György Szűcs
The Hungarian Barbizon
István Réti and the Nagybánya Painters
I am not in the position to judge the role and place of the Nagybánya
Artists Colony in the history of Hungarian painting, in view of the fact that
I regard myself more or less a member of that colony. [...] It is true that by
the Summer of 1914, the time that
I first went there, the artists colony had already passed its zenith, and when
I left it, Nagybánya (Baia Mare) was about to be annexed to Romania. Nevertheless,
at that time Károly Ferency was still there, and I could feel the colony's and
the countryside's formative influence on my artistic attitude. [...]
Thus spoke the painter István Szőnyi in 1953, looking back on
his early years at Nagybánya (Baia Mare), going on to emphasize
In my view, the most important thing about Nagybánya is that
it started a movement, which is essentially still alive, and one can add something
to it, one can continue it, and if necessary, one can reach back to it.
If said in a ideologically neutral cultural milieu, these words,
valuable source material as they make, would do no more than add local colour
to an era in Hungarian history: fragments of information about the early days
of a painter who has already reached the zenith of his career. We must not forget,
however, that we are in the 1950s, when socialist realism on the Soviet model
reigned supreme, with important and influential movements being written off
as "hostile", and left-wing aspects of complex oeuvres being hailed as "progressive
traditions", whatever that meant, earning the artist in question some patronizing
pats on the back by his politically committed but artistically negligible contemporaries.
The Nagybánya Artists Colony, which had been established in 1896, was no exception
in attracting the marked attention of the Party's official art critics. All
the more so, since in the framework of arguments and counter-arguments it was
relatively easy to present oeuvres in such a way that Nagybánya could be used
against Nagybánya, so to speak. To complicate matters further, the peace treaty
after the First World War transferred the town of Nagybánya to Romania, and
although the colony managed to preserve its autonomy for a long time to come,
right until the second half of the 1930s, it gradually came to form part of
the Romanian political and cultural milieu. A large Nagybánya exhibition scheduled
to take place in Budapest in 1953 fell through, because "the preparations were
ideologically incorrect", to use a contemporary turn of phrase by an art historian.
At the same time, despite all the slogans about proletarian internationalism,
Romania looked askew at research that revealed and confirmed the presence of
Hungarian traditions.
What could the "ideologically correct" approach have meant in connection with
Nagybánya? On the one hand, it strengthened the line of demarcation that the
founders' generation-István Réti, Károly Ferenczy, János Thorma-had themselves
drawn between their plein-air naturalism and impressionism and
the second generation's modernist tendencies based directly on French Fauvism,
effectively jettisoning from the Nagybánya movement the artists associated with
the latter group, such as Béla Czóbel, Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba, Sándor Ziffer
and Tibor Boromisza, who were disparagingly called the "neos". Originally they
were accused of turning away from nature, of extreme rationalism and of the
whimsical use of compositional elements; now the charge against them was allying
themselves with "a formalist programme established outside Hungary". On the
other hand, establishment art critics raked through the oeuvres of the Nagybánya
painters, who had mostly painted landscapes, portraits and still-lifes, that
is to say ideologically neutral genres, for elements that could somehow be used
to lend a revolutionary aura to their art. This was how János Thorma's monumental
painting Rise Hungarians! came to receive especial attention. Depicting the
outbreak of the 1848 Revolution, with the martyr poet Sándor Petőfi standing
at the centre, the painting's message was nicely in tune with the 1950s' popular
slogan "Our banner, Petőfi", and its narrative also met the crucial requirement
of socialist realism: ease of comprehension. Another artist to receive deferential
treatment was István Réti, an accomplished artist of sober bourgeois outlook
whose compositions Burial of a Home Guard (1899) and Kossuth's Portrait (1931)
were embraced as proofs for the status of a revolutionary democrat. Therefore,
if only at the price of some compromises, Nagybánya made it to the exclusive
club of "progressive traditions" and, as a result of ongoing art historical
research, Lajos Németh's book on Simon Hollósy could be published in 1956, followed
by Nóra Aradi's monograph on István Réti in 1960.
