceived as a clearly definable group of artists working towards shared objectives. Parallel with this group, Béla Iványi-Grünwald was also surrounding himself with young and progressive artists during the same period, in the town of Kecskemét. Ödön Márffy had the following to say about the Eight’s joint efforts: “The shared or related efforts of this artistic group could perhaps be best expressed described by saying that they attempted to build up their pictures to a strict set of principles, emphasising the composition, the construct, the forms, the essence.”27

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D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : S TILL L IFE , C . 1910

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D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : T WO F EMALE N UDES , 1911 (M ISSING )

Czigány’s “other artistic commitment” mentioned above was the painting of the monumental fresco in one of the sanatoriums being built at the time in the vicinity of the Budapest

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part known Városliget – probably the Park Sanatorium, which was constructed to the designs of Marcell Komor and Dezsô Jakab, and completed in April of 1912. Hugó Kalmár, dur-

ing an interview he gave in the 1960s, remembered that Czigány painted a fresco on the wall of an outbuilding of one of the sanatoriums in Városliget, which was later regrettably destroyed.28 The designs must have already been commissioned and accepted by 1911, as Géza Feleky refers to a sketch depicting two female nudes reproduced in the catalogue of the 1911 exhibition, and a large-scale study in oils displayed at the exhibition, as a “frieze detail”.29 Czigány’s first truly representative show in Hungary, therefore, took place at the Eight’s 1911 exhibition, where he featured as a member of one of the most progressive artistic groups in Hungary at that time. By that time the painter's circle of friends and acquaintances included the cream of the liberal intelligentsia which also numbered among its members prominent personalities from the radical civic movement. Among his close friends was Endre Ady, whose writing Lajos Hatvany had described as a literary “Rippl-Rónaiism” in 1908, in another indication of the intellectual common ground occupied by the poet and the painter.30 The art of the Eight, by the same token, came to be written about by the critics as a form of painter’s “Adyism”, and this caused the activities of Ady and the Eight to be associated with each other in the public mind, sometimes pejoratively and sometimes proudly and unashamedly. By superimposing the concepts of poetry and painting onto each other, this modernism was celebrated through this

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dualistic word usage even by those who viewed the proponents and heralds of the radical changes with hostility. The socially sensitive painters, poets and thinkers of this era believed that the spoken and written word, and works of art, had the power to improve society and resolve its contradictions by serving as a common denominator. And they also trusted that peoples’ lives could come to radiate beauty and joy as a result of their creative efforts. In March 1911, donning the mantle of spokesman for officialdom, Count István Tisza marked Bertalan Pór's solo exhibition by launching an open attack on the latest trends in painting, and their representatives. Tisza, a qualified attorney and economist who in the previous year had been elected as a member of the academy, felt he had the authority to state a position on the issues related to modern art, which was also coming to represent a growing political force. Tisza viewed every single action by the civic radicals who were also struggling for the introduction of suffrage for all, and thus the activities of the artists within their circles, as a potential threat to the taste and thinking of the masses. As the chairman of the governing political party, he attacked the efforts to achieve reform in a series of articles, not even sparing Pál Szinyei Merse.31 His essays gave rise to a huge press debate, in which proponents of the liberal and radical viewpoints, finding themselves on common ground, launched a joint counterattack. Bertalán Pór’s exhibition held at the Könyves Kálmán Salon incurred Tisza's ire because the organisers linked it with a celebration of Ady. In this way, the irresolvable conflict between the poet and the politician provoked a reaction that far exceeded the weight of the artistic event.32 In a series of interviews published in the Pesti Napló, József Rippl-Rónai, István Csók and the other members of the Eight were among those quoted. Czigány said the following at this time: “I don’t know whether Count István Tisza is more ignorant than he is malicious in his role. The only significance that his performance has for us is that the words of an extremist politician still carry a long way here; and it is also likely that many – first and foremost a wretched, lame horde of ‘artists’ – will greet him as their profit because his artistic principles are in keeping with the artistic taste of the masses. He is only better than the hackneyed artist in that he doesn’t paint as well. Pictures and the endeavours of painters have generally not been as deep, noble and in such close contact with nature since Cézanne and the conscious evaluation of his works and teachings. The painter’s endeavour: to pick out from nature everything that is valuable in terms of painting, and to leave out all that only disrupts the picture, especially

D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : W OMAN C OMBING H ER H AIR , 1909 ( DESTROYED )

that which is foreign, and of no use to the painter. These include: the search for a certain banal materiality, the pursuit of a certain hateful ideal of beauty that exists only in the imagination of the soft-headed, the application of certain vacuous atmospheres, and so on. Where art is concerned the public has never known, and still doesn’t know what is going on. Only a small fraction of our society possesses the degree of culture and need for culture that finds artistic pleasure in the new art of today: this is the faction within society whose political taste and stance do not extend to Count István Tisza.”33 In his statement, Czigány highlighted the art of Cézanne as an example to be followed, judging atmospheric and genre painting, and art that slavishly depicted materiality, to have had their day. In his view the painter’s task is not to serve popular taste, but to develop one’s own creative method for exploring the internal laws of art. At the same time, he believed that artistic creation can only equate to a gesture of creation if the artist, taking nature as his starting point, leaves out the parts that he judges to be superfluous, and reinforces the elements that present themselves as important. At this time Czigány still truly believed that culture, and specifically the fine arts, could be an important means of transforming society.

D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : T HE P AINTRESS , 1909 (M ISSING )

In May 1911, in the “Czigány issue” of Aurora, Bölöni wrote about the artist’s works displayed at the National Salon.34 From among the reviews of the Eight appearing at that time, especially significant from Czigány’s point of view

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D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : S TILL L IFE , 1911–1912 • C AT . NO . 110 B ELOW : D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY IN HIS STUDIO ON S ZÁZADOS ÚT , 1912 (D ETAIL

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OF A PHOTOGRAPH BY

M ÓR E RDÉLYI )

was the article by Ödön Gerô entitled “The new art and the public”, in which he also stated that: “Because in the art of the neoterics, a certain agitatorial martyrdom is expressed. The neoterics make sacrifices, the fate of the neoterics is ridicule. The neoterics don’t receive scholarships, millionaires don’t commission portraits from them, and they don't land senior positions either in the administration of art or in the social scene that clamours around it. Both in social life and in literature, modernity can no longer achieve results that aren’t underpinned by this kind of suffering, by the persecution, pursuit, ridicule and mockery in which these struggling painters share. The neoteric painters tangibly demonstrate the martyrdom that is a class trait of every revolutionary, every social innovator who wants to teach people how to understand and see, who wants to liberate. In the art of the neoterics I see the beautiful phenomenon of great democracy, a great drive for freedom, a great liberation of culture.”35 Czigány’s personal life took one of its fateful turns in 1911. On 8 April, one month before the opening of the exhibition at the National Salon, his first wife, Mária Trebitzky, committed suicide. According to the testimony of their contemporaries their marriage was already in crisis at that time. His younger brother recollected that Czigány frequently socialised and neglected his wife, and women were crazy about him. The year 1911 was a turning point in Czigány’s life. He came to play a central role in art policy-shaping events that remain important to this day, while his wife left the ranks of the living under tragic circumstances, leaving their children to be raised by the painter. Following this, Czigány moved to the artists’ colony on Százados út, where he occupied studio 13. His next-door neighbour in the colony, which was mainly inhabited by sculptors, was Bertalan Pór; but among the painters Béla Kádár also worked here, as did Ferenc Csont, one of the Eight’s “entourage”.36 In 1912, five years after he had last exhibited in the Mûcsarnok, Czigány once again participated in the traditional spring collection of the National Hungarian Fine Arts Association. This is a surprising piece of information given that Kernstok had last exhibited here at the turn of 1903–1904, Czóbel at the turn of 1904–1905, Orbán in 1906, Márffy and Vedres in spring 1907, and Pór in 1909, while Tihanyi and Berény had always steered clear of the Mûcsarnok, Czigány was regularly featured here from 1912 right up until the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Of the four works presented in spring 1912 a representative, conventional image of a woman was also reproduced in the catalogue. And it was from here that the Metropolitan Gallery purchased for its collection what was

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P AUL C ÉZANNE : T HE B UFFET , 1877

perhaps his most masterful still life – modern yet classic in its quality.37 One of the reasons for Czigány’s apparent u-turn was to be found in his friendship with István Bárczy, the mayor of Budapest. Bárczy’s collection included his first publicly exhibited self-portrait, and the most appealing image of Endre Ady to be painted by Czigány, the beautiful portrait referred to as “Ady with wine” (R. 70), which unfortunately has not been seen since 1945. It was probably on Bárczy’s advice that the painter returned to the officially sanctioned art scene in Budapest, perhaps based on the consideration that this would also provide more scope to achieve successes abroad. His next opportunity to do so arose in

