Köpöczi Rózsa: A grafikus Szőnyi – akvarellek és goauche-ok (PMMI, Szentendre – Zebegény, 1994)

Előszó

FOREWORD "How "beautiful"and "good" it would be if beauty saved the world. " /from Dezső Kosztolányi: ABC, p. 24 Nyugat Literary Publishers Budapest/ István Szőnyi and some of his contemporaries who started their careers in the apocalyptic chaos of World War I and the subsequent revolutions gave a specific answer to the challenges of their times. Instead of joining the Avantgarde movement which rejected or at least questioned everything, all previous values in an attempt to create a new world, they chose a passive, introvert way of protest. Szőnyi has been only lightly touched by the spirit of Avantgarde: his expressive, monumental early nudes and landscapes show the influence of Béla Uitz. Nonetheless, he also refrained from joining the officially supported style, the Neo-Classicism of "The Roman School", favoured by the establishment between the two world wars. In the mid-thirties, almost simultaneously with Aurél Bernáth, his art turned back to the traditions of Nagybánya. They strove to create an art which is not subordinated to external influences, ideologies, which is not the rejection of something, but explores the objective existence of matter, nature and things, seeking refuge in the matter while never rejecting the pleasures of the spectacle and the senses. The painters, sculptors, art critics and collectors who tried to live and work in the above spirit frequently met at the Gresham Café, hence the tradition to call them "The Gresham Group". István Szőnyi belonged to them. Szőnyi lived in Zebegény from the mid-twenties. He was fascinated by the spell of the Danube Bend and this small village for life. His most brilliant paintings were born here. He adopted a new technique: egg tempera, whose fixative he invented for himself. He absolutely needed to bathe in the stream of spectacles which refreshed his senses again and again. His visual "notes", water-colours, gouaches were collected and systematized in folders with a meticulous care, since they were his actual links with reality and nature. The innumerable small colour sketches had a significant role in the solutions of problems with lights and colours that were his primary interests. At the time when his style in Zebegény matured to the fullest, it was just the transubstantiating power of light, the radiation which entered the landscape and the objects which concerned him the most. "He breaks the radiant colours by adding temperate greys and browns which results in an effect as if light was filtrating from the depth of matter itself.", Ernő Kállai wrote in an article from 1941. It is not by accident that apart from water-colour he chose to make his sketches in the rare, almost forgotten technique of gouache, since it was so close to the egg tempera of his panel paintings that some of these small pictures on paper seem to be fully solved. This volume contains almost all the water-colours and gouaches of Szőnyi. We have considered the full publication of the graphic part of his oeuvre all the more important, since the public may rarely meet these pieces as opposed to the large scale paintings. They rest in the storerooms waiting for the sparse exhibitions when they reveal their latent values. By our publication they may become a collective property that can satisfy our senses any time at home. They might even take us closer to the secret of Szőnyi, "the magic of realism" that is so hard to articulate in words. 7