Ilona Sármány-Parsons

Painting the Nude

A modell. Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (The Model. Female Nude Imagery in 19th-century Hungarian Art) Exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. 14 October, 2004 - 6 February, 2005.
Catalogue. Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery, 2004, 487 pp.

 

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The special situation of Hungarian painting in the 1860s

Up to the final third of the nineteenth century, the visual arts in Hungary (mainly painting and sculpture) were somewhat neglected. However, with the signing of the political Compromise (Ausgleich) with Austria in 1867, the Hungarian nation acquired total cultural autonomy within the Empire, which inevitably brought about the demand that the infrastructure of artistic patronage be improved and substantially re-organised.
There was a significant Hungarian artistic heritage (monuments, statues, pictures) mainly in those parts of the country which were Catholic by religion and thus belonged to the 'culture of the senses'; but there were also large territories which, having been Protestant for centuries, belonged to the 'culture of the word', and thus lacked a flourishing tradition of cultivating the visual arts. Even the nobility and the middle classes of Protestant Hungary lived puritanically: their churches were simple, their homes were adorned mainly by family portraits if at all, and except for those few with experience of travel, they were not really cultivated in the visual arts. On the other hand, the patronage of the Catholic aristocracy, together with that of the Church, had produced some remarkable buildings and paintings, although these were rarely on view to the general public.
Around the 1860s, sensual lushness in the arts was still morally alien to the average educated citizen. The cultural elite came largely from the 'Protestant corner' of the country, and they also dominated the press. The fine arts, if they were not regarded as wasteful luxury, were employed for strengthening patriotism, for raising the general level of education, and finally as a necessary means for representation at diverse private and institutional levels. Furthermore, in keeping with the traditions of the Enlightenment and the Protestant elite, it was considered important to underpin them with a didactic, moralising and educational discourse.
Following the Compromise, the political leadership (especially Count Gyula Andrássy, Baron József Eötvös, and also some other aristocrats) tried to promote art institutions and the national collections; but too much had to be done within too short a time if they were to fulfil their dream of 'catching up' with the more advanced West-European 'cultural nations,' for example the French or the English. Art education and the higher-level training of young painters was established mainly for training teachers of drawing.3 Development was slow though and, for about three decades, promising talents were generally sent to study abroad, mainly to Munich. Occasionally they still went to the Vienna Academy, but Hungarians usually took special care not to be seen to reflect Viennese trends too closely. For many years, Paris was rarely chosen as a place for the study of art (it was expensive and difficult to find a studio); this only changed from the late 1880s onwards with newly established scholarships, and partly because of the expanding possibilities of art studies for foreigners in the French capital.
Hungarian painting was never an insular, nationally determined art; it developed among a vivid exchange of ideas and thoughts influenced by what was happening abroad. In view of this it is not surprising that the leading painters of the second half of the nineteenth century were strict adherents to the stylistic ideals of official academic painting (mainly in the German art centres, like Munich, Vienna and Düsseldorf). Such painting carried all the more weight because state comissioned murals and grandiose history paintings were needed by the young Hungarian state. Indeed little time was left over from official commissions to paint pictures for the general art market.

