H. Bathó Edit – Horváth László – Kaposvári Gyöngyi – Tárnoki Judit – Vadász István szerk.: Tisicum - A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok Évkönyve 15. (2006)
ISTVÁN SZABÓ: WHAT MADE SZOLNOK KNOWN NATIONWIDE
SZABÓ István 1999. ZÁDOR István két kéziratos önéletrajza. In: Jászkunság, XLV. évf. 2. sz., március—május, 106. és 110. SZABÓ István—SZABÓ László 1989. Szolnok. In: Adatok Szolnok megye történetéből. II. kötet (szcrk.: BOTKA János dr.). Szolnok, 250. SZABÓ Péter—SZÁMVÉBER Norbert é. n. A keleti hadszíntér és Magyarország. 1943—1945. Puedlo Kiadó, 53—54. ISTVÁN SZABÓ After the end of World War II, life restarted with great difficulties in the damaged and scattered stúdiós of the Artists' Colony. It was not only the works of art of the Artists' Association of Szolnok that were destroyed during the war, but several priváté collections as well. Szolnok was a bridgehead town, an area of combat operations, from which the offices had been evacuated, and people had fled to the neighbouring villages; there were only 4,000 people staying in the town. The situation of the Artists' Colony started to become impossible when the preparations for the war began to gain momentum in 1938. The diseriminative measures affecting the Jews — their shops were closed, their land was taken away — meant that the group of craftsmen, merchants and intellectuals — many of them Jews —, who had been the patrons of the Artists' Colony, ceased to exist. After clearing up the ruins, four stúdiós of the artists' colony were made useable where Ferenc Chiovini, who returned from Besenyszög, and Mihály Patay, who had lost everything after demobilizing from the Army, moved in with regards of the legal continuity. Apait from these two, Szolnok-born Sándor Botos and Jenő Benedek, an art teacher of the local Ferenc Verseghy Secondary Grammar School, got the other two stúdiós. The first exhibition of fine art was held in the Conference Room of the County Hall between 15 th and 24 th May titled Szolnok in Hungárián Fine Árts. It marked an important milestone in the history of the artists' colony, since it was the last time when the history of the colony was presented without any manipulation. The radical change in cultural life had not taken place yet; artists were appreciated by their decade-long respect and not by official distinctions. The organizers chose the matériái exhibited according to a known and accepted SZML (Szolnok Megyei Levéltár) SZolnoki Művészeti Egyesület iratai. 1908—1950. SZOLNOK ÉS VIDÉKE XXV. és XXVI. évf. számai VARGA Béla 1994. A szolnoki zsidóság története, 1840—1944. Szolnok, 129. system of values. In this exhibition, the artists' colony still held the levél that the artists had achieved in the previous 50 years. The exhibition was organized as representative, so the exhibiting artists were largely the determinant members of the colony whether the organisers reached back to the years of foundation or chose from the works of the prominent creators of the 1930's or the end of World War 2. Apart from the living artists, it was not only the artists who had died at an old age during the previous decades, but alsó the ones who had perished in the war. Among the exhibitors one could find Barna Basilides, Kálmán Gáborjáni Szabó, Eszter Matthioni, Aurél Bernáth and Zoltán Borbereki Kovács, all of whom had förmed the basic members of the colony in precious years. With their artistic activities and keeping up the standard, a new generation would have arrived, after the death of Tibor Pólya, Iván Pólya, Vilmos Aba-Novák and Adolf Fényes, they would have taken over the relay baton from their older colleagues. After 1947, however, the situation changed. First of all, because those who took positions in Szolnok and got involved in the life of the colony were not local people. They were not experts, they were not well-trained, they did not have a proper overview of culture and they were not bound by local traditions. But the artists who influenced them were not guided by the artistic considerations among the new circumstances. For those artists who lived in Budapest and took positions, the Szolnok colony ceased to exist as a summer atelier. As regular members of the Artistic Association they worked on the renewal of the colony for a while, but in 1951 when the Association was outlawed, their work came to an end. After 1947, the four artists living in the colony barely had any opportunities for joint exhibitions. The artists living in other parts of the region appeared as their peers, WHAT MADE SZOLNOK KNOWN NATIONWIDE From the 2 nd World War to the cessation of the Artists' Association V. 294
