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

ing three movements in one picture. Rippl-Rónai was inspired to create similar pastel pictures, Ferenc Medgyessy to create his relief Dance (Cat. IX-13) and Elza Kövesházi Kalmár to create bronze statuettes.

248 (Cat. IX-17) Rippl may also have been familiar with the photographs taken of Isadora Duncan in front of the caryatids in the hall of the