Zwickl András szerk.: Árkádia tájain, Szőnyi István és köre 1918–1928. (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2001/3)

TANULMÁNYOK - GYÖRGY SZÜCS: Among the Décor of History - Pessimism and Quests for Intellectual Paths in the 1920's

At a point in expounding his theory, Ligeti comes to state the following: "The sequence of the three modes of fine arts may thus be conceived of as the way of the flesh. It appears and is shaped in the architectural age, it glitters fully illuminated in the time of sculpture, and it is scattered in the pictorial age."

2v We may contrast this with Ervin Ybl's analysis, which also followed Riegl's optical and plastic division, but modelled it on his own body of knowledge, and regarded the "solidification of form" taking place in the last stage of the "pictorial age" as a moment in the quest for path. A former student of law and philosophy, Ybl saw an analogy between the imperial period of Rome and the civilization of his own age, as had Spengler; and he revealed the essential similarities between the composition of form of the two ages. His actual train of thought was prompted by a 1915 lithography by the Austrian artist Albin Egger-Lienz, leading him to the recognition that, after impressionism, "today's art works with heavy forms again, easy optics were replaced by plastic aspirations. The physical separation of shapes and objects is not suppressed, it is not dissolved in an all-encompassing space, but is actually given prominence to the expense of space."

30 Following Riegl, Ybl regarded the dynamics of "artistic will to form" (Kunstwollen) as the internal driving force of artistic development; and, in agreement with Ligeti, he considered impressionism as the final point of the optical possibilities of painting, from which it followed that Cézanne was the "border-stone between impressionist optics and modern picture-writing that stresses corporeality."

Jl On the other hand he would actually not accept the existence of trends (cubism, expressionism) that could not fit into this dual scheme, because, in his opinion, "however far stylisation roamed away from reality, it always has to give due respect to the rules of seeing, which are the basic possibilities of artO There were other approaches to the art of the first decades of the twentieth century, as several heirs of the progressive approach regarded expressionism to be a period trend appearing as a reaction to impressionism. A devotee of applied arts, Pál Nádai, who had once upon a time been a lecturer at the radically leftist Galilei Circle, saw the new expressionist "will to form", which discovered the primitives (African sculpture, gothic art), as a reaction against 1 9

,!l scientistic self-assurance, the Zolaic formula "of giving a portion of nature", in other words, against the naturalist-impressionist outlook; but could neither deny that, beside the many "romantic" schools, the germs of a "neo-classic" art were discernible in those turbulent times. This was signalled by a Homer cult unfolding among the Germans and the new Ingres school among the French, which "strives to reproduce the lofty emotion arising from a clearly linear composition, a noble and simple sketching." And then, for summary's sake, he went on to state: "By contrast to the traditions of pictorial vision of the last century, it is the formal problems of block-like composition or of bold positioning on decorative surfaces that we encounter everywhere."

33 The sketchy review above points out the fact that both practical work and the theoretical quests for paths defined themselves with respect to the negative experience of the World War. The traumas of the worldwide conflagration and of the revolutions, the pessimistic awareness of life represented in "symbolic images" by Spengler determined the public mood in Hungary also, and led thinkers and artists alike to make a reckoning. The reckoning however was hindered by conditionings rooted in the existence of the Monarchy, the strengthening of a nostalgia that mused on the "piping days of peace" forever lost, and the emigration of the greater pari of progressive artists and thinkers, the postponement of the appearance of the next, war-racked generation. "This was the tragedy of this generation - as the historian, Miklós Asztalos put it. - At the profoundly significant beginning of a new period, when the future was being prepared by the old generation, they were not the first generation of the future but a rear-guard of the old one fallen behind. They were a generation without a future in the eyes of the old one and one that belonged to the past in the eyes of the young.Consequently, he word "new" in the mouths of leading politicians of ihe era was meant to separate "old" concepts adapted to the times from their original meanings, but even more so to deprive meaning from the genuine novelty in the vision of the future that progressives had proclaimed in the beginning of the century. The silent majority of thinkers and artists did the reckoning within themselves; historical-political experiences infiltrating their work only indirectly, in 1920, Ervin Ybl wrote the following: "Long lasting artistic and cultural development was necessary for artists to leave their studios behind. Their studios had to become dreary and academic before they could withdraw from them. This had not occurred in Rembrandt's time yet. How lively the studio had been then I A violent beam of light broke in through a small opening, setting a proportionate light to a patch the size of a hand; moreover, the yellow moon even had a halo; far afield, however, everything seemed to be ready to subside into darkness...

35 In Ybl's own time, the situation, it seems, was just the reverse: painters withdrew from the madding crowd into the silence of their studios, into a timeless asylum where the validity of knowledge they had gained and the artistic value they had learned seemed to be ensured longer.