May 1912, which he participated with two paintings in the International Art Exhibition in Cologne (Sonderbund). Besides Czigány, from among the Eight Berény, Kernstok, Márffy, Orbán and Tihanyi also featured at this event, as did Fémes Beck and Vedres. Czigány, therefore, despite his show in the Mûcsarnok, retained the trust and friendship of his comrades. Pór was working on his frescos at the People’s Opera at that time, while Czóbel still wasn’t exhibiting with the group that listed his name on its catalogues.38 Here I would like to point out that neither for Czigány, who in 1908–1909 exhibited in the MIÉNK as a “naturalist”, then in 1910 in Berlin as a “neo-impressionist”, and most recent-

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ly at the international “expressionist” exhibition in Cologne, nor for the other Eight members who featured with him, was the labelling or “pigeonholing", the attributing of a painting style, as critically importance as many people believe today. The fact that Czigány was happy to present his works, all painted in a very similar style, labelled as either naturalist, neo-impressionist, or maybe expressionist, suggests that around 1910 this was not a top-priority issue or problem for him or for the Eight in general. In August 1912 the Nagybánya Painters’ Society held its annual exhibition, marking the 15th anniversary of the artists’ colony’s existence. Two of Czigány’s works created in Nagybánya

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AND HIS WIFE

B ORISKA S ZILASI , 1925 ( PHOTOGRAPH

were lent to the exhibition by Dr Ferenc Herczinger and the photographic artist Aladár Székely. The National Salon Almanach, published in the same year, printed the painter's main biographical details for the first time.39 In a supplement to the Christmas 1913 issue of the Pesti Napló, in a brief lexicon of the fine arts compiled by Kornél Tábori, his first drawing of himself as a monk was published.40 This was the first manifestation of a theme that would be so important to Czigány from then on, in which the Jewishborn artist, who had later been baptised as a protestant, depicted himself in the role of a Catholic priest or monk. Even his contemporaries could only guess at the true reason for this. So far no satisfactory and clear explanation has been found for the problem of Czigány’s monastic self-portraits, which, although they appear sarcastic, nevertheless have a more serious internal charge than self-caricature. In February 1914 Czigány took part in the great exhibition held by the Artist House, which was possibly the most important artistic event of the year in Hungary. Then he also exhibited at the March collection, a spin-off of this, held at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. When the First World War broke out the painter, who was at the time raising his children single-handedly, was not called up for military service. In 1915, the first and only volume of the Hungarian Fine Arts Lexikon, edited by János Szendrei and Gyula Szentiványi Gyula set out in print the most detailed information regarding the painter’s life and work to date.41 At the turn of 1915–1916, Czigány created one of the most representative

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of his paintings depicting himself as a monk and head priest, The Cardinal. He first displayed this work in spring 1916 in the Museum of the Fine Arts to unanimous acclaim from contemporary critics. Károly Lyka published a reproduction of the painting in the spring 1916 issue of Mûvészet.42 1917 brought a new important change in Czigány’s life, as in March he married Szilasi Borbala, who was 13 years his junior. “Boriska”, who was 21 at the time of the wedding, had previously prepared for an artistic career as a student of Károly Kernstok. In September 1918 Czigány participated in the Belgrade exhibition held to promote Hungarian art, which was organised by Egon Kornstein, a reserve lieutenant in the 37th Austro-Hungarian joint infantry regiment, and in civilian life a member of the Waldbauer-Kerpely String Quartet. The consolidated, cultural peace demonstration helped to normalise the relationship between the occupying troops and the Serbian population, both of which wished for an end to the war. The exhibition was not a war exhibition, so the themes of the works on display were not related to wartime events. Of the former Eight, besides Czigány, Berény, Kernstok, Márffy, Tihanyi, Fémes Beck and Vedres were also featured here.43 Czigány actively participated in the artistic scene of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which brought revolutionary changes in every area. First he was occupied with organising the artists’ colony established in Balatonfüred, led by Márffy, Pór and Béni Ferenczy, then in July he was appointed to teach on the Budapest summer art teacher and painter retraining course. This course was run at the Epreskert

D EZSÔ C ZIGÁNY : S ELF P ORTRAIT , 1911

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(Mulberry Garden) site of Budapest College of Fine Arts, on the site of the Former Benczúr master-school.44 There is no data to suggest that Czigány was persecuted or imprisoned – unlike his close friend Róbert Berény – during what was known as the “white terror”. He also retained his studio flat in Százados út. In June 1920, however, he was among those barred from the Hungarian Fine Artists’ Association, according to the text of the resolution to this effect: “due to his improper and antinational conduct displayed during the proletariat dictatorship.”45 Consequently, between 1920 and 1924 Czigány could not exhibit at either the collections of the Fine Arts Association or at the National Salon. He next exhibited in 1922, again with Márffy and Vedres, in a joint exhibition at the Helikon Gallery in Budapest. In 1924 the gradual consolidation of the situation made it possible for Czigány to rejoin the official artistic scene. At the first group exhibition of the New Society of Artists (KÚT), of the former members of the Eight, Czigány, Márffy, Vedres, and as a guest artist Béla Czóbel, once again exhibited together. In 1925 Czigány and his family settled first in Paris, and then one year later in Nice. In November 1927 a representative exhibition of Czigány’s latest paintings was held in the Budapest studio of the photographic artist Aladár Székely. Visitors mainly had the opportunity to view landscapes of Paris and the south of France. Czigány and his family resettled in Budapest in the winter of 1929–1930. Their decision to return may have been primarily due to financial problems. Following this he regularly featured in

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the exhibitions of The New Society of Fine Artists, but in the years following the Great Depression pictures or exhibitions no longer created the sensation that they had in the years around 1910. Czigány and his family met their tragic fate on 1 January 1938, when the artist killed first his terminally ill wife, then his daughter and grandchild who were staying with him as guests, before finally taking his own life. Dezsô Czigány’s last important statement was published in a volume of ‘life-shaping’ reading chosen by 170 writers, artists and scholars, published by Béla Kôhalmi in 1937. “I received my first great and defining literary experiences – at a very young age – from Zola. It was Zola who opened my eyes to the individual and social lives of people. My close affinity with Petôfi began at a young age. My spirituality, my love of the Hungarian land, my speech – after my mother – was shaped by Petôfi. Around the age of seventeen I found Raskolnikov. He hit me with terri-

ble force. Ever since then, Dostoyevsky shows me the world of man’s mood and feelings with an inconceivably great, great art. (The personality of Prince Myshkin had a bad formative influence on me.) Anatole France had much to do with the emergence of my ideas about people, society and the universe. I read his novels constantly, one after the other, and they are sources of renewed joy for me to this day. Ady's poems had – and still have – an effect comparable to that of Dostoyevsky. But today, I nevertheless believe that the path to recognising myself and people – a constantly recurring sensation – was shown to me by Freud’s psychology (not psychoanalysis). From this, and from the influence of Anatole France, I derive my world view, with the result that I am somehow at peace with myself, and reassured with regard to life. I regularly re-read the Odyssey and the Bible – especially the Old Testament. Bebel’s work “Women and Society” also had a formative influence on me.”46 D. CZIGÁNY: SELF PORTRAIT

Notes 1

3 4 5 6

10 11

15 16

Pamacs [Nyitray József]: Tavaszi tárlat. Hazaiak [Spring exhibition. Hungarians] in A Hét, 13 April 1902, pp. 242–243. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] I, p. 20. Yartin [Nyitray József]: Nemzetközi tárlat [International exhibition] in Budapesti Napló, 8 May 1902, p. 5. Az Utak [The Roads Parted] I, p. 21. Rum, Attila: Czigány Dezsô. Budapest, 2004, pp. 7–9. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 14. Magyar képzômûvészek lexikona kérdôív. [1914–1915 között] [Questionnaire of the lexicon of Hungarian artists, 1914–1915], HNG Archives, inv. no.: 484/1920. Réti, István: A nagybányai mûvésztelep [The Nagybánya artists’ colony], Budapest, 1954, p. 326; Rum, Attila: Czigány Dezsô; Czigány Dezsô (1883–1938) és Czóbel Béla (1883–1976) festômûvészek emlékkiállítása [A commemorative exhibition of D. Cz. and B. Cz.], Budapest, László Galéria, 2002.; Mûgyûjtôk Galériája Aukciós Ház 16. aukció 1994. november 17–25 [Art Collectors’ Auction House, 16th auction, 17–25 November 1994], Budapest, 1994. No 113. A Nemzeti Szalon kiállítása. [The exhibition of the National Salon] Budapesti Napló, 1904. február 28. 8. – Az Utak I.: 67. Bálint, Jenô: Elôszó [Preface] in A „Helikon” IV. kiállítása [The 4th exhibition of the “Helicon”], Budapest, Helikon, 1922, pp. 5–6. Ibid., 6. Bölöni, György: Czigány Dezsô. Szombat, 1, 1910, 9. – Az Utak II.: 380. Bölöni, György: Magyarság–emberség [Hungarianness and humanity], Col. and ed. Erki Edit. Budapest, 1959, p. 142. Az Országos Magyar Királyi Képzômûvészeti Fôiskola Évkönyve [Yearbook of the Hungarian Acadamy of Fine Arts] 1932–1933. Budapest, 1933. 74. Bölöni, György: Fiatal magyarok [Young Hungarians] in Népszava, 5 June 1907, pp. 6–7 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] I, pp. 269–270. Rózsa, Miklós: Czigány Dezsô. Pesti Napló, 1938. január 8. 2–3. Since the majority of the sources connected to the christening (Ady, Lajos: Ady Endre, Budapest, 1923, p. 134.; An interview by Béla Horváth with László Czigány [1960s] – The estate of Béla Horváth, HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MDK–C–I–217; Czóbel, Béla: Találkozások Adyval [Meeting Ady] Emlékezések Ady Endrérôl. [Recollections of Endre Ady] III, coll. and ed., and notes by Miklós Kovalovszky, Budapest, 1987, p. 60.) unanimously state that Endre Ady offered to be the painter’s godfather, this information – although latterly proven to be erroneous – went into all of the subsequent monographs about the painter. However, Czigány’s godfather was provenly Bölöni.

