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

Tanulmányok / Studies - Nagy Ildikó: Az akt a 19. századi magyar szobrászatban / The Nude in 19th-century Hungarian Sculpture

The Nude in 19th-century Hungarian Sculpture ILDIKÓ NAGY [SUMMARY] In 19th-century art schools the basis of instruction was a collection of plaster copies. These included replicas of antique and modern sculptures, as well as plaster casts of parts of the body, architectural ornaments and architectonic details. Although differing in size and composition, these collections shared a central rationale, and some standard works (the Apollo Belvedere, the Belvedere Torso, the Barberini Faun, the Medici Venus, the Venus de Milo, the Discobolus, the Borghese Fencer, the Dancing Faun, Hermes Seated, and figures from Michelangelo's Medici chapel) were found everywhere. The sculpture of classical antiquity was part of the everyday life until the late 19th century. There were copies of its works in palace gardens, public parks and buildings, and reproductions adorned middle-class apartments. Artists used it as a reservoir of examples for their own work. This dissemination and popularity also implied that in time the works would become devalued, with artists and the public gradually turning away from the idealized forms of antiquity, hungry for real life in works of art. It was an unequivocal part of education to draw and model after nature, so even figures in costumes were first fashioned from the nude. Modelling was later aided by photographs, as well as by casts taken from models themselves: masks of living and dead faces and plaster copies of hands, feet and sometimes trunks. Some artists had a large collection of these casts, and they sometimes incorporated a copy of a body-part or of an antique model into their own works. Rarely, a cast would itself rise to the rank of an artwork. Although plaster casts taken from models were mentioned as early as Pliny the Elder, their use in sculpture was viewed differently in different ages. Clearly, they were employed during the Renaissance, but from the 18th century on there were reservations about them. In the 19th century, much criticism was levelled at them, yet their use was widespread. Sculpture was looking for the true image of man somewhere between the ideal forms of antiquity and the verism of casts. Hungarian sculpture was brought into being by the artist generation whose members began their careers, or returned from foreign studios, in the 1880s. This was when an extensive public and private construction boom gave rise to many commissions, and when the need for public monuments also emerged. Prior to this time, very few sculptures were made in Hungary (such works were mainly portraits or sepulchral monuments), and hardly any nudes. Of the output of Neo-classicist masters, the nudes by József Engel, who lived in Rome for twenty years, were exhibited in London, Vienna and Budapest, and passed into foreign and Hungarian collections. His works on biblical and mythological themes are typical examples of Victorian nude sculpture, with many antique reminiscences and some concessions to sentimentalism. Among the works by Hungarian architectural sculptors, Ferenc Dinnert's Flora (1860) is outstanding (Cat. 1-29); perhaps this was a piece in a Four Seasons series. Unlike the customary static representations of the theme, the figure - a unique creation in Hungarian sculpture at the time - is animated, the drapery is arranged in a sophisticated manner and the profile is beautifully Hellenistic. It was the National Exhibition of 1885 that first showed a large number of Hungarian sculptural ensembles (44 works by 1 1 sculptors), including two important nudes: Adolf Huszár's Venus and Amor, commissioned by an aristocrat and the last work of the artist's short but fertile career, and Károly Senyei's Vanity, a success and the first major work by a student of the Munich Academy. The two jointly indicate a change in the meaning of nude sculpture, a transformation of classical values. What is missing from Huszár's Venus is divinity, selfconsciousness paired with the ideally beautiful body, the representation being converted into a "mother-and-child" composition, as in several contemporaneous European works. In Senyei's sculpture the self-conscious, defiantly beautiful body is paired with the concept of vice, that being the only way to reveal natural beauty to the viewer. A mythological theme, however, made the most daring nude representations presentable. József Róna's teasing nymphs and lascivious fauns (Cat. VIII-14-15) afford confirmation of this. The prudish and prejudiced citizen could give rein to his lustful thoughts under the cloak of mythology, while being utterly outraged when this "hallmark" was missing. Elza Kalmár's Longing, an overt expression of the human body and of eroticism, provoked uproar in the press. Art at the turn of the 20th century had a dual task: to find new symbols for the new concepts of modern life, and to find new forms to represent the human body. Sculptors started along a number of roads, with varying degrees of success. For example, they added various attributes to naturalistic nudes to indicate velocity, steam power or electricity, but old topoi were also revived. Barrias's work Nature Revealing Itself to Science is a beautiful nude shedding her gown after the pattern of Renaissance and Mannerist sculptures entitled "Time Revealing Truth".