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

Tanulmányok / Studies - Imre Györgyi: A modell / The Model

Vienna academy that made both William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Mihály Munkácsy its honorary members that same year and in 1888 Lord Leighton and Gyula Benczúr. Lötz, who in Vienna had assisted Carl Rahl in executing his monumental assignments, at home became the favoured genius of the Hungarian state court and private commissions. He assumed similar tasks in the representation of the aristocracy and the court as Sándor Liezen-Mayer (Cat. VII-13) and Gyula Benczúr in Munich. (Cat. VII-12) Their Venuses and Bacchantes are inseparable from the furnishings of the Bavarian Louis IPs palaces

—from Schloß Linderhof to Neuschwanstein

— or the Venus-grottoes made for opera sets that were based on the librettos of Richard Wagner.

144 By this time Lötz had made decorations for many private palaces (Cat. VII-35, 37) and the most significant art institutes of Budapest, such as the Vigadó, the National Museum and the old Art Hall. On his previous state assignment Lötz followed Ipoly's Hungarian Mythology in portraying a 'Hungarianized' story of Greek myths, whereas in the theme of the Opera House's Olympos he broke away from it. Ipolyi reproached him for this at the general meeting of the Fine Arts Association: '...don't we have a similarly cheerful mythological theme in our civilisation and history of art that is more interesting than the dubious contest of the gods of the Olympos, and isn't it a lack of ideals and spirit to bring forth for the hundredth time this old cliché instead? Isn't there a subject closer to us than this outmoded world, one that encourages us in today's language of morals, patriotism and ideals in place of the empty niceties of form?'

150 Olympos

—contrary to Ipolyi's Hungarian Mythology

— produced the notion of non-historical time. The fashioning of the figures was characterised with a tendency towards eternal perfection by the Grecian ideal of beauty."

1 Lötz created on his ceiling piece a cultic space that is dominated by an era of repetition, ensuring 'eternal recurrence'.

152 Producing sequences of colour and motion, Lotz's nudes produced a musical effect."' Lötz produced his nude pictures for an educated and intelligent audience who interpreted within a mythical scope of time these female nudes that symbolically represented the senses, elevating them markedly from the 'personal erotic imagery of individual artists'."

4 Nevertheless this bright contemporary public capable of such distinction interpreted a whole series of works as the more or less concealed portraits of the artist's foster daughter, Cornelia Lötz."' From the 1880s onwards we can detect in Lotz's paintings a stereotypical face that replaced the portrait-like depiction of personality, and eventually became linked to one single model: Cornelia. She became the artist's favourite model from the beginning of the 1890s.

156 Due to both her personality and fragile figure Cornelia was wellsuited to become closely intertwined with the concept of the fetish-like model of Lotz's nude pictures which, breaking away from plastic reality, became increasingly ethereal from the 1890s. (Cat. VII-38-39-40) She spent much of her time in sanatoriums as we find out from photographs and letters written to her by her father.

157 Cornelia's person evidently formed a part of the rhetoric that made Lotz's 'Hungarian nude painting' individual. Another element of it was the settings and the life style of the painter. A photograph from 1900 taken in Lotz's studio that was furnished with oriental rugs shows Lötz standing next to his fresco cartoons with, propped against the wall, the enlarged drawing of a Greek vase in the company of his daughter who is sitting as a bayadere. Ingres' connotation of muse/lover is clearly recognisable. (III. 14) However, on the basis of his sketches we can state that beyond her unusual face Lötz did not use Cornelia as the model for any of his nude paintings. The personal myth between Károly Lötz and Cornelia

—like a modernised Caritas Romana

—was linked even in the achronic ensemble of the painter and the muse with the epoch of 'eternal beauty', part of the essence of his painting."" With his increasingly elongated and abstract nudes Lötz gradually reached a liberated and erotic intimacy that was detached from the monumental block-like quality of architectural painting and so far unknown in Hungarian fine art. The resting bacchantes, dancers and odalisques or the lying Bayaderes all assumed Cornelia's countenance in his late oil paintings, water colours, the balsa-wood lid of a tobacco case, the drafts of fans designed for his daughter or the lunette sketches made for the Museum of Fine Arts, never to be completed due to the painter's death. (Cat. V1I-19-20) In 1885 Lötz was appointed teaching director of the women's painting school. The extent to which the concept of the Galerie des Femmes was linked to the figure of the artist is visible in the gesture of the graduating students, who presented him with their portraits applied in a folding album made from silk rep, placed in a neoRenaissance case.

159 The ceiling piece of Olympos was later submitted by the Fine Arts Association to the Minister of Education for reproduction. Thus court mythology came into being historically as well

—in a cheaper version

—resulting subsequently in the representation of the 1930s."'" In a 1933 radio lecture László Piri Bálás correlated Lotz's idealised figures with 'Olympian serenity': 'These figures were born in the imagination of Lötz and forever in the history of art will represent a wholly individual type, the Lötz type'."

1 On the evidence of the list of losses of the Second World War the Hungarian embassy in Berlin was represented by the crimson-draped Leda by Bertalan Székely and Lotz's Titania, for instance."

2 The Analytic Method of Bertalan Székely Following Imre Henszlmann's concept on the organisation of research and collecting, publicised in 1862, the role of the repository of knowledge was adopted by the building of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences."'' The Esterházy picture gallery, still in private ownership at the time, was assembled in the Academy of Sciences' top-lit