Gopcsa Katalin (szerk.): Egry (Budapest, 2005)

created novel, modern interpretations of the Balaton scenery. Nonetheless, it was József Egry who earned the title "Painter of the Balaton", bestowed by the critic Károly Lyka in a review of Egry's retrospective exhibition of 1936. "I think I was born with the impulse to paint, for my childhood empathies lay mostly in this direction," writes Egry about his beginnings. "My greatest treat was a visit to the National Gallery. (They didn't allow you to enter barefoot!) ... Paintings, I looked for paintings everywhere... I longed to be a painter, but I was too young and ignorant in this respect." (Egry: Recollections of My Life.) It does seem miraculous that this child of an impoverished family who had to drop out of the eighth grade nourished such an unquenchable thirst for painting, seizing any opportunity to be near oil paint and varnish. Egry was born on March 15, 1884 in Újlak in the county of Zala adjacent to Lake Balaton. His parents were simple tillers of the soil who lost their land as a result of a family dispute; his father was even jailed. Having become dispossessed, after a series of migrations and day-laborers' quarters, the family packed up their meager belongings and moved to the capital, where they found it very hard to fit into the life of the urban proletariat. Egry as a child worked as a water vendor in City Park, served as errand boy at the market, copied scores for musicians who bunked in their room, and later helped out at construction sites. His life was turned around when he became apprentice to the decorative painter Emil Fellegi. "With that I entered a world where one loses one's previous reality A change like that liberates the explosive instincts and manic enthusiasms hidden deep inside, and you begin to construct that blissful imagined world where resignation is unknown ... where you are unable to see anything other than pictorial line and color." Soon he switched over to János Korcsek, who was chiefly known as a portrait painter. Meanwhile he attended evening courses at the School of Decorative Arts. After the first exhibition of his work at the National Salon Egry looked up the critic Károly Lyka at the editorial offices of Művészet. The critic's attention and patronage constituted a support that was both material and moral, and introduced Egry to other artists, notably László Mednyánszky and István Farkas. His early self-portrait with dark background, painted around 1903, shows the face of a raw youth of about twenty, still in search of his identity. The kinship with János Balogh Nagy's self-portraits from 1900-1910 is clearly indicated in the introductory volume Modern Hungarian Painting (18961919) where Egry's Self-Portrait (Plate 1) is reproduced facing illustrations of Balogh Nagy's self-portraits. We may also discover a distant relationship to the dark tonality of the paintings of Mihály Munkácsy, whose work Egry studied and at times copied in the museum. This admiration for Munkácsy's romantic-realist art can be seen in several village genre scenes painted around 1900, just as the influence of László Paál is evident in a few early landscapes that depict copses on the shores of the Balaton. For quite some time critical writing about Egry had focused exclusively on his oeuvre produced after 1922. The work of the early years (referred to by the artist as "anguish wrapped in obscurity") first received attention at exhibitions held at the Thury György Museum in Nagykanizsa (1968) and at the Hungarian National Gallery (1971), both curated by Béla Szíj. These canvases contain the germ of many ideas expressed in later works. It is most interesting to observe, alongside the development of the artist's professional skills, how he forms and shapes his vision of nature, and how intense and percolated through personal experience is his sensitivity toward social themes. All this manifests in compositions that at times resemble cut-outs. The scenes featuring figures of workers and homeless people mirror the passionate energy expended by Egry in re-living these experiences. This first-hand nature of the experience authenticates the painting titled Night Shelter (Plate 7). He returns to this subject during his sojourn in Paris. On the right side of this composition, organized into a single plane, shows the figure of the young Egry. Lajos Fülep emphasized the naturalistic ordering of the scene in pointing out the effect of inevitability created by the immediacy of real life that went into the making of the prototype. A surprising aspect of Egry's oeuvre may be glimpsed in a recently rediscovered painting of circa 1904 (Plate 2) depicting the Danube Bend. Lenke Haulisch attributes great importance in several respects to this painting with its tonal, glazed technique depicting the majestic vision of the broad river inscribing a double curve as it rolls from Pilismarót toward Visegrád under menacing clouds whose darkness is pierced by a light that reveals the sun as the source of rays of a higher order that spiritualizes matter itself In this ripening of the artist a great role was played by his brief trip to Munich (1904) and his Pans sojourn of 1905-1906. In Paris he enrolled at the Julian Academy, but soon dropped out, feeling fettered by the mode of instruction. "Nonetheless I owe Paris a lot for my development," he later