Kálmán Makláry

Alfréd Réth,
Cubiste Extraordinaire

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Starting out – Nagybánya

Alfréd Réth (originally Roth) was born into a middle-class family on February 29, 1884 in Budapest. His father, who had eight children to support, worked as a family practitioner. (His patients included the painter Baron László Mednyánszky.) He wanted his son to become a bank official, but Réth, who had his heart set on a different career, rebelled. Mednyánszky and the publisher József Wolfner took him under their wings: on discovering the young man's talents, they encouraged him to paint and also introduced him to Oriental and Buddhist philosophy. The summer of 1903 found the nineteen-year-old Réth working at the Nagybánya artists colony ("Hungary's Barbizon"), where modern Hungarian painting was in the making. Here Réth joined a movement which was determined to "resurrect" Hungarian painting. Encouraged by the news of what was happening in Paris, members of the group were all set for a confrontation with the spirit of Academicism. Sensing that he ought not to rely on second and third-hand information, Réth was resolved to see the Parisian developments for himself. Upon his return, and with his family's support (although his father still opposed his plans), he set off, first to Paris and then to Italy to study the art of the Renaissance masters "at the cradle of painting." During the eight months he was away, he took the opportunity to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. In the autumn of 1904, on his way home, Réth stopped over in Paris to see the second Salon d'Automne. It was on this occasion that he saw thirty-two of Cézanne's paintings all in one room, an experience that left a deep mark on him.
Réth was back at the Nagybánya artists' colony again for the summer of 1905, but his instincts told him that if he wanted to live freely and fulfill his potentials as a painter, he had no alternative but to take up residence in Paris: "With a few exceptions, the entire generation of artists gravitates to Paris." With the support of the prominent art critic Károly Lyka and the painter Mednyánszky, he set out for the city of his dreams in the winter of 1905. The painter József Egry mentions this journey in his memoirs: "I left for Paris at the end of 1905. In Vienna I met Roth, who was also on his way to Paris. We spent one day in Vienna. We went to see the museums. On the way to Paris we had a very pleasant journey, enjoying the winter magic of Switzerland. (...) We arrived in Paris at night. (...) The following day we moved into a furnished flat in the attic of a building by the Seine; we took it over from a Hungarian, some kind of a fur-dresser, whose address we had been given. The next day we enrolled in the Julian.

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The Cubist period and rise to fame

The year 1911 is an important date in the history of Cubism, the year the Cubists held their first collective show under the aegis of the Salon des Independants. That was also when Zsófia Dénes, an important figure of the period's literary and art scene, first arrived in Paris. Since her aunt and uncle, Valéria Dénes and Sándor Galimberti, were staying in Marocco, at the time along with Matisse, they asked their friend Réth to look after their niece. This is how Zsófia Dénes recollects the exhibition:

We crossed a few rooms, he was dragging me by my arms and I was whining, because I wanted to stop. The walls were plastered with the works of Rouault, Matisse, Marquet, Derain, Othon Friesz, Camoin, Dufy and the like- all familiar names to me.
"Of course, later you will have to come back here and see all these, too: Gustave Moreau's school and the beginnings with Cézanne. And the Nabis, who are a kind of prophet, and the Fauves, the Beasts. They had already started to shake the foundations. But I want to make your head swim." And he dragged me. He dragged me straight to room 41. That room had already gained some notoriety during that spring for being the one where all the Cubists gathered. That was the first time they were presented to the public as a group, as a school and as a movement. Painted on large canvasses and plywood boards, there were the compositions of Braque, Gleizes, Metzinger, Lhote, Léger, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and the only woman, Marie Laurencin- and many others. Thirteen artists altogether. Chagall was allocated to this room also, obviously by mistake. And Réth, too. He was the friend who gave me this guided tour. He was fully entitled to be here, since he was a through-and-through Cubist. Alfréd Réth, or Frédi, who dragged me through all those rooms so as to confront me with the most revolutionary development of the Spring of 1911, Cubist painting. I had already known the word Cubism. That Frédi was a Cubist, I had also ascertained. But to see Cubism, to see the school of painting physically manifested through the pictures hanging on the walls, that was something I had not seen and had not even imagined. That room 41 inside the pavilion on the bank of the river Seine- in 1911- was simply beyond belief, something out of fantasy land for someone from Pest.

