Ilona Sármány-Parsons

Challenging the Canon

Magyar vadak Párizstól Nagybányáig 1904-1914 (Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904-1914). An Exhibition in the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 22 March-20 August 2006. Catalogues in Hungarian and in English edited by Krisztina Passuth and György Szucs. Hungarian National Gallery, 333 pp. and 246 pp., respectively.

The chances are that recent exhibitions at the Hungarian National Gallery will ultimately change the Hungarian canon through the re-evaluation of wellknown masters, together with the discovery, or rediscovery, of others who had been suppressed or simply off the radar screen for at least half a century.¹
It will certainly require several years, perhaps decades, before the rest of the world acknowledges that Hungary too has produced remarkable artists whose works are worthy of recognition and deserve to be collected-even in Paris, London and New York, traditionally the most important and wealthiest of the world's art centres. The present writer is cautiously optimistic that this will eventually be achieved, despite the many obstacles still to be overcome.² Investors tend to pursue a taste that has been sanctioned by expert opinion, and more investment means more shows and greater public awareness. Nor is it entirely a matter of money. The now widespread interest in Scandinavian and Finnish art has pushed up prices; that process began when some visionary curators began to put the finest Scandinavian masters on show (e.g. the exhibition "Northern Light," New York, 1982).
Before the First World War, Europe was more cohesive culturally than it is now; it is ironic that there seems to have been a greater mobility and genuine exchange in the fine arts than exists under twentieth-century globalisation. Exchanges may have been limited by factors such as relative wealth and social class, but around 1900, wonderfully rich shows, involving Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, were circulating between Paris, Vienna, Budapest and Prague, something which would be impossible to organize in the same way now.³
One obstacle faced by Central European art (other than Viennese) in its struggle for greater recognition has been the iron curtain that still firmly exists in the mindset of the art institutes of the West and of the North-Atlantic countries. Typically, when galleries or museums in former Socialist countries (apparently still newcomers in Europe's very patchy memory) wish to exhibit important works by great names such as Matisse or Cézanne in order to demonstrate their impact on their own domestic art scenes, the core countries of old Europe are reluctant to cooperate. Important works don't usually travel further than Vienna unless current political developments demand some exceptional gesture in terms of cultural representation; nor do works from what is obviously regarded as the cultural periphery of Europe figure in their own blockbuster shows. The few recent successful international shows in Central Europe for which French, American and German museums have lent some famous works have, alas, been the exceptions that prove the rule: one-off political gestures and subjected to strict financial limits.
Such financial limits are the most frustrating aspect of modern exhibitionmaking, since the costs of insurance and transport make it nearly impossible for a former Socialist country, struggling with a shrinking cultural budget, to initiate an internationally important exhibition in which the great names of European modernity or the past few centuries are included. Despite all the above-mentioned disadvantages and obstacles the possibility of alterations to the European canon has at least been posed by exhibitions that have focused on the great Hungarian masters and on half-forgotten Hungarian schools of painting.⁴ While the wider Hungarian public has rediscovered its enthusiasm for painting over the past few years, response from abroad still leaves much to be desired, perhaps understandably, given the paucity of information available. Whether it be the result of philistinism, commercial interest, cultural chauvinism, or a combination of all these, one cannot ignore this reality. The present exhibition is organized around a thematic grouping of the items (306 in all, among them 20 French works that include 15 paintings, together with 2 small bronze sculptures and a series of graphics-from the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest-by Matisse.)⁵ It begins with a pictorial reflection of Budapest and Paris, interspersed (in the inner corridor of the show area) with early studies (mainly nudes) produced by apprentice Hungarian artists in the studios and private academies of Paris. Early self-portraits (Róbert Berény, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba) introduce the viewer to the main artists in the show.
