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

PHD THESES AT THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - Judit BOROS: Hungarian Painters in Paris (1880-96)

JUDIT BOROS Hungarian Painters in Paris (1880-96) The 1880-96 period the dissertation discusses is rather short, but no mere coincidence. I regard this decade and a half (a year or two may naturally be added at both ends) as the beginning of Hungarian modernism. This was the time Hungarian painters living in Western Europe, most of them in Paris, some in Munich, encountered the phenomenon of modernism in painting. Broadly speaking, the subject matter of my thesis is this very encounter. I sought to review the period in a horizontal section, exploring and presenting art phenomena which occurred side by side, in a way severally intertwined, in a given place, at a given time. The first part of the study discusses modernism as a theoretical issue. The second part reviews the fate of Hungarian painters living or studying in Paris at the time, giving special attention to the relation with modernism. Grouping the various issues, the chapters of the second part (The Painting of Mihály Munkácsy and His Pupils; The Hungarian Students of the Académie Julian; The Paris Period of József Rippl-Rónai, and, as an epilogue, The Theoretical Questions of the Modernism of Károly Ferenczy) analyze the life circumstances, artistic approaches and activities of the painters concerned. Munkácsy À NAGYVILÁGBAN / IN THE WORLD yt •;{ ' '' ..-ïsi'it I Traditionally, art history prefers chronological analyses focussing on cause-and-effect relations. A monographic study of an artist or an artistic style, however, would usually disregard whatever is not in direct and close relation with the oeuvre under discussion. Should the influences on a phenomenon or an artist or on the broader context of a stylistic trend be brought up, they remain marginal with regard to the subject matter discussed. However, I was interested in the mechanisms of interrelations, hidden connections and contacts. As the poet Domokos Szilágyi succinctly put it: "Who knows the hidden ways we are acquainted with what we know?" In the discussion of the question of modernism, I was primarily influenced by the work of three American art historians. The studies of Michael Fried made me comprehend that the material of 19

th-century art (painting) was artistic (painterly) tradition per se; analyzing the extraordinarily increased role of vision (image), Jonathan Crary pointed out the distance between the visual sign and the marked object, as well as, by implication, the not to be neglected role of the recipient as the place where vision becomes image; and Robert Jensen called attention to the often ignored role of art business (the laws of the market valid in art life in a broad sense). The choice of subject matter was prompted by an observation - to be more precise, an observation in the form of a question Hungarian art history had formulated earlier. So was the question put: Why was it Jules Bastien-Lepage or the "refined naturalism" hallmarked by his name that influenced the style of the majority of Hungarian painters studying in Paris? Why did they not realize that the "task" of the time, i.e. (to use the terms of Lajos Fülep) solving the "problem of the third dimension, deep space" with the means of "colour and value", was thematized not by extreme naturalism descriptive and sentimental at once, but impressionism (within the naturalistic-realistic tradition), which thrust vision (the problem of visualify) into prominence? French painting in the middle of the 19

th century certainly fulfilled this task, primarily within the framework of plein-air naturalist landscape painting. Impressionism, however, was the result of the conscious application of subjective visuality based on optical laws. It very much used colour and value, but it was hardly concerned with the problems of spatial depth. Being the characteristic feature of impressionistic representation ("impressionism is the art of momentary impact"), fragmentary time much rather favours effects perceptible on pictorial surfaces and captured in a single glance.