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

Antal Deli are listed in Ernő Kállai 's book Neue Malerei in Ungarn as Szőnyi's followers, and they visited Nagybánya more than once in the said period. Jándi, who started his art studies at the colony back in 1911 and then in the early 1920s turned up in Budapest amongst the followers of the etching generation, had his first retrospective exhibition at the Belvedere in 1923. Antal Deli was a member of what later became known as the Szentendre artists' colony, and Vince Korda, the set designer of future Oscar-winning Korda movies, painted works of similar topics and style at Nagybánya at the time. But on the long run the Nagybánya roots proved crucial not only in the observance of the plein-air view of nature. Although they all resided in Budapest, Szőnyi and his followers turned their back on the metropolis and looked for location as well as inspiration for their paintings in the provinces, while their longing for Arcadia and Mother Nature was mixed with a nostalgia for Nagybánya, which had by then been transferred to Romania under the Trianon Peace Treaty. Several new artists' colonies were founded in rump Hungary after Trianon, in which the young artists, mostly college students, took their share. Their efforts failed to last beyond one or two summer seasons, however; one example was the shorklived Bicske artists' colony founded by Ernő Jeges, Antal Deli and Lajos PándyO Several of Szőnyi's followers, including Jeges and Goebel, worked on the establishment of an artists' colony in Szentendre, a small town at the Danube after 1 92Ó, evidently still under the spell of Nagybánya. The eight members of the colony founded in 1 928, like Szőnyi himself, had all been in Réti 's class at the Academy of Fine Arts.

40 Members of the Szőnyi circle themselves were in search of new locations: AbaNovák and Patkó worked at Tarján and Bodajk in the early 1920s. Szőnyi worked in Budakalász near Budapest first, and in Zebegény after 1923, where he eventually settled in 1924 and continued to live there with his family until 1930. The small village by the Danube Bend became his most important inspiration, and the landscape, his family members and the people living here came to provide the chief motifs of his paintings. Initially the artist worked here in complete isolation; by the end of the decade the old colleagues had all reappeared and in the 1 930s the visiting friends and colleagues came to form informal circle around the artist.

41 Just as Szőnyi discovered his "Nagybánya" and Arcadia at Zebegény, Aba-Novák and Patkó spent the summer of 1 925 in Felsőbánya (Baia Sprie, Romania) where their interest, similarly to Szőnyi's, was turned to the life of simple people. Károly Patkó, who had spent the previous summer at Nagybánya and regularly visited the nearby Felsőbánya, decided in favour of the small mining town up in the mountains this year instead of the artists' colony. Several of his friends accompanied him: Vilmos AbaNovák and his wife, Kató, Lajos Fonó, Emil Kelemen and Ernő Bánk also came to spend the summer here.

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4 They submitted a selection of their works for the Nude Exhibition held in the Palace of Art in the autumn. Szőnyi's growing reputation was indicated by the fact that his At the Peak was awarded with a prize and purchased, while the young generation was exclusively represented in the Nude Album, which supplemented the catalogue, by the neo-classical works of the Szőnyi circle (Erzsébet Korb's compositions were displayed posthumously).

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' The year 1925, along with the exhibition, proved to be an important watershed in the history of the Szőnyi circle. The large-scale comprehensive works shown at the exhibition at the same time formed the climax and the consummation of their earlier phase. The impassioned biblical/mythological scenes and the Arcadia of timeless and carefree existence both were gone, to be replaced by real people and everyday reality/'

1 The switchover was anything but not sharp, and a certain time-lag could be observed in the case of Szőnyi's followers: they still continued to work in the classicising style when the Szőnyi circle had already started to diifl away from the ideals they had held in the early 1 920s. While the influence of Aba-Novák and Patkó was felt in an ever growing circle, the transformation that was set off in their painting during their stay at Felsőbánya continued to go ahead in the period after 1925, parallel with Szőnyi's development. The choice of theme changed in the case of all three painters: the nude compositions gradually disappeared, giving way to everyday scenes and depictions of working men. But the contemporary themes meant the representation of simple peasant life, rather than life in the big city; the strong emotional charge was replaced with an idyllic atmosphere, the dramatic dynamism with a peaceful tranquility. In 1 926 a small company met regularly in Aba-Novák's home in Zugliget a suburb of Budapest, and two years after their summer at Felsőbánya Aba-Novák and Patkó found a new rural location. In 1927 Dr. Sándor Baumgartner, a district physician in Somogy County, invited them to stay in his home in Igal. The visitors soon grew into a lively crowd, when, in addition to the participants of the Felsőbánya summer colony, several young artists joined in." In the Autumn of 1 927 they moved to the nearby Törökkoppány, then returned to Igal for the summer of 1928. The changes that took place in the art of Aba-Novák and Patkó during the two summers spent in Igal demonstrated that their earlier style had van-