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

NEW ACQUISITIONS - Imre Szobotka: Annunciation (Prologue), 1915-17 (György Szűcs)

IMRE SZOBOTKA: ANNUNCIATION (PROLOGUE), 1915-17 BY GYÖRGY SZŰCS Imre Szobotka (1890-1961) belongs to those artists whose works from before the First World War can be left out of no representative exhibition showing the Hungarian art of the first years of the century. His life course started out almost following the usual pattern. In 1910, he graduated at the Budapest School of Applied Art, and, called by his friend József Csáky, he went to Paris. After his earlier Italian travel, he must have been shocked at the bustling life of the metropolis, the mood of the debates sparked by the advent of newer and newer isms and at the variegated culture of the international company gathered there, and, as a particular experience, the 1911 exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants, especially the Cubists' - the 'block artists' - room. Szobotka enrolled in the Académie La Palette, where two antithetical representatives of Cubism, Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier, were the correctors. At this time there were several Hungarian artists, who were influenced by Cubism at various degrees, such as Alfréd Réth and the former Matisse pupil, Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba. Apart from acquiring the practices of the Imre Szobotka: Annunciation (Prologue), 1915-17. Watercolour, pencil on paper, 230x152 mm Unsigned Inv.: F. 2004.1 Purchase from the estate of the artist in 2004 new mode of seeing, the 'spatial organisation' of Cubism, they attempted to add their individual flavours to what they might sometimes have felt far too impersonal. Szobotka himself sought to develop an individual idiom which could be useful for Cubism, and to seriously ponder the relationship of the almost mathematical order of paintings and their world of form and colour. By 1914, he established his individual style, which is probably closest to the Orphism of Delaunay; in other words, he tried to blend the strict cubist mode of structuring with colouristic effects. In the summer of that year, together with Ervin Bossányi, he went to Saint-Brieuc, Normandy, to do their usual summer work. And for a read, he took a copy of a 'best seller' given to him by Alfréd Réth: Paul Claudel's mystery play L'annonce faite à Marie. The neo-Catholic poet and diplomat, Paul Claudel (1868-1955), brother of the ill-fated Rodin pupil, Camille Claudel, began to write his play during his mission in Prague in 1911, and had it published by Editions Gallimard the following year. After the breakout of the First World War, as citizens of the enemy, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, he and his friend were interned. The years of confinement, intellectual famine, led them both to try and transpose into pictures the correspondences between the age of Jeanne d'Arc, the time of Claudel's mystery play, and their own 'disjointed world'. This was how Szobotka's Claudel series began to take shape - in the want of paper, on ever decreasing sheet sizes. In the starting picture, in the prelude to the drama, a night talk between church-builder Pierre de Craon and Violaine, the daughter of a country squire on her way to Jerusalem on penance, develops into such a spiritual fellowship that Violaine even offers her wedding ring to support the building of the church. At the end of the play, Pierre, having built his greatest church after the symbolic sacrifice of Violaine, takes her body back to her parents' house. The message of the play, the belief in restoring heavenly and earthly order, must have helped the interned artists to survive. Szobotka, however, was not interested in either summoning up the historical period or narrating a story in pictures; finding the deeper meaning of the play, he sought to realize the rules of an autonomous pictorial order by the means of Cubism, apt for this very kind of task. The Hungarian National Gallery was able to purchase a series consisting of 10 pieces from the estate of the artist, which it displayed together with other early works by him. Earlier on, the works had been on exhibition at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Paris and at the Saint Brieuc library.