Thus it was that in 1911 the Cubists and Réth literally burst upon the scene. At the Salon d'Automne the Cubist group grew more numerous still with the newcomers, including the Hungarian József Csáky. At the Salon, Réth's picture was hung between the paintings of Matisse and Rouault. Next he exhibited at the Jubilee Exhibition of Nagybánya and then he was invited to take part in an exhibition in Berlin. It was probably there that Herwarth Walden first had the opportunity to look at Réth's paintings, although the possibility cannot be excluded that a common friend, the poet Ludwig Rubiner, had originally called Walden's attention to the Hungarian painter; whichever was the case, the fact remains that in February 1913 Walden asked Réth to represent the new French movement, Cubism, in Der Sturm, his own gallery. Réth exhibited eighty of his compositions; the journal Der Sturm published Réth's article on Cubism, along with his artistic credo. By this time, Réth was considered a major artist; this was underlined by the fact that the gallery had featured the Delaunays previous to his exhibition, and Franz Marc, one of the founders of Der Blaue Reiter, after it. That was when Miklós Rózsa, the director of the Muývészház of Budapest, discovered Réth.

It was partly due to Alfréd Réth that in this very tense and intensive period in the art world extensive contacts were established between Der Sturm and Muývészház, in other words, between Berlin and Budapest. And so have we now come back, through Paris and Berlin, to Budapest, the Muývészház. This exhibition took place in April and May, 1913 as the International Post-Impressionist Exhibition, although the title is misleading, as the content pointed far beyond Post-Impressionism. Not only did the Expressionists and Fauvists hang their works next to the compositions of Hungary's Eights and Cubists, but- according to the evidence of the catalogue- Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay also showed some of their abstract paintings. As far as Alfréd Réth was concerned, he had a separate section within the exhibition, featuring thirty-six of his works. In this way, Hungarian Cubism, which had been born in Paris, found its way back to Budapest- in illustrious international company.

Thus Réth was set on the way which made him an important twentieth-century painter. The Berthe Weill Gallery mounted an exhibition of his paintings in 1913, the gallery which had been amongst the first to show Braque, Picasso, Léger and Juan Gris. The future looked promising to Réth but unfortunately only for a few months. The Great War broke out and, as a Hungarian citizen, he spent the next four and a half years in an internment camp in the Bretagne.

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Abstraction-Création

In February 1931 a new art movement was born out of the débris of the shortlived group Cercle et Carré. Calling itself Abstraction-Création: Art non-figuratif,12 the group held exhibitions with the aim of popularising abstract art. Alfréd Réth joined the movement in 1933; he took part in the group's exhibitions in 1933 and 1934. The series Rhythms and Découpage were produced during this period.
For a few years during the 1930s, Réth was producing works which were characterised by curving lines and the interplay of concentric circles and contrasting tones. Enjoying a freedom he had never before experienced, the artist added fresh colours to his palette, colours that were hitherto unseen.

After the monochrome of Cubism, the colorful world of the Impressionists, the Fauves and the Orphists opened up for him, and Réth was happy to bow to the power of light and colour. Following in Delaunay's footsteps, he, too, looked upon colour not just as one particular property of matter, but as a pure element, a pure form and a perfection that needs no complement.

The distinctly isolated colours were not meant to express sensuality or a newfound vivacity. Quite the contrary: the colours of the paintings referred to the theories of light and colour. They elevated the physical laws above the problems of taste, beauty and aesthetics- in line with the painting of Delaunay and the Orphists. In 1934 and 1935, in conjunction with the Rhythms, Réth embarked on a series of new experiments, which resulted in brightly coloured three-dimensional pictures, or Découpages (Clippings). These painted wood constructions, which the artist liked to refer to as "formes dans l'espace" (forms in space), while Roditi called them super-collages, are full of bright colours, featuring shifted half discs and full discs and forms analogous with Leger's machine aesthetics. He incorporated all these into his wood panels, the edges of which coincided with the contours of the painted forms. The same signs and motifs of industrialised urban folklore, which had originally appeared in the pictures he had made during his metaphysical period, reappeared in the compositions constituting the series of "forms in space."
In April 1935 Réth had a one-man show in the Galerie Pierre, where his latest works were shown next to a selection of his compositions from 1912 and 1913. The fact that immediately before Réth's exhibition the gallery showed Pablo Picasso's works clearly says something about Réth's own status. Futhermore, the Galerie Berthe Weill invited Réth to hold a second exhibition there, which took place in 1939.

