Katalin Gellér: The art colony of Gödöllő 1901-1920 (Gödöllő, 2001)

(Innocence

). Ferenc Sidló's Awakening, a portrait of his wife, expresses longing imbued with pain. In the weaving workshop weaving was mainly done by women, so was embroidering. The young weavers, mostly from local artisans' families, were treated as family members, they too attended outings and festivities. The formidable, destructive female figure of Art Nouveau can also be found in the work of Körösfői-Kriesch, Sándor Nagy and Rezső Mihály, though with far less emphasis given to it. Sándor Nagy's female nude bending backward in an artistic curve is entitled Longing. Comparing it with Franz von Stuck's or Gustav Klimt's allegories of sin, it is a subtly Japanized work drawn for the beauty of the sweeping line. Rezső Mihály, who combined Aubrey Beardsley' style with the geometric secessionism in his works, used the favourite stereotypes of symbolic graphic art: incorporeal princesses in snow-white clothes and androgynous lovers. In his coloured ink drawings Diabolo and Woman Puppeteer in a hat the marionetteer of Félicien Rops moving a tiny male figure on strings is revived. In his watercolour of a woman wearing a turban the predominant, almost threatening motif is the strangely broad mouth. Sándor Nagy's early decorative motifs evolved from a combining of the female form with animal figures, which appeared in both ornamental drawings and in fantasies: women with claws on their breasts, with birds' bodies remi- A'

adá

r Körösfői-Kriesch: woman in a Red Dress/oil on wood. 1897 niscent of Alfred Kubin's depressive world and late medieval visions alike. His design for a gobelin, The Rose and the Butterfly, shows a couple united in a kiss, but one of the rose woman's arms ends in huge skeletal claws embracing the butterfly-man with thorny branches.