Gosztonyi Ferenc - Király Erzsébet - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2002-2004. 24/9 (MNG Budapest, 2005)

STUDIES - Éva Bajkay: The Classicizing Trends of the 1920s and their Beginnings in Pécs Tradition and Modernity in the Pécs Arts Society

Art took on different characteristic shapes or different portents in the various cities of the world that became artistic centres for longer or shorter periods.

21 There were thus notable differences between Budapest, isolated at the time, and the arts centre of Southern Hungary, Pécs, which despite the Serbian occupation was opening towards new trends while being faithful to its Mediterranean tradition. Beside Kassa (Kosice), Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), Arad and Vienna (where Kassák 's group was reforming), Pécs became a centre that received activists dispersing from Budapest.

22 Though Dobrovics and Hugó Johan had visited the capital of modern art, Paris, the Pécs group maintained more intimate links with Munich, the city that turned to the legacy of European antiquity. This was so not only because of the famous German schools - Alfréd Forbát and Lajos Cacinovic studied architecture in Munich -, but also thanks to the traditional links of the town with Italy, and perhaps because the German settlers invited to Baranya county 150 years earlier had come from Bavaria. At the beginning of the 20th century Munich was lively with Rudolf Steiner's lectures, the ideas of theosophy and an expressionism inspirited by esoteric works ('Der Blaue Reiter', Marc, Kandinsky), something that came through on the pages of Krónika. It was from Munich that Kandinsky and Klee went to teach at the Bauhaus, while Kanoldt found his fountainhead of inspiration, in the wake of the 19th-century Nazarenes, in Italian Renaissance. It was the interaction of the two types of endeavours, the conservative, classicizing attempts on the one hand which saw their periodic revival, especially at the beginning of the 1920s -, and the isms that sought fresh methods for the construction of the picture, on the other, that informed the best work of members of the Pécs Arts Society. The Pécs Arts Society had its founding assembly on December 16, 1920, in the school on Hunyadi Square. The founders, local writers, painters and musicians, who were aware of the work of the Budapest activists - not only through Dobrovics, but also through Farkas Molnár, who from 1916 studied for a year at the Academy of Fine Arts, and then took six semesters at the Budapest Technical University -, consciously 'turned their backs on day-to-day politics of any kind, inter-denominational and social hatred', and considered it their mission 'not only to cultivate the arts and intellectual treasures, but also to be of service to a long-desired consolidation'.

21 As it was customary at the time, the leaders of the society went on to define its goals in the 'gentlemen's café' (the Royal). These included the wish to 'provide artists working hitherto in isolation with a home, and to turn the town, through exhibitions, literary events and concerts, into an emporium of art'. This quiet foundation ceremony was followed by another, better advertised event on 4. Ernő Gebauer: Dancers, ca. 1923. Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs January 22, 1921, in the Művészház (Artists' House) on Széchenyi Square.

24 This time the desire to educate the public was expressed more emphatically. It was in this spirit that a public lecture series began on February 21. The subjects advertised throw some light on the problems and traditions the artists, who spoke for free, held important: Jenő Gábor: 'On Art'; Farkas Molnár: 'The Evolution of Art'; Cacinovic: 'On Architecture'; Gusztáv Gebauer: 'General Considerations for an Appreciation of Egyptian and Chaldean Art'; Jenő Gábor: 'On Greek Art'; Henrik Stefan: 'On Old Christian Art'; Cacinovic: 'On Byzantine Art'; Béla Sebestyén (teacher, Stefan's brother-in-law): 'On the Renaissance'

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. Beside Egyptian and old Christian art, so important for modernism, the emphasis apparently fell on antiquity and the Renaissance. Quite democratically and in agreement with its original policy, the Arts Society offered membership for artists of the most varied abilities. Within the Society, there was a natural antagonism between the very active moderns and the naturalist painters, yet both trends were equally represented at the exhibitions. In lack of a complete documentation, we can reconstruct the five displays of the Pécs Arts Society only with the help of the contemporary press.

26 The first exhibition presented 40 works by the most senior artist, Ernő Gebauer, in Művészház on Széchenyi Sqaure. This and the last two displays featured traditional