Éva Forgács

Looking Again at the Canon

Modern Hungarian Painting 1892-1919. 639 pp. and appendices, 943 illustrations in colour. Modern Hungarian Painting 1919-1964. 839 pp, 1526 illustrations in colour. Edited by Tamás Kieselbach. Kieselbach Gallery, Budapest, 2003, 2004. The Hidden Treasures of Hungarian Painting. Selection from Hungarian Private Collections, Volume I. 1853-1919. Edited by Judit Virág & István Törő, Budapest, Mű-Terem Gallery, 2004, 335 pp. with unpaginated illustrations in colour.

 

1

Unsurprisingly, the growth of the art market in post-Communist Hungary has brought about a reassessment of the body of Hungarian art. In the highly competitive world of art dealers, two individuals have distinguished themselves not only as outstanding dealers but also as art historians with a vision, ready to ferret out works from every hidden nook and cranny. They are Tamás Kieselbach of the Kieselbach Gallery and Judit Virág of the Mű-Terem Gallery. Both operate in Falk Miksa Street, among several art and antique shops in downtown Budapest.
Their latest achievement, and it is no small achievement, is in publishing their respective volumes on modern Hungarian painting both in Hungarian and in English. While the Mű-Terem Gallery's is actually an exhibition catalogue, with its second volume still to come, Kieselbach has produced an enormous two-volume collection of high-quality reproductions whose stated aim is to reconsider the canon and narrative of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungarian painting up to 1964.
Kieselbach's enterprise is unprecedented not just in Hungary but, as he justly claims, in the international art world as well. The two bulky (and heavy) volumes of Modern Hungarian Painting run to some 1,500 pages with no less than 2,500 reproductions in colour, 37 short essays (primarily addressed to foreign readers) providing basic information on some of the key artists, collectors and issues in the period covered. Kieselbach and his team (the key members are Marianna Kolozsváry and Péter Molnos) selected this impressive material from the holdings of 71 museums and 183 private collections in Hungary and abroad after examining about 70,000 paintings altogether and setting up a database of that magnitude. "It is no exaggeration to say that the Hungarian painting of the last hundred years has never been examined on this scale before," writes Kieselbach.
Although archive photographs of many works are available, the team had each and every painting re-photographed to produce the body of consistently high-quality (although somewhat spruced-up) colour reproductions the two volumes contain. This was important because in this publication it is the images that create the narrative. "I have produced a book which shows the paintings that live in me, rejecting all compromise," Kieselbach says in his Preface. "I wanted to allow the history of Hungarian painting to speak through the works themselves in a book that is primarily aimed at the eye. The paintings are not mere illustrations. They take on the leading role in the book."
It has to be noted that an undertaking on this scale would hardly be possible anywhere else in the art world. This is not only because there might be no need to boost the image of, say, Dutch or Italian painting but, more importantly, because of the unbearable cost of the copyrights of about 2,500 reproductions and the overwhelming paperwork involved. Kieselbach acknowledges copyrights to other institutions for five reproductions out of his staggering total, which suggests that all the other private and public collections permitted the re-photographing of their holdings without the need for acknowledgment. This must be a fairly unusual arrangement on this scale, one that the Mű-Terem Gallery has also managed to achieve. The publishers simply do not claim the copyright of the published photos and consequently no copyright holder is indicated. A reflection of the chaotic situation in Hungary as regards reproduction rights.
The Mű-Terem book, The Hidden Treasures of Hungarian Painting, as its title indicates, is based on the works that had been literally hidden until the Gallery showed them late in 2003. In this case, the period covered starts in 1853, allowing the inclusion of nineteenth-century romantic and realist paintings, an area popular with many collectors. Judit Virág mainly seems to strive to confirm that Hungarian painting is of higher quality than generally acknowledged. She puts some of the great finds of recent years into limelight, often overlapping with the Kieselbach book. One of the merits of her book is that it publishes previously unknown photographs of many artists. Katalin Sinkó's introductory essay on the history of Hungarian art collecting makes the case for continuing this tradition. The great value of the Mű-Terem catalogue is that most of the paintings it includes are strikingly good and throw light on some previously neglected aspects of well-known oeuvres. For example József Egry's early, 1910 symbolist-type painting Golden Age (Adam and Eve) adds to what he has been largely known for, and even for an unknown artist like Gizella Dömötör, the work chosen to represent her (Portrait of a Woman, 1916) is powerful.
Kieselbach has many strands to follow in these two impressive and ambitious volumes. He delivers an overwhelmingly rich body of the Hungarian painting of the period, demonstrates his independent judgment in the selection, and reveals connections hitherto "concealed or hidden from the public eye", as he puts it. He set himself the task of exploiting the possibilities of the book:

What I hope is that history will emerge from the choice of paintings, their positioning, sequencing and the visual experience they offer. ...Position on the top of the page or the bottom, to the left or to the right, full or half or quarter page: nothing is by chance or by happenstance; quality, linkage by theme or atmosphere, mutual responsiveness through colour or form, harmony of toning, archetypal allusions, symbolic layers resonating in proximity.

Most of what he selects are drawn from the usual suspects, but the emphases are often shifted. Volume I opens with Rippl-Rónai's 1890 Woman in White-Spotted Dress, and Volume II ends with Béla Kondor's 1964 Wasp King. Alongside Rippl-Rónai, Volume I puts centre stage Károly Ferenczy, László Mednyánszky, Tivadar Csontváry-Kosztka, and the colourists of the Nyolcak, or (The Eight): Róbert Berény, Dezső Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Lajos Tihanyi, along with the less spectacular painters of the group, Dezső Orbán (Desiderius) and Bertalan Pór. Also not surprisingly, and not against the consensus, János Vaszary and Lajos Gulácsy are well represented. There are strong and welcome presences of Vilmos Csaba Perlrott and Imre Szobotka, painters who are not exactly unknown to art lovers but heretofore have not been ranked with the members of The Eight in the canon. A strong body of works by Géza Bornemisza, Tibor Boromisza, Sándor Ziffer and others represent the second generation of the Nagybánya artists' colony, which since the early 1990s has had attention drawn to it by a younger generation of art historians.
Volume II opens with pieces from the 1922 Graphic Portfolio of Aurél Bernáth, an avant-garde series of prints of a young artist (who later became mainstream) and these are followed by works from outstanding Hungarian avant-garde artists: János Mattis-Teutsch, Lajos Kassák, Sándor Bortnyik, Béla Uitz and others. More works by The Eight are included, as if in continuance of Volume I. István Nagy, a painter rediscovered by Kieselbach as one of the great masters, appears in both volumes with many charcoal drawings and pastels to accompany his paintings, and János Nagy-Balogh gets more emphasis than usual. The central figures of the early twentieth-century narrative are such classics as Gyula Derkovits, who combined cubist-constructivism with a classicist vision, and the haunting, expressive István Farkas, József Egry, Lajos Vajda (represented by more charcoals, drawings, collages than paintings), Dezső Korniss, Imre Ámos, György Román, Jenő Gadányi and Menyhért Tóth, painters who resist categorisation. The middle section presents the visions of Arcadia of the Hungarian neo-classicists. This is followed by works by several members of the European School (Európai Iskola) group founded in 1946, for example Tamás Lossonczy, the abstract painter Tihamér Gyarmathy, the surrealists Endre Bálint and Margit Anna, the strictly structured paintings of Jenő Barcsay, the idiosyncratic works of Lili Ország, Béla Veszelszky and, as a last chapter, a representative of the post-war generation, Béla Kondor.
Finally the History includes biographies and a bibliography, a list of the paintings with complete information, pictures from the Kieselbach Gallery's exhibitions in preparation for this publication, a collection of quotations, samples of the Gallery's forthcoming project, and quite some more.
Apart from a purely visual structure, the novelty of Kieselbach's presentation of modern Hungarian painting is the adding of a large number of names to the canon and the shift of focus onto the great colourists. There are, undeniably, works by barely known or unprolific artists, which should not be overlooked, particularly in a culture which can ill afford itself such a luxury. Focusing on those bold colourists who lived and worked with the German expressionists and the French Fauves, and who are now referred to as the "Hungarian Fauves" makes sense, since this now appears to have been an outstanding trend in Hungary, even if it was not a genuine 'Hungarian' style. Some of Vaszary's paintings are as vivid 'colour symphonies' as any Maurice Vlaminck or André Derain painting from roughly the same period. At this point Kieselbach joins forces with initiatives such as the Hungarian National Gallery's 2002 exhibition János Mattis-Teutsch and the Blaue Reiter group, which convincingly made the case for the Hungarian artist's kinship with the Munich expressionists of the early 1910s.
Kieselbach's intention to let the pictures speak for themselves and construct their own narrative implicitly challenged the dominant methodology and views of those Hungarian art historians who base themselves on the history of styles and chronology. Challenging this tradition is grounded, among other things, in the sizable contribution that Kieselbach and other art dealers have made throughout the last fifteen years to the actual number of recognized Hungarian paintings. Sifting through private collections and the storage rooms of provincial museums, a great number of previously unknown or forgotten paintings have been brought to the fore. Most of them fall into one of two main categories: they are either previously unknown works by established artists, or unknown works by unknown, hardly known, or only marginally considered artists. In the former category there are a few breathtaking discoveries such as József Nemes-Lampérth's 1917 Portrait of a Man (reproduced in the the Mű-Terem Gallery's catalogue), István Nagy's 1911 Naked Trees with Houses, and a number of Lajos Tihanyi's paintings. In the latter category, the book includes remarkable works by Béla Farkas, Margit Gráber, Mária Modok, Józsa Járitz, Géza Vörös, Ödön Vaszkó, and a great many others who painted compelling pictures, and whose integration into the narrative of modern Hungarian painting makes its texture richer. Ödön Vaszkó is particularly interesting as the representative of a Hungarian version of Neue Sachlichkeit. His Evening, from 1932, which represents an apartment building in the evening light, prefigures László Fehér's 1988 photo-based painting, Balcony, which is, of course, beyond the time-limits of this publication. It is these far-shooting connections that come across as more interesting than the obvious ones: for example, thumbing through Volume II, one is tempted to see kinship between the early Ferenc Martyn and 1960s Pál Deim, the Aurél Bernáth of the late 1920s-early 1930s and early 1960s Béla Kondor.