18 19

22 23 24

See Párizstól pocsolyavárosig. Bölöni György és Itóka levélnaplója 1906–1912. [From Paris to the “puddletown”. A diary in letters by György Bölöni and Itóka], selected and preface by Csaba Nagy, Budapest, 2005, p. 46. Az élet szobra. Ady Endre képzômûvészeti írásai [The sculpture of life. Writings on art by Endre Ady], ed. and introduction by József Varga József. Utószó: Németh Lajos. Budapest, 1977. 78. A Ház, 2, 1909, 3, p. 69. Kernstock, Károly: A kutató mûvészet [Inquisitive art] in Nyugat, 3, 1910, I, p. 95. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted],II, p. 288. Lukács, György: Az Utak elváltak [The Roads Parted] in Nyugat, 3, 1910, I, pp. 190–193. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 319–322. Czigány ,Dezsô: Magyarok sikere Berlinben [The success of the Hungarian in Berlin] in Pesti Napló, 12 February 1910, pp. 10–11. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 331–332. Ibid., 331. Bölöni 1910. op. cit. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 378–381. Béla Déry, former director of the National Salon said the following in 1926 about the choice of name of the collective: “I am talking about the ‘eight’ whose first exhibition, the ‘Eight’ I made fifteen years ago at the National Salon. I say ‘I made’ because I was godfather to the eight who more like eighteen, calling them the ‘Eight’ which has since become a household name.” Dezsô Ádám: “Today’s youths are “pseudo-youths” which is why: long-live the real youths!, says Béla Déry, director of the National Salon” in Ma Este, 1926, 6, pp. 25–26. Other sources claim the name was decided on in the studio of Dezsô Orbán where those present chose the name “the Eight” at Róbert Berény’s behest. Cf. Krisztina Passuth: A Nyolcak festészete, [The painting of the Eight], Budapest, 1967, p. 79. Új mûvésztársulat [A new collective of artists] in Pesti Napló, 16 April 1911, p. 14. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] II, pp. 98–99. A Nyolcak harmadik tárlatának katalógusa. 1912. november–december [Catalogue of the third exhibition of the Eight], Budapest, Nemzeti Szalon, 1912. Dévényi, Iván: Márffy Ödön levele a Nyolcak törekvésérôl [Letter of Ödön Márffy about the efforts of the Eight] in Mûvészet, 10, 1969, 8, p. 10. Interview by Béla Horváth with Hugó Kalmár [1960s] – the estate of Béla Horváth, HAS RIA Archives, inv. no.: MDK–C–I–217. Feleky, Géza: A Nyolcak. „Nyolcak” kiállítása a Nemzeti Szalonban. [The exhibition of the Eight at the National Salon] Bev. Feleky Géza. Budapest, 1911. 10. Hatvany, Lajos: Ady a kortársak közt. Ady Endre levelei és levelek Ady Endréhez. [Ady among his contemporaries. Letters to and by Endre Ady] Budapest, 1934. 103. Tisza, István: 20000 korona [20 thousand crowns] in Magyar Figyelô, 1, 1911, pp. 256–259 – republished: Valéria Vanília

42 43

WITH A

BOOK, 1910–1911. (MISSING)

Majoros: Tihanyi Lajos. A mûvész és mûvészete [Lajos Tihanyi. The man and his art], Budapest, 2004, pp. 388–389; István Tisza: Andrássy Gyula a mûvészetrôl [Gyula Andrássy on art] in Magyar Figyelô, 1, 1911, p. 439. Passuth, Krisztina: A Nyolcak festészete [The painting of the Eight], Budapest, Corvina, 1967, pp. 77–78. Bölöni, György: A mûvészek és Tisza István. Interjú [The artists and István Tisza] in Pesti Napló, 16 April 1911, pp. 40–42 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, p. 101. Bölöni, György: Czigány Dezsô in Aurora, 27 May 1911, pp. 279–282. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, pp. 201–202. Gerô, Ödön: Az új mûvészet és a közönség [The new art and the audiences] in Aurora, 5 August 1911, pp. 355–359 – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, p. 216. Tizenöt földszintes ház áll a Százados-utcába [Fifteen singlestorey houses in Százados utca] in Mûvészet, 10, 1911, p. 426; I.: A Fôváros új mûvésztelepe [The capital city’s artists’s colony] in Interieur, 1, 1912, 13/14, pp. 1–3.; Budapesti Cím- és Lakásjegyzék [Budapest register of addresses and apartments], Budapest, 1912, p. 797. Dezsô Czigány: Still Life, 1911–1912, oil on canvas, 55 x ~61 cm, HNG, inv. no.: F.K. 918. Felvinczi Takács, Zoltán: Mûvészeti programkiállítások és beszámolók [Art programme exhibitions and accounts] in Nyugat, 5, 1912, II, pp. 373–374. – Az Utak [The Roads Parted] III, p. 421–423. Almanach. (Képzômûvészeti lexikon), [Almanac (A lexicon of fine art)], Béla Déry, László Bányász, Ernô Margitay (eds.), Budapest, 1912. 158. Tábori, Kornél: A Pesti Napló Képtára. Száz eredeti rajz. Festôk, szobrászok kis lexikona [The gallery of Pesti Napló. One hundred original drawings. A small lexicon of painters and sculptors] in Pesti Napló, 25 December 1913, p. 69. Szendrei, János – Szentiványi, Gyula: Magyar képzômûvészek lexikona [Lexicon of Hungarian artists] I, Budapest, 1915, p. 345. Mûvészet, 15, 1916, p. 35. Bálint, Zoltán: Magyar képzômûvészeti kiállítás Belgrádban 1918 ôszén [Exhibition of Hungarian art in Belgrade in the autumn of 1918] in Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 15, 1966, pp. 119–120. Rónai, György: Intézkedések és tervek a mûvésznevelés megreformálására 1918 és 1919-en. Részletek a magyarországi mûvésznevelés történetének kéziratából. Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 19. 1970. 143. Kizárták a kommunista képzômûvészeket [Communist artists banned] in Magyarország, 20 July 1920. Kôhalmi, Béla: Az új Könyvek Könyve. 170 író, mûvész, tudós vallomása olvasmányairól [The new Book of Books. 170 writers, artists and scientists on what they read], Budapest, 1937, pp. 99–100.

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B A R K I

BÉLA CZÓBEL ‘This Hungarian painter is phenomenal. Here in Hungary even his name is unknown, but in Paris his work is discussed among painters and critics. If Kernstok is the uncrowned prince of the younger Hungarian artists, then their invisible leader is Czóbel.’ 1

Although the above quotation (suitable as an epigraph even) was not expressly a reference to the Eight but instead to a still-unorganised group of young Hungarian painters – the Hungarian fauves, to use today’s terminology – who were then ‘gravitating to Paris’, it nevertheless conveys the one-time significance of Czóbel (1883–1976) and the part he played in the coming together of the Eight. The paradox of Czóbel’s connection with the Eight was that while he was one of the key figures in the coalescing of the group, i.e. in the events leading up to its formation, in the workings of that group he occupied the role of an outside, quasi-honorary, member. His was a story unique in the group, namely that he played almost no part in its work despite being a member of it. Studies of Czóbel discuss his time with the Eight very laconically, devoting just a sentence to it in each case. Moreover, in his reminiscences and in the interviews he gave, even Czóbel himself was unable to provide much information. While his associates almost invariably regarded the time of the Eight as the best of their careers, Czóbel labelled this period one of ‘total withdrawal’.2 It was his achievement earlier on, between 1906 and 1909, the peak of his career, that made Czóbel a key figure of those move-

ments in modern Hungarian art that sought new paths. It was because of this that he was able to become an indispensable member of the Eight, albeit to all intents and purposes a member in name only.