Issues of patronage and the public taste

Although the state did its best to promote the fine arts and to stimulate patronage, it took decades until a wider layer of the middle class discovered the joys of collecting or of being a patron of the arts. The Society of Artists of Hungary5 arranged for two large exhibitions in Budapest each year, in spring and in the winter, but this was not enough to create a habit of gallery going or of regularly buying pictures.
The real change came after 1890, when some members of the cultural elite (many aristocrats still among them) intensified their efforts to stimulate the patronage of high culture within Budapest society. In 1894, a second organisation holding exhibitions came into being, the Magyar Szalon. The greatest breakthrough came with the Millennial Exhibition of 1896, a national exhibition embracing most aspects of Hungarian industry, agriculture, commerce and culture. From May to October of that year visitors could see a display of the latest technologies and a Historical Pavilion, offering an overview of a thousand years of the Hungarian past, plus a separate, substantial and rich exhibition of Hungarian paintings. Of the twenty million inhabitants of Hungary, one million turned up, and even if not all of them saw the art show, most of them attended the Historical Exhibition, for which a special pavilion was built. It consisted of the replicas of twenty-two different historic buildings of the country in the form of a sequence of reconstructed Gesamtkunstwerk period interiors, all in the spirit of Historicism, but designed and arranged by the leading Hungarian painters of the age.
The majority of the visitors experienced the sensual joy of finding themselves in a colourful and harmonious aesthetic ensemble for the first time in their life. They saw how a medieval or Baroque lord might have lived in his palace: the objects, the furniture, the pictures, statues, goldsmith's works and textiles were mostly genuine and represented the glorious past of the nation. Even the strictest Protestant could realise how intellectually overwhelming - and how useful - the culture of the senses can be; and more especially, how it can educate the nation and allow people to understand their past much better. For a great many people this was the very first time that they took note of the existence and importance of art.6 Moreover, the growing interest in painting helped to establish the art market in the capital.

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The first generation of modernist painters

Well over a decade before the venerable Károly Lotz painted his famous Ingres paraphrase, two of the leading figures of the 1860s generation, József Rippl-Rónai and János Vaszary, had begun assiduously experimenting with a modern style, both trying to develop an individual artistic personality and style within the disorientingly rich and confusing art scene of Paris, then the art capital of the world. Both of them changed the representation of the female nude in the 1890s, but in very different ways.
János Vaszary (1867 - 1939) was a protean character. A restless experimenter and an independent minded intellectual, he never attached himself to artistic groups, but sampled nearly every stylistic tendency of his age. He would create a few major pictures in a (provisionally) chosen artistic trend, but after clarifying its aesthetic-intellectual problems and finding virtuoso formal solutions for them, he would soon turn to the next "ism" and start from scratch to resolve a new stylistic challenge. In respect of nude painting, he occupies a crucial position in the stylistic turn of the age. At the very end of the 1880s, he was a follower of the Bastien-Lepage type of refined, elegiac plein-air naturalism; then in Paris, in 1894, he turned to decorative Art Nouveau and continued to paint in this manner after his return to Budapest.
This resulted in very diverse Jugendstil paintings (mixed occasionally with a heavily naturalistic approach), but exhibiting also a profound knowledge of impressionist colour effects in his treatment of plein air nudes (Greeting the Spring / The Living Key, 1899). This type of candid, naturalist nude (the painter faithfully retained all the individual features of the model) was hitherto unparalleled in Hungarian art, as it was in the oeuvre of the painter. The subject of the composition, a wild Bacchante greeting the statue of Priapus, was a provocation to the still highly conservative Budapest public, which was used to 'classically' beautiful models likewise the way the green, blue and yellow hues flickered on the white skin of the red-haired model was another provocation in the eyes of someone, who had not yet seen Renoir's impressionist nudes.
Soon afterwards, between about 1901 and 1905, Vaszary began to work in two different styles in conjunction: on the one hand he chose a powerful, robust realism for his rural themes; and on the other, he exploited aestheticised colour harmonies or refined tonal compositions for his highly intimate scenes with nudes. These usually small pictures of women in dark but cosy rooms show some affinity with the nudes of the fashionable French painter, Paul Albert Besnard, but Vaszary is independent enough to offer new poses and colour effects. His nudes are naturalistic, but embalmed in such gentle atmospheric colour-harmonies that their sensual appeal makes the viewer forget the plumpness of the individual model (Woman before a Mirror, 1904). There is a somewhat claustrophobic feeling in these narrowly focused close-ups, and in this particular picture, even a certain self-absorption in the woman, whose face is obscured from the viewer.
Such paintings reflect a limited world of feminity, which would have appealed strongly to a certain kind of connoisseur, since most of these compositions remained in private collections. They are indeed typical of the fin-de sičcle. But Vaszary soon became bored of the genre, turning in 1905 to landscape and other subjects; only in 1911 - 12 did he start drawing nudes again.
One of the most individual of the Hungarian Art Nouveau painters was József Rippl-Rónai (1861 - 1927), who lived (after a short period of study in Munich) in Paris between 1887 and 1901 and was on the fringes of the Nabis group. However he did not achieve success in his homeland until 1906. In Paris he drew one really stunning nude in 1890: the treatment is powerfully frontal and provocatively sensual, and owes nothing to the style of the contemporary painting in the French capital. What makes the Female Nude: Margaritte Renard so exceptional, apart from the crude strokes of the pen that seem like an agitated cross-stitch, is that the model retains all her individualism. Her face is not hidden and her stare has an almost embarrassing boldness, candidly confronting the voyeur, the "male gaze". For a long time there was nothing like this pen-drawing in Hungary, and even Rippl-Rónai did not repeat this approach to his model in any later work. His other compositions with female nudes in the 1890s are usually figures shown from the back, modestly anonymous, yet appealingly sensual. They are painted in a soft, nearly fluid style, and are set in dark, indistinctly defined interiors.
For a long time Rippl-Rónai had no success and no influence at home, his Parisian, or so called "black," period in painting being regarded as highly decadent in Budapest. After settling in Hungary, in his hometown of Kaposvár, he gradually changed his style and subject-matter. As a result, his more colourful genre works, interiors or landscapes, finally found their public. When he managed to sell all his pictures at the first auction of his work at the Könyves Kálmán Art Gallery, he became a sensation overnight. In 1906/7, his style changed again and now the fiery intensity of his warm colours, with their sharp contrasts of reds, greens and yellows, became the favourites of Budapest connoisseurs, now rapidly growing in number.
Several compositions featuring nudes were painted in his studio or in the lush garden of his yellow-painted villa, the Villa Rome, in Kaposvár. The nudes become decorative, yet anonymous, dancing bodies; their classical gestures and rhythmic movements serve to evoke an arcadian joi de vivre.16 The sensual pleasure of merely being alive, the opulence of radiantly warm colours and the pleasantly simple subject-matter of such paintings are all factors that continue to make Rippl-Rónai a perennial favourite with Hungarian collectors.