The downside of having such a rich pair of books is that we encounter a rather great number of second- and third-rank works. The problem arises from Kieselbach's unsuccessfully trying to coordinate his vision as an art historian with his all-embracing interests as an art dealer. Although he is convincing when he introduces some of the good work of marginal artists, he is less credible when he fills up many of the pages with the works of mediocre ones such as Hugo Scheiber, Béla Kádár, Frigyes Frank, or such embarrassing ones as Gyula Batthyány, Gyula Tichy, Rezső Bálint, Lajos Kunffy, to mention but a few. These are the more problematic because they often appear in the vicinity of the really good works, which makes one wonder what exactly the publisher-editor meant by "rejecting all compromise", as he promises in the Preface. It is simply not credible that he would consider, for example, Gyula Kosztolányi-Kann and József Rippl-Rónai as each other's equals, although he places their works on facing pages. In fact, the weaker paintings are more obviously weak in the vicinity of more powerful works. One is tempted to think at some points that there is an effort to validate lesser painters by interspersing the really good paintings with their works. Sometimes it works, but more often it doesn't. For example, juxtaposing a major painter with a minor one such as Vaszary and Frigyes Frank is a stretch, as is putting Nemes-Lampérth next to Maria Lanow. The differences in quality are all too obvious.
Another aspect which I find troublesome is the relative overweight of neo-classicist works from the inter-war period, mainly from the School of Rome (Római Iskola) painters, which are formal, heavy-handed and pretentious, lulled into a fake ideal world. It is hard not to imagine that there are a great number of such works available for the market, which might be the main reason for their emphatic inclusion.
Inclusion and exclusion is inevitably a problem for every anthology. In this amazingly rich pair of books, which offer an all-encompassing view of modern Hungarian painting, there a few puzzling questions. One is raised by Kieselbach's brief disclaimer in his Preface concerning the almost total exclusion of the works of László Moholy-Nagy. The reason given is that most of his career unfolded abroad, so he was actually not part of the Hungarian art scene, whereas this publication deals with Hungarian painting in Hungary. But if this be so, why include works by Jolán Gross-Bettelheim, Gábor Peterdi, Vilmos Huszár, Sándor Trauner, Maria Lanow, who scarcely lived and worked in Hungary at all, or, strictly speaking, even such expatriates as Dezső (Desiderius) Orbán or Lajos Tihanyi, who spent a great part of their lives in other countries? Considering exclusions, there is one painful omission in Volume II, that of Tibor Csernus. Although he left Hungary in 1971, and has not been part of the Hungarian art scene since then, Csernus's work in the 1950s and early 60s is pivotal and unique. His absence is the more striking because his teacher, Aurél Bernáth, is given due attention and less significant artists such as Béla Kontuly, Géza Bene and Gyula Czimra come across as protagonists of the 1950s in the book. Once again, it is hard not to think of the perspective of the art dealer, who is not interested in Csernus because his works are not on the market in Hungary.

