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

Jegyzetek

Kádár Béla: Városi jelenet/

Béla Kádár: Urban Scene (1940)

Glücks (1898-1981) - who they had got to know one year earlier at the commemorative exhibition of Farkas organized at the National Saloon in March - and his wife Karola Grósz with the help of a mock contract hoping for the coming of a better historical situation. Eventually, 291 works from this group of artworks got into the fine art collection of the Kecskeméti Katona József Museum by a donation in two parts, first in 1980 and later in 1989. Lajos Lóska was right to write the following in connection with the exhibition displaying the second unit of the donation: “Such a bequest consisting of so remarkable works of art will do great honour to the Gallery of Kecskemét which can definitely be associated with other collections of the grand 20th century painting, for instance the Modern Hungarian Gallery of Pécs or the Deák Collection of Székesfehérvár.” The significance of the works is underlined by the fact that in 1983, the Cifrapalota was altered in order to achieve its purposes as a museum.

Although with the artworks of, for example, Béni Ferenczy, János Nagy Balogh, József Rippl-Rónai, Gyula Rudnai the museum is able to store a large group of fine quality works, the collection is considered even more important and illustrious because of the pieces - concerning their quality and quantity they can picture the oeuvres - of three prominent solitary artists of Hungarian art that also got into the collection by the bequest. Besides the already mentioned Mednyánszky- Farkas intended to establish his own museum- and István Nagy most of these pictures were obviously made by István Farkas. However, it might be surprising that not only his father’s activities discussed above were his principal reasons for becoming an artist, but his childhood which he spent in terror due to his father’s ’’despotic (sadistic) inclination”, and it greatly affected his creating world, motifs, figures and iconography even more... Even if he tried to get rid of the obtrusively transmitted way of living of his father the sensitive, fragile artist could never dispose the bullying lifestyle of his father. Consequently, he was in a gradual process of estrangement until the end of his life from his family, business (and to some stage from art itself), and from the place where he theoretically belonged to concerning his upbringing and his social status. Farkas started his art studies around 1900 under the guidance of Mednyánszky, who took Master Pista on his journeys, “painterly prowlings” After his studies in Hungary he could finally experience the process of the birth and spreading of the contemporary modern and avant-garde tendencies in Munich and rather in Paris, and he soon started painting cubist compositions. He was namely a student of the Academy La Palette where he could learn from and work together with such prominent artists like Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger or Ferdinand Léger. In the Montparnasse he was the neighbour of among others Othon Friesz, György Bölöni and Rainer Maria Rilke. During the First World War he served as an exploratory and an artilleryman, but after the war in November 1924, he moved back to Paris which was the beginning of his most fertile period of the oeuvre. Approximately until 1929, the main genre was the still life after switching over to tempera, and its purist kind of ’style’ could be considered as art deco that is, in some respects, the successor of the different avant-garde tendencies, for example, of Cubism previously used by Farkas. The Correspondences-folder was published in 1928 with his dreamlike and surrealistic paintings on the verge of abstraction - more precisely with the prints made with pochoir method - and with the poems of André Salmon who belonged to the circle of friends of Apollinaire. The self portrait (Plate 57) displayed at our exhibition was painted around this time in which a disturbing subsequent motif occurs on the top right cor58