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

It was dance and the dancer - a theme typical of the turn of the 20th century - that emerged as the new idols of the era. This was largely attributable to the great dancer personalities who conquered the whole world, not only creating a new culture of movement, but also representing a new approach to life and art (Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Grete Wiesenthal, and so on). In the depiction of dancers, the stylisation of Secessionism is combined in a fortunate way with the decorativeness of the movement. The dancer's body is a contour in space expressing emotion, state of mind or an abstract notion. It may capture a composed movement (Cat. IX17) or an instinctive one (Cat. IX-26), but the sculptor may also arrange the pose of the dancer according to certain principles of plasticity without referring to real activity (Cat. IX-25). Sculpture solved the dilemma of ideal versus natural representation of the human body by stylisation, for a short time. A typical example is the sensually moulded female nude leaning over a rock or rising from it called Danaid, Despair, Sorrow, or most often Eve. Her long hair commingles with the stone chaining her to it as it were, thus indicating the tragedy that she caused and is suffered from at the same time. Sin and tragedy associated with beauty are coupled with the concepts of ugliness and death, from Fremiet's Gorilla Kidnapping a Woman (1887) to Emile Hébert's And Always! And Never! (1863), in which Death, with a decaying body, kidnaps a beautiful female nude. Hungarian sculpture did not produce such shocking examples. In this, only the painfully or passionately - but always provocatively - voluptuous female nudes in the posture of farewell on Secessionist sepulchral monuments suggest the decadent union of Eros and Thanatos in the mentality of the fin de siècle. Secessionism also created the opposite of the "sinful woman": nude figures of innocent, naive and sincere, most often sad, young girls. The antique unity of body and soul was torn apart: beauty was coupled with sin, innocence with sadness and the burden of knowledge. After a rapid and tempestuous success, the stylised passionate female nudes of Art Nouveau lost their popularity for a long time. Artists tried to return to the classical ideals (Cat. IX-18) - which were probably never completely lost - or to keep close to the order of nature. The new variants of Venus Naturalis reported on the body alone, on the joy of momentary existence, without a thought for the past or the future (Cat. IX-13). However, the 20th century allowed art to have that experience only at very rare moments and with limited validity. In the great works of that century, the human body narrates pain and helplessness. These works speak of a world where gods are dead, where heroes have died out, and where man is left alone. For the expression of this experience, it was no longer classical Greek antiquity but certain extraEuropean cultures that provided the archetypes.