Ilona Sármány-Parsons
The Munich Road to Modernity
München—magyarul. Magyar művészek Münchenben 1851–1914
(Munich in Hungarian. Hungarian Artists in Munich 1850–1914).
An Exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest,
2 October 1989–10 January 2010.
Catalogue, Hungarian National Gallery, 2009, 337 pp + 351 ill.
In the 19th century Hungary had no Academy of Fine Arts and many of those
who wanted to become artists went to study abroad. In its first half it was
Italy and Vienna which attracted most of the young aspirant painters. However
after the defeat of the War of Independence against the Habsburg rulers in
1849, Vienna became understandably unpopular with Hungarians. For different
reasons, mid-century Italy too had lost its appeal as a place of training in the
arts. By that time Munich began to rival Paris as a centre of art and not only for
Hungarians, but also for Poles, Czechs, Scandinavians and Americans. Indeed
up to the late 1880s, judged purely by the number of students it attracted, it
was more important than Paris.
Munich, with its long tradition of art patronage and its important picture
collections and museums, had become the centre of art education in Germany
in the early 19th century. Strongly Catholic, and in this respect much like
Vienna, the city had always belonged to a region embedded in a culture of
the senses and the Wittelsbach dynasty generously supported painting,
architecture, drama and music there. The Kings of Bavaria not only financed
the Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1808) but also erected new buildings for
their ever-growing picture collections, the latter being used like the Louvre as
places for artists to study their craft. The Bavarian state, and also the inhabitants of the city, were highly conscious of the immense cultural and
financial potential of the art scene and the art market, the latter being much
ahead of those elsewhere in Germany, and in particular superior to that of the
intensely disliked rival, Berlin. Even after the unification of Germany, Bavaria
could, up to a point, console itself with the plausible claim that Munich, rather
than Berlin, was the real cultural capital of the Germans.
With its vibrant artistic, theatrical and music milieu (it was after all host to
the experimental staging of many of Wagner’s operas), as well as the Bohemian
life of cafés and beer cellars, Munich became a magnet for the new generation
of artists in Europe and America, being cheaper than Paris. Nearly four
hundred Hungarian painters studied here between 1850 and 1914, the great
majority before 1896.
The exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery highlights this intimate
relationship. "Munich in Hungarian" (the title is somewhat enigmatic) shows
about three hundred and fifty works (paintings, graphics and sculpture)
selected from some sixty years of Hungarian artistic activity in the Bavarian
city. But while it is well known, at least in Hungary, that Munich, especially its Royal Academy of Art, was the preferred location for Hungarian painters in the
second part of the 19th century, this exhibition and its catalogue re-evaluates,
and in some aspects changes fundamentally, the traditional image of this long
and fruitful symbiosis. Such a re-evaluation is certainly overdue, since the
"Hungarian Munich School" was for long merely seen as a breeding ground of
conservative, old-fashioned and mannered pictures, indeed anything that was
"conventional" and opposed to modernism. An exhibition such as this may or
may not succeed in modifying this ingrained image, but it certainly stimulates
the viewer to rethink what was going on in this period of Hungarian painting.
[...]
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.