The sections that follow focus on two Hungarian art colonies-Nagybánya⁶ (today Baia Mare, in Romania), at the foothills of the North-East Carpathians), and Károly Kernstok's estate in Nyergesújfalu, a village at the Danube Bend. The Nagybánya works, here represented by the so-called 'Neo' group, are mainly landscapes, often painted from unexpected angles (thus, from church spires and towers) and exhibiting bright, vibrant colours. The other most remarkable genre is that of the Arcadia compositions, figurative scenes with nudes reposing in the bosom of nature. The themes and compositions in this section testify to Cézanne's influence-an aspect rather ignored in the current show, although the catalogue authors make sporadic reference to it. In the last rooms, the organizers have placed some outstanding later works by younger painters, for example József Nemes Lampérth. His style integrated various influences, including Cubism and German Expressionism: a unique new synthesis of modernism before the outbreak of the First World War.
Most of the items, by 34 artists, date from the period between about 1903 and 1914. They are mostly small-scale, typical of what youngish artists produced at the beginning of their careers. Another common factor is that the palettes of these painters are bright, intense and cheerful, the overall effect being one of harshness and a certain violence. The drawings and sketches (mostly nudes from studio models) are separately exhibited on the third floor of the National Gallery, a rather desolate space to which graphics are traditionally expelled.
The principal curator and initiator of the exhibition is Professor Krisztina Passuth, from Budapest's Eötvös Loránd University, who wrote about some of these artists already in 1967, in her first book.⁷ She and co-curator Gergô Barki and her team-Péter Molnos, Attila Rum and Zoltán Rockenbauer-have given us the fruits of their extensive research in the Catalogues, together with György Szucs, who curated the show on the part of the Hungarian National Gallery.
The show had a broad public appeal in Budapest, although full appreciation of a considerable number of the items inevitably assumes a degree of background knowledge of the relevant artistic trends. After all, the professional viewer was aware that the exhibits document a period when young artists were trying to find their way in the latest styles, while seeking to articulate an individual vision. The exhibition is not, therefore, composed only of masterpieces, although there are still several extremely fine works on display. Those who have seen exhibitions of the Hungarian National Gallery since 1996, from the centennial Nagybánya show onwards, and those who know the Gallery's permanent exhibition well, will experience (in spite of stylistic differences) a sense of organic continuity within the Hungarian painterly tradition. If a single binding factor in this tradition had to be picked out, it is the definite preference for vivid colouring encountered again and again within the broad stream of 'painterly' qualities.

In many ways, this is an exhibition that reminds one of an experimental piece of chamber music; by the same token, the visitors who will gain most from it are those prepared to make the effort to work through the studies in the bulky catalogues (a French version is also planned). The Hungarian one is the more extensive, divided into four major sections. The first, "At Home and Abroad" (five studies, one by an American, one by a French and three by Hungarian scholars) discusses in great detail the history and the historiography of French Fauvism, the artists who adopted it and those Hungarian painters whose names and works are associated with the Parisian scene approximately between 1903 and 1914.
The first long study by Krisztina Passuth addresses the seemingly unimportant issue as to whether a handful of young Hungarian painters exhibiting in Paris in 1905-1910 may rightly be said to belong to the Fauves or not.⁸ She makes a plausible case at least for Béla Czóbel, since he did exhibit in the famous Salon d'Automne exhibition in 1905 in which the canvases of Matisse, Vlaminck and Derain inspired the French left-wing art critic Vauxcelles to coin the word Fauves. By supplying a name-Wild Beasts-for a number of painters who had not previously constituted a group, he thereby "constructed a style" which, according to the current view, never possessed a coherent group of stylistic features.⁹ Even today, despite the extensive literature about it, there is no consensus about the existence of a common Fauve style.