The war years and Réalités Nouvelles

History once again interrupted Réth's career just when it began to take off anew; this was so regardless of the fact that, in spite of his Jewish ancestry, he was able to occupy himself with creative work during most of the war in Chantilly- although in reduced circumstances. Lacking the basic materials necessary for painting, he started to experiment with materials which had rarely or not at all been used previously in the fine arts. He mixed powdered coal, cement, slag and chalk powder with glue, then used a painter's spoon to apply the mixture to slabs of concrete- since canvas was also in short supply.

I think that non-figurative art should find its own materials, to be able to express our ideas in a spontaneous fashion, we should abstain from using traditional materials. (...) I wanted to avoid the separation of colour and material. These two elements are closely bound up in everything that nature offers to our vision. And we all know that paint only allows the imitation of various materials.

Moving from the découpage of the 1930s, through the three-dimensional pictures made in 1944 of concrete, he arrived at the series Harmony of Materials, which reached their high point the 1950s.
Apart from his Cubist days, the "most visible" period in Réth's oeuvre- and therefore also the one that was the most accessible to critics- was the time when he was associated with the group Réalités Nouvelles, when he created the series Harmony of Materials.
The first Salon des Réalités Nouvelles was held in 1939, and then relaunched in 1946, in Paris. Réth took part in it in the following year. In 1947 the young Denise René invited her to her gallery, where Réth was represented by nine of his compositions. This was followed the next year by a one-man show covering Réth's entire oeuvre, where forty-five works produced between 1912 and 1948 were exhibited. His work received extensive media coverage. Jacques Lassaigne described the exhibition in the following words: "Réth is one of the most serious and most authentic vanguards of the actual movement working towards abstraction."
Following this, but still in 1948, Réth was invited to participate in the exhibition Tendances de l'art abstrait. The following year he had his retrospective in the Galerie Folklore of Lyon. This was followed by the exhibition Le Cubisme (1907–1914) in 1953 in the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, where Réth was among the participants. In 1955 the Galerie de l'Institut organized a retrospective for him, where he showed forty-six of his paintings and George Waldemar contributed an essay to the catalogue. In 1957 he contributed five paintings to the exhibition Art Abstrait. Les premičres generations (1910–1939)16 held in the Musée de Saint Etienne; dated 1910, one of his paintings, The Relationship between Straight and Curved Lines, was among the earliest works shown.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Réth used a wide variety of materials for his compositions, which included brick powder, cement, sawdust, pebbles, crushed seashells and eggshell, matchsticks, slag, charcoal, wood fibre, shale and fabric. In a way, the series Harmony of Materials was already anticipated by a composition he produced in 1914, Robinsonian Landscape. From as far back as 1914, Réth enriched the surface of his works with sand; later he added other materials to his armoury, the colour and the texture of which came to form an organic part of his compositions. Réth was among the first to apply sand to his paintings (two years after Braque's and one year after Picasso's similar experiments). Through his experiments with clay, he participated in the preliminary history of such movements as art brut or the "matičrists," whose members included Alberto Burri and Piero Manzoni. He evidently exerted an influence on some Hungarian artists also, most notably his good friend István Farkas, who experimented with the same process, as seen in his painting Still Life with Pipe (1928), and Ferenc Martyn, whose composition Structure (1970) relied on the same technique.
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Kálmán Makláry
now based in Paris and in Budapest, launched Maklary Artworks in 2002, to promote exhibitions and the publishing of books on artists whose work needs a reappraisal. He is co-author of Alfred Reth: From Cubism to Abstraction (Maklary Artworks 2003)