A key to the entire undertaking is the "positioning and sequencing" of the paintings which reveal the "hidden connections" between them. Indeed, many of the juxtapositions are revealing. Common knowledge and longtime consensus would, for example, bracket the impressionist Károly Ferenczy as a typically late- nineteenth-century painter, whereas the work of József Rippl-Rónai is seen on the other side of the centennial divide as an early modernist, not only a virtuoso art nouveau master but one who idiosyncratically surpassed such a bracket. The juxtaposition of Ferenczy's 1905 Sunny Morning and Rippl-Rónai's 1909 A Still Afternoon..., however, eloquently shows that both are encapsulated in the same era of idyllic timelessness, and their different painterly idioms are but a thin veneer over a sensibility that was fundamentally shared. Indeed, they belonged to the same generation, born in 1861 and 1862, respectively. Here Kieselbach suggests that the subject matter and the lingering mood of a painting can be so reliably indicative of a painter's identity that they may have priority over the stylistic markers and painting method. In this case the Zeitgeist connects the two artists more than their different painterly approaches divide them.
Some other juxtapositions are equally subtle, but the truth is that I find many of them just thematic. Groups of still-life-with-flower paintings are clustered, as are groups of cityscapes, hilly landscapes or portraits. Thematic grouping works against the grain of the adequate reception of paintings, and thus the fundamental concept of these books, because it tends to verbalise the visual experience, which is exactly what Kieselbach is intent on eschewing. But again, it is hard to avoid the idea that identifying paintings according to their subject matter is what the public, including buyers, is most ready to accept. Suggestive groupings of paintings have such priority that the editor overlooks his own self-imposed rules for them. For example, in the post-1919 Volume II, József Koszta paintings dated 1904 and 1909 respectively, stand along with several István Nagy and János Nagy-Balogh landscapes dated 1910, perhaps so that they may be in the context of Gyula Rudnay's and János Tornyay's pictures ca. 1920. A landscape by Csontváry from ca. 1900 appears in Vol. II next to a 1921 Derkovits and a 1918 Moholy-Nagy, opposite an early Vajda from the late 1920s. It is hard to tell how illuminating such groupings are and what their message is. Is there some mysterious inner connection between artists as profoundly different as Csontváry and Moholy-Nagy? And if so, what might that be?

