Sz. Kürti Katalin: Vezető a Déri Múzeum kiállításaihoz I. Régi képtár és Új magyar képtár (Debrecen, 1978)

piece series, Life of People in Poverty, an artist representing critical realism. Akin to the social sensitivity of this series is the work painted in 1907, Peasant Girl, which shows a young girl in the interior of a peasant 'guestroom', dressed in her Sunday best. The legacy of Munkácsy's critical realism was present in Hungarian art as a hidden stream and made its influence felt, with the mediation of the Great Plain painters, until the middle of our century. The artists of this school undertook, at the beginning of the century, the task of presenting to Europe a realistic picture of Hungary, Ad/s „Hungarian fallow-land". They regarded as of overall importance the expression of Hungarian national features. They were joined primarily not by geographical vicinity, i.e. life on the Great Plain, not even by devotion to the same style, but by án identical aim and programme. All of them were widely-travelled artist who, having become acquainted with the great artists of the world and the artistic traditions of the individual nations, felt they had to come home because „the fog is, thickest here, it is here that the fog has to be broken and blown away first. By writing, pictures, lectures, museums," (Tornyai). With their works they became torch-bearers of the arts at home, at Szentes, Hódmezővásárhely, Baja, spokesmen, accusers, arousers of a nation's conscience. The two „puszta" landscapes by Tornyai, included in our collection, display man's fight against the forces of nature with such expressiveness that we can feel that those people are wrestling not only the wind, the winter, the storm, but also their own fate. The paintings of József Koszta are much more colourful than those of Tornyai painted at Vásárhely and Mártély. The rebellious and incendiary colours of his paingings remind us of the dense tragic atmosphere of Móricz's short stories. Inebriated by the colours of the Szentes landscape he succeeded in creating an expressive colourism. His colour visions of great expressive power reflect the full-blooded Hungarian character of his temperament, the feeling of the „possibility of only here and in this way." A close relative of Koszta's, as far as the vigorous use of colours is concerned, is László Holló. The artist, who died not long ago (there is a separate Holló Museum in Debrecen), can be classified among the Great Plain painters, on the other hand, he is also an outstanding representative of Hungarian expressionism. Like Tornyai, Koszta, Rudnay, he was the painter of the life of poor people. On his expressive canvases he revealed the drama of the Hungarian peasants' lot between the two world wars. Whatever topic 91