Köpröczi Rózsa: A grafikus Szőnyi. Rajzok, vázlatok, tanulmányok (Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága – Szőnyi István Alapítvány, Szentendre – Zebegény, 1996)

SELECTION FROM ISTVÁN SZONYI'S INDIVIDUAL GRAPHIC WORKS "Drawing must be considered the basis of all kinds of works of fine arts. Whatever technique may be applied, drawing is present in every work of arts. No period, no style could have done without drawing." (SZŐNYI ISTVÁN: A RAJZ, P. 13. A KÉPZŐMŰVÉSZET ISKOLÁJA, KÉPZŐMŰVÉSZETI ALAP KIADÓVÁLLALATA, BP, 1976.) What we think of a drawing or a sketch has changed a lot during the centuries. Renaissance art literature used to have a favourite topic, the "parragone", i. e. comparing different genres with one another. The winning genre would most often be drawing. It was Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), an architect and painter of Florence, who wrote the first summary of the ideas of Renaissance art history, "Biographies of Artists", in which he put drawing to the first place above all other fields of art. According to Vasari, a work of art becomes similar to divine creative activity through drawing. A drawing or, in other words, "disegno" is identical with the artistic idea itself. Analysis of drawings is very important in the oeuvre of almost all kinds of artists - be it either a painter, a sculptor or a design artist - as finding the idea, that is, invention is always involved in a drawing. It is the technique, style and method of a drawing that most directly indicate the marks of the hidden process of visual drinking - often undiscoverable in the final version of the work. The more varied and multicoloured the style of a drawing is, the more plastic the artistic concept is. István Szőnyi left an extremely rich graphic oeuvre after his death. Most part of it has remained in the collection of the memorial museum. During the several years' research work and in the course of processing of the stored material the staff of the museum realised that this treasure should be published. Some of the pictures have already been exhibited, but a good selection could give a better view of the whole. Though only a few of the several thousand drawings and sketches can be inserted in a book, the leaves - in spite of the editor's subjectivity - might suggest a cross-section of the whole of the material. The primary principle of the arrangement was grouping according to genre, topic, or technique and only the secondary principle was that of chronology The pre-arrangement had been done by Szőnyi himself, who sorted most drawings in maps according to topics. Looking through the maps we can hardly decide which drawing to omit from and which one to put into the book. The final structure of the book was formed by choosing one hundred and twenty pictures, which have been set beside each other.