2

With all my respect for Kieselbach's undertaking which provides us with the most complex and gigantic illustrated publication on Hungarian painting ever, I would like to spell out what I find problematic about the lack of some kind of guidance throughout the all-visual volumes.
There are two competing, half-articulate narratives of Hungarian painting which have their own respective sub-texts in history and in the painterly material. Kieselbach either chooses to ignore this duality, or hopes to overcome it by sticking to visual material only.
One of these is tied to the Enlightenment, which has, since the end of the eighteenth century, represented the authority of the supranational Western tradition in Hungary as well as the possibility, in the eyes of vanguard Hungarian artists and thinkers, to integrate Hungarian into Western European culture. Modernist painters who were schooled in Paris or Munich and followed French and German styles acted, as artists, as freely as the innovative painters of these countries. They believed that their work would contribute to bridge the cultural gap between Hungary and Western Europe. From Nagybánya through The Eight, the Activists to the surrealists of the European School and the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, they were consistently disliked by officialdom. However, Hungarian art history writing has sided with them and the modernist narrative, with nods to the art historian Lajos Fülep's fascination with the 'national genius'. The eventually recurring allure of this concept has become, by and large, the dominant narrative of modern Hungarian art. Cultivation of the 'national genius' on the other hand was, throughout the twentieth century, a sub-current, addressing deep-running, suppressed reservoirs of what was thought to be genuinely Hungarian. While modernism and its international concept were mistrusted by the adherents of this latter concept and were not accepted as the dominant language of Hungarian art, 'genuine Hungarian' artworks never amounted to a mythical meta-narrative. They lacked the potential to become official or mainstream art, or even a decisive trend, in the counter-culture.
In parallel to the efforts to construct modernism, there were efforts to construct a national mythology. These related to the never quite identified origin and ancient culture of pagan Hungarians, and it was this pre-Christian pagan dream which had kept myth under the surface of the official national Christian culture. The idea of the pagan past remained semi-suppressed as a collective unconscious, and reference to it evoked a collective dream rather than a specific idea. Mythologising a 'genuine' Hungarian spirit implicitly opposed the official cultural ideals of every political system in Hungary as foreign (including Christianity as a foreign imposition on the pagan Hungarian identity, not to speak of Communism); therefore the explicit European-ness of the modernist Hungarian artists, and their aspirations to transcend national identities, was as distant and disagreeable to those who adhered to this myth as anything can be. Therefore, what Lyotard calls the two great narrative traditions in Western culture in terms of the legitimisation of knowledge, the past-bound mythical narrative on the one hand, and the projective, future-bound modernist one on the other,1 have been in deep conflict in the Hungarian culture of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
In painting this dichotomy is tangible in the work, reception and repeated rediscovery of Tivadar Csontváry-Kosztka, a provincial pharmacist-turned-painter, who was in his 50s when he received what he understood as a prophetic mission to paint. Fanatically believing that it was his mission to find the original homeland of Hungarians, he travelled East. In 1910, exactly at the time when The Eight took the first steps to outline a programme for modernist painting in Hungary, Csontváry mounted an exhibition at an alternative venue, the Technical University of Budapest, which was received by some critics as the "genuine talent" of "the new Hungarian art". One critic asked: "Shouldn't we keep such innocent prophets in higher esteem than the all too savvy, routine and powerful daubers?"3 Csontváry himself published articles about the concept of Genius. His work was aggressively promoted by Béla Hamvas and Katalin Kemény in 1946,4 and Lajos Németh's great rediscovery and the major exhibition of Csontváry's work in 1963, as well as Zoltán Huszárik's cult film about the artist, were clearly part of resuscitating the myth of the 'national genius'. Csontváry's painting betrays much dilettantism, while some of his visionary landscapes are overwhelming. There have been efforts in the last decades to present Csontváry as the Hungarian Le Douanier Rousseau, though this was opposed by the late critic Ernő Kállai, who pointed out that while Rousseau was the product of fine-honed French culture and his paintings abound in conspicuous detail, Csontváry's pictures lack attention to them and are "roughly dilettante", "reflecting the lofty imagination and the suppression of the individual of the Hungarian Plains."5 Kieselbach gives extraordinary exposure to two of Csontváry's paintings, printing them oversize, on two facing pages of Volume I. But, aware of how divisive this art is, he includes conflicting quotes of painters on Csontváry in the back of the book. Aurél Bernáth comments on Taormina: "[it is] an inn-sign, the worst of its kind: a photograph awkwardly blown up, a bad photomural", while to Endre Bálint "Csontváry was not a naďve painter. Naďve are those who believe him naďve."
The unconditional inclusion of Csontváry, along with a few other artists whose work is more visionary than sound in the professional-painterly sense of the word, such as Lajos Gulácsy and Jenő Paizs-Goebel, is a reconciliatory and all-inclusive gesture on Kieselbach's part (as well as an expression of his own best judgment); it agrees with the overwhelming approval of Csontváry's work by the many Hungarian intellectuals whose selection of the best five Hungarian painters is printed in the back of the book. Yet I can't help seeing the work of these artists as outsider art, which stayed outside of the main pursuits of Hungarian painting and single-mindedly embraced visions which did not relate to the problems of authentically expressing the modern world. If I would welcome any organising principle in the presentation of modern Hungarian painting, it would be some kind of distinction between mythologising and modernism, siding with Bernáth rather than Bálint, between naďve painters and professionals.