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A sea-change in attitudes

The rapid urbanisation of Budapest brought about changes in social mentality and behaviour. A self-concious and ambitiously intellectual elite saw the life-style of Berlin and Paris as its model. Young and dynamic, they were the first generation to profit from excellent secondary-school education, the foundations of which were laid in the early 1870s. The professional and commercial middle classes (often only second generation metropolitan citizens, a considerable portion of them Jewish) wanted to 'catch up' with the latest cultural achievements of Western Europe. Growing living standards enabled them to afford new luxuries, such as travel, sport, music - and even the collection of works of art. This process was accelerated by the free exchange of ideas and information supplied by the press.
The second generation, born in the very early 1880s, tended to be multilingual, which made it easier for them to relate to the intellectual and spiritual issues pre-occupying young men and women everywhere in Europe around 1900. The ge-neration that signed up to the various trends of Modernism was full of energy, waiting impatiently for the mantle of leadership to be passed on from those who, in the early 1890s, had initiated the first reforms against the establishment. This impatience manifested itself in various fields, including politics, where prominent members of the upcoming generation became radical leftists.
In painting this led to a curious phenomenon. The general public's taste lagged so much behind this stylistic upheaval that not even the leading modernisers of the 1890s could achieve any notable success before 1905/1906. Success, when it came, came nearly too late for many, and not at all for others.
The year 1905 was, in any case, an important turning point. All over Europe, in the most important art centres, a new and combative spirit was manifest in most fields of human creativity - in mathematics, physics, literature, music and painting. Here our concern is only with the last of these, but it is important to remember that the radical avant-garde, which was to flourish in the years following 1905, turned passionately against the previous generation and ignored or strongly criticised its values. It was dedicated to upholding or rediscovering the ancient elemental qualities of humanity that seemed more truthful and "genuine" to it than anything produced by the decadent European civilization that had gone before. First they had to overturn the dominant values in painting and then start to build something new. To sum up (and to bring the focus back to our theme, nudes) Aestheticism, Naturalism, Impressionism, Art Nouveau, all these had to be overthrown, so that a new, potentially non-mimetic image of the body could be created, one reflecting the primeval strength of ancient and primitive non-European cultures.

