István Réti

The Nagybánya Artists Colony

Excerpts

"At the foot of a crescent of mountains of immense height nestles Nagy-Bánya** with its old-fashioned buildings and Gothic tower, like a piece of the Middle Ages forgotten here by time. Above the town and the whole
valley there is a peculiar blue mist, as if the sky had come completely down to earth. You can't believe you're not dreaming, or you think it's just memory, that you're not here now, but have been here long, long ago and spent happy hours here.

Sándor Petőfi: Letter to Frigyes Kerényi, 25 May, 1847.

1896-the first year

Of necessity, regular work commenced within the school. Hollósy soon posed
models-in fine weather they would be in the shade of the big trees-and would come round to adjust them. He never neglected the school. The plein air lighting was a great novelty for pupils and masters alike. Until then, teaching everywhere had been carried out in studios, and Hollósy was initially groping unsurely in unknown territory.
In Munich he had explained portraiture using models, a unidirectionally lighted, rounded form, the regular logic of the studio view, but here, in the open air, forms dissolved, the continually changing light played with colours and painterly values, and figures had barely any tangible, physical appearance-the view was composed of more or less definite patches of colour. Amidst the
foliage, the shifting sunlight continually flashed its rays in different places through the translucent depths of the backdrop of emerald greenery, out of which the dishes that were the faces of ceremonially stiff peasant models gleamed with an improbable lustre, all but transfigured, due to the reflected light of the white-bodied clouds poking up from behind the hill. The young painters stood awed and powerless before Nature's magical transformations and beauty, even though some had come already equipped, besides raw talent, with much creditable painterly knowledge and skill.[...]
Before then, acting as a model had been an unknown occupation at Nagybánya. Hollósy's school gradually accustomed people to it. János Thorma, to take just one example, had been barely able to persuade even beggars to pose for a couple of hours, for good money too, for such pictures as The Martyrs of Arad or The Sufferers. Secondary school boys had sat for my own Bohemians' Christmas Eve. The townsfolk were initially suspicious; they just didn't understand what was wanted of them. People from outlying villages were more willing to cooperate: all they had to do was sit, and for that they got a day's pay. Later on the fashion spread to the townspeople as well, first of all amongst the mining people of Veresvíz. That was where many of the young painters lived at the time. The first to pose as models were children, later on adults too, then Gypsies and the village's Romanian and Magyar day-labourers. Of course, there was no question of nude modelling: even some time later, even the men would rarely consent to that. They started to get used to it, though, as time moved on towards the 1910s, and later on even women would pose unclad, mostly peasant girls from the village, some of them stunningly beautiful in the nude. All along they got a day's wage for a day's posing. They would turn up of their own free will every Monday morning, when new models were set, and almost as thronging a market for models eventually grew up as at the College of Art in Budapest. During the First World War, though, the village models all dropped out because they did not have ration coupons that were exchangeable in the town. Before then they had come in from the village for the whole week, only going back home on Saturday night with their earnings. Afterwards it did not prove possible to re-accustom the villagers and the school had to rely solely on Gypsy
models.[...]
It was harder to get the painting work going outside the school, however.
The promises repeatedly made in Munich, that we were going to sow new seeds at Nagybánya, that a new spring for Hungarian art would start here, were kept up with big words. We were steeling our faith so our will would be strong for what was to come later: action. It was just that, for the meanwhile, the enthusiastic talk was unable to consolidate into appropriate creative activity; in the meanwhile, we merely sought subjects to paint, readied ourselves and sensed we were in a constant state of evolution. We were forever waiting for someone who wasn't there yet, someone who had yet to arrive. A good month passed like this. We simply became intoxicated by the splendid May, then the splendid summer. It was there that we discovered afresh the entire world, the things seen a hundred times over, the beauty of the whole world. We imagined nobody had ever seen this before us-the belief of the young at all times. A more discriminating segment of the town's young sparks allied themselves with great fellow-feeling to the painters' circle, and over time this link deepened with some into warm, life-long friendships, despite their being scattered by fate far from Nagybánya.