C AREER B EGINNINGS : NAGYBÁNYA , M UNICH , PARIS The first experience of Czóbel’s career, one which was to influence his entire oeuvre, was his encounter with the art of József Rippl-Rónai. A gymnasium (grammar school) student at the time, he visited almost daily a solo exhibition by the Kaposvár painter staged in Budapest’s Hotel Royal.3 Securing his school-leaving certificate in the summer of 1902, he did not follow in the direction set by Rippl-Rónai, who had been the first to import the modern French spirit to Hungary, but instead departed for Nagybánya, the centre of plein air naturalism in the country. There he began work under the direction of Béla Grünwald Iványi, an enlightened teacher who

was particularly open to the new trends. Like many of his fellow students at Nagybánya, in the autumn of 1902 Czóbel enrolled at the Munich Academy, where he joined the class conducted by Johann Caspar von Herterich, a historicist painter whose approach was conservative. He was later instructed by Wilhelm von Diez also.4 Czóbel spent the summer of 1903 at Nagybánya and in the October of that year exhibited for the first time, in Budapest, at the autumn exhibition staged by the National Salon. There his works attracted press attention, as representatives of the Nagybánya line.5 Returning from a spell in Munich, which was almost de rigeur for Nagybánya students but which exerted no particular influence on him, Czóbel continued his painting studies not at the German institution, but in Paris, from 1903. Like many of his subsequent associates in the Eight, he, too, enrolled at the Julian Academy, where he chose as his supervisor Jean-Paul Laurens, who was popular among the young Hungarian students there. In the spring of 1904, Czóbel won the special prize in the school’s nude competition. In the very same year, work by him featured in an exhibition in the French capital.6 Discovering the animated and bustling world of B ÉLA C ZÓBEL

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G ELETT B URGESS , C . 1910

Paris, the pioneering initiatives of the great salons, the modern classics in the Pellerin collection, the galleries of Ambroise Vollard and other art dealers, and the works of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne, as well as those of other neoimpressionist and post-impressionist artists, he became increasingly drawn to the latest currents in art. In the autumn of 1905, he penned an account of new works at the Salon d’Automne, voicing his liking for them and calling attention in his article to the fauves, who were then making their appearance under the leadership of Matisse.7 Armed with around a dozen newly painted canvases, Czóbel reappeared in Nagybánya in the summer of 1906. Inspired by the modern milieu of Paris, his loudly coloured ‘poster-like’ works disarranged the world of the artists’ colony, which was accustomed to sober plein air painting. He was caught in the cross-fire of heated debates. Becoming suspicious, his perplexed

B USY S TREET

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M ONTPARNASSE , 1906–1907

teachers warned that he would ‘infect’ his fellows during the short summer season. Under Czóbel’s influence, some of the young students at the colony began to paint works of a neo-impressionist or post-impressionist kind. Many of the embryonic painters mocked by their teachers as ‘neos’ went in the autumn of that year not to Munich, but to Paris to study, and even to exhibit. These paintings by Czóbel sparked a palace revolution at Nagybánya, but they cannot be regarded as fauve works par excellence. For this reason, the ‘neos movement’ (principally the start of it) that Czóbel generated cannot be discussed under the heading fauvism, although that particular summer (1906) was definitely a turning point in Czóbel’s evolution into a fauve.8

C ZÓBEL

FAUVE

From among his Hungarian fellow artists (and, we might add, his non-French colleagues also), it was Czóbel who participated the most pronouncedly in the French fauve movement. Works he produced in the final quarter of 1906 and early the next year can already be firmly linked to the fauves. It was in the autumn of 1906 that paintings by him first appeared in the room at the Salon d’Automne used by the fauves.9 In the years that followed, Czóbel consistently displayed his works along with theirs at exhibitions staged at the Salon d’Automne and at the Salon des Indépendants. Primarily by way of these exhibition appearances as a member of the French fauve group, he became, around 1906–1907, a known figure in the Paris art world.

Czóbel’s position now strengthened. For a brief period around 1907 and 1908, he was in the forefront of West European modernism and among the most progressive artists in Paris. Important evidence of this has been placed in the public domain by publications brought out in connection with the ‘Hungarian Fauves’ exhibition in Budapest.11 Of the sources in them, special mention should be made of ‘The Wild Men of Paris’,12 a work by the American writer, poet, painter, and journalist Gelett Burgess (1866–1951). This was put together during Burgess’ sojourn in France in 1908 on the basis of interviews with eight artists described by Matisse as the most progressive.13 In the light of a recently discovered source previously unknown in the international specialist literature, it was not just in the columns of The Architectural Record that Burgess immortalised the fauve and cubist painters in the front rank of modernism, among them Béla Czóbel. A year before publication of his much-cited article, he published an anthology of short stories in which he drew on his experiences in Paris in 1908.14 Of the artists interviewed by him, Braque and Metzinger do not feature in this literary work. On the other hand, with an obvious naturalness he does mention Czóbel, as a significant figure in the new Parisian movements. The essence of the stories is that the fictitious main protagonist, Haulick Smagg, paints pictures in his New York studio that are similar to those in Paris, or even rawer and wilder, without knowing anything at all about the Paris painters or the movements to which they belong: ‘He, who had never been in France, who had never seen a single disciple of its school, was of ” les fauves” – he was a Wild

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Beast – wilder, if possible, than Dérain, as wild as Czobel or Picasso. [...] The rudely carven African gods that had delighted and stimulated Dérain, the Alaskan totem poles to which Picasso was indepted for his fury, the Aztec graven images that had urged Czobel to his ferocity, were all unknown to Haulick Smagg. […] Dérain’s shrill blues and tumultuous reds, Czobel’s harsh greens, and Picasso’s hot yellows Smagg, in his artistic orgy, rewove into crazier forms.’15 As documentation of Czóbel’s belonging to the avant-garde elite, it is worth quoting another source, likewise hitherto unknown. This is a short memoir from the pen of his French colleague Lucien Mainssieux, who got to know Czóbel by way of a loose group formed by his fellow painters Jules Flandrin, Jacqueline Marvall, and the American Max Weber. ‘Around 1907 I found myself in a Hungarian set consisting of Zichy, Ervin and Jenô Körmendi-Frim, Berény (a real sheep type), Baron Hatvany (who, as I understand, had bought his noble rank from the Pope), Perlrott (a sorry bohemian), and the astonishing Béla Czóbel (German: Zobel [sable]), who counted as a hero in that small world. It has to be said that his fierce talent towered above all that loud mediocrity. His merit was that he discovered Matisse’s fauvism before anyone else was interested in it. After that he calmed down a lot, but since he no longer made scandals no one talked about him any more. The seed which overturned the spirit of French painting did not stem from us: this wild wind blew here from the east, from the Russian steppes or from the Hungarian puszta. It wasn’t Matisse who caused or brought it, but Béla Czóbel, a young and sombre hero transfigured through wild art with whom I became acquainted on his arrival in Paris. But this painter found the good earth required for his full development in the cultured hotbed milieu of Matisse and in our refined French school. Matisse’s restless soul discovered the tipping point in his own renewal in the barbarian schemas, the role-model of concentrated energy and brutal coarseness, and the huge ultramarine blue and cadmium nudes framed in forceful black contours that were brought by this Hungarian. Exerting great influence, this man lived in a studio in Vaugigard in all the primitive austerity of a home ghetto, like a first settler in his cell. On the wall there was a fine, expressive, and imposing figure of Bonaparte, sincere and strong in demeanour, and the bronze mask of a conquistador. There was a bed, two chairs, a waste-bucket as in a prison, a table, and the things needed by a painter, nothing more. On the wall there were small samples of Negro and fervent art. It was this that enthralled Matisse around 1907–1908.’16

B ÉLA C ZÓBEL (?): P ARISIAN S TREET , C . 1906

The above recollections, ecstatic and perhaps a little excessive in tone, and the disclosures in Gelett Burgess’ writings serve to remind us that one of the greatest losses to twentieth-century Hungarian art is the disappearance without trace of those fauve works by Czóbel that could confirm statements based on these documents, written ones in the great majority of cases.17 At the same time, more thorough analysis of the texts cited yields additional interesting information. On the one hand, this sheds light on hitherto-unexamined traits in Czóbel’s art that can be linked to primitivism. On the other, it points out that one of the main reasons for Czóbel’s aloofness from the work of the Eight may have been the very fact that he was known in Paris and was already embedded in the local artistic community and in the international modernist elite.