The label nevertheless became mandatory for a certain type of work, despite the fact that it only ever covered a handful of painters (Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, Marquet, Dufy and, for a very short time, Braque are the most prominent names). All experimented with harsh colours in a roughly similar way, but they lasted barely two years as a recognisable grouping. The leading authority on the period, Jack Flam, hesitates to apply the term Fauvism later than 1907, admitting thereby that the somewhat fragile notion was rapidly marginalized by Cubism and other contemporary fashions. On the other hand, Flam writes lyrically about the influence of Fauvism on perceptions of modernity and modernism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In a century dominated by geometrical, conceptual, and 'dehumanized' art, Fauvism has become a locus for a regretted humanism, a regretted individualism, and a regretted nostalgia for direct contact with nature. This, I think, is why Fauvism has retrospectively come to be such an important element of twentieth-century art. It stands for so many aspects of modern art that are supposed to have become passé but that nonetheless continue to exert great presence, and even to suggest a certain future potential. In a curious way, Fauvism stands both as the founding gesture of the independence of twentieth-century painting from traditional naturalism and as evidence of the potential viability of a new kind of naturalism.¹⁰

Flam challenges the existing consensus, which underlines the 'barbarian' characteristics of the style. He argues against overlooking the connection to the alternative twentieth-century painterly tradition, where the human figure and the subjectivity of the creator are never entirely absent. Flam identifies the most vital function of Matisse and his art in its role as a counterpoint to the conceptual and abstract traditions of modern painting from Cubism onwards.
Sophie Barthélémy offers a pioneering study on art criticism in the French press concerning work produced by Hungarians in Paris before 1914.¹¹ Perhaps for the first time in the annals of French art history, this study is frank in its description of the widespread xenophobia in French art criticism in Paris around 1900, something which throws an entirely new light on a number of contemporary sources (for example, those highly negative evaluations that are sprinkled with what would now be regarded as racist remarks). The article helps us to understand the very real difficulties foreign painters had to face in the 'capital of light'.
György Szucs (the curator of the 1996 Nagybánya centennial exhibition) contextualizes in his article the role of the young Neo generation of painters in the painters' colony at Nagybánya,¹² while Attila Rum further examines the issue, raised earlier by Passuth, of whether these young Hungarian painters belonged to the Fauves or not.
Section 2 of the English Catalogue, "From Paris to Nagybánya", contains eight studies, of which four focus on the Parisian art world: on the Bohemian scene revolving around venues like the legendary Café Do^me, on the various teaching Academies and private art schools, on the commercial galleries and, finally, on art patronage. The urban and cultural background is expounded; the ways of Parisian art life are explained; the milieu of the art students and how they went about an artistic education are described; finally how patronage functioned through funding by wealthy connoisseurs like the American Steins or by the commercial avant-garde galleries like that of Berthe Weill, is examined.
Drawing on the detailed cultural-historical studies of the last two decades in which the art life of Paris has been mapped in great detail, Hungarian art historians locate young Hungarian artists of the day within the cultural spectrum of the city. Many such artists later disappeared from public consciousness and were dropped from the collective memory of the pioneers of the first 'isms'. With the outbreak of the First World War, they were obliged as enemy aliens to part overnight from the artistic hub of Montparnasse, with its Bohemian life and its international artistic community, leaving all their belongings and their works behind them.
All this has been known for some time, at least to Hungarian art historians, the most important sources being memoirs, interviews and the family correspondences, but the pictorial evidence for those legendary years was sparse. Now, with the reemergence of many canvases, and the rediscovery of a wider spectrum of sources, we are beginning to see the artistic development of the period much more clearly. From what was previously fragmented information, a sophisticated chronology has emerged. Legends are confirmed or thrown into doubt and one important fact becomes indisputable: young Hungarian painters living in Paris after 1900 took an active part in exhibition life, tried hard to assert themselves individually on the art market and very early on embarked on remarkably bold painterly experiments.
In the English Catalogue three essays map up the contemporary art scene in Hungary focusing on Budapest, Nagybánya and Nyergesújfalu. Peter Molnos's elegant article¹³ gives an excellent overview of the intellectual and art scene in Budapest in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Shifting the spotlight to the Hungarian provinces, György Szucs contributes a second study on Nagybánya, in which he relates the colony to the social life of the provincial town drawing on memoirs and literary descriptions: he examines how the artists' social networks and their way of life had a major impact on their outlook and attitudes. Over several decades, generations of artists acquired their basic education as painters in this picturesque mining-town.¹⁴ Their Weltanschauungwas shaped by the local atmosphere, as were the motifs on their paintings, while their thematic preferences were determined by the models and standards worked out by the Nagybánya pioneers and their immediate successors. For more than half a century, Nagybánya shaped a major trend: plein air painting, involving fidelity to decorative naturalism and a nostalgia for balance and harmony in life.