3

An important feature of Kieselbach's achievement is that it is his individual contribution. Although the short essays are written by excellent and established art historians, the two volumes reflect Kieselbach's personal choices, preferences, his tastes and interests. (This he reconfirms in the Preface to Volume II.) The very fact that an individual - an art historian, collector and art dealer - had the professional and financial power to produce a work of this magnitude illuminates a few specifics of the present situation of the arts and the art market in Hungary.
According to the press information pack, Kieselbach originally intended Modern Hungarian Painting for a foreign readership, explicitly pointing out that there are still many countries whose art is still unknown or undervalued in Western Europe and the United States. He clearly offers its publication as a means of achieving a better international recognition of Hungarian painting.
This intention is nothing short of heroic, by which Kieselbach, even if it is in his best interest as an art dealer, has a far-sighted strategy. At the cost of several years of work and considerable amounts of money, he is making an attempt to fix Hungarian art in the international context as it has not been done before. What the Goliaths of the Hungarian museums and art institutions have not been able to accomplish, Kieselbach tries to achieve on its own. Hungarian art still commands its highest prices in Hungary, and prices are far from being stable even though a consensus is being hammered out from auction to auction. As long as Hungarian art does not command approximately the same price abroad as at home, how-ever, it is not as convertible as the Hungarian currency now is. It is the condition for the survival of the Hungarian art market to stabilise prices at home and abroad. This is something that museums may shrug off, but an art dealer cannot. The publication of these two luxurious volumes is primarily to serve this effort. Kieselbach had to place his bet on this effort not being futile. His argument is that even if Hungarian painting is mostly derivative, it includes works of compelling quality and quantity, which can be the reasonable choice of any collector of the modern period. From this point of view, the inclusion of second- and third-rate works convincingly demonstrates a layered body of paintings, where the great masters are in a living context rather than working as solitary geniuses.
Kieselbach's effort is the more timely as he has had to contend with an already set image of Hungarian painting in the West, whose focus is on the ethnographic features of even modernist art in Hungary. For example, a 1995 exhibition in Ingelheim, Germany, merged the Hungarian avant-garde with folk art, under the title Csárdás in Quadrat; and when the Neue Galerie in Linz, Austria, put up an excellent, major exhibition of twentieth-century Hungarian art in 1998, a local article referred to the event as "Ein Csárdás pannonischer Kunstvielfalt", or A csárdás of Pannonian art diversity.
Kieselbach tries to maintain awareness of the internationally established qualities of Hungarian art. This is presumably why he includes in the Appendix small-size reproductions of "The Most Famous Hungarian Pictures of the World", reminding readers that such great and familiar names as André Kertész, Martin Munkácsi, Robert Capa, and Brassaď were Hungarians. This move, however, is part of a different strategy than the one he follows in excluding Moholy-Nagy, whose name recognition is second only to Béla Bartók's, and could coagulate the image of Hungarian Modernism for those who are using this work to familiarize themselves with it.
Kieselbach is fully aware of the recognition abroad of Hungarian literature and film; taking that as a model, he invited the Academy Award-winning film director István Szabó to speak at the book launch. Retrieving success for the art of the past is much more difficult than representing the art of the present which, after all, belongs to the future. Yet if belated success could come to Hungarian writer Sándor Márai after his death in 1989, with his works newly translated and published in Germany, Italy, Great Britain and the United States, why could this not happen to the great treasure of Hungarian Painting?

 

Éva Forgács
former Associate Professor of Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Crafts and Design, is Adjunct Professor of Art History at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. She is author of The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (CEU Press, 1995) and co-editor of Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910-1930 (The MIT Press, 2002).