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

INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH. PHD THESES AT THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - Györgyi Imre: Female Nude Imagery in

portraits for which Italian Renaissance iconographie standards, facial expressions of passion (tête d'expression) and costume pictures served as bases. Marastoni modelled his ideal portraits after 'his beautiful wife, Johana Bianki': she was the model for the Greek Woman and the Woman at her Dressing Table. III. Budapest's social elite followed the model of the Viennese Academy when electing Károly Lötz, a former student of Marastoni in Budapest and Carl Rahl in Vienna, to be favoured genius of the Hungarian 'state court'. Károly Lotz's al secco ceiling piece of the Opera House (1883) depicting the Olympus was first real representative assignment in fine arts demanding genuine technical and painterly accomplishment in the reconstructed Budapest with its avenues and boulevards - 'Haussmanized' on the Parisian model. Lötz created on his ceiling piece a cultic space that is dominated by an era of repetition, ensuring 'eternal recurrence' and the scholarly idea of the nude representation founded on Neo-Platonic doctrine of ideas, one that is opposed to the historical time of repetition. This ceiling picture represented the 'court' of Zeus, where harmony appeared as amour courtois, conveying at the same time the modern myths of official art. Lotz's nudes for Olympus embodied a specific desire for beauty, eroticism and wealth. Within the modern urban environment that mythological figures of the ceiling piece of the Opera House provided a framework decoration, inside which the wealth and representation of the new 'City Centre' ruled, while Lötz decorated the new villas and mansions with allegoric variations on the apotheosis of art. In Lotz's nude painting we can detect a stereotypical face that was replaced the portrait-like depiction of personality, and from 1890s eventually became linked to one single model the artist's (foster) daughter, Cornelia Lötz. Due to her face and fragile figure Cornelia was well-suited to become closely interwined with the concept of the fetish-like model of Lotz's nude pictures. IV. In his letter written probably to Hans Makart, perhaps on the very occasion of this invitation to Vienna, to teach life drawing and painting at the Academy of Vienna, Bertalan Székely summarizes with scientific precision his artistic principles, expounding them in connection with female imagery, or more correctly Leda and the Swan - a theme that engaged him for decades. The letter in effect shows how the subject of the female nude led Székely to wards the conceptual bases of modern painting. His phrasing and problems indicate the influence of vitalism, while Hermann Helmholtz's physiological optics and Eadweard Muybridge's photographic experiments can be indentified to have served as starting points for Székely's own, artistic experiments. V. József Rippl-Rónai 's nude garden scenes painted between 1911 and 1913 condense space and time. Representing himself in the company of his models, the artist makes his own contribution to the fetish-making fantasy world of the artist-genius, developed since the Renaissance. Also functioning as his ars poetica, these works make use of the female nude images of his 1890, now destroyed, tapestry, Idealism and Realism, just as his nude drawings of his artist friend and model from Paris, Fenella Lowell, or photographer Olga Mate's artistic nudes. He fitted into the drafts of Models in my Garden in Kaposvár and Park with Nudes — besides his ink drawing of Three Figures - two standing nudes depicted among idealised surroundings from the surviving sketch for his tapestry entitled Idealism and Realism (1895), along with Olga Mate's nude photograph of Fenella, made specifically for this work. The tutor of the dissertation was György Kelényi, its opponents Katalin Keserű and Lajos Végvári. The degree was awarded 'summa cum laude (1999)'. A chapter of dissertation was published: A leány azonosítása. Kiss Bálint Jablonczai Pethes János leányától búcsúzik a leopoldvári börtön ablakánál 1674-ben című festményén. (Identification of the Girl. János Jablonczai Pethes Bids Farewell to His Daughter in the Window of the Leopoldsburg Prison in 1674). In: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Evkönyve (Annales de la Galerie Nationale Hongroise) 1997-2001. Etudes sur l'histoire de l'art en honneur de Katalin Sinkó. Budapest 2002, pp. 153-160. The dissertation only partially covered the concept of the related exhibition I curated for the Hungarian National Gallery, The Model -Female Nude Imagery in 19th-century Hungarian Art (October 14, 2004 - February 6, 2005), which was opened by Werner Hofmann. With the exhibition I intended to show the position of Hungarian works within the European tradition of the visual arts.