Zoltán Rockenbauer was faced with a rather different task when writing about Nyergesújfalu¹⁵. He has reconstructed the story of an art colony which might not really have been a colony, merely an agreeable opportunity for a small circle of friends to engage in experimental work as guests on the small estate of one of their number, the charismatic intellectual Károly Kernstok. He, exceptionally in his generation, abandoned his well established academism in order to become a "revolutionary artist". The works the group produced were inspired by the garden and by local models and reflect a common artistic and intellectual quest for something which is both visually and spiritually new. Rockenbauer has reconstructed the details of their activity from rather meagre sources and has given us an account full of intuition and empathy. This entirely new research, moreover, led to the discovery of some lost works of Kernstok.
The Hungarian Catalogue's third section, "Themes and Genres" (not included in the English version), contains four studies that offer detailed iconographic and stylistic analyses of the leitmotifs in the paintings of the Hungarian Fauves: Gergely Barki on the nude (generally the female nude),¹⁶ György Szucs on landscapes and cityscapes¹⁷ and Zoltán Rockenbauer on still lifes¹⁸. All of these studies offer fresh insights, focusing on the novelty of approach or originality of composition. Gyula Kemény, a professional restorer, offers refined and detailed analyses¹⁹ from his specialist angle. His particular skill lies in his illumination of what the untutored eye might consider to be very small differences between the works of French and Hungarian artists. In a virtuoso display, by analysing the palette, the paint, the brush-strokes and the spacial solutions of the compositions, he demonstrates the truth of the old commonplace that the devil is in the detail.
Section 3 of the English Catalogue (Section 4 of the Hungarian) discusses three major painters: Béla Czóbel, Róbert Berény and Vilmos Perlrott Csaba,²⁰ who interpreted the visual world around them in very different ways. Each embraced multiple impulses from the vibrant and complex art life of Paris. It is not only their sensitivity and openness which is striking, but, most importantly, they all developed unique personal styles, differentiating them from their French and Hungarian contemporaries. It is regrettable that the editors did not include Ödön Márffy among the painters thought worthy of individual treatment. His early oeuvre is certainly of the same quality as those of the three painters examined here. Fortunately, he gets a longer treatment in the appendix of the Hungarian Catalogue, where a detailed biographical section offers a useful database for future research on all the artists whose works are on show, together with an extensive bibliography.

The present exhibition includes 24 Hungarian and 10 French painters. The most important Hungarian names among them were Róbert Berény, Dezsô Bornemisza, Tibor Boromisza, Dezsô Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Valéria Dénes, Sándor Galimberti, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezsô Orbán, Bertalan Pór, Lajos Tihanyi, Csaba Perlrott Vilmos, József Nemes Lampérth and Sándor Ziffer, all belonging to the generation which, in the first decade of the twentieth century, experimented in a way that was truly in harmony with the spirit in Paris at that time. They can be roughly subdivided into two groups: those who were dubbed 'Neo' painters by contemporaries, and those who, some time later, went on to form The Eight with several other artists in 1909.²¹ This division dovetails also with a loose chronology, for the aggressive rebellion against the aesthetics and style of the founding fathers of Nagybánya by the Neos emerged as early as 1906. Czóbel's 'shocking' canvases inspired other students in Nagybánya to paint with harsh, violent colours and to turn away from the gentle naturalism hitherto prevailing towards an expressive stylisation of forms. Doubtless the works of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne played a major role in this dramatic turn.