C ZÓBEL THE ‘P RIMITIVIST ’ (?) Up until now, Czóbel’s primitivism has been investigated only in connection with fauvism. In reminiscences, documents from the time, press reviews, and in letters also, he appears unequivocally as one of the wildest, rawest, and, if you like, most ‘primitive’ figures. Louis Vauxcelles, the ‘godfather’ of the group, dubbed him an unpolished fauve,18 Ahlers-Hestermann, the chronicler of German artists living in Paris, wrote of him in his autobiographical pieces as the wildest of the fauves,19 and Gelett Burgess judged him to be wilder than Derain.20 In her autobiographical novel, Gertrude Stein said that Czóbel was a fiercer fauve than Matisse,21 the leader of the

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B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : F EMALE P ORTRAIT , 1907 (M ISSING )

B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : S ITTING W OMAN , C . 1912

group. Press reports in France and in Hungary likewise emphasised Czóbel’s brutally raw, ‘barbarian’, wild, and primitive character,22 while fellow painters from Hungary were taken aback by Czóbel’s ‘wild’ turn.23 But on what level was Czóbel, similarly to Picasso, Vlaminck, and Derain, preoccupied by tribal art, by the culture of bygone overseas civil-

isations, and by the works of medieval masters labelled ‘primitive’ by these artists?24 In short, what was the nature of the ties, if any, that bound Czóbel to primitivism? That Aztec carvings influenced his art is mentioned only by Gelett Burgess, albeit consistently in both works by him cited above. The source for Burgess’s allusion is unknown. At the

B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : L YING F EMALE N UDE , 1907

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B ÉLA C ZÓBEL AND HIS WIFE I SOLDE D AIG DAUGHTER L ISA , 1910 S

AND THEIR

same time, reference to a bronze mask of a conquistador25 and to African tribal art is to be found in Mainssieux’s reminiscences. According to the testimony of another recently discovered source, Czóbel was at this point already regarded in artists’ circles in Paris as a characteristic representative of primitivism. In a letter to Mainssieux dated summer 1907, Jules Flandrin mentions that Max Weber, a mutual friend, had sent him an interesting picture postcard from Venice: ‘I’ve received from Weber a photograph of one of the primitive mosaics in St Mark’s, Venice. My first impression was that it was a drawing by a savage. It was extremely Matisse Czóbel, set in rings in a dome, and looked at more closely the naïveté of the detail is very entertaining.’26 The fact that Czóbel’s contemporaries linked his art at this time with the masters of medieval mosaics is no proof that he actually concerned himself with them, in other words that ‘primitives’ did in fact influence Czóbel’s art. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the ‘primitivism’ of the Hungarian painter did exert an influence on a painter from Livorno who at this time was still unknown. Paul Alexander, a mutual friend, recalled the matter thus: ‘In his [Modigliani’s] drawings reside inventiveness and the simplification, the stripping down, of forms. This is because he was influenced by African art. Modigliani reconstructed the lines of the human face, adjusting them to primitive schemas. [...] During his research into simplification of drawing, he was likewise fascinated by certain paint-

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ings by Rousseau the customs officer and by market-place figures by Czóbel.’27 For the moment, it is only these written documents that offer a (rather uncertain) picture concerning the level on which the primitivist wave then reaching Czóbel’s contemporaries played a role in his art. At the same time, it seems unlikely that in the milieu and constant company of not only Béla Hein, József Brummer, and Max Weber, but also Matisse, Derain, and Picasso, Czóbel would have been left untouched by this particular trend.28 Unfortunately, the works that he produced in this period have disappeared without trace. One of Czóbel’s most unusual paintings, one showing primitivist influence, is likewise missing; it is known merely in the form of a black-and-white reproduction.29 Primitivist traits can also be discovered on a portrait of a woman30 painted in 1907 but lost since then, and on a hitherto completely unknown female nude by the artist. An old photograph of this last work found among the papers of György Bölöni31 is at present our only pictorial source for the almost one dozen nude paintings created by Czóbel in his fauve-primitivist period, exhibited in the fauve rooms of the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d’Automne respectively, but since then missing without exception.

‘P ARIS IS NOT LOOKING THE O THER WAY ’ After the autumn of 1906, events in Hungary exerted a diminishing influence on Czóbel’s work. In 1907, he was invited to the Nagybánya artists’ colony to teach, but did not go there. Instead, he accepted an invitation from Kernstok, spending the summer on the artist’s property at Nyergesújfalú. He had established closer ties with Kernstok while in Paris, in the autumn–winter of 1906–1907. Czóbel had exerted a powerful influence on his older colleague in the French capital already, but at Nyergesújfalú – as during his re-appearance at Nagybánya earlier on – he became the leaven for a modernist fermentation of crucial significance from the point of view of the Eight. One year later, Ödön Márffy, too, linked in to this local process.32 However, at Nyergesújfalú Czóbel performed the role of catalyst only; the paintings he produced there he exhibited not in Hungary but in Paris, at Berthe Weill’s salon.33 Mme. Weill’s modest premises served as the first exhibition space for the most progressive painters of the age. This salon was significant with regard to the fauve movement also, and Czóbel’s solo exhibition there was an important waypoint in the

R ÓBERZT B ERÉNY : S INGER OF THE P ARIS C ABARET , 1906–1907 • C AT . NO . 34.

short period of his career spent by the artist within the Hungarian fauves group. Of those artists who would later make up the Eight, only Czóbel staged a solo exhibition in Paris. This, too, could be a serious argument for his preferring the French capital to Budapest. He took no part in organisational work in Hungary. During his time in Nyergesújfalú,

B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : C ABARET T HEATRE IN P ARIS (R EVERSE OF C ABARET T HEATRE IN P ARIS ), 1907 • C AT . N O .122.

he associated with Kernstok most of all and, naturally enough, concentrated exclusively on painting. In late 1907, MIÉNK was constituted. Czóbel was a founding member of this, through Kernstok. However, he never really took part in its activity, apart from sending works for its first two exhibitions. B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : M OULIN

DE LA

G ALETTE , C . 1907–1908 (M ISSING )

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The reasons for Czóbel’s remaining aloof from the work of the Eight should probably be sought in the fact that he was – as the above sources all indicate – trying to succeed in Paris instead. For example, in one recollection he relates that ‘I was often with Modigliani and his friend, and with Dr. Paul Alexander, who is still alive today and who at that time was being awarded his doctorate. We met in a studio somewhere near the rue Douai, in a place that had no owner. There worked a painter by the name of Doucet, with whom Charles Vildrac, the poet and then art dealer on the rue de Seine, was in touch. Everything was very different from Montmartre and the Hungarians. M. Paul Alexandre had brought some hashish, une sorte de pâté verte, que nous avons mâché. It was probably insufficient and had no effect on me. I went with Modi to the Caf. Con., which at that time was called the Européen. I’d like to mention also the Atelier Humbert, where I went with Berény to paint nudes of an evening. That’s where Derain, Marquet, Manguin, etc. used to go, painters who are now famous but who then were not yet so. It must have been around 1906–1907.’34 As well as with these painters, Czóbel associated with the above-mentioned American Max Weber and his French friends Marval, Mainnsieux, and Flandrin. He also knew Metzinger, Braque, Le Fauconnier, Matisse, and Picasso, and was close to Dunoyer de Segonzac. In addition, he was on familiar terms with Friesz, Valtat,35 and others among the fauves. At the same time, he was also known in non-French circles in Paris, for example in the society of Gertrude Stein and especially in that of her brother Leo,36 as well as in the Central and East European and German Jewish circles that in Paris constituted a separate clique.37 In these circles his ties with Adolphe Basler were highly significant.38 During his sojourns in Paris, Czóbel did not really seek the company of his Hungarian colleagues. There, too, he spent time with Kernstok, but the majority of reminiscences tell that he sought company among foreigners, seldom among his compatriots. With some malice, Géza Bornemissza recalled matters as follows: ‘Czóbel was terribly selfish. We were at the Steins and I was talking with Picasso. It was not then the custom to introduce oneself. I knew who he was, but he didn’t know me. Later on Czóbel appeared. Picasso asked him who I was. Czóbel replied: “A Hungarian” – and waved his hand. [...] Czóbel wrote on his studio door “Frappez la porte, après dites votre [nom] S.V.P.” He wanted to open the door only when he’d heard someone’s name. Csaba Perlrott once played a trick on him. He knocked and said that he was the man who brought the money. Czóbel opened the door to him.’39 B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : R ED N UDE S CULPTURE II, 1909

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B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : N UDE S TUDY , 1910 (M ISSING )

Czóbel had no team spirit: he concentrated on his own career, seeing as his goal success on the Western art scene primarily. One of the most important elements in his ties to Paris may have been the very fact that he achieved real, serious successes in the French capital. Of those who belonged to the Eight group formed subsequently, he was – according to our present knowledge – the only artist who not only regularly exhibited his paintings in Paris, but also sold them there, which on a certain level contributed to his livelihood in the French capital. We know that he sold paintings off the walls of the Salon d’Automne as early as 1905. Still missing today, these works were purchased by Klaus Pringsheim,40 Thomas Mann’s brother-in-law. We know that at the solo exhibition he staged at Berthe Weill’s in 1908 pictures by him were likewise sold.41 Moreover, the owner of the gallery herself acquired pictures from the artist.42 In an interview given during his old age, Czóbel, told of the sale in France of some of his early works even.43

B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : R ED N UDE S CULPTURE I, 1908

A PPEARANCES IN H UNGARY In the years before the formation of the Eight, György Bölöni endeavoured to create for Czóbel a reputation in Hungary also, and especially business opportunities in the country. His flat in Paris already served as storage place for Czóbel’s work.44 There he managed to find buyers for a few pictures,45 although from his undertakings in Hungary he hoped to secure many more. In the summer of 1909, Bölöni tried to create in Kolozsvár, Nagyvárad, and Arad – large provincial towns in Hungary – a market for pictures by mainly young painters who had spent time in Paris and who were committed to innovation. For the travelling exhibition he organised under the title ‘New Hungarian Painters’, Bölöni managed to acquire two Czóbel pictures. This was, however, not Czóbel’s suggestion, Bölöni insisted that there be pictures by him in the exhibition.

