Ilona Sármány-Parsons

A Plea for Vaszary

János Vaszary (1867-1939). A Retrospective Exhibition
at the Hungarian National Gallery, 18 October 2007-17 February 2008.
Vaszary János 1867-1939. Catalogue.
Budapest, MNG, 2007, 444 pp. + Appendix, 55 pp.

 

...

An artist of a small nation is practically expected to be an epigone. If he should make a genuinely original contribution to any of the 'styles' that is his idiom at any particular time, he is immediately suspect to the opinion-makers. Contradictory judgements await such an artist in this part of the world: either he is accused of slavishly adopting something that is foreign and alien to local traditions, or he is faulted for not following his original mentor(s) with sufficient accuracy. The non-classifiable painter is thus branded as either unpatriotic or insufficiently progressive. The groundlessness of such judgements and the blindness of those who have made them have not prevented them from becoming near clichés in Hungarian art history.
In fact, the new ideal of artistic genius constantly in flux was part of the paradigm shift in the discourse about the function of art that occurred around 1900. This was just the time when the career of János Vaszary began. Coming from the provinces, and studying (like most Hungarian painters of the time) in Munich and Paris, Vaszary was ambitious and ready to keep in step with the Zeitgeist, an ambition that required flexibility, intelligence and professional knowhow. Vaszary possessed all of these qualities. Among the first generation of modernist Hungarian painters, however, he was a rare phenomenon. The others, too, rebelled against Historicism, conservative artistic ideals and the moribund styles of academic or salon painting, but worked 'instinctively', cultivating spontaneity. They were, for the most part, either unwilling or unable to deal with the aesthetic, theoretical or philosophical aspects of the new trends. Vaszary stands out for his interest in all three.
Vaszary was also something of an outsider because of his aristocratic and condescending view of the Bohemian milieu then in vogue. There was also his reticence. Whenever art historians tried to write up his career in the decades after his death, they soon discovered that there was no extended correspondence replete with personal references (as there is for József Rippl-Rónai). Nor was there an image-building autobiography with remarks on contemporaries, juicy stories, or gossip. As a person, Vaszary remains a closed book. There is only one short, unfinished autobiography from 1936 covering his youth and full of his impressions of Paris and Rome, as well as the somewhat sparse memoirs of his wife.
On the other hand, we do have an exceptionally valuable source for Vaszary's intellectual and artistic development, namely his writings on art, which he published sporadically in art journals and newspapers.¹ Most of them are travelogues and criticism, occasionally pamphlets and disputatious articles on Hungarian cultural policies, and they all demonstrate his ability to analyse the cultural and social issues of his time. One encounters through them an honest, independent mind with a huge knowledge and understanding of the age he lived in. The forthrightness and civil courage with which he attacked the extremely conservative cultural establishment after 1932 is also exceptional. His first text, dealing with various issues in painting, was published in 1903 when he was 36 years old; his last one, a major study of modern art and its relationship to contemporary art policies ("What Will Happen to Our Art?")² appeared just a few weeks before his sudden death in the spring of 1939. All his writings reflect depth of character: Vaszary was sensitive to ethical issues and had a profound sense of responsibility, both for the culture of his country and for the coming generation of artists.

...

Looking at both the "boudoir" pictures and those celebrating rural Hungary, one is bound to ask: who is the Impressionist with whom Vaszary identified? Certainly this soi-disant Hungarian Impressionist had a busy alter ego, the plein air landscapist. According to the list of titles put on display at the yearly exhibitions at the Műcsarnok, the alter ego painted dozens of landscapes, mainly of Lake Balaton. Three of these are now on display and all three avoid depicting bright sunshine, focusing instead on cloudy skies and stormy weather. The lack of bright, sunlit colour was characteristic of Vaszary's paintings at that time: many of the interiors he painted around 1903/1904 are also nearly monochrome. His wonderful Rain (1904) and Spring (1904) with their refined, fluid brushwork suggesting moist air and immense space, still employ colours that are on the subdued, shady side: mossy greens and gentle blues. His canvases are bathed in sunshine from 1904 onwards, when he embarked on a truly Impressionist period (Breakfast in the Open Air, 1907). But even here, Vaszary reminds us not so much of a French as a German Impressionist. He uses loose brushwork and bright, sunlit colours, rather than tiny brushstrokes and complementary colours. His Impressionism is as 'synthetic' as is Ferenczy's Naturalism of the same years. Vaszary, however, prefers quite different colour harmonies than his great contemporary, and blurs the outlines of his figures with a brushwork that is uniquely his own. Both artists were among the first leaders of the Society of Hungarian Naturalists and Impressionists-MIÉNK-an alliance of all shades of modernism founded in 1907.
The year before, in 1906, Vaszary had a one-man show in the Nemzeti Szalon, an important retrospective, where he exhibited one hundred and fifty works, a large number of which were sold. (According to his wife, he made the princely sum of 32,000 Crowns from this show.)³ In the wake of this success, he embarked on a long study-tour, visiting Venice, Milan, Barcelona and Madrid. The Spanish journey features prominently in the sketches he brought back, but his preference for vibrant colour had been evident in his work even prior to this trip. His return home marked the beginning of a most prolific and happy period in his life. Vaszary's proved to be a good marriage, and his wife and her family often figure as models in his Impressionistic canvases.
Aurél Kárpáti, who wrote the introduction to the first album of Vaszary's works, published in 1941, once asked the artist what he considered to have been the most profound experience of his life. His answer was one word: "Colour". It is indeed colour, but this time an untamed, extremely fresh colour which begins to light up his canvases in scenes that radiate joie de vivre (e.g. Conversation, 1909). The paint, still somewhat heavily applied and pastose, is even more radiant and more plastic. But though the paint is, the figures and objects are not entirely subordinated to the dictates of colour.

