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

NEW ACQUISITIONS - József Nemes Lampérth: Self-Portrait, 1912 (György Szűcs)

JÓZSEF NEMES LAMPÉRTH: SELF-PORTRAIT, 1912 BY GYÖRGY SZŰCS After his premature death, József Nemes Lampérth (1891-1924) left behind no more than a hundred and fifty works - paintings and drawings included. He probably never produced any more, for, in spite of his dynamic, seemingly hasty mode of painting, his brooding, Dostoyevskyesque character would allow him to put forward only works compositionally ripened. Luckily, he continuously dated his pictures; out of his precision, perhaps even mania, he even marked the months and days thus the trajectory of his art can be drawn with relative ease. Only recently coming to light, his Self-Portrait was unknown to scholarship, nevertheless, it fits in perfectly well with the streaking style that he had developed by around 1910. The painting was presented to the Hungarian National Gallery from the estate of the art historian Frigyes (Frederick) Antal (1887-1954) by his son living in Switzerland. According to his statement, his father had bought the painting from the artist in Berlin in the early 1920s. True enough, Gurlitt Gallery did put up a Nemes Lampérth exhibition, but as far as we know, only tintdrawings were featured there. The oil could, of course, have turned up in the German capital, as the sticker of the German transport company on its back attests. Probably due to his school friends, Béla Uitz and János Kmetty, Nemes Lampérth soon got acquainted with the representatives of Hungarian progressivism gathering from 1915 in the Vasárnapi Kör (Sunday Circle) lead by the philosopher György (Georg) Lukács. From among these figures, the painter portrayed Arnold Hauser, Frigyes Antal and Károly (Karl) Mannheim. Theses tint pictures he displayed at the exhibition of the artists' group 'The Youth' (or The Seven) at the Nemzeti Szalon (National Salon). According to the evidence of his letters, he was a close friend of János Wilde, the art-historian who, as Johannes Wilde, was later to be deputy director of the Courtauld Institute in London. During the First World War, drawings by Nemes Lampérth was published - e.g. a Lajos Kassák portrait among them - in Kassák's activist magazine, MA, and he participated at the third, 1918 demonstrative exhibition arranged by the magazine. It is no mere coincidence that we find him in the company of, among others, Frigyes Antal, János Wilde and Béla Uitz initiating a reform of art education during the 1919 revolution. In the autumn of 1911, at just twenty, he painted one of his epoch-making works, his Self Portrait, made up of fields of colour and, in December, just before leaving for Paris, a dramatically powerful picture of his József Nemes Lampérth: Self-Portrait, 1912. Oil on canvas, 94x76 cm Signed lower left: Nemes Lampérth J. Inv.: 2002.10 T. Presented by Georg M. Antal in 2000 father's death, The Bier (both in the possession of the Hungarian National Gallery). It was in the period between these two that the version of the self-portrait with a hat was produced, the autographic inscription stuck on the back of the frame stating: T painted this in spring, March, April, May, 1912'. The mode of painting with one sweep characteristic of the two former pictures can be recognized here as well, but a closer look at the surface reveals that he repainted the outlines of the hat and perhaps even the forearm, as though he made another attempt at reconciling meticulous fidelity of drawing and a constructive design preferring comprehensive shapes. The later period of the artist affirms the presupposition that the style he had found was more favourable to land- and cityscapes than to portraits wanting to suggest psychological character, too. The oeuvre of Nemes Lampérth has thus been augmented by a significant work, which, by way of being displayed at the permanent 20th-century exhibition of the Hungarian National Gallery, will, like other works in his oeuvre, hopefully become part and parcel of European modernism.