Rippl-Rónai Seen Whole
by Ildikó Nagy

With a major exhibition of József Rippl-Rónai's works now running in the National Gallery in Budapest, the leading art historian Ildikó Nagy takes the opportunity to reflect on a career that led him from Munich to Paris and, finally, to the sleepy provincial town of Kaposvár. Although he was the first Hungarian painter to belong to an important school of European painting, les Nabis, his initial attempt to achieve recognition in his own country, through his first exhibition in Budapest in 1900 was hardly a success. Gradually however he won recognition from discerning critics and collectors to become an artist who has been always considered as one of the greatest in Hungarian art. Ildikó Nagy traces the phases in his work and their critical reception over the years, paying attention to the continuous reassessment his oeuvre has been subject to, noting that his interiors period will clearly be the next to be reevaluated.

Memoirs
by József Rippl-Rónai

This selection of the painter's reminiscences focuses on the thirteen years he spent in Paris and on the circle of painters and writers he moved in. He describes the help he received on first arriving there from Munkácsy, then a succesful and established artist, an influence he had to shake off. There are fascinating accounts of how contemporaries such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, his life-long friend Maillol, Toulouse-Lautrec viewed one another and how the young Rippl-Rónai viewed them.

Translating Zsuzsa Rakovszky
by George Szirtes

A selection of Rakovszky's poetry, New Life, was recently published by Oxford University Press in George Szirtes's translation. Here the Anglo-Hungarian poet reflects on the nature of a “writer-reader's" response to poetry, and in particular to the Hungarian poetry he has, to use one of his analogies, “danced with." He provides a compelling account of a poet's working procedure.

Hungary's Pillaged Art Heritage - Part Two: The Fate of the Hatvany Collection
by László Mravik

In this, the second and concluding part of his major article on the fate of an enormous part of the nation's heritage, Dr Mravik focuses on the collections of the Hatvanys, an immensely wealthy family whose fortune was founded on sugar. Baron Ferenc Hatvany's was the largest and most valuable collection of paintings in private hands in pre-war Hungary, ranging from Old Masters and French Classicists to the Impressionists. The author has succeeded in tracing documentation which shows how the baron took steps to preserve his treasures from the air raids and, more especially, from the Jewish Commission, a government body appointed to sequester art treasures in Jewish ownership after the German occupation of March 1944. He succeeded in depositing many items in banks under the names of two of his employees. To no avail: the specialised art looting units of the Red Army simply seized the banks and carried off everything they found. Dr Mravik documents the futile attempts of the government to call the occupiers to account, the banks' own investigation of missing property (some records are still not accessible), Hatvany's complicated claim for compensation from the West Germans in the sixties and token gestures from the Soviets later at returning an infinitisemal amount of what had been looted.

Childhood and How Children Live Now
by Zsuzsanna Vajda

Zsuzsanna Vajda, who heads the Department of Psychology at Szeged, surveys the history of the concepts of childhood and child-rearing in Hungary in the first part of her article. The differences between the urban middle-class and the rural poor were evident and substantial up to the fifties. Driven by centralized educational policies, a process of liberalization in child upbringing was marked from the sixties on. The years since 1989 have seen an idealization of West European methods but the assertion of children's rights is still unresolved. The second part, drawing upon a survey conducted in a small town in the East of Hungary, provides a broad picture of the life of children in Hungary at the end of the nineties.

Children of the Changeover
by Péter Somlai

In a parallel article, Péter Somlai who heads a department at the Institute of Sociology of Budapest University describes the current situation of the 1.8 million children under 14 and the 810,000 between the ages of 15 and 19. Since 1989 the crucial economic factor affecting children is the drop in the ratio of those in employment by 30 per cent. He points to the increasing frequency of some family patterns other than the “standard" two children with biological parents model. Socialization has also changed markedly with the onset of market-driven products aimed at children and parents. Although the kindergarten network has managed to survive on a large scale, inequalities in education and educational opportunity have become more marked. (The special case of Gypsy children is also described.) The economic factor is also at play in the steep rise in the numbers of children at risk. The gradual reduction of the state's role in protecting children has not as yet been matched by the development of Hungarian civil society.

Privatization: A Preliminary Balance Sheet
by Éva Voszka

The ownership of the Hungarian economy is now “not substantially different from that of other market economies." Éva Voszka has made a special study of the “dinosaurs", the old gigantic state companies during the transition. Here she reviews the goals and strategies (often confused and conflicting) adopted by the last communist government and the two succeeding administrations. Although the processes were sometimes unpredictable and transparency was not always what it should have been, she finds that the Hungarian approach was ultimately pragmatic and flexible and the transfer of ownership relatively rapid. She sees further opportunity to hive off more from the state sector and encouraging signs in the mergers and rationalization now taking place in certain industries. In addition, Hungarian companies are already involved in capital export, which may well be of growing significance in the years to come.

Hungarian Agriculture and the EU
by Gyula Varga

Gyula Varga, Deputy Director of the Research Institute for Agrarian Policy, describes how the old socialist bloc's most succesful agricultural sector found itself having to pay an “unreasonable price for the unavoidable price of the transformation." He pinpoints the causes in relative isolation from the world market, a drastic shrinkage of markets –especially the domestic market – after 1989 and, not least, in the misguided thinking and policy of the 1990-1994 government. After years of plenty, production dropped back to pre-1971 levels. He highlights the government's rejection of the reform efforts of the 1980s and its politically motivated policies that have deepened the crisis, in particular the treatment of the co-operatives and state farms. Although nominally transformed, he observes that “we have no precise knowledge of the the ultimate effect of these transformations." Finally Professor Varga discusses how agriculture has to face the challenges of EU accession.