From 1910 onwards, Vaszary revived the line. His change to linear brush strokes became the harbinger of the fundamental stylistic change that would be his answer to the newest aesthetic movements in Paris and elsewhere. By then he was over 40; successful, but no longer young, he was determined to move with the times and meet the challenge of the new "isms"-Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction. His stunning drawings of nudes at this time are the fruit of this quest for modernity, a quest which makes him unique in his generation in Hungary.
However, there was little time to crystallize these restless and diverse experiments into some sort of synthesis. The First World War changed everything. Like most of the artists of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vaszary was protected (no well-known Austrian or Hungarian artist was sent to the front lines). Painters, however, were obliged to serve the war effort, illustrating crucial events for the public. Originally their sponsors expected depictions of heroism and victory, but reality dictated otherwise, and most of the artists in fact reported on the human tragedies of war. Vaszary's wartime pictures and drawings are deeply expressive, full of pain and mourning, much like those of the (by then) aged László Mednyánszky.
After the war, Vaszary tried to reinterpret the tragedies he had witnessed in terms of the universal symbolism of his Golgotha pictures, which evoked the suffering of mankind through the sacrifice of Christ. For these Golgotha pictures, Vaszary used a black background, which then became standard for all the genres in which he painted: still lifes, portraits, nudes and somewhat enigmatic scenes borrowed from the world of the circus and the theatre. The early 1920s were the most traumatic years for him and his wife. The lost war, the disastrous Paris peace settlement, poverty and an overall sense of uncertainty are well articulated in this 'Black Period' when the basis of all his compositions is a black background, from which the colours break out like prisoners streaming into the light. The Vaszary of this period is mesmerisingly Expressionistic, but it was a stage of his life that ended quite abruptly in the spring of 1925 upon the impact of the fresh artistic impressions he received in Paris.
He had not seen his beloved Paris since 1912: the now bustling and wealthy metropolis with its stimulating art scene revived his zest for life. Another source of stimulation was his teaching job at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (from 1920 onwards). He took his painting classes extremely seriously as indeed he took everything in life. Contact with youth galvanized him and revived in him the spirit of experimentation. It was a challenge to explain to a new generation everything he had learned about the world (and not only about painting), but he rose to it, becoming one of the best teachers in Budapest. In his teaching, Vaszary focused on principles and on an ethical approach to art but remained open to all new artistic experiments introducing his students to all the latest "isms" that he saw on his regular visits to the French capital. From 1925 onwards, the pulsating rhythm of the modern metropolis becomes a favourite subject for him. First Paris, but soon also Budapest, with its emblematic panoramas seen from the Korzó on the Danube embankment, became his new leitmotivs. The black background disappears, to be replaced by a sparkling white one, where virtuoso blue silhouettes of people and buildings form a playful Art Deco vista, the details pulsating with his rediscovered delight in being alive.
Portraits, still lifes, townscapes, beach scenes and lyrical vistas are the fruit of this wonderful Indian summer of artistic creativity. Nevertheless, Vaszary cannot be said to have been totally fulfilled as an individual. In 1932, he was unjustly dismissed from his teaching job due to the pressure of the conservative lobby at the Academy. From then on, he taught in private drawing schools, which was hardly the same.⁴
He did not give up his struggle to make room for modernity in Hungarian art and continued to write persuasive manifestos for the cause. Personally, he had achieved a lot, but he was also a civic-minded individual who had set himself the task to work in a manner that was not only modern but also patriotic. Drawing on the wealth of impressions garnered during his metropolitan Parisian interludes and his hugely-enjoyed trips to the old towns and modern seaside resorts of Italy, he created a sophisticated artistic idiom that was Hungarian, and yet everything but provincial. He was 72 when he died, but amazingly young in spirit.
Some people take the view that Vaszary's truly personal style was his last one (he was about sixty when he embarked on this style), where the colours dance in space on a white background in palettes that are harmonious, polyphonic and, not least importantly, extraordinarily beautiful. Art Deco is the category into which the fruits of this period are usually forced. But in fact, this last Vaszary period expresses the spirit of the interwar École de Budapest in its most elegant and sensual form. Vaszary's brush elevated the Budapest panorama into an airy, dream-like space, the aesthetic equivalent of the good life which, however, was the privilege of only a very few. Nobody has ever painted this city so lovingly, nor endowed it with such a beckoning, friendly, dreamlike quality. Vaszary created the quintessential pre-Second-World-War 20th century, located in a particular time and place. It was a world that had, perhaps, never existed, save in the imagination of this great colour-magician.

 

¹ The most substantial anthology of his writings is: Ottó Mezei (ed.): Vaszary János és/vagy az új reneszánsz. Vaszary János összegyűjtött írásai (János Vaszary and/or the New Renaissance. The Collected Writings of János Vaszary). Tatabánya, 1987.

² "Mi lesz művészetünkkel?" Pesti Napló, 9 April 1939, 35. In Ottó Mezei (ed.), op. cit., pp. 189-191.

³ All in all, 1906 appears to have been the annus mirabilis of the nascent Hungarian art market: Rippl-Rónai had a very successful auction in January, and then Vaszary also sold a lot of his pictures in spring.

⁴ Most members of the "European School" (Európai iskola), a group of post-Second-World-War avant-garde painters who cultivated non-figurative or abstract painting, were originally Vaszary disciples.

 

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.