Deconstructing the female body

In spite of the evident modernism of Rippl-Rónai's sun-drenched 'paintmosaics' of 1910 - 11, these were no longer regarded as innovative. Some members of the younger generation, who had been lucky enough to study in Paris as early as 1903 or 1905, had made the acquaintance of the avant-garde artists of the time, such as Matisse and Picasso, who were painting excitingly modern compositions as early as 1907.
Until recently, academic scholarship dealing with the group of painters known as the "Eight"(Nyolcak) regarded 1909 as the year when a radically new theoretical approach to fundamental issues in painting emerged, a reaction against Naturalism, Impressionism and Art Nouveau / Secession in Hungary. The great Parisian retrospective exhibitions of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne gave vital impulses to the development of a new mode of painting in Hungary too, but the relatively few well known pieces in Hungarian public collections (painted at that time by the Eight or other young painters) were always interpreted as pale imitations of French works. Matisse was always referred to, but the sophisticated network of artistic connections, whether personal, professional or commercial (through the galleries) has not yet been studied in detail. In the last fifteen years, as major items from the first decade of the century re-emerge from obscurity, it seems that the chronology, and very often the stylistic evaluation, of individual artists, careers and movements together with the history of Hungarian modernism and modernity will have to be reconsidered.
The Eight brought fresh inspiration from Paris. The part played by their intellectual leader, Károly Kernstok (1873 - 1940), is also one which requires reassessment. In 1903 he painted a large studio picture, Three Models, which brought him notable success on account of its Rembrandtesque darkness.26 Other members of the group, like Czóbel, Berény and soon Vilmos Csaba Perlrott (who never belonged to the Eight), were actively involved in the Paris art scene, directing attention to the fact that Hungarian Fauvism is not merely an unreflected derivation of the Matisse style. It also has close connections with Cézanne and to the birth of Cubism.
Amid this climate of intricate influences, the major figures in Hungarian painting made great efforts to remain autonomous within the wider context of the modern movement, each of them persistenly trying to create an individual style according to his own ideas and temperament. The rediscovered paintings clearly demonstrate an authentic artistic autonomy. They represent the first fruits of the Hungarian avant-garde, which was heavily involved in the leftist politics of the time.
An interesting example of the feverish search for new stylistic possibilities and effects is the large nude27 by Vilmos Csaba Perlrott (1880 - 1955) who was a student of Matisse in 1908/9. The Reclining Nude, might have been painted even earlier, between 1907 and 1909, since it does not yet resemble a mature Fauvist painting, having touches still reminiscent of Gauguin. Each of its horizontal zones shows a different handling of the brush. There is a tension between these different zones and an irritating uncertainty pervades the blue and white pattern of the background behind the sofa, as if it were merely a provisional solution. The geraniums in front of the bed look as if the painter has imported them from an earlier composition of his Nagybánya period. On the other hand, the dark-skinned model, lying on her belly like one of Gauguin's Tahitian girls, looks somewhat scornfully at the viewer, perhaps distantly recalling Manet's Olympia, which Perlrott might have seen when in Paris. His later works assimilated all the elements of Cubism and combined them with a temperamental Expressionism, creating a unique and cohesive stylistic synthesis of the two; but here he is still in the orbit of the earlier masters, the prophets of modernity.
One of the most daring experimenters was the then twenty-year-old Róbert Berény (1887 - 1953). His two early works from 1907 were probably shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1908 and are as good as any French work of the time. His bold distortion of the female nude, together with the arbitrary colour fields and the harsh contrasts of tones, endow the body with a strong plasticity, and demonstrate that the young painter was determined to create a new style.
