Ilona Sármány-Parsons

A Melancholy Colourist

Munkácsy a nagyvilágban. Munkácsy Mihály muvei külföldi és magyar
magán- és közgyujteményekben (Munkácsy in the World: Mihály Munkácsy's
Works in Private and Public Collections at Home and Abroad)
An Exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery, 24 March-31 July 2005.

...

Munkácsy was an exception among Hungarian painters in the nineteenth century in that, apart from a few early years spent studying in Pest, Vienna, Munich and Düsseldorf, he passed his entire active life in Paris, then the art capital of the world. The wealthiest and most generous collectors of his age were American millionaires, who bought his works straight from his studio; the art dealer and marketing genius Charles Sedelmeyer acted as an intermediary. With the exception of a few publicly exhibited paintings such as Milton and the monumental religious canvases, the greater part of Munkácsy's paintings disappeared into private collections and has not been shown since. For many years, organising an "international Munkácsy exhibition"1 was not a realistic proposition, partly because of the existence of the Iron Curtain and partly because of the lack of adequate financial sponsorship. 2 In the new political dispensation, and not least due to the generous help of a few American collectors of Hungarian origin (first and foremost, Imre Pákh), it has at last become possible to mount such an exhibition, and more importantly to include in it the least known of Munkácsy's oeuvre.3 Years of intense preparation and much organisational work have preceded this show, all of which labour is triumphantly vindicated by the new light it casts on the style of an old master. Notwithstanding these practical difficulties there were clearly theoretical considerations, considerations of the canon, at work too. From the 1890s onwards, the structure of the European art market changed fundamentally. A network of private dealers (galleries) took over the role of guiding public taste from traditional art institutions, bringing about a dramatic shift in the tastes of the art-consuming elite. These dealers were assisted by the new "opinion makers", the art critics of the daily, weekly and monthly press.4 This paradigm shift brought with it the cult of Impressionism and a rapid acceptance of the various "-isms" that followed, but also (perhaps inevitably) led to the dethroning of the idols of the previous generation. This implied a rejection of realism or academic idealism, and finally a downgrading of the classical, so-called "mimetic," aesthetic values. The change came about very rapidly, but its consequences were enduring. For more than seventy years, realism, with the exception of Courbet's brand, lost its appeal and (seemingly) its historical importance. Even the international exhibition boom since the 1980s has left this type of painting almost entirely unnoticed.
Thus the greater part of nineteenth-century "bourgeois realism" in painting, especially where it cannot be squared with a left-wing political agenda, has become a nearly forgotten field in the history of art. Even the most representative painters are little known: virtually no exhibitions, no monographs and no cultural studies have been devoted to their oeuvres since the second great paradigm shift that took place around 1905. That was when the canon of the nineteenth century was rapidly constructed and almost overnight the French contribution became the normative one within the great European narrative of the fine arts. By the second half of the twentieth century certain trends of French painting from the second half of the nineteenth century and focusing on the autonomy of visual representation were seen as the harbingers of abstraction and non-figurative painting. In practice this meant concentrating on the sequence of "-isms" that began with French Impressionism.5 The rest of the artistic production of the period was relegated to a minor status, variously described as conservative, official, retrograde or even pseudo-art, and was almost universally regarded as something inferior, not to be measured by the same aesthetic standards as the art admitted to the canon.
This heavily ideological concept of modernist progress, valuing only the production of avant-garde artists, and focusing always on the newest stylistic developments (the so-called "cutting edge" within a handful of leading art centres), established a highly selective value-system in which other artistic trends, such as narrative and figurative painting, became endowed with negative connotations reaching well back into history, nearly indeed to the age of Romanticism or Courbet. Even such a pioneer of the "new art history" as T. J. Clark, while brilliantly elaborating the historical and social milieu of nineteenth-century art in all its cultural, ideological and spiritual aspects, ends up bestowing the accolade only on the politically engaged "revolutionary realists" (Courbet, Daumier). Although attempts were made to rescue the different local traditions and historic values of this or that national canon, the discourse of art history (and in a broader sense, that of the critical literature of most countries) were adjusted to this international norm and became increasingly ambivalent about the "cultural heroes" of the previous century.
During the decades of isolation in the fifties an ideologically censored profession of art history in Hungary was able to accommodate appreciation of some realist masters. Munkácsy, because of his plebeian origin and plebeian subjects, was still celebrated; indeed, he was among the very few Hungarian painters to be honoured with a richly illustrated monograph and even a catalogue raisonné, the latter published in 1958. It remains a seminal work on Munkácsy, despite the fact that its author, Lajos Végváry, was unable to see a great part of the oeuvre, the data for which he collected with enormous difficulty. By the late 1960s, and concomitant with the slackening of ideological control, it became a sign of "backwardness" to admire romantic subjects, bourgeois realism and indeed the work of most of those painters who had been highly appreciated in Hungary in their own lifetimes. These artists were rather patronisingly regarded as likely to appeal only to the naive, uneducated public; any serious intellectual, who thought of himself as a part of the nation's cultural elite, would not indulge a taste for such art. At the same time, a younger generation of art historians, trying to catch up with the scholarly discourse dominating the profession in the West (non-socialist, North Atlantic countries), and simultaneously struggling for the autonomy of artistic experimentation in opposition to the dogma of Socialist Realism, naturally turned away from those artists and trends which were officially accepted, for whatever reason. The promotion of non-figurative art was assisted by the historic fact that most of the Hungarian Avant-garde during and after the First World War belonged to the political left, or even to the Communist Party, and thus could be counted ideologically as "one of us" by the Marxist cultural establishment of the late sixties and early seventies. (However, even within the official cultural establishment there was a difference of opinion as to which Communist tradition should be preferred - the local Hungarian one or the orthodox, Russian line.) Gradually the socialist national cultural canon (or at least what was regarded as such) was reformulated by the urban political opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of those artists who had been heavily promoted by the state as standard-bearers of "official art" were demoted in favour of those who had earlier been on the margins both of society and of the art world. National icons thought of as embodying genuine artistic values were no longer to be artists like Munkácsy, but rather painters like Csontváry, Derkovits or Kassák.
An ahistorical and rather frivolous tone was in vogue in cultural journalism reflecting the changed preferences of art historians and questioning the whole practice of academic Historicism and realism, while disregarding the social context in which many artists of the nineteenth century lived and worked.

