Gellér Katalin - G. Merva Mária - Őriné Nagy Cecília (szerk.): A gödöllői művésztelep 1901-1920 - The artist's colony of Gödöllő (Gödöllő, 2003)

GELLÉR, KATALIN: INNOVATION AND TRADITION

Kupka, theosophy opened the road to spiritualization for the Gödöllő artists. In the estate of Ödön Moiret in Vienna, for example, there were several charcoal and pastel drawings and relief sketches of religious and anthroposophic themes.

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8 The multilingual catalogue of 1909 published during the world congress of theosophists held in Budapest includes Körösfői-Kriesch's series The country of häppiness, the elaboration of the history of a "soul" in words and picures. The catalogue also lists one work each by Sándor Nagy, Róbert Nádler, Béla Takács, Frank Haymann, Sven Bengtsson, Fidus, Hans Erlandsson, Rudolf Adamek, Hean Delville, Stanislas Stabrowsky, Francois Gos, and Miss Lavlen Pullen. * The study of self-knowledge as the basis of the views on one's self, nature and the world linked them to Jenő Schmitt and the contemporary theosophists, first of all Rudolf Steiner and the community he founded in Dörnach.

55 Sándor Nagy's works are most closely affiliated with Schmitt's ideas, Kriesch's religious views were more traditional, closer to the revival of neo-Catholicism permeating the works of Maurice Denis, among others, in his works for church commission, and his frescos painted in the inter-war years, Sándor Nagy also returned to the traditional symbolism of the Catholic religion. AESTHETIC VIEWS: A MORALLY BASED CONCEPT OF ART As for their views on art, it is obvious that contents were more important for them than form. Sándor Nagy first worded in his writing What does the facade of Notre-Dame de Paris tell us? in 1899 that "how" (i.e. style) was secondary to the problem of "what".

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0 In his later study, The Art of Life, he replaced the question "what is art" with "what is life". In Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch's wording: "art is not created by the new form," but the artist discovers the new forms while searching for a new view of the world, hence "form is the secondary phenomenon."

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1 Sándor Nagy condemned historicism, impressionism, secessionism, the pointillists, and all tradition-sanctioned genre division in sacred and secular painting, including figuralists and landscapists, history and portrait painters. As against impressions painted after nature, he ascribed greater importance to works belonging to applied arts.

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2 In Körösfői-Kriesch's view, the "grand passion, the passion in one's soul: that is the core of all art."

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3 The real art work is "the volcanic explosion [...] of the individual's soul," wrote Sándor Nagy who repeatedly returned to analysing the creative process. The artist's starting point is the natural sight, "external contemplation". That is followed by the internal individual reshaping it, or transformation into spiritual form.

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5 During the translation into artistic form, the feeling loses much of its intensity:

"... the spoke of the technique of performance reaches the lowest point when it has the most to convey, because it pains the creative spirit to rematerialize".

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5 Sándor Nagy's art concept that encompassed the entire world and life shared common features with the aesthetics of the symbolists, with Schwedenborg's theory of correspondences and with the wording of Albert Aurier: "there are correspondences between the Spiritual and the Natural [...] there is no trifle in the Realm of Nature [...] that has no meaning in the Realm of Spirit or has nothing to correspond to there."

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6 During their wanderings the allegorical characters in his book about the art of life arrive at a "barren plateau": 'Thus contemplating, they felt the great magnetic link that attracted their thoughts to the infinite; but it was an enigma to them how this feeling could gain strength in the earthly matter."

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7 The elements of thinking were more important that emotions, subjectiveness. As Sándor Nagy put it: "... the work of art is idea in form! It is the desire of incessant progress to dress the idea in ever more perfect form".

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8 In line with the theoreticians of 19

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h century idea painting, the Gödöllő artists wished to be formulators of the "absolute", "unchanged" ideas. A tapestry of Sándor Nagy (whereabouts unknown) carried the inscription: "1 cast my entire body upon it to protect the ideas for which 1 am," and Ödön Moiret's texts accompanying his figures of astral bodies also attest to the dissemination of ideas.

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5 For better understanding, they presented the social ideals and moral questions in a discursive manner, using old topoi and allegories. Their cumbersome nature, the "lack of secrets" in their symbolism, their monotony all root in this basic attitude. The theoreticians of the English Arts and Crafts movement were probably influenced by Plato's ideas of house planning, painting and making of artefacts: "bad order, bad rhythm and bad tune are siblings of bad speech and bad character, while their opposites are siblings and imitations of sober and good character."

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0 The adoption of Ruskinian ideas was probably reinforced by Körösfői-Kriesch's thorough knowledge of the Greek authors, as it was also an emphatic idea he cherished: "all formal manifestations of life must have artistic contents - if they haven't, they are immoral," he wrote.

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1 The goal of art was first and foremost education: improving the self, educating the masses. Unlike the followers of aestheticism, they believed in the rightfulness of a fine and good life. They devoted much time to teaching drawing, to the revival of old techniques and folk crafts. Their art