These two Berény compositions are in fact very different. The Nu d'une jeune Italienne, with its Expressionist distortion, yet retains the cohesion of the body, while the impasto colours of the Reclining Female Nude have a life of their own. They simultaneously construct and deconstruct the body into units of coloured plasticity. The human presence is still very prominent in this composition, but this is not the case with the lying torso. This "objectification" of the female body is very strongly in the tradition of the radical avant-garde, which focuses above all on elaborating different elements of painting. Berény was in no way interested in the individuality of the model - had it been a wax figure it would have served his purpose equally well. And that purpose was to create semi-autonomous fields of colour, treating the human body in terms of units of plasticity.
Berény was not alone among the young artists of the first decade of the twentieth century to focus on the creation of a new visual vocabulary and syntax. The more lyrical painter Ödön Márffy (1878 - 1959) did something similar. In the Hungarian context he was equally revolutionary when compared with the 'naturalist' painters of Nagybánya. Márffy's chief contribution to the new image of the female body is his depiction of a vibrant, red nude in a sun-drenched summer garden (Standing Nude). The flaming colours burn with an even more sizzling intensity than in the canvases of Rippl-Rónai. In its composition and in its size, it is more ambitious than the experiments of Berény, but evidently Márffy's aesthetic ideals do not involve the decomposition of the young, slender body. The graceful gesture of the young model, whose face is hidden by her arm, brings a certain dynamism into her posture, which is echoed in the vibrating colours of the foliage sourrounding the girl.
In the years between 1900 and 1914, Budapest was in many aspects the Paris of the East, at least as far as painting was concerned. Despite amazingly little financial support from connoisseurs and collectors, two great generations of painters, each creating a totally individualistic style, managed to survive and even achieve recognition and success. Whether the Parisian fertilisation of Hungarian painting was entirely due to such a narrow group of artists is a moot point. At the time, there were many intricate connections (such as travelling exhibitions or study tours) between the Hungarian art world and that of Germany, Austria and other European countries. Europe had opened up and everything seemed possible for a generation that was unaware of a Great War looming on the horizon, after which everything was to be different. The synchronicity of works created between 1903 and 1914 in the studios of these two generations makes for puzzling contrasts. There can hardly be a more stunning one than the late Ferenczy nude of 1912 and the early Berény Torso (Reclining Female Nude 1907). Yet it was Ferenczy who introduced the problem of how to draw a female body to many young painters (some of working-class origin) in 1912 in the evening classes at his Epreskert studio in Budapest, thus expanding the horizons of many who had no opportunity to go and study in Paris.
The young Béla Uitz (1887 - 1972) went regularly to Ferenczy's evening classes and not only learned to draw the usual model there (who was herself a girl from a humble working-class family), but also ended up marrying her. It was Uitz who inspired his brother-in-law, the young avant-garde writer, Lajos Kassák, to take up painting. Uitz's drawings of the model are fundamentally different from the nudes of Berény, not only because he adheres to the classical human ideal, in which the personal dignity of the depicted is paramount, but also because his primary aim was to learn to draw as faithfully as possible, and not to create a new style. This traditional loyalty to the mimetic was something the radical avant-garde wanted to do away with and in due course the young experimenter also abandoned it.
Cubism was also an important stylistic inspiration in the Budapest of the early 1910s. A characteristic example is an ink drawing by József Nemes Lampérth (1891 - 1924), made in Paris in early 1914. Nemes Lampérth sadly did not live long, but he left an oeuvre that is highly "masculine." He favoured impasto blocks of colours that endow his models with a sculptural heaviness, even when they are only two-dimensional. Two years later, in the middle of the war, he painted a couple of large nudes in this "Cubo-Expressionist" manner. In their monumental simplicity and aggressive plasticity, these are among the decade's masterpieces. Their monumentality is something that is common to all of Nemes Lampérth's work, whether 'portraits' of objects, landscapes or human beings. His style had a major influence on some of his colleagues, who continued painting such monumental pictures with nude figures even after the Great War, compositions that recalled a golden age, when mankind lived in harmony with nature and with itself in a remote Arcadia.

 

Ilona Sármány-Parsons
is Recurrent Visiting Professor at the Central European University, Budapest. She has published widely on the artistic life of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its painters.