...

For about a quarter of a century, Munkácsy was the example to follow for all Hungarian painters who dreamt of making a career. He himself tried hard to live up to his image, founding a scholarship for young talents and always being ready to help his countrymen to find their feet in the French capital. His hospitality was proverbial. However, as a foreigner who never mastered French well, he was never truly integrated into the official Parisian art scene. Moreover, the uniqueness of his style (virtuoso, highly emotional, yet realistic) marked him out from his contemporaries. His work offered psychologically convincing and often dramatic scenes from the life of the poor (Last Day of the Condemned Man, 1869), and later from history generally (Milton Dictating "Paradise Lost" to his Daughters, 1878, Christ before Pilate, 1881.) Yet, and despite his idiosyncratic talent, it would have been extremely difficult for him to have become a celebrated painter in the Paris of the 1870s that abounded with gifted artists, had he not been adroitly promoted by one of the shrewdest art dealers of the age, Charles Sedelmeyer.18 Originally a specialist in Dutch painting, Sedelmeyer had moved from Vienna to Paris in 1866. Besides selling old masters, he developed a line in promoting and selling painters from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, artists such as August Pettenkofen, Rudolf Ribarz, Eugen Jettel and Václav Broz·ik. Perfect craftsmanship and a virtuoso technique were the sine qua non for any artist he agreed to represent. Although a very shrewd businessman and a brilliant presenter (he staged theatrically impressive shows of his artists' work, took their major paintings on tour and was adept at working up expectations at auctions), Sedelmeyer was also a fair manager, and by no means the exploitative villain that the later literature on Munkácsy likes to present.19 He was in fact an art manager in the new style, carefully assessing how to appeal to the snobbery of the nouveaux riches, or to flatter the taste of American collectors. Actually he did not much differ in his dealings from Paul Durand-Ruel or Georges Petit, the dealers of the Impressionists. Sedelmeyer also recognised very early the immense influence of the media, which in those days meant the daily press.20 He established the marketing ploy of "travelling pictures", taking the famous monumental works of the Paris Salon or the World Exhibition on special tours round the big European cities.
At that time, giant Historicist canvases played the same role as costume dramas from Hollywood were to play in the twentieth century. The public of the 1870s and 1880s lived in a much poorer world than today as far as visual stimulation was concerned: coloured pictures could only be seen in churches or in museums, and what was on offer locally could be very limited. The spoiled and sophisticated Parisian art scene (at that time the undisputed centre of the European art world) was uniquely rich in the number and scale of regular art shows it had to offer. The rest of the world was grateful if it was able to see an important painting occasionally, such picture tours helping to make an artist world-famous and his dealer extremely rich. This sort of stage-management was thus the best publicity an artist could get at the time and inevitably also distinguished the big names from those destined for relative obscurity.
Sedelmeyer made a contract with Munkácsy, under the terms of which he payed him a substantial regular salary, which enabled the artist to live in grand style. For ten years from 1878, Sedelmeyer had exclusive rights to sell Munkácsy's paintings and organised the exhibition-tours of the painter's most monumental compositions, the subjects of which had usually been suggested by the dealer in the first place. These giant historical canvases had to have well known historical themes that were readily accessible for the majority of the educated middle class. The subjects of the paintings therefore had to be well known beyond their own native shores, which meant that internationally celebrated historical personalities were considered the most suitable, those who belonged to the collective memory of European (or, more generally, Western) culture. Milton, however, was something of an exception to this rule: of course he was a wellknown literary and historical personage for the educated Anglo-Saxon public, but his fame was limited to Continental Europe.

