Ildikó Nagy
Rippl-Rónai Seen Whole
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At the turn of the century, the contrast offered by Paris, the world's capital of
art, and Kaposvár, a small Transdanubian town, which everyone simply called a dusty hole, was dramatic indeed. The change in lifestyle and dwelling place, which Rippl-Rónai took upon himself, would have made many a man unfortunate. Many an artistic career was nipped in the bud under similar circumstances. Not so that of Rippl-Rónai, who saw in the small town of his birth not its backwardness, but its domesticity, intimacy, warmth and humour, which he proceeded to depict in his works. His home at number 58 Foý utca with its adjoining rooms, its Biedermeier striped sofa and chairs, its sideboard and writing desk, round tables and easy chairs, became the main subject of his paintings. The walls are hung with his own paintings, the tables are bedecked with flowers, the chairs have colourful shawls with flower designs leisurly flung over them, and everywhere one looks, one sees the family's favourite objects—mirrors, framed photographs, birds in a cage, a bowl of fruit, a philodendron and sanseveria, a gilt baroque statue of an angel, lamps with red shades and the snaking pipe of the iron stove. We see this home at various times of the day and from various angles. We get the feeling that time has come to a standstill. We get an indication of the changing seasons only from the nature of the cut flowers and the fruits, while the tale of a family saga is told by signs such as the absence of the colourful scarves from the easy chairs, sometimes rearranged in order to decorate the walls, or the family using pink coffee cups instead of the polka-dot tea service.
The people themselves are timeless—the artist's wife, parents, siblings and extended circle of relations with Uncle Piacsek, his sister-in-law's father, at their head. Indeed, Uncle Piacsek was one of the artist's favourite models, and we find him variously portrayed, drinking, smoking a pipe, dozing off, reading a letter, listening to music, or just sitting in the background while charming little girls read children's books or play with dolls on an easy-chair.
This painterly disorder is actually highly ordered. We know from the artist's correspondence how scrupulously he planned every detail of his compositions: in this "peace time" home, the rooms glimpsed through the open doors surround their occupants and guests with an air of blissful tranquillity. We feel that it must have been highly attractive to live there, and to recall what life was like there.
It was these pictures of his home and immediate surroundings that brought
the painter true popularity. The canvases he painted between 1902 and 1906, known as his "interior period", were always the most popular of his works.
At the auction held after his 1906 exhibition, it was one of these that fetched the highest price. Old Gentleman and Woman Playing the Mandolin (the old gentleman was, of course, Uncle Piacsek), was bought by a collector for 1,510 crowns. To appreciate what this meant at the time one need only mention that the price of ten such works was enough for Rippl-Rónai to buy the Villa Roma with its
extensive grounds. This estate became his permanent home and the scene, subject, and inspiration for his paintings, and later, the museum dedicated to his memory.
The move into the villa in 1908 marks the beginning of the "maize-like pictures", though Rippl-Rónai painted My Father and Uncle Piacsek Drinking Red Wine, the first work in this style, a year before. In this painting space is highly restricted, the background is closed off by a wall and there are no doors to add depth. Of the familiar room interior only the top of the round table is visible, on it two wine glasses and a decanter, while the two elderly gentlemen are just barely squeezed in between the table and the wall, the bright red of the tablecloth and the harsh yellow of the background. Rippl's style was evidently undergoing a major transformation. A restricted space, great masses of unified, bright colour separated by brown contours, and the patches of paint applied with a rough hand, lined up one next to the other like so many grains of maize, are typical of Rippl's new "dotted" style. Fewer objects furnish the interiors, and the artist's favourite subject is his own studio, with finished paintings lining the walls and standing on an easel.
At the same time, though, Rippl-Rónai continued to produce his beautiful idealized portraits, this time garden scenes with nudes. From September, 1910 for nearly twelve months, the painter had a houseguest—Fenella Lowell, a strange English girl, who travelled, danced, played music, sang, and had sat as a model for several famous French artists. In the garden scenes her figure recurs, taking on a multiplicity of poses, not as the subject of some concrete event, but as the embodiment of the abstract ideal of beauty.