The shifts in cultural policy favoured, or at least did not stop, the publication
of István Réti's posthumous work, A nagybányai művésztelep (The Nagybánya Artists
Colony, 1954), admittedly only after the editor's omissions of certain parts
that either commented on the events of recent history in an "incorrect manner"
or discussed the purpose of art from an "outdated" aesthetic viewpoint. This
bulky tome appeared to continue and complement Károly Lyka's books, Magyar Művészélet
Münchenben (Hungarian Art and Artists in Munich, 1951) and Festészeti életünk
a millenniumtól az első világháborúig (Hungarian Painting from the Millennium
to the First World War, 1953). The connection is not coincidental, since Lyka,
who started out as a painter studying under Simon Hollósy, was one of the best-qualified
art historians writing on 20th-century Hungarian art, and the best interpreter
and advocate of the Nagybánya movement in particular, who launched the educational
reforms of the 1920s at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts jointly with István
Réti.
We know that Réti signed a contract with the publishers Atheneum in the Spring
of 1940 to write a book of about 130,000 words, but perhaps we are not very
far off the mark in suggesting that he had already started work on his
magnum opus as far back as 1909. That was the year when the ambitious mayor
of Kecskemét proposed to set up an artists colony in the town in the heart of
the Great Plain, and by offering better working conditions he managed to lure
away from Nagybánya some of the painters led by Béla Iványi Grünwald. That was
when Réti published his first, comprehensive essay, Tizenegy esztendő a nagybányai
festőkolónia életéből (Eleven Years in the Life of the Nagybánya Artists Colony),
in the local paper Nagybánya. In connection with this, Lyka says: "He wrote
the story of the Nagybánya painters very nicely and accurately, and this brief
work can lay claim to being treated as a source publication." Although these
words could be read as guidance, Réti, unlike his friend Károly Lyka, never
laid down his brush for good, but since he was inclined to contemplation and
soul-searching, he often turned to writing to get him over his creative crises.
If we arranged in sequence Réti's writings published in his own lifetime, we
would essentially get the book's structure and content. In fact, Réti himself
chose this patchwork method. But the seams are apparent only to scholarly analysis,
because the book, rather than being a series of mechanically stringed essays,
is the rewritten, re-thought and homogenized fair copy of the original studies.
The introductory study of the Nagybánya jubilee exhibition of 1912, the series
sketching out the portraits of the co-founders of the colony, Hollósy, Ferenczy,
Thorma and Iványi Grünwald, which was published in 1924 in the journal Nyugat,
or his study A művészet és természet (Art and Nature) which appeared in the
Annals of the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, provided the material for Réti's
book, who retired after 1939, and tried to shut himself off from the world as
much as possible.
I shall suspend my correspondence and inquiries for some time
to come. The reason for this is that I have buried myself in Hollósy,
he wrote in 1941 to a former student of his, András Mikola, at
Nagybánya. Then he also touched on his working method:
I have re-written my old piece, and expanded it. A large number
of previously unknown paintings and writings by Simon Hollósy have emerged
since then, and I have to incorporate these into my old essay, and in general
much of it has to be revised and put in a new light.
The completion of further drafts and the revision of the data
were made easier after August 1940, when under the second Vienna Award Nagybánya
was ceded back to Hungary (remaining in Hungarian possession until 1944). András
Mikola and János Krizsán, the leaders of the artists colony, continuously sent
documents to Réti, mostly lists of students and photographs suitable for publication,
"to lay a broader and deeper foundation for the book", in Réti's words. The
opening lines of a letter written by Mikola in October 1940 are of interest:
"I guess your work is almost finished by now...;" even so, outside the circle
of his closest friends no one could read the freshly typed chapters for years
to come. He must have, indeed, completed one version of the manuscript, since
in early 1941 it received the highest literary prize, one that had been founded
by Ferenc Baumgarten, the aesthete and art critic who had died in Germany in
1927.