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Before the advent of Post-Modernism, which blurred previously sharp ideological distinctions, the autonomy of painting was not only an aesthetic ideal but was also closely tied to spiritual and ethical values in art. This meant that an authentic art work came to be seen not only as necessarily abstract, but also something that was as independent as possible of the materialistic social value of a commodity. It followed that a true artist had to ignore not only the mechanisms of the art market but even its existence. Subsequently, however, this was a doctrine that was honoured more in the breach. Indeed, in the last fifteen years or so, the discourse of art history more and more reflects the dramatic change caused by the vigorous marketing of modern works of art. It is no longer a matter of shame to confess that art is also a commodity - quite the contrary. Art was of course a commodity in nineteenth-century Paris too, and we would be well advised not to fall into the trap of thinking that the aesthetic quality of a picture is necessarily diminished simply because it was well marketed within the lifetime of the artist. The manner in which art prices, success and celebrity were built up has recently become a fashionable subject for art historians, but it is important to remember that this is a theme that belongs as much to the history of Impressionism as it does to that of "official" art, or of "consumer" art.
The great paradigm shift that has occurred in art-historical and aesthetic discourse25 has made it possible for us to look with a fresh eye also at those works of Munkácsy which were subsequently pushed to the margins of his oeuvre, although they actually constituted a major part of it: these are principally the "salon" pictures of the upper middle class at leisure, and his history paintings with biblical subjects. The present exhibition at the National Gallery gives appropriate and generous space to both genres.
Naturally, for the art connoisseur of the twenty-first century, the landscapes, still lives, and even the salon pictures will tend to be more pleasing than the biblical scenes. However, Post-Modernism has gone some way to rehabilitating narrative and figurative representations of the nineteenth century. The family idyll verging on sentimentality is regaining legitimacy in terms of its own aesthetic; the virtuoso brushwork depicting the tactile values of velvet, silk, glass or metal can again be appreciated for what it is: a bravura display of perfected technique. Recent auctions have demonstrated how esteemed such painterly virtues are, even in the eyes of modern collectors. The novelty in these dark, claustrophobic and luxurious, but nevertheless pleasing, interieurs is the freshness of the palette, the warm and bright colour harmonies, the sophisticated, rare hues of the drapery, the sureness of the compositions and the sophisticated light-effects (The Music Room, 1879; Morning in the Country House, 1881.)
Munkácsy was only one among a number of successful painters (for example, Alfred Stevens, James Tissot, John Singer Sargent) who specialised in depicting these domestic interieurs of leisured high society when in Paris. The painterly quality of the tonal harmonies and the fascinatingly modern brushwork in the details are a genuine surprise even to those art historians who like to focus on technical trouvailles, that is, on the métier of the individual painter.
In the case of the religious pictures, it is other merits which bring revelations, even for sceptics, when confronted with well restored and well-lit canvasses. Before restoration, many were puzzled by the enthusiasm of the leading nineteenth- century art critics for these works, and by their inclination to write lengthy psychological analyses of the scenes depicted and of the individual figures. Now, even the reduced versions shown here of the huge originals, or the sketches for them, reveal their expressive qualites, a genuine effort to catch the psychological drama of the scene, while never overstepping the limits of a plausible historical reality. Even to the average viewer today, whose secular outlook might incline him to expect an allegorical treatment of the narrative, these representations still have a powerful immediacy. When Munkácsy's compositions are compared to run-of-the-mill contemporary religious depictions, it becomes clear that his approach to such well-worn subjects is by far the most realistic, as it is the most human and dramatic.

 

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.