Veszprémi Nóra - Jávor Anna - Advisory - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2005-2007. 25/10 (MNG Budapest 2008)

STUDIES - Ágnes FELFÖLDI: Béla Fónagy and the Belvedere Salon (1921-24)

phenomena moving in nature."

48 One of his exhibits, Street in Fehérgyarmat painted in 1914, was bought by the Museum of Fine Arts in the wake of the show. Bornemisza's 1924 Still Life with a Sculpture, which was displayed at the Second Group Exhibition at the Belvedere, is now held by the FING.

49 Bornemisza came to be a founding member of the KXJT, and the most memorable pieces in his oeuvre are the refined, witty watercolours he painted with a French-like elegance. Opened on April 2, 1922, the exhibition of the works of Zsigmond Cselényi Walleshausen (1888- after 1945) and István Gádor was somewhat eclipsed by the news of the death of King Charles IV of Hungary the day before. Zsigmond Walleshausen displayed, apart from his decorative-like expressionist paintings, landscape engravings and linocuts with Biblical themes. In the second half of the 1920s, he joined Géza Blattner's Arc-en-Ciel Puppet Theatre in Paris, taking part in painting the props and translating Imre Madách's play The Tragedy of Man in 1937. In the 1940s, he settled down in the outskirts of Paris, sending articles for publication in the Hungarian press. He survived the Second World War, but produced no work of lasting value afterwards.

50 István Gádor (1891-1984) started out as a sculptor, but soon gave it up for ceramics; however, he sought to go beyond the decorative object function in this craft, too. After 1919, he worked at the Vienna Wiener Werkstätte for a longer period. It was at the Belvedere that he put up his first one-man show, and wrote the following on this period: "I built myself a small stove on the fifth floor at 19 Lónyay utca. The reason for doing so there was that I had been ousted from my shop in Lehel utca. After few months of work, in 1921 [actually in 1922 - the author] I set down to arrange my exhibition at the Belvedere. It got pretty good reviews in the press. At the time, the practice was that the press would bring out the critiques right on opening. Belvedere sought to give justice to artistic experimentation. The exhibition room of Béla Fónagy and András Komor was thus an initiator of the free aspirations the Tamás Gallery and the KUT shows would later seek to fulfil."

51 Many of his works, including several of those shown at the Belvedere, are in the possession of the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs. Among others these include: Nude (Female Nude with a Bunch of Grapes, 1927), Dancer (1921), Woman Standing (Female figure or Japanese Figure, 1922), Kiss (1916), Earth ( 1922), Hippopotamus (1920).

52 At the joint exhibition of Béla Kádár (1877-1956) and Károly Cser opened on April 30, 1922, the former presented the graphic material in which he treated of his Vienna and Berlin experiences. These drawings in charcoal and pencil brought about a radical turnabout in his style in the 1910s, his subject matter being enriched with the symbolism of modern cities and village stories. Some of his exhibits were reproduced in Iván Hevesy's book on Kádár.

53 (111. 7) In recent years, several of his drawings have turned up at Hungarian auctions and art shows (1920: Mad Dog; Mood in a Hungarian Village; c. 1922: The Fiddler; The Bridge; A Vienna Detail). These works, whose whereabouts had been unknown and whose majority is in private collections, can be dated to this period with reasonable certainty on the basis of their style. György Sümegi characterized Kádár

's work of the early twenties in the following way: "... he evokes the figures of Hungarian villages and German tales in idiosyncratic depictions; however, he adds some grotesque flavour, overtones almost turning into parody. There seems to be a move away from expressionism, from 7. Front page of Iván Hevesy's book on Béla Kádár, 1922 the dominance of the subjective factor, from the prevalence of affection, the predilection for the unique and the distorted towards a more rational approach, anticipating the 30s."

54 Subsequently in 1923 and 1924, Kádár exhibited his work in the Der Sturm in Berlin. And his most successful appearances were in New York, at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926 and the Anderson Galleries in 1927, at both of which his work was shown together with Picasso's, Braque's and Chagall's. The sculptor Károly Cser ( 18801960) had just returned home from his six-year war captivity in Siberia (Russia) in 1920. The ensuing decades proved to be his most prolific years, and he often turned to Biblical and mythological themes. The HNG holds almost twenty of his works, including Pain, which he first exhibited at the Belvedere and later, in 1926 at the third KUT show, and Dancers and Woman Dancing.

S5 (111. 8) Several of his works were erected in public places, e.g. his statue of Lajos Kossuth in Nyíregyháza and a war memorial in Vác. A bomb hitting his house with his studio in it during World War II destroyed many of his works. Though the press did cover the exhibition of Richárd Károly Beer (1892-?), which closed the spring round of shows at the Belvedere, it was not much of a success, and the artist, who had been brought up in the United States and had had experience in Munich, returned to Switzerland; his name has not cropped up in connection with exhibitions in Hungary ever since. One of the Budapest dailies wrote the following of him: "After the series of cubists and expressionists, Károly Beer means a few steps backwards because his view of nature does not seem to go beyond the idiom of naturalism and impressionism. He is fond of simplified, reticent things."

56 The autumn season was started with Hugó Scheiber's (18731950) retrospective, who developed his densely expressive mode of painting in the direction of constructivism, even futurism. The show was dominated by his cityscapes and self-portraits, which with their unique modernity achieved great public acclaim. Two years earlier, he had been working in Vienna together with Béla Kádár, and, now, with this exhibition, he returned home to Budapest. He often participated at Hungarian and foreign shows: in 1923, he put one up at the Alkotás Gallery in Budapest, and appeared at the Der Sturm Gallery several times in Berlin in 1926-27.