Nagybánya once again came to the forefront of interest. Elderly painters revisited
the scene of their former glory, and members of the younger generation flocked
to the town on a special grant known as a Transylvania Scholarship. The expression
"Hungarian Barbizon", which had been coined fifty years earlier with the inten-tion
to help the public in placing the artists colony, re-appeared in the title of
several newspaper articles in the 1940s. The public could also read about the
lighter moments in the colony's life after January 1942, when Józsi Jenő Tersánszky,
a writer born in Nagybánya, published his serialized novel A Félbolond (The
Half-Witted),
a charming insider's account of the bohemians, in a Budapest literary magazine.
Although the style of the finished text suggests permanence, there are places
in the book where we can sense the passage of time, in connection with occasions
when Réti learns about the death of some of his colleagues. This was so in Béla
Iványi Grünwald's case, who died in September 1940 amidst constant worries for
the life of his wife and historian son, both of whom had remained in London
throughout the Blitz. Luckily, the book, regardless of the hap-hazard conditions
surrounding its birth, escaped the fate that books here in Central Eastern Europe
so often have: that of being left in torso. "Today I have finished the main
body of my book: it has now been all typed up. I have the complete list of names
up until 1935, also typed up. The same applies to the list of illustrations,"
Réti informed Elek Petrovics, who in 1943 helped him in collecting the illustrations.
Although book publication was not suspended even for the last years of the war
(a booklet entitled Képalkotó művészet (Visual Art) containing Réti's two smaller
theoretical pieces appeared as late as 1944), sadly he did not live to see the
publication of A nagybányai művésztelep, his literary enterprise that in posterity's
view has even overshadowed his accomplishments as a painter. He died during
the siege of Budapest in the middle of January 1945.
The artist's widow faithfully preserved the manuscript that had somehow survived
the destruction of the studio. It was eventually published with the help of
the aging friend, Károly Lyka, in 1954. Until 1992, when the complete text was
published, it continued to function as a basic handbook for those who cared
to learn about the Nagybánya artists colony. We can wholeheartedly share in
the enthusiastic reaction András Mikola sent to Réti's widow:
Nagybánya Exhibitions
The approaching centenary of the Nagybánya
artists colony's foundation (1896) gave a new impetus to research into art history.
In the early 1990s MissionArt Gallery launched the publication of a series of
monographs and source publications. Simultaneously, preparations for the 1996
exhibition "The Art of Nagybánya" and the accompanying catalogue were being
made. Recently, the works of Nagybánya artists have featured in several exhibitions
both in Hungary and abroad. One such exhibition, entitled Le fauvisme ou "l'épreveu
du feu", was held in 1999 in the Musée National d'Art Moderne of Paris, where
compositions by Béla Czóbel, Sándor Ziffer, and Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba were shown.
The exhibition Künstlerkolonien in Europa" arranged by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum
of Nuremberg, will continue into the year 2002, with works by Károly Ferenczy,
Béla Iványi Grünwald, István Réti, and Sándor Ziffer. Visitors to Lumičres magyares,
an exhibition presenting the colourist trends of Hungarian painting between
1870 and 1914, held in the Hôtel de Ville of Paris, will also have a chance
to see a large number of works by Nagybánya painters. All these together, in
conjunction with the essays published in the catalogues of the separate Nagybánya
exhibitions (Seele und Farbe, Collegium Hungaricum, Vienna, 1999; Lights and
Colours, Muzeul Nat,ional de Arta, Bucharest, 1999) will contribute to a more
complex picture of Hungarian art in the first half of the 20th century.
I fell on the book with a vengeance and was
unable to put it down until I had read the last word. It was quite understandable,
considering that the material mattered to me a great deal, and in some cases
I felt that it unlocked from my mind memories of my youth, describing our
struggle and our aims in life in such a splendid style that it makes the book
a pearl of not only our writing on art but also of our literature in general.