C ZÓBEL

OUTSIDE HIS STUDIO IN

P ARIS

IN SPRING

1908

At the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition, held in the Kálmán Könyves Salon at the end of that year, Czóbel featured probably with a lent, and therefore ‘Not for Sale’, landscape and in all likelihood the two still lifes that had featured in the travelling exhibition and that had remained with György Bölöni when it was over. Czóbel was not present in person at the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition and played no part in the organisational work that surrounded the formation of the ‘New Pictures’ group of artists; at this time, too, he was in Paris. The main role in his appearance was once again probably Kernstok’s. On the basis of the known sources, it seems that Czóbel experienced a serious artistic crisis in this period. He hardly worked at all. From the summer to the autumn of 1909, he was in Volosca, where he probably made only drawings and did not paint.46 It was not his most recent paintings – in other words, those made in 1909 – that were submitted for the ‘New Pictures’ exhibition, but rather – if our hypothe-

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sis regarding reconstruction is correct – works from 1907 and 1908. As a result of the latest research, Czóbel’s participation in the exhibitions staged by the Eight can now be reconstructed. If we look merely at the fact that Czóbel displayed pictures at these exhibitions on one occasion only (in other words, that with his three paintings at the ‘New Pictures’ show he achieved membership of the group for life), this does not in itself seem a significant breakthrough. However, if we bear in mind that Krisztina Passuth was compelled forty-five years ago to admit that ‘we have no knowledge of his pictures from the period of the Eight’,47 the finding is nevertheless important.

242

Two Czóbel still lifes painted in 1908 that have appeared on the international art market in recent years are in all probability identical with the works exhibited in the Kálman Könyves Salon.48 Although because of his own omission from the grouping Rippl-Rónai had problems with the group of young artists who had split from the MIÉNK without informing him in advance, he nevertheless visited their exhibition. Elek Petrovics recalled: ‘He [Rippl-Rónai] found much worthy of acknowledgment in the show. He was very much interested in it. He considered the two still lifes by Czóbel to be the most complete.’49 Arguments for and against in connection with the identity of the third pictures shown have been raging for decades.50 In the light of

our knowledge today, the present author is inclined to accept the original hypothesis, namely that the landscape put on display at the very beginning of the year 1910 is identical with the painting Courtyard in Nyergesújfalú now kept at the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs. This, too, was made well before 1909.51 ‘New Pictures’ was the first truly progressive exhibition in Hungary to represent a moreor-less uniform direction. But one of the most important links between the eight (plus one) artists who exhibited was, nevertheless, that all were young painters who had spent time in the French capital, with many of them actually residing there during the period the exhibition was on. The show represented a turning point: one after another the exhibitors moved back to Hungary. Afterwards only occasionally did they return to the scene of their studies, Paris. Of the Eight, only Czóbel did not return to Hungary at this time, instead settling in France. It was symbolic that he moved with his family to Montmorency at the very time of the group’s most important exhibition, the one staged in the National Salon in 1911.52 Behind his decision to stay away there was, we may surmise, not only the obvious income issue, but also a certain lack of interest in the group’s activity, since he failed to send a single work to the exhibition or even to view it. He participated neither in the organising of the exhibition, nor in the administrative work necessary in the time for which it ran. Moreover, he did not react in connection with the Tisza controversy, which provoked a response from every member of the Eight except him. Nor did he contribute to the well-mounted press campaign, which was probably influenced by the group. He even stayed away from its regular coffee-house discussions, their lectures in art galleries, and even the ‘fuss’, their term for the commotion that surrounded them. We are aware of no letter, picture postcard, or document of any other kind that would indicate his maintenance of links with the group at this time, not even one that informed its members of developments, although in this period, principally during the exhibition itself, the Eight were in fact together and very frequently in touch with their acquaintances and friends. The fact is that Czóbel was in close connection only with Kernstok and Berény, coming in contact with them in Paris especially and with the latter at Nyergesújfalú. Czóbel’s link to the Eight, or more correctly the link ascribed to him, was his name only. In the National Salon almanac published the following year, the curriculum vitae for Czóbel makes no mention of his participation in the group. György Bölöni’s series of articles on the artists of the Eight published in the periodical

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Aurora at the time of the National Salon exhibition of 1911 lacks a study only on Czóbel. It is likewise significant that four years later, in his study in the gala catalogue of the San Francisco World Exposition, Bölöni makes no mention of Czóbel in his analysis of the most modern trends and of the Eight.53 However, one chronicler of the 1911 exhibition of the Eight does provide interesting information on the artist: ‘Béla Czóbel features in the title only. He is in Paris, working. The news is that more than 100 pictures by him await the judgment of the public and that probably we’ll see them separately in the autumn in a collective exhibition.’54 Where Andor Cserna’s information came from we do not know; nor are we aware that preparations of any kind were under way for a large solo Czóbel exhibition. We can be certain that no solo exhibition was staged for Béla Czóbel in Hungary in the period suggested. Moreover, it is questionable whether he really did have several hundred works at this time. But if he did have them, why would he want to display them at a solo exhibition and not jointly with the Eight? What we do know is that Czóbel did not send pictures to the group’s last exhibition, held in 1912, and that once again he did not view the collected works of his associates. Despite his staying away, his seven fellow members insisted that Czóbel remain a member of the group. His name was included on the exhibition catalogues of the group right up to the end as a reference. Well-sounding, it served as a symbol of the initiatives of renewal importing the spirit of Western endeavours and of the progressive thinking of Paris.

C ZÓBEL ’ S WORKS AND A CTIVITY AS A M EMBER OF THE E IGHT , UP TO THE F IRST WORLD WAR The majority of the works made by Czóbel as a member of the Eight are unknown. Recent years have seen the emergence of a copper engraving probably made during the artist’s stay in Volosca in 1909 and the re-emergence of a still life composition from 1908, a photograph of a highly similar, 1909, version of which has come to light among the Ernô Kállai papers.55 In recent years, two paintings made in 1910 have emerged in the art trade and, apart from these, we also know of a reproduction of a drawing likewise dated to 1910.56 In Mimi Kratochwill’s study of Czóbel, there is a reproduction of a painting of the artist’s daughter Lisa that was made in the first half of

R AOUL D UFY : L YING N UDE , 1909 –1910 • C AT . NO .131.2. • © P HOTO CNAC / MNAM, DIST .RMN / PHOTOGRAPHER R AOUL D UFY : P ROVENCE L ANDSCAPE , 1905 • C AT . NO .131. • © M USÉE D 'A RT M ODERNE / R OGER -V IOLLET

the 1910s, as well as an aquarelle entitled Le Bistrot à Corneille and dated 1913 by the painter.57 As well as the above-mentioned works, a photo-

graph of a landscape made in Nyergesújfalú came to light during the preparations for our present exhibition. Found in the papers of the art histo-

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B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : D ETAIL

B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : H ARBOUR , C . 1909–1912

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128

rian Béla Horváth that are now kept at the Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, this may provide a basis for judging the direction taken by Czóbel’s painting during the existence of the Eight. According to the testimony of the sources, Czóbel’s artistic crisis deepened at this time; he painted little, producing instead only drawings and aquarelles that brought to his art a growing distance from the vehement fauve style and a calming down. His visits to Hungary became rarer and rarer. He exhibited in Hungary seldom; there it was more the case that others, not the artist himself, arranged for work by him to be shown. In Paris, Czóbel had exhibited once already at the major salons,58 and in addition had featured in two collective exhibitions staged at Berthe Weill’s, in March 1909 and December 1913 respectively. At the Nagybánya jubilee exhibition in 1912, he displayed only earlier (pre-1906) works that could be linked to the artists’ colony,59 and at the ‘International Postimpressionist Exhibition’ staged at the House of Artists in 1913 he showed only works of graphic art, although he did win a prize with them. All these works are unknown to us, but with regard to a drawing by him published in the periodical Nyugat the awarding of the prize appears in an interesting light.

