Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)

Tanulmányok / Studies - Bicskei Éva: A helyi mint nemzetközi / The Eocal as International

alone or in groups, and anatomy studies are signed with the letter F and an Arabic numeral. The pictures can be identified from German-language Katalogblatts, which collected and listed all the photographs belonging to this series as 25 small photographs per sheet in numerical order from 1 to at least 900 in the case of the E series, and from 1 to at least 400 in the case of the F series. The series, in its entirety, covers all the areas of art academic training, from life drawing and head, hand and drapery studies to anatomy and studies in composition, and as such it is unique among contemporary rather simple and often risqué nude photographs. It therefore presupposes the collaboration of a teacher or a painter with extended knowledge of art academic studies. Only in this way can its quality and main aim, that of providing studies of the human body 'for painters and sculptures' as the Germanlanguage Katalogblatts states, be accounted for. The Frenchman L. Igout is the photographer generally identified as the author of these pictures from his stamp which appears on the mounts of the pictures (dated 1880), and their editor as A. Calavas (or Giraudon), again from their stamps. Nevertheless, identifying the author of the pictures on the basis of the stamp on their mounts is methodologically problematic. The stamps of the depot legal suggest that the photographs arrived in the French collection in two waves that can be dated from 1880 and 1886. The photographs entering the depot legal in the first wave, numbered between El and E600, were stamped by Igout and/or by the editors Calavas and Giraudon in 1880. Photographs with a higher number were not stamped by Igout, but only by Calavas and Giraudon, and only began to enter the French collections in 1886. Based on my research into different photography collections in Paris and Berlin, I advance the hypothesis that Igout could have been a local distributor of the series in France, similar to Calavas and Giraudon. The German Katalogblatts could have served as advertisements, from which French distributors ordered photographs. This explains the composition of the French album sheets, with 8 or 16 photographs per sheet stamped by Igout (and also by Calavas and Giraudon), mixing photographs of the series with other different nude photographs. This practice points to the fact that either they were not aware of or they played down the original goal of the well-structured series, which was to provide a comprehensive and unified view of the human body (in motion). I suggest that the photographs of the series could have been taken by Dr Hermann Heid (1834-1891), a Germanborn chemist and photographer, who owned a photographic studio in Vienna, and also in Pest at the end of the 1860s and the beginning of the 1870s, and later also had business connections with the famous Hungarian photographer György Klösz (1844-1913). Several books written at the turn of the century by C. H. Stratz attributed the authorship of the series of nude photographs to Heid. Heid's name appeared as an integral part of a similar particular numbering of photographs depicting refined head studies (signed with the letter M and an Arabic numeral) and full figure 'genre' pictures (signed with the letter R and with an Arabic numeral). Some of the studio props of these series are the same. Beyond the limited 'written' evidence my argument is based on the series of nude photographs itself (and the dates of their entering different foreign collections). Surely one should bear in mind that, in the 19th century, art academic training was a standardised form of education (with a common traditional heritage) in many European academic centres. These reservations notwithstanding, the remarkable similarities between some photographs in the series, students' studies and Székely's head studies of the models in the School (considering the model, the pose, and the composition), lead to the preliminary conclusion that they reflect the teaching activity in the School in the early 1870s. There are grounds to believe that these activities could have be photographed. A ministerial report informs us that 'photographers' were attending evening classes in life studies at the School at a time when when Heid owned his atelier in Pest, located in the vicinity of the School. The encyclopaedic totality of 'academic' studies in the extended series of photographs is also remarkable, suggesting a unitary artistic view behind their composition. Such an artistic view could have been provided by Bertalan Székely, who was Head of unified studies from life drawing to anatomy and composition in the School. Indeed, Székely strongly emphasised to the young artists the effect of the studies in composition beyond life drawing and anatomy, and the importance of hand studies. Many of the tasks at his composition classes are extremely similar to the poses of male models in the photographs. Moreover, from the 1870s on he studied movement (of horses), and he intended to take photographs of animal locomotion. While the series of nude photographs and its authorship are obviously under-researched issues, and the available evidence is still scarce, their striking similarity to life studies at the School in terms of the models, timing, location, and main actors, cannot be ignored by any sensible researcher. It is only hoped that additional Hungarian and international research into these connections will enrich our knowledge by providing missing details, or even modify some of our views on the problem. Beyond the particularities of this case study, the claims that I make and the hypothesis that I advance in this paper open up a research agenda on the local and international ramifications of 19th-century art (photography) and art academies. It is necessary to go beyond the usual interpretational framework of art phenomena as 'national'. The process of European integration and the renewed interest in the writing of an integrated history of Europe (including that of international institutions), as well as recent interdisciplinary and critical theories, challenge Hungarian and foreign art historiography to overcome colonising and hegemonic narratives. Only in this way can Hungarian art phenomena - such as institutions, artists, and representations - be integrated into the history of an international art scene, avoiding the pitfalls of both colonising and autochthonous interpretations, and presenting local specificity as internationally valid artistic or cultural forms.