The great achievement of this exhibition is its mapping of the relationships between these two groupings and its revelation of the missing links between them, namely those experimental works that document mutual influences. With the help of the press (a fierce media battle developed for and against them), they immediately acquired considerable fame-or notoriety-among the intellectuals and art connoisseurs of the capital. This fame has never really lost its lustre in Hungary, since The Eight were also enthusiastically supported by the group who later belonged to the circle of Georg Lukács. They were the first artistic grouping in Hungarian culture who belonged to the radical intellectual Left, embracing a vision of a socialist utopia, which, for most of them, led on to support for the Communist Republic of Councils in 1919. Many of them had to seek refuge abroad after the Republic was overthrown and those who returned did so only much later.
Identifying artistically with modernism and the avant-garde, these radicals of middle-class origin were considered ideologically suspect during the first two decades of communism, insofar as they could not plausibly be regarded as forerunners of 'Socialist Realism.'²² It was the imprimatur of Georg Lukács, especially in the last decade of his life, that brought about a re-appraisal of the artistic output of these painter friends of his youth. As a result, from the 1960s onwards, it was generally accepted that The Eight were an integral part of the canon of Hungarian painting, and in 1967 the first, and so far the only, short book on the group by Krisztina Passuth²³was published. The illustrations were mostly in black and white and focused on their loose alliance formed in 1909 and their three exhibitions in Budapest after 1910.
The fate of their other contemporaries was somewhat different: experimenters of artistic genius as they were, painters like Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, Sándor Ziffer, Valéria Dénes and Sándor Galimberti (the latter two died in 1915) did not engage in the political and ideological conflicts of their age. The memory of them slowly faded, especially of those who remained in Nagybánya even after the town became a part of Romania. For nearly half a century they have been all but forgotten.
Among the bonuses arising from the by now almost two decades of changes in the social and political climate of a country so long under ideological control have been a slow revival of middle-class interest in art, concomitant with the rebirth of the art market through art dealing and collecting. An astonishing quantity of hidden (supposedly lost) works emerged from the storerooms of provincial museums, tiny flats, the attics of villas and other forgotten corners. Hardly anybody could have expected that so many paintings by Hungarian masters had survived the devastations of twentieth-century history, during which Hungary suffered substantial loss of human life and a massive destruction of its material wealth. (It is not generally known abroad that only a tragically small percentage of the objets d'art which the country had possessed in 1939 could be traced in 1989. Apart from the havoc wrought by the war, the forty-five years of Russian occupation and the policies of Soviet-type regimes further reduced the artistic heritage of the country to about 1.8 per cent of that existing in 1939.)²⁴
Nobody can reconstruct the visual impression of those canvases which have not been seen since the First World War. In a few cases, shabby black-and-white prints have survived of them, but that is the best we have. In the case of those Hungarian painters who are the sensations of this exhibition, it is not only the last fifty years that have obscured their works. As noted above, given that they were enemy aliens in France in 1914, they had to flee Paris, leaving most of their works behind. The majority of them were to perish over the next few years. Paintings, whose existence we know of only from contemporary critics may re-emerge after nearly a century of obscurity, but one cannot be optimistic.
This exhibition was partly made possible because a few pioneering commercial art galleries made it their task to reconstruct the Hungarian artistic heritage from the early 1990s on by painstakingly locating important paintings, often rescuing them from total oblivion. At first, they focused on the works of the half-forgotten second generation of Nagybánya painters. Notably the MissionArt Gallery's two founders, the art historians László Jurecskó and Zsolt Kishonty, organized a pioneering Nagybánya show in Miskolc,²⁵ and it was also they who published the first documentary volumes on several oeuvres which had not previously been recorded (Tibor Boromisza, Oszkár Nagy, Gizella Dömötör, Hugo Mund).