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N YERGESÚJFALU , 1913 (M ISSING )

B ÉLA C ZÓBEL : S TUDY , C . 1913 (M ISSING )

In the summer of 1913, Czóbel again visited Kernstok’s country property. Indicative of the deepening of his artistic crisis at this time is the fact that he painted little there. Instead, he produced drawings and aquarelles that were restrained in their subject-matter and arguably more subdued. These he displayed at the ‘Open’ exhibition at the House of Artists in 1913 and subsequently at the ‘Grand Exhibition’ in 1914. Likewise linkable to the graphic art genre is his participation in an earlier, Hungarian, undertaking60 and his featuring in a graphic art travelling exhibition that visited a number of American cities in 1913–1914.61 On the other hand, works by him did not appear at two exhibitions of outstanding importance for the Eight: the Sonderbund show in Cologne in 1912, the first large-scale international review of Expressionism, and the so-called Panama-Pacific International Exhibition, the first representative overseas exhibition of Hungarian painting, at the San Francisco World Exposition held in 1915. This was in spite of the fact that work by members of the group was very much included by the organisers in both exhibitions.62 For want of the works required, our knowledge is limited, with the result that we know very little concerning the artist’s style at this time. On the basis of those works that are known, it is

probable that Czóbel did not side with his associates in the classicist change of direction so characteristic of the Eight. At the same time, in his fauve period already he had gone beyond the spirit of Cézanne that was likewise characteristic of the group. Cubism and futurism influenced him hardly at all. On the other hand, his fauve character remained noticeable on the surface, sometimes looser and more lyrical, but on the other hand sometimes analogous with the brutal power of his beginnings, in dense works that are concentrated in an icon-like way. Summing up, it may be said that the uncovering and writing up of Czóbel’s work before the First World War still requires additional research. After investigation of the written sources (in French for the most part) and discovery of missing works (the overwhelming majority of which are, presumably, in France), we may be able to form a clearer picture of that period of Czóbel’s career during which he was present in the history of modern Hungarian painting as a symbol most of all.

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Notes 1

6 7

12 13 14

15 16

‘Az Új Magyar Festôk. Megnyílt a kiállítás’. [The show of the New Hungarian Painters] Kolozsvári Hírlap, 30 May 1909 issue. 7. – Az Utak II.: 96. Two years earlier, László Márkus had put it similarly: ‘Of the Hungarians among the “Indépendants”, the visible head of the entire company is Béla Czóbel.’ Marco [Márkus, László]: ‘A tavaszról és egyebekrôl’. [About spring and other matters] A Hét, 14 April 1907 issue. 251. – Az Utak I.: 221. Interview by Béla Horváth with Béla Czóbel on 24 September 1961. Papers of the art historian Béla Horváth. MTA MKI, ltsz.: MDK–C–I–217.; Látogatás Czóbel Béla mûtermében. Csapó György riportja, 1973. október 12. – Magyar Rádió Hangarchívum Hungarian Sound Archive, D 2288/2/2. Czóbel, Béla: Önéletrajz levélben. Az új magyar mûvészet önarcképe. [Self-portrait in a letter. The self – portrait of new Hungarian art] Budapest, [1945], 15–16. – Entitled Impressions by József Rippl-Róna (1890–1900), the exhibition was on display from 22 December 1900 in an unoccupied flat in apartment block belonging to the Hotel Royal. According to an entry in the Matrikelbücher der Bildende Künste München, 1809–1920, he enrolled, under the name Béla Czóbel [Zobel], in Johann Casper Herterich’s preparatory drawing class on 30 October 1902. (In a number of places in the specialist literature, the last mentioned is featured, wrongly, as Ludwig Herterich). Source: www.bayerischelandesbibliothek-online.de/matrikelbuecher. Kézdi-Kovács, László: A Nemzeti Szalon ôszi tárlata. [The autumn exhibition of the National Salon] Pesti Hírlap, 18 October 1903 issue. 5. – Az Utak I.: 56–57. At this show, at the Salon du Champ de Mars, he featured with two pictures. Czóbel, Béla: Levél a párisi ôszi szalonról. [Letter on the autumn salon in Paris] Modern Mûvészet, 1, 1905, 2. [Among the advertisements 9–11.] For more on this see Barki, Gergely: ‘A vaddá válás evolúciója Czóbel Béla korai portréin’. [The evolution into a fauve on the early self-portrits of Béla Czobel]. In: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya. Ed. by Krisztina Passuth, György Szücs. Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery, 2006. 201–216. It is wrongly spread in the specialist literature that works by Czóbel featured in the fauve room at the Salon d’Automne in 1905 already. Braque, too, was mistaken when he remembered exhibiting with him in the fauves’ room at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906, because this event took place a year later. See Braque’s letter to Czóbel written in 1952 quoted in Genthon, István: Czóbel. Budapest, 1961. 20. In many places in the French and Hungarian press of the time, it can be read that works by Czóbel were exhibited in the fauve room at the Salon d’Automne in 1906. With regard to whether this was the first occasion of their being shown, see Puy, Michel: Les Fauves. La Phalange, 15 November 1907 issue. – Republished in Dagen, Philippe: Pour ou contre le Fauvisme. Paris, 1994. 144. It is important to draw attention to the fact that although Czóbel belonged to the wider circle of the French fauve group (in other words, he was not a member of the fauve group that made its debut in 1905), the names of Valtat and Puy (for example), too, appear in the specialist literature on fauvism only a good deal later. If we look at the style only, unequivocally wilder and more pronouncedly fauve-type works were created in Czóbel’s atelier at this time than by Puy, Camoin, Valtat, Manguin, or Marquet. Barthélémy, Sophie: ‘Pan! Dans l’oeil… A magyar Vadak fogadtatása a párizsi szalonokban a korabeli francia kritikák tükrében (1904–1914)’. The reception of Hungarian Fauves by contemporary French critics In: Hungarian Fauves 2006. Op. cit. 72–73. – Also Barki 2006. Op. cit. 201–216. Burgess, Gelette: The Wild Men of Paris. The Architectural Record, May 1910. 400–414. Fry, Edward F.: ‘Cubism 1907–1908. An Early Eyewitness Account’. The Art Bulletin, 48. 1966. 70. Burgess, Gelette: Lady Méchante or Life as It Should Be: Being Divers Precious Episodes in the Life of a Naughty Nonpareille. New York, 1909. Ibid., 349–350. The text on Czóbel by Lucien Mainssieux (1885–1958) came to me from M. François Roussier, from his study on Mainssieux and Marval, in connection with my research regarding Jacqueline Marvall, touched upon in my Czóbel study published in the catalogue Hungarian Fauves. M. Roussier is the keeper of the Marval papers in La Tronche, where many documents connected with Czóbel are preserved. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Lôrinc Czell for offering to help search out documents. Some of the works made by Czóbel at this time are presumably in private hands in France. When the First World War broke out, Czóbel had to leave Paris. Earlier works by him remained in his

