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

Following the expressionism of his earliest nudes, where the social environment of Parisian brothels was also present among his artistic themes (Cat. X-7), RipplRónai experimented in his later Indian ink paintings with what was for western attitudes the more objective approach to the human body of Japanese erotic wood cuts. In his Memoirs he recounts how the birth of modern photography also had a direct influence on his artistic perception. In a separate article Rippl-Rónai emphasises that for him the most interesting thing about Degas' photographs was the new reality of the 'ruined' photos.

25 As a graphic artist the technical nature of rearranging pictures of the negative printing block must also have been of importance to him in revealing the nature of the picture mirrored from a new point of view. This was reinforced by the logic of oriental prints, which run from right to left

—back to front to western eyes

—and also affected the spatial relations of his 1892 works. In his Memoirs he writes that this was when he acquired Japanese prints, one of which is clearly visible in the photograph of his Neuilly studio. 'This was where the brush drawings done in Indian ink by the ancient Japanese artist Sesshui were mounted on the warm-grey walls. They had been brought from Japan by the eternaltraveller seaman husband of Mme Leroi d'Etiolle, a distinguished artist of the Salon.'

2515 Rippl-Rónai himself took care of the 'archiving' of his works which

—-beginning with his Indian ink drawings from around 1890—were created sur le motif, drawing on the fabric of raw senses 'as opposed to composing'. The nude photographs surviving in the artist's legacy probably originate from this early Parisian period and it may have been Rippl-Rónai himself who took the index photos of Lazarine, his model, colleague and wife. It may also have been he who took the photograph of the female nude reclining on the bed, later used as a model for his drawing of a woman leaning on her elbows, deemed even by him worthy of preservation among his 'pictorial notes'.

254 (Cat. X-ll, 17) In his Indian ink drawing of Margarette Renard RipplRónai accomplishes an equal handling of the pictureplane, which he writes about in Memoirs in connection with his later oil paintings.

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" It is no accident that he exhibited the picture among his early nude drawings at his Royal Hotel exhibition in 1900. The exhibition, which he called Impressions of József Rippl-Rónai 1890-1900, featured both his earlier and later pictures, and included alongside his 203 works Japanese and Chinese drawings. Rippl-Rónai's Oriental Exhibition included art and ritual objects belonging to non-European civilisations, from Persian miniatures and Japanese wood cuts to African sculptures. When he organised this exhibition in 1910 at the Kaposvár School and in 1911 with József Brummer, Lajos Kozma and Miklós Vitéz at the Művészház [Artists' House] he had already given his own 1900 exhibition, which was a mix of his existing oeuvre and his oriental collection.

241 The entirety of these 'impressions' was in itself an individual work of art. The exhibition catalogue also showed the Indian ink drawing of a nude with her back to us,

242 which seems to be the torso of the reclining woman drafted for the studio of Munkácsy's Viennese ceiling piece. The fragmentary nature of the picture and the bracelet on the woman's arm, using the motif of sensuality of Ingres' odalisques, lift the nude out of any incidental historicising context. In 1913 this Indian ink drawing also appeared in the album Fifty Drawings by József Rippl-Rónai and served as the model for a number of his oil compositions around 1912, such as Two Little Naked Girls Reading.

145 From 1907 onwards, following the early pastels RipplRónai began to mount his earlier nude works into liveliercoloured oil compositions with the appearance of sur le motif creation. He also incorporated earlier nude photographs and drawings of Lazarine into his new works. Rippl-Rónai's nude garden scenes painted between 1911 and 1913 resemble a self-constructed gallery of ideals. Into the drafts of Models in My Garden in Kaposvár (Cat. IX-12) and Park with Nudes

—as well as his ink drawing of Three Figures (Cat. IX-11)

—he fitted two standing nudes, based on surviving sketches for his tapestry entitled Idealism and Realism (1895),

244 along with Olga Mate's nude motion-photograph of Fenella Lowell, created specifically for this work. (Cat. IX-9, III. 17) Apart from the 'ruined' photos, the drawings and the objectivity of the oriental illustration of the body, the experience of a 'collective' exhibition twenty years earlier also had an inspirational effect on Rippl-Rónai's 1911-1913 garden scenes. In the manuscript version of Memoirs we can read of how, following his exhibition at the Palais Galliera, Schiff 'the old American millionaire' put RipplRónai's pastel portraits on show in his private collection: 'Instead of hanging his accumulated works of art he put them in his great hall as one plants flowers in the garden, creating paths in the room and making a real "avenue of trees" from the beautiful sculptures. The flowers were the pictures

—Manet and Bastien Lepage lay strewn on the ground just as did Holbein or Rembrandt...'

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' In his nude garden scenes Rippl-Rónai transubstantiated the expressive intentions of his early drawings, and ever more consistently raised the painterly question of created spontaneity. In his oil pictures made up of 'sensitive dots' and 'small impressions' Rippl-Rónai carried to their limits the aesthetic principles expressed manifesto-like by Maurice Denis in 1890: 'Let us imprint upon our minds that a picture, before it is a battle horse, a naked woman or a story, is essentially no more [...] than a flat surface.'

246 This he did when with Matisse's logical consistency he shut the window Alberti had opened four and a half centuries earlier.

247 From this point onwards the picture plane is no longer a window through which the world of ideals becomes personal and realistic, but merely a flat surface. Rippl-Rónai's nude motion-compositions were also directly influenced by the motion-photography of the time. He was not alone in being inspired by Isadora Duncan's performance in Budapest in 1902 and the photography in the artistic journal A Hét [The Week] show-