The rehabilitation of the Neo group of Nagybánya required a turn in Hungarian art historiography, for which MissionArt provided crucial documentation. By supplying a rich database and freshly published primary sources,²⁶6 MissionArt Gallery enabled a new generation of art historians to reintegrate many forgotten artists into the national canon. The official canon, fixed by four decades of shifting ideological control began to fall apart rapidly when other commercial galleries followed suit. Among them were the two most important auction houses, Tamás Kieselbach's Gallery and Judit Virág's Mu- Terem Gallery. These two houses restored the turn-of-the-century practice of promoting art exhibitions independently of the 'established' institutional system. They searched for hidden treasures in neglected provincial and private art collections; and they even managed to coax back to Hungary some lost masterpieces from the descendants of emigrant families. For those who missed the exhibitions and regular auctions where these works were shown, there are the two huge volumes published by Tamás Kieselbach²⁷ and the publications of the Mu-Terem Gallery,²⁸ available for study. Between them they offer an alternative overview of modern Hungarian painting since the 1890s, and their challenge of the canon has provoked the long overdue discussion about a number of issues thus raised. Amidst discussions and debates, the trend of rediscovery continues. Just a week before the National Gallery opened its Vadak show, the Kieselbach Gallery was exhibiting a so far unkown private collection of Kernstok's and Berény's paintings, highlighting a missing link in the oeuvre of a painter who was the doyen (though not necessarily the most brilliant) of the Eight. Hopefully some of these works will also appear in a major public show to follow on chronologically from the present one.

The aim of the exhibition of Hungarian Fauves was threefold: firstly to reconstruct the exact chronology of the artists who belonged to the generation of 1905-the radical avant-garde. Secondly, to discover the intricate connections between the French Fauves and the young Hungarians studying and working in Paris between 1903 and 1914 and to reconstruct how they networked within the Parisian art scene. And, finally, to discern the stylistic cohesion, along with clear distinctions, between these individual artists.
The scholars who set about this threefold task have had to tread carefully and find the right words in order to clarify whether this handful of young painters, particularly Béla Czóbel, Ödön Márffy and Róbert Berény, may be labelled as genuine Fauves or not, whether they can be meaningfully placed in the international canon of the Parisian avant-garde. The exhibition-and the Catalogues- demonstrate that young Hungarian painters were not only present at the birth of modernity when Fauve tendencies were taking shape in Paris, but also that these painters (first and foremost Czóbel) were recognised and accepted as allies by their French colleagues and some critics; furthermore, they played an active part in elaborating and disseminating radical modernity, which many surveys still identify as having begun with the Fauves.
If this conclusion seems rather a footling issue for the layman, those acquainted with the workings of art history and with the thinly veiled snobbery that underlies decision-making over international exhibitions will recognize that these are important issues for a small country-one whose painting more or less dis appeared from the European cultural consciousness for more than fifty years. Indeed, with the exception of a handful of exiles, not a single Hungarian painter has found a place in the international canon!²⁹
The canon is important because it determines the status of an individual artist's work when it comes to the global competition in staging appealing cultural events. Obviously, too, it influences the reciprocity (or lack of it) in exhibition loans and also has implications which may lie outside aesthetic considerations but are far from negligible. Art has a vital role in the image that any country wishes to project, even (or perhaps especially) in these days of economic and political globalization. Apart from its music, Hungarian culture remains in the realm of that fascinatingly 'ethnic' world that is thought of as lying at the periphery of Europe. A visit to the Hungarian National Gallery is frequently missing even from the program of upmarket cultural tours. Those drawing them up may consider the Museum of Fine Arts a safer bet, on account of its Grecos and Goyas, or the 'Esterházy' Madonna by Raphael. Hardly anybody comes to Budapest to discover Hungarian painting for its own sake; and yet, in terms of sophistication, it can reasonably claim a distinctive and distinguished national school of modern painting.
