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

ical meaning by being taken for the main vehicle to depict the Hungarian past: "The art that the Hungarians had brought with them only lives on in the peasantry," Körösfői-Kriesch wrote in his article on the art of the region. Sharing Károly Kos' convictions, the Gödöllő Colony claimed that the Transylvanian medieval churches and the living crafts preserved the perished Hungarian Middle Ages. In many of Körösfőí-Kriesch's works the typical Kalotaszeg church enclosed with a surrounding wall and the carved wooden grave post, kopjafa, are recurrent motifs. The latter was chosen as the emblem of the Young Architects in 1906. They elaborated the collected motifs in a synchretic manner. In the mosaic cupola Körösfői-Kriesch designed for the cemetery in Kerepesi Road, a typical Transylvanian building suggests the Heavenly Jerusalem. Starting out from the identification of ancient art with folk art, Thoroezkai Wigand used elements of Székely architecture, while Sándor Nagy drew on Transdanubian wooden columns and grave posts to reconstruct Attila's mansion and palace. The border of Sándor Nagy's tapestry entitled Attila's Return from the Hunt, that once adorned the wall of the National Salon and his stained glass window for the Veszprém theatre are the apotheosis of the past and folk art. REPRESENTATION OF HISTORY, FAIRY-TALES AND MYTHS The Gödöllő artists were mainly "idea painters", defining the art work as "idea clad in form" (Sándor Nagy), the vehicle of a "world view" (Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch). This abstract ideocentric approch materialized in Ödön Moiret's transfigured creations and in the texts he carved into his statues and reliefs. They deemed it their moral duty to search for the "ancient symbols" (Körösfői-Kriesch), to create a Hungarian mythology which, similarly to the great German romantic generation, they understood as an artistic-moral program created by the individual subject. They drew on Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, popular themes of Hungarian history and genre painting, folktales, folk ballads. The romantic synchretism of Arnold lpolyi's Hungarian Mythology is revived in their works: an attempt to reconstruct the Hungarian myth by fusing antique, medieval and folklore sources. They often took extreme liberties in using the different historical sources: the attire and headgear of the pagan priestess in the Palace of Culture in Marosvásárhely were presumably taken by Körösfői-Kriesch from the Mycenean snake goddess statues and Antal Reguly's Asian material. Körösfőí-Kriesch's historical paintings depict the outstanding periods of the Hungarian past. A favourite subject of his painter-predecessors in the 19th century, the age of King Matthias appears in several of his works, such as Hunting with Falcons in King Matthias' Reign exhibited at the Hunting <AY.>'.ANAPA WM Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch: Cassandra / gobelin, around 1909