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

TANULMÁNYOK - ANDRÁS ZWICKL: The Pictures of the Ideal and the Real - The Arcadia Painting of the Szőnyi Circle

Aba-Novák, Erzsébet Korb and Károly Patkó; they are known in the literature as the Szőnyi circle, although several young artists painted in a similar style during that period - mostly on Szőnyi's inspiration. Members of the Szőnyi circle, along with his followers, failed to form a close-knitted group; they never declared a program or artistic credo, nor did they organise separate exhibitions. Despite all this, contemporary art critics and art historians, who noted the inherent connection between them very early on, took stock of the artists concerned, who mostly belonged to the same generation anc whose career developed along similar lines in many ways. They scored their first successes before reaching thirty, then turned their backs on their previous period and made a name for themselves in Hungarian art history with a fundamentally different style of painting. Although the Szőnyi circle's Neo-Classicism formed part of the broad range of international "neo-classicisms", its origins were different in many ways. Of the several causes, the historical circumstances play the leading part. Born in the 1 890s, Szőnyi's generation barely started their art education at the Academy of Fine Arts when the First World War broke oui and they all had to join the army. They were able to continue their studies or start their careers only after a disruption of four years, once the war had ended. Although all this might also have affected the artists elsewhere, in Hungary, a country fighting on the losers' side, the disruption caused by the First World War proved to be far greater than in most of the other European countries. Upon their return from the War, the artists found themselves in a country torn by revolutions and the experience of a Soviet-type Counci Republic: a country greatly impoverished and politically antagonised, and shrunk to one-third of its former size following the Paris Peace Treaties. In addition to the war and the catastrophic economic situation, the country's art life suffered other losses, also; after the fall of the Council Republic most of the progressive artists of the previous generation emigrated, with some of the younger artists also leaving the country for periods of various length. Since Hungary was severely isolated in the new political situation, the latest artistic developments could not reach the artists who stayed home, for whom foreign travel proved increasingly difficult, and so local traditions gained in importance. What were the traditions that the young generation could build on? Above else there was Nagybánya (today: Baia Mare, Romania). By the 1920s the artists' colony, which had been established in 1 896, became the symbolic standard-bearer of modern Hungarian art, and its gradual institutionalisation made its effects felt in every area of art life, including art education. With the consequent appointments of Nagybánya masters at the Academy of Fine Arts after the institution's reorganisation by Pál Szinyei Merse, plein-air Naturalism and Impressionism provided the guiding pattern with regard to modern art, and after 1913 the students had opportunity to became acquainted with them during their summer courses at the colony. At the same time the Nagybánya "Neos", a group of second-generation innovators inspired by the Fauves, surpassed the founders' concept of nature. The other important component of the Szőnyi circle's Neo-Classicism was the allegorical and symbolic concept of art that they inherited from Art Nouveau and realised in multi-figural compositions set in the Neos' endeared Arcadic surroundings representing the idyllic relationship between man and landscape; it was also manifested in the painting of Nyolcak, most notably in Károly Kernstok's and Bertalan Par's monumental nude compositions of a Utopian outlook. But it was not just the Nyolcak group that followed in the direction sel by the Neos: in 1909 in Nagybánya a number of prominent painters under the direction of Béla Iványi Grünwald established the Kecskemét artists' colony, which came to play an important role in the emergence of the Cubo-Expressionist style in the mid-1 91 Os. It was this movement that paved the way, and acted as immediate forerunner, for Szőnyi's Neo-Classicism at the turn of the 1 91 0s and 1 920s. Of the artists who exhibited their works in 1916 and 1917 under the title Fiatalok, Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba, Béla Uitz, József Nemes Lampérth, János Kmetty and Péter Dobrovics produced monumen tal nude compositions, landscapes and heroic self-portraits which revealed classicising tendencies. The transition between the respective arts of the two generations was perfectly continuous, especially in graphical art. It was this continuity, and this double bonding, that Kállai emphasised; in his book he opened the chapter on the 1910s, which was entitled Der expressive Naturalismus, with Béla Uitz and then continued the presentation with Szőnyi immediately afterwards, emphasising the role of Uitz and Nagybánya as the most crucial preliminaries of the latter's art. For Szőnyi the Nagybánya training proved to be decisive.

Iv He began his studies at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts in 1913 in Károly Ferenczy's class, spending the next summer at Nagybánya on an Academy grant; he returned there twice during the war and after his discharge from the army he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts under István Réti, one of the leading masters of the artists' colony. The drawings and paintings he made in Nagybánya already showed the characteristic features of his later style: he conducted parallel experiments with figurai compositions of classicising