Őriné Nagy Cecília (szerk.): A népművészet a 19-20. század fordulójának művészetében és a gödöllői művésztelepen (Gödöllői Múzeumi Füzetek 8. Gödöllői Városi Múzeum, 2006)

Folk Art as Reflected in the Art at the Turn of the 19,h and 20th Centuries and in the Art Colony of Gödöllő. Abstracts in English / Angol nyelvű összefoglalók

222 Abstracts in English 222 Veronika NAGY ethnographer, University of Debrecen "DOING FIELD WORK" - ETHNOGRAPHIC INTEREST OF THE ARTISTS OF GÖDÖLLŐ The activity of the Gödöllő art colony is worthy of attention for ethnographic research primarily because of the drawings, sometimes attaining even the value of documents, that the artists made of costumes and buildings under the inspiration of their frequent collecting trips. The works of art and sketches that have been preserved reveal a lot of these trips but more is to be known of the deeper layers of the artists' attitude to popular culture from diaries, notes, letters and the descendants' memoirs. Scholars have referred to these latter to a lesser extent when approaching the subject from an ethnographic point of view. The artists of Gödöllő have called primarily at centres of folk art that were already famous at the time so the art of the regions of Kalotaszeg and Mezőkövesd appears mostly in their works. Many of them have visited a number of other regions e.g. Transylvania, the region of the Csángó villages called "Hétfalu" (a region consisting of seven settlements where a Diaspora of Hungarians live detached from the motherland a long time ago. This population is called the "Csángó"); the artists went also to Torockó, to Tard and Szentistván to be found in the vicinity of Mezőkövesd, to the Transdanubian Göcsej, to the region along the northern coast of the Lake Balaton, to Somogy and to Sárköz. The aim of their collecting trips was different from that of the contemporary scholars; systematic research and exploration did not motivate them because they were under the spell of artistic purposes. The aesthetic manifestations of popular art were in the focus of their interest, this was what really attracted them to the villages. On the other hand, if they wanted the villagers to open up before them thereby wanting to attain their goal, it was necessary to show empathy to them, and to adapt themselves to local circumstances, behaving like scientists of their — or even of our - time. It was mainly the national traditional costume and the popular architecture that meant for them the fertilizing force, which they considered to be, on the strength of its beauty, of its materialized character and practicability, suitable for the renewal of national art, in contrast to articles of industrial mass production. Strangely enough however, in the turn of the twentieth century, the same articles produced by industry enlivened and made folk art more colourful, and it was thanks to industry that the attention of different layers of society above peasantry turned their eyes more and more to popular arts. Therefore, the artists of Gödöllő were admiring a slightly modified folkloric art which was more colourful than originally and was on the verge of decadence but which was built on ancient bases and was fed by earlier traditions.