The Hungarian National Gallery's exhibition was at least five years in the making and is scheduled to be seen in France in the Musée d'Art moderne in Céret between June and October 2008. From there it will be transferred to the Musée départemental in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Matisse's birthplace, (October 2008- February 2009) then, probably, to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Dijon. The perseverance of Krisztina Passuth (who herself lived in Paris for two decades and knows only too well the attitude of her Western European counterparts towards the national schools of painting in Central Europe), likewise the persistence of numerous Hungarian art historians and dealers (who want at least to make Hungarian painting known, if it cannot yet be properly appreciated), cannot be too highly esteemed. All are engaged in the search for a lingua franca that will open up a dialogue with their Western (in this case French) colleagues. This is why so many of the studies in the present Catalogues wrestle with the issue as to whether a handful of young Hungarian painters exhibiting in Paris in 1905-1910 belonged to the Fauves or not. In fact, all are fascinating painters in their own right, offering differing individual syntheses of the various 'isms.' Most importantly, they created a specifically Hungarian version of radical modernity, one which is always boldly colourful, never totally abstract, but is imbued by true artistic passion within its self-contained world, and produced paintings that are a joy to see. Can there be a more exacting test of enduring relevance and quality?

 

1 The exhibitions which contributed to this process were: Nagybánya 1996; Rippl-Rónai 1998; Mattis Teutsch 2001; Mednyánszky 2004; Munkácsy 2005.
2 Exhibitions of avant-garde twentieth-century Hungarian painting are documented by two important catalogues: Standing in the Tempest: Painters of the Hungarian avant-garde 1908-1930. Ed. by S. A. Mansbach. Santa Barbara, Museum of Art, The MIT Press, 1991; Central European Avant- Gardes: exchange and transformation, 1910-1930. Ed. by Timothy O. Benson. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The MIT Press, 2002.
3 See Ilona Sármány-Parsons: "Der Einfluss der französischen Postimpressionisten in Wien und Budapest." Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Galerie, Jg. 34/35, Nr. 78/79. 1990/91 Wien, 1992.
4 For example, besides the shows mentioned above, the "Arcadia" Exhibition in the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest in 2002 has redrawn the map of Hungarian painting in the 1920s.
5 It is regrettable that the show does not include those works and that stylistic period of Matisse which had a profound influence on the Hungarians among whom two painters, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba and Géza Bornemisza, were definitely his students.
6 Nagybánya was the first Hungarian painter's colony, founded in 1896 by a handful of painters returning for the summer from Munich, an outpost of Hungarian painters at that time. The founding generation represented a decorative colouristic naturalism, close to contemporary Post-Impressionistic tendencies, but around 1905-6 their students revolted against their aesthetic and taste and embarked on more modern artistic trends. They were labelled as Neo-painters-an ironic reference to the then fashionable Neo-Impressionism. Most of these young beginners are among the most fascinating in this exhibition-Czóbel, Boromisza, Bornemisza, Ziffer, Tihanyi and Perlrott. See also György Szucs: "The Hungarian Barbizon. István Réti and the Nagybánya Painters", The Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. 42, Winter 2001, No. 164, pp. 68-76.
7 Krisztina Passuth: A nyolcak festészete. (The Eight and their Painting) Budapest, Corvina, 1967, 176 pp.
8 Krisztina Passuth: "Wild Beasts of Hungary Meet Fauves in France", pp. 11-36. If not otherwise indicated, references are to the English version of the Catalogue. Apart from this introductory study, Passuth has written three other articles, which also figure in the English version. She has also compiled the bibliographies of all the French artists and of some Hungarian artists for the Appendix, and the list of Hungarian painters at the exhibitions of the Salon d'Automne.
9 This is a classic example of a discourse that 'constructs' something which might not have existed before and which also influences the future life of what it constructs.
10 Jack Flam: "Fauvism, Cubism, and European Modernism", p. 45..
11 Sophie Barthélémy: "Pan! Dans l'oeil ...! The Paris Salons' Reception of the Hungarian Fauves in The Mirror of Contemporary French Critiques, 1904-1914", pp. 61-69.