The characterization of the artists, the insightful analysis of the works,
and the eloquence of the language are unequalled, engaging the interest not
only of painters and art historians but of everyone who understands and appreciates
literature.
In 1885, when Simon Hollósy created the first work to achieve real success,
Tengerihántás (Corn Huskers), he could not suspect that he and the students
of his free school, to be opened the following year in Munich on the encouragement
of his friends, would become the vanguard of an artistic movement which prepared
for the 20th century. The Munich Hollósy circle soon became famous, attracting
students not only thanks to Hollósy's prophetic dedication and the romantic
glow of his intellect, but with a new teaching method, which set aside plaster
of Paris models, and used plein-air exercises instead, with a result of such
high-quality skills and knowledge that even "opposing" German professors welcomed
his students at their academy courses.
At this time novel thought was represented by the art of a painter who has since
then been obscured by the Impressionists, Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose
La pauvre fauvette (1881) could be seen in the original at the 1888 Munich International
Exhibition. Réti in his book makes mention, beside "portraits of fine perfection,"
of his village genres, which were the results of an attempt "to create harmony,
under an all-revealing, (so called) grey plein-air light, between details and
the atmospheric whole, between Holbeinian graphic as well as shape and the modern
requirements of airy tones and colours." Detachment from the academic canon
and compulsory biblical-mythical topics, the rejection of the brown key of studio
settings and the use of black, as well as the development of Bastien-Lepage's
naturalist expression constituted the first step towards plein-air painting.
"Subtle naturalist" masterpieces appeared in succession, like Károly Ferenczy's
1891 treatment of a then popular suburban theme, Plakátumok előtt (Before the
Billboards), István Csók's melancholic interior, Az árvák (The Orphans), which
uses almost exclusively shades of blue, or Iványi Grünwald's Ave Mária (1891),
a far relative of the pre-Raphaelites.
Armoured with a professional knowledge refined on large canvases and with the
messianic zeal of young men, the Hollósy group in Munich eagerly awaited their
study trip to Nagybánya. The town invited them in 1896, at the suggestion of
István Réti and János Thorma, both of whom hailed from there. The initial confidence
of the guests soon suffered a setback, as their "subtle naturalist" style, largely
relying on theory and perfected in almost laboratory conditions, could not cope
with the swiftly changing conditions of light and shadow, was unable to set
down shapes melting in the strong sunshine. Though most of them had been to
Paris (Hollósy had not), had worked at the Julian Academy, and had seen exhibitions,
mostly in the Louvre, they were not familiar with the pictures of the Impressionists.
István Csók recalled the Paris period:
Puvis de Chavannes's Pauvre Pécheur considerably weakened
Bastien-Lepage's absolute authority, and if the Caillebotte room had been
there in the Luxembourg with its wonderful Renoirs, Manets and Degas', if
we had had a chance to see the landscapes of Claude Monet and Sisley, our
whole view of art may have taken a different course.
In Nagybánya initially they were engaged in examining illumination
at dawn and dusk, as well as the effects of light filtering into interiors,
and it took years before summer sunlight could eventually play the dominant
role on their canvases, in the wake of Hungarian precursors-Mihály Munkácsy's
realistic landscapes, Pál Szinyei Merse's early plein-air experiments-and foreign
inspiration. The summit of this process, emphasised in Réti's book, was the
1903 Károly Ferenczy exhibition in Budapest, where the works displayed had solutions
similar to the Impressionists', like the flickering colourful snapshot of Fürdőzők
(Bathers, 1902) or the soft brushstrokes of Október (October, 1903), which nevertheless
imparted a stately character to the golden garden scene. The Nagybánya painters
approached the pure painterliness of Impressionism, but retaining the organization
of the picture, as well as keeping the balance of colour and line remained their
highest priorities. With a felicitous expression, Ferenczy called his art "colourist
naturalism."
