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

Katalógus / Catalogue - V. Venus-minták / Models of Venus - Gellér Katalin: Zichy Mihály erotikus témájú művei / Erotic Subjects in Mihály Zichy's Work

other academic artists at the time, the Oriental subject or the moral lesson were only pretexts for the representation of beautiful women half clad or in the nude; most of his historical scenes are genres spiced up with eroticism (as e.g. Raphael and His Model). Since at the time erotic subjects and nudes could only appear in pictures with historical or antique subjects, many of Zichy's erotic works are "rococo drawings" or mythological scenes. His sources for these were the works of such 18th century French painters as François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Charles Eisen. Zichy made a few paintings which featured fauns, for which Arnold Böcklin may well have provided some inspiration, though they definitely owe much to his friend Félicien Rops. He painted a faun abducting a woman in 1874, and dallying fauns in 1878. The composition of his The Crowning of the Sculpture of Priapus closely resembles works by Félicien Rops, like the hitter's drawing for the front page of Joséphin Péladan's Curieuse (1886), and his heliogravure Vieux faun (Hommage à Pan). Nothing shows better the indispensability of mythological references in the case of erotic subjects at the time than the fact that his art dealer actually asked him to add two panels with mythological figures to the painting variously called Modern Siren or Nana before it was presented in Vienna. In 1885, Zichy dedicated an entire album to those of his nude drawings that counted as erotic. To the modern viewer the finely drawn female figures will look more like academic studies than erotic works. Zichy also made a large number of drawings dealing with the "art of love" - by his own admission, about 160 though he never sought to publish them actively, for fear of censorship. He had 45 of these photographed, which he planned to publish under the title Confession d'un enfant de fin de siècle. In the end, an album entitled Breviárium eroticum appeared in 1895, which contained 58 illustrations, but no copies of which seem to have survived. Though he was aware that the drawings of the album, like other works of a similar nature, could not be exhibited easily, Zichy would have liked to donate the originals to the Hungarian National Museum. It was a sign of the hypocritical attitude of the times to erotica that the first new and successful collection of Zichy's erotic works was published only five years after his death, in 1911, in Leipzig. Exhibition-goers were able to see the first presentation of such works in 1913, at a selection of his illustrations at the National Salon in Budapest. The hallmark of Zichy's mode of presentation is impassiveness; he passes no judgements, merely presents the sight as if it were a carefully laid out, highly detailed contemporary still life. The figures are without character (several of his actors return in a number of pictures), they are only vehicles of a spontaneous force, of the "Dionysian rapture", which he manages to suggest with the sensual vibration of his lines, passages that intimate passion and energy. This freedom of approach, it seems, did not derive from the libertine atmosphere of the tsar's court, but from a heritage of liberal thought and his growing sense of realism. Zichy, in other words, ignored the "scientific" stereotypes of the age; his art was more of a classic ars amatoria. We would search his oeuvre in vain for the heroines of the allegories of vanity so popular at the time, or the kind of understanding of sin that was typical of Eugène Delacroix or Félicien Rops, who employed a set of medieval symbols and whose female figures were tempted by the devil. And unlike his friend, Rops, he does not make use of the figure of the demonic woman in his erotica, much favoured in the late 19th century. Zichy was left unimpressed by the decadent image of the evilpossessed woman, though that was precisely what was found to be missing by the reviewers of the above-mentioned Budapest display, who pronounced the approach represented by his drawings outdated.