The town

The part of town formed by the hills, along with their orchards, vineyards and, on the upper slopes, dense woods, that rise abruptly, almost without transition, from the plain offered a rich store of motifs for the sort of intimate landscape-paysage intime-called for by the concept of naturalism. From the very beginning painters looked here for subjects to paint, and sought backdrops for their figurative canvases too. Alongside that, the transparently bright air and sparkling sunshine were a spur to developing the Impressionist play of colour and light.
Had painters found themselves there in the first half of the nineteenth century, or mid-century, it is unlikely that these motifs would have inspired their Classicist or Romantic tastes. For Nagybánya also has another part: the big, broad grassland stretching to the south and west of the town. The flatness of the Hungarian plain undulates right up to the point where the closed line of hills suddenly obstructs its path. Biedermeier taste would most likely have settled on this as the part worthy of "depiction". Painters and public alike at that time revelled much more in broad panoramic sweeps, all-embracing vistas of distant space. Their gaze sought the wide, distant view, blue hills paling in the atmosphere at the edge of the horizon. Foreground shadows and masses of trees or buildings to the side in the middle ground, besides their objective signification, effectively served to lend an enhanced sense of distance to the horizon in the centre. That was what a "landscape" was then.
One sees the same broad panorama today on coming from the west and looking out on the circle of flatland at whose northern and eastern fringe stands the army of sentinel hills beneath which spreads Nagybánya, with its old towers. Arriving from the south, from Transylvania, the panorama is, if anything, even more captivating. Up till the end of the last century, the magnificent Boggy Forest, with its massive oaks, was still intact, and one had to pass through this to reach the wide expanses of the bare, broken ground of Rushy Meadow, Nagybánya's Campagna, on whose eastern fringe distant tall peaks loom hazily on their barren, rocky ridges, snow-covered for the greater part of the year. Opposite is the chain of green hills, behind it-ever mounting waves. To the right, by the entrance to the valley of the River Fernezely, shivers a hazy-blue mist, the smoke from the smeltery foundries described so poetically by Petőfi...
Confronted with this captivating spectacle, Nagybánya's artists sensed that "to grasp all is to lose all": the wonderful vista could not be squeezed in its entirety into a picture-plane that would be taken in at a single glance, its grandiosity could only be imperfectly represented pictorially. The painters therefore broke it down into pictorial elements, what they termed "motifs"; they "entered into" and lived in the landscape. These separated, "internally" viewed slices of landscape, whether accompanied by a figurative composition or not, yielded denser masses and patches of colour, a picture that was also decoratively more substantial, than did grand vistas. This narrow, almost enclosed pictorial space-especially with compositions placed within it-became one of the characteristic features, all but a stylistic hallmark, of the earlier paintings of the Nagybánya school. [...]
Why exactly did Nagybánya become the permanent base for the Nagybánya painters? Many ask, and the question is reasonable. It goes without saying that Nagybánya is pretty, so abounding in pictorial motifs as to be almost unmatched. On one side is the open ground onto which the unobstructed horizon of Hungary's Lowland plain debouches, on the other, in a huge semicircle, are bunches of splendid, undulating hills. A spirit of history floats like a light cloud above its copper-roofed towers and ancient houses, the whole as if it had been clipped out of one of Jósika's novels. The town is guarded from the north and the east by mountains-the smaller ones to the fore. Gentle orchards at the foot of their slopes creep up to steep vine terraces, whilst their brows are crowned by old trees, biblically grave chestnuts. Behind them, in taller crests, range the beech- and oak-clad peaks, and right up on high, above the heads of all of them, the distant blueness of the gigantic, crook-backed craggy spine of Black Mountain, Rosali and Gutin.

The trade

A certain type of trade in art also grew up in Nagybánya. The initiative in this was taken by the master-confectioner Gyula Gyöngyössy on completely unselfish grounds, in full accord with the noble spirit of old Nagybánya. He had the idea of placing the rooms of his pa^tisserie at the artists' disposal for the purposes of providing a permanent exhibition space. In order to ensure that standards were maintained, he asked the school's leading painters to judge the submitted pictures. He also undertook to act as middleman in selling the pictures, without taking any cut of the price. He did this at a time (in 1909) when the colony was undergoing one of its most critical periods. Iványi Grünwald was preparing to take himself off to Kecskemét, along with the greater part of the youngsters; the principals who were staying were considering the closure of the painting school, whilst the townspeople viewed the whole affair with indifference or indeed, in many cases, hostility. Gyöngyössy defied this mood in both word and deed. He was well acquainted with the painters from his confectionery shop, had heard about their troubles from their conversations, and believed he would be helping the younger ones, albeit modestly, with the venture. During the two or three years that were still left of this admirable man's life (up till 1912), he did indeed manage to drum up a good few thousand of crowns' worth of turnover from the pictures. On our persuasion, he latterly began to take a minimal percentage cut from the price of pictures that were sold, but he used that money to take out subscriptions for the patisserie to various illustrious art magazines, later donating the complete volumes at the end of the year to the painting school's library, thereby performing a double service for the cause of art.