Gyergyádesz László, ifj.: Kecskemét és a magyar zsidó képzőművészet a 20. század első felében (Kecskemét, 2014)

Jegyzetek

happiness. This momentum became common in his works of the period together with the replacement of plein air features. A few years later, Iványi gradually returned from “decorativeness to a more naturalistic approach of nature”, and his compositions in Baroque style “drew near the principles of the painters of Academism... as if the film had been rewound.” Because of the common features of nude depictions and the attitude of looking back into the past we should mention the specific painting of Li pót Herman (1884-1972) here that often derives from mythology and emphasizes the styles of ancient art historical periods (Plate 24 and 25). Fortunately he reported on its components in detail half a century later in his reminiscences: “the then monotonous landscape of the Great Plain does not easily reveal itself for inexperienced painters. I am forced to use my imagination. I have to compose happy shepherds, white rabbits and doves as well as flying and dancing nymphs under the undoubtedly lovely trees of olives, rising poplars and locust-trees... And, thanks to the slightly chubby Gypsy girls and other self-sacrificing models, later the fashionable jovial muses could come into existence.”

The city centre of Kecskemét, the main square and its surroundings were the topic of many pictures in the first period of the artists' colony (1909- 1919). One of the most popular and the most typical motifs of the centre was the calvary leaning to the arched baroque wall in front of the Church of Friars (in the case of some paintings together with the market). Iványi also painted it in the winter of 1912 at least in five variations. Among these works, the best known and the most perfected is the Market Women among Snow Heaps (Plate 15) where the artist simplified the composition (by giving up the depiction of the snowfall and the leafless trees in the foreground) and turned each motif with formal reduction (e.g. the snow heaps with bluish-lilac and pink shades) into decorative colour patches by outlining them with dark lines. In the same year Rezső Bálint (1885-1945) a member of Kéve (Association of Hungarian Fine Artists and Applied Artists), who spent only four months at the colony depicted the calvary and its wider surroundings from farther, from a viewpoint closer to the main entrance of the town hall. The painting was described as follows by a contemporary journalist: "The public was most fond of the sceneries of Kecskemét. The intimate and warm paintings brought nearer to art even the local shallow-hearted. So, can Kecskemét be painted so beautifully? This question was glowing in their eyes. Especially well made the townscape titled

the «Church of Friars and its Environs» which is going to be purchased by the town for its museum. It would be a crime to let it go.” On the right side of the pastel veduta (page 24) the first Catholic lodging house (1894, Ferenc Zaboretzky) can be seen that suffered irreparable damage during the First World War while on the left side near the parish church the one-storied shops are drawn following the arched line of the former cemetery fence. A remarkable aspect of the religious tolerance of Kecskemét is that the Catholic bazaar was rented by Jewish merchants from 1841 until they were demolished in connection with the formation of a garden with ancient ruins after the excavation of 1973/1974.

The Calvary (Plate 17) of Vilmos Perlrott Csaba (1880-1955) is one of the artist’s - and the colony’s - best works which is not the naturalistic or impressionist rendering of the original sight but a stylized reinterpretation in a synthesizing style (fauvist colours, Cézannesque forms and structures, cubist motifs and the professed inspiration of Gauguin). The momentum of how Perlrott assembles certain elements of the sight into a single motif, cramming them in a relatively narrow strip of the tightly linked fore-and middle ground is unique and typical of the artist. Yet owing to the dominance of colours, the painting’s main effect is decorative thus “it might be taken as a forerunner of expressionism”. Perlrott was a student of “the Prince of the Fauves” Henri Matisse in Paris. In spite of this fact, the large still life with a clock around 1910 (Plate 16, a donation of Marcell Nemes), however reveals the influence of Cézanne (e.g. fruits, creased drapery, patchy background). Moreover, it might be possible that Perlrott could have seen the Black Marble Clock of the French master since it was in the possession of Adolf Kohner at that time. During the Christmas of 1919, he married to the young entrant Margit Gräber (1895-1993), who he met at the artists’ colony of Kecskemét. We preserve many study sketches of Gráber from the period between 1916 and 1919 (pages 23 and 53) and she also drew Nemes’s certificate of honorary citizenship. At the beginning of the 1920s during their German emigration Perlrott similarly to other contemporaries (e.g. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff) - commenting on the horror of the First World War and the sorely tried human lives - turned to the graphic genres and religious iconography "Christ-drawings, pietas and ascetic saint heads appearing in lithography and the coloured tint-drawings composed into blocks, all emanate the emotional religiousness of the German ’’Kleinmeisters”, the Grünewalds and

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