The preoccupations of the Parisian years seem to reappear in Rippl-Rónai's canvases, particularly the relish in ornamentation which had characterized his textiles and wonderful applied art objects. These works are really studies for wall paintings; several even bear the title "project" or "fragment", but these studies were never realized. He did design, however, a few stained glass windows, including the well-known one for the Ernst Museum in Budapest, which is also a nude composition. Besides its planar quality and separate "dots" of paints, the "maize-like period" is also characterized by the application of unblended colours, inspired by the colours of the flowers in his garden. "I have come to love not only the scarlet coloured sage and the red single geranium, and also the pure white flowers, but even more so the chrome-yellow zinnias. I know of no other colour that is warmer than this particular yellow. These are the colours I am presently looking for, practically collecting them, in my home, too, in objects, on shawls and walls," he wrote in his Memoirs. Rippl-Rónai's "maize-like period", which gave us a number of wonderful portraits, flower still-lifes and landscapes, especially manor houses and gardens, is the most colourful and high spirited chapter in the history of Hungarian art.
After 1919, Rippl-Rónai painted only pastels. Of these, the portraits of the great Hungarian writers of the time, Zsigmond Móricz, Mihály Babits, Loýrinc Szabó and Frigyes Karinthy, are outstanding—and, of course, his portraits of women, whose hats, fur stoles and gloves now reflected the fashion of the 1920s; the gestures, too, are seductive in a new way, but these women are just as beautiful and desirable and provocative as ever.
Throughout his working life, Rippl-Rónai continued to paint self-portraits as well. His last work, completed just a couple of months before his death, is also a self-portrait. The lines, drawn in pastel crayon, speak of a trembling hand, the forms are indistinct, as if the artist's face were covered by a veil. The sixty-six- year-old painter appears to us in the guise of a lacklustre old man who has no
illusions about what lies ahead, but will not flinch. He has brought to bear the unsparing objectivity of the portraits of old women, made during his "black period", to the portraiture of his passing. Nonetheless, his rapidly depleting energies are for a moment held in check by a still lively spirit, so that the painter, who through his career had presented to us every motif of his life, can now show us this, his last station.
Rippl-Rónai has been praised by the best Hungarian art historians. His biblio-graphy was finished in 1977 and contained 2,144 entries. Apart from a handful of vitriolic reviews during his early years, he has always been considered one of the greatest of Hungarian artists, albeit various periods of his oeuvre met with a varied reception through the years. Art historians hold the works of his French years in the highest regard. They belong to one of the most characteristic schools of art of the age, Les Nabis, who brought startling innovations to painting following the Impressionist years. Initially My Grandmother and Old Woman with Violets were considered to be his best works, but then the art historian Lajos Fülep called the artist's portrait of Maillol "brilliant", and the best piece of the artist's oeuvre to date. This was in 1910. From then on, the Portrait of Aristide Maillol has been discussed as a masterwork and a precursor of a Hungarian modernism inspired by Cézanne. In 1936 the portrait was deposited in the basement of the Musée d'Art Moderne (Jeu de Paume), and shown perhaps once every decade. It has never again been seen in Hungary (nor is it in the National Gallery's exhibition), and it has become something of a legend. It was hailed as the artist's supreme masterpiece, while the paintings that followed, especially the "maize-like" paintings, were considered too weak to stand up to the passing of time.
The change in taste brought about by an appraisal of Art Nouveau changed the evaluation of Rippl-Rónai's oeuvre as well. The works created in that spirit were suddenly admired beyond all his other works, especially the full-length portraits of women in hats, Woman with a Bird-Cage preeminent among them. This painting, which was exhibited all over the world, became celebrated, and reproductions of it abounded, adding to its popularity.
The artist's "maize-like" paintings had to wait for recognition until more recent times. One was shown in Münster, Grenoble and Weimar 3 along with works by Signac, Matisse, the early Kandinsky and Delaunay, as an example of painting that looked on the depiction of the objective world as a mere pretext, of painting that expressed the idea of autonomous form in art. This brought about another reappraisal of Rippl-Rónai's work, discussed in one of the articles 4 in the National Gallery exhibition catalogue.
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1 - Based on research by Mária Bernáth.
2 - Csilla Csorba: "Előhívás. Rippl-Rónai József és a fényképezés." (Development. József Rippl-Rónai and Photography)
In: Rippl-Rónai József gyűjteményes kiállítása. (József Rippl-Rónai's Collected Works). Catalogue. Budapest, 1998. pp. 185-199.
3 - Farben des Lichts. Paul Signac und der Beginn der Moderne von Matisse bis Mondrian. Catalogue. Münster, 1996.
4 - Mariann Gergely: "Kései elégtétel. Rippl-Rónai József vitatott "pöttyös" korszaka (Belated Amends. József Rippl-Rónai's Controversial "Dotted" Period). In: Rippl-Rónai József gyuýjteményes kiállítása. (József Rippl-Rónai's Collected Works). Catalogue. Budapest, 1998. pp. 81–88.
Ildikó Nagy ,
is an art critic specializing in twentieth-
century Hungarian art.