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atelier, which was seized by the French state, which later, in 1921, sold it at a public auction. ‘M. Czobel, fauve inculte, hongrois ou polonais’. Vauxcelles, Louis: ‘Le Salon des Indépendants’. Gil Blas, 20 March 1907 issue. – Quoted by Oppler, Ellen C.: Fauvism Reexamined. New York – London, 1967. 18. ‘Der Wildesten einer war dagegen der Ungar Béla Czobel’. Ahlers-Hestermann, Friedrich: Pause vor dem dritten Akt. Hamburg, 1949. 167. See above. Stein, Gertrude: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. […] For example, ‘This painter [Kees van Dongen] is the complete opposite of M. Czóbel, of whom we were speaking. The latter is as brutal as Dongen is sensitive and affected.’ Malpel, Charles: ‘Quelques Salons. Petites Expositions’. In: idem: Notes sur l’art d’aujourd’hui et peut-être du demain. Paris – Toulouse, 1910. 180. For example, a letter from István Csók to Lajos Fülep dated Paris, 26 March 1907. Fülep Lajos levelezése I. 1904–1919. Correspondence of Lajos Fülöp I. Szerk. F. Csanak Dóra. Budapest, 1990. 72–73. This term (les primitifs) still lives on in the French specialist terminology for the art of the Middle Ages. There may have been a misunderstanding here. Letter from Jules Flandrin to Lucien Mainssieux, 8 July 1907 (Paris). I hereby thank M. François Roussier for a photocopy of the letter. In this, Flandrin made a schematic sketch of the dome in question next to the text quoted. The dome was probably the famous Genesis dome in St. Mark’s Basilica. Paul Alexandre is quoted by his son, in Alexandre, Noël: Modigliani inconnu. Paris, 1993. 65. Béla Hein (1883–1931), a critic and newspaper correspondent then living in Paris, was one of the first collectors of, and dealers in, tribal art. József Brummer (1883–1947), a pupil of Matisse who began as a sculptor, dealt in African sculpture, similarly as one of the first to do so. For more on this see Passuth, Krisztina: A festô és modellje. Henri Rousseau: Joseph Brummer portréja (1909) Kép és recepció. [The painter and his model. The portrait of Joseph Brummer by Henri Rousseau] Mûvészettörténeti Értesítô, 51. 2002. 225–249. Béla Czóbel: Moulin de la Galette, 1908. First to reproduce it was Gelett Burgess; see Burgess 1910. Op. cit. Béla Czóbel: Portrait of a Woman, 1907. Oil, canvas, mark bottom left: Czóbel 07. This work was likewise first reproduced by Gelett Burgess; see Burgess 1910. Op. cit. OSzK Kézirattár, Levelestár, Fond 127/581/83. Czóbel’s influence on Kernstok can be documented beyond all doubt, and it is indicative that Kernstok painted an important, representative portrait of the younger painter at Nyergesújfalú (Károly Kernstok: Czóbel képmása [Portrait of Béla Czóbel], 1907. Oil, canvas, 101.4 x 70 cm, mark top left. K. K. MNG, ltsz.: 6826.). Nevertheless, in the view of the present author, Czóbel played a role not just in Kernstok’s switching to the fauve style. He thinks it conceivable that in the following year, 1908, he may have exerted an influence on Márffy, too, despite the fact that they never met there. Czóbel’s influence may have reached Márffy on the one hand through Kernstok and on the other hand indirectly, possibly through a few works left at Nyergesújfalu. The solo exhibition at Berthe Weill’s took place in March 1908, featuring approximately thirty oil paintings and just as many drawings. Letter from Béla Czóbel to Endre Bajomi Lázár, 20 July 1964. PIM Kézirattár, V. 5253/164. Part of the letter is published in Bajomi Lázár, Endre: A Montmartre. Budapest, 1967. 194–195. The ‘studio without an owner’ was in fact a place in the rue Delta that Paul Alexandre rented for his painter friends. Cf.: Noël 1993. Op. cit. 1. That Modigliani was pleased to meet up with Czóbel is related in Paul Alexandre’s reminiscences. Ibid. 59. For his getting to know Friesz and Valtat, see Látogatás Czóbel Béla mûtermében [A visit in Béla Czóbels’s studio]. Interview. Csapó György riportja, 12 October 1973. – Magyar Rádió Hangarchívum, D 2288/2/2. According to reminiscences by András Mikola and Géza Bornemisza, the Hungarians maintained contact with Leo Stein primarily. Czóbel may have known Leo quite well, since he made two drawings of him. Silver, Kenneth E. – Romy Golan: The Circle of Montparnasse. Jewish Artists in Paris 1905–1945. New York, 1985. 13–14. For more on this, see Barki 2006. Op. cit. 212–213. Interview by Béla Horváth with Géza Bornemisza [n. d.]. Béla Horváth papers. – MTA MKI Adattár, ltsz.: MDK–C–I–217. Interview by Béla Horváth with Béla Czóbel [n. d.]. Béla Horváth papers. – MTA MKI Adattár, ltsz.: MDK–C–I–217. It was at this time that one of his most fauve-like works, his Man in a Straw Hat, c. 1906–1907 (Chicago, R. S. Johnson Fine

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Art), first changed hands. In connection with this, see Barki 2006. Op. cit. 212, 216. Jacqueline Marval owned a 1906 Czóbel still life that she acquired from Berthe Weill in a swap. The work was auctioned in 1932 and is at present missing. It is likely that Mlle. Weill had a number of pictures by Czóbel, but currently little information is available to us regarding her papers and effects. Interview by Béla Horváth with Béla Czóbel, 24 September 1961 [n. d.]. Béla Horváth papers. – MTA MKI Adattár, ltsz.: MDK–C–I–217. There were approximately twenty Czóbel pictures in Bölöni’s flat around 1906. See Bölöni, György: Friss szemmel [With a fresh eye] . Sajtó alá rend. Erki Edit. Budapest, 1968. 621. Párizstól pocsolyavárosig. Bölöni György és Itóka levélnaplója 1906–1912. Vál., a jegyzeteket és az elôszót írta: Nagy Csaba [From Paris to puddle-town. Letter-diary of György Bölöni and Itóka. Ed. Csaba Nagy], Budapest, 2005. 31, 54. For more on this, see Barki 2006. Op. cit. 214. From Krisztina Passuth’s preface to A Nyolcak és aktivisták köre. [The circle of the Eight and the Activists] Katalógus. Székesfehérvár, Csók István Képtár, 1965. Szerk. és bev. Passuth Krisztina, K. Kovalovszky Márta. Székesfehérvár, 1965. 5. The works emerged in 2007 at an auction at Sotheby’s in New York and later came to Hungary. In connection with the identification of the two still lifes, see Barki, Gergely: ‘Czóbel Béla: Virágcsendélet, 1908.’ Kieselbach Galéria tavaszi képaukciója. Budapest, 2008. 174–177, and Barki, Gergely: ‘Czóbel Béla: Csendélet, 1908.’ Virág Judit Galéria ôszi aukciója. Budapest, 2008. 102–107. Petrovics, Elek: ‘Töredékes feljegyzések Szinyeirôl’ [Fragmentary notes on Szinyei]. – Szépmûvészeti Múzeum Könyvtár, Petrovics-colligatum, coll. 1. – Quoted in Molnos, Péter: ‘Petrovics Elek (1873–1945) az ember. Kései kárpótlás egy elmaradt lakomáért’. In ‘Emberek, és nem frakkok’. A magyar mûvészettörténet-írás nagy alakjai. Tudománytörténeti esszégyûjtemény. Szerk. Bardoly István, Markója Csilla. Budapest, 2006. 239. Information from Ferenc Romváry , based on verbal information from Dr. Antal Németh, a former owner of the picture, and on information given to Németh by the owner before him. See Romváry, Ferenc: ‘A modem magyar képtár története. Új szerzemények I.’ [The history of the Modern Hungarian PictureGallery] A Janus Pannonius Múzeum Évkönyve, 1968. Pécs, 1968. 224. Zsuzsa Mendöl does not think it likely that this was the work that featured at the Kálmán Könyves Salon under the title Landscape. See Mendöl, Zsuzsa: Czóbel Béla két festménye. [Two paintings by Béla Czóbel] Jelenkor, 21. 1978. 157. The work was probably made in the summer of 1907 on Kernstok’s property at Nyergesújfalú. In connection with this, I must rebut an assertion earlier accepted by me also, according to which Czóbel was probably in Nyergesújfalú in 1908. He spent that summer in Honnfleur and Paris. – Cf.: Párizstól Pocsolyavárosig 2005. Op. cit. 54. He gave an account of the move in a letter addressed to his mother and dated 16 April 1911. – Published in Kratochwill, Mimi: Czóbel Béla (1883–1976) élete és mûvészete. [ The Life and work of Béla Czóbel]Veszprém – Budapest, 2001. 19. Bölöni, György: ‘The Art of Hungary’. In: Catalogue de Luxe of the Department of Fine Arts Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Eds. John E. D. Trask, J. Nilsen Laurvik. San Francisco, 1915. 87–91. -aa- [Cserna, Andor]: ‘Mûvészeti Revü’. Kelet Népe, 10 May 1911 issue. 350–352. – Az Utak III.: 158. See in more detail Barki, Gergely: ‘Lost and Found’. Artmagazin, 7, 2009, 3. 52–58. L’avant garde en Hongrie 1910–1930. Quimper: Galerie Arts et Civilisations, 1984. Kratochwill 2001. Op. cit. 26, fig. 14. After 1908, he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants only in the spring of 1914 (under the name Zobel). In a letter written to Béla Lázár and dated 7 April 1912, he undertook to participate in the 1912 Salon d’Automne exhibition, but did not do so. – MNG Adattár, ltsz.: 4574/2. The organisers did not ask works from Czóbel. Instead, they exhibited privately-owned early works by him that were true to the spirit of Nagybánya. Of the six Czóbel works displayed, five can be identified; the sixth – entitled Ringelspiel – is missing. Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Adolf Fényes, Károly Kernstok, Bertalan Pór, and József Rippl-Rónai announced a subscription in January 1912 for six engravings. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Contemporary Graphic Art in Hungary, Bohemia and Austria. The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. Albright Art Gallery. Intro. by. Martin Birnbaum. New York. 1914. For this in more detail, see the present author’s further study on pages 20–43 in this catalogue.

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