12 György Szucs: "Dissonance or New Harmony? The Art of the Nagybánya 'Neos'", pp. 47-60.
13 Péter Molnos: "Budapest, the 'Paris of the East' in the Hungarian Wilderness", pp. 101-117.
14 György Szucs: "Egy regionális centrum: Nagybánya" (A Regional Centre: Nagybánya), Magyar vadak, pp. 129-136.
15 Zoltán Rockenbauer: "The Fauves by the Danube, or Could Nyergesújfalu Have Been Hungary's Coullioure?" pp. 125-131.
16 Gergely Barki: "Párizstól a Paradicsomig. Utazás a Magyar Vadak aktja körül" (From Paris to Paradise. A Journey around the Nude of the Hungarian Fauves), Magyar vadak, ibid., pp. 145-158.
17 György Szucs: "Táj és természet, ember és város" (Landscape and Nature, Man and the City), ibid., pp. 159-172.
18 Zoltán Rockenbauer: "A fauve-os hatások alakulása a modern magyar csendéletfestészetben (1905-1914)" (Fauve Influences and Modern Hungarian Still Lifes [1905-1914]), ibid., pp. 173-184.
19 Gyula Kemény: "Francia nyomvonalak a Magyar Vadak és neósok fesztészetében. Egy restaurátor feljegyzései" (French Traces in Hungarian Fauve and 'Neo' Painting. A Restorer's Notes), ibid., pp. 185-200.
20 Gergely Barki: "The Evolution of Czóbel's Fauvism in the Mirror of his Early Portraits," pp. 133-148; Gergely Barki: "Róbert Berény, the 'Apprenti' Fauve", pp. 149-166; Judit Boros: "The Synthetiser. Vilmos Perlrott Csaba's Painting", ibid., pp. 167-180.
21 The Eight were Róbert Berény, Dezsô Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezsô Orbán, Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi.
22 A few of them nevertheless had abandoned their modernity and became professors at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts after the Communist takeover in 1948, thereafter propagating Socialist Realism in its most orthodox form. One was Bertalan Pór, a lesser light among them.
23 See Note 7.
24 See: László Mravik: "Sacco di Budapest" Depredation of Hungary. 1938-1949. Budapest, MNG, 1998; László Mravik: "Hungary's Pillaged Art Heritage. Part 2." The Hungarian Quarterly. Vol. 39, Summer 1998, No. 5, pp. 53-78.
25 László Jurecskó-Zsolt Kishonthy (eds.). Nagybánya-Nagybányai festészet a neósok fellépésétôl 1944-ig (Nagybánya Painting at Nagybánya from the Start of the 'Neo's' until 1944). Miskolc, Mission- Art Galéria 1992.
26 Nagybánya Könyvek (Nagybánya Books). Eight volumes, among them an excellent scholarly documentation compiled by Árpád Timár of the critical writings published in the Hungarian press between 1896-1909 on the Nagybánya art colony and on its artists, A nagybányai muvészet és muvésztelep a magyar sajtóban 1896-1909 (The Artist's Colony of Nagybánya and Its Art in the Hungarian Press 1896-1909). Miskolc, MissionArt Galéria, 1997. See also Edith András-Mária Bernáth (eds.): Válogatás a nagybányai muvészek leveleibôl. 1893-1944. (Selected Letters by Nagybánya Painters) Nagybánya könyvek 8. Miskolc, MissionArt Galéria, 1997.
27 Tamás Kieselbach (ed.): Modern Hungarian Painting I. Budapest, Kieselbach, 2004 and Modern Hungarian Painting II. 1919-1964. Budapest, Kieselbach, 2005.
28 The Hidden Treasures of Hungarian Painting-Selection from Hungarian Private Collections I. Budapest, Mu-Terem, 2004. Second volume 2005.
29 László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer and Victor Vasarely are the universally accepted names, all others are marginal, even if they found a niche in the post-1945 international art market ( e.g. Simon Hantai, Tibor Csernus etc.). Although from the 1970s onwards a few Hungarian art historians tried to bring the works of the Hungarian Activists and Constructivists (especially Kassák) into the limelight, only a few professionals know about them and acknowledge their historical position, whereas Russian Constructivists, even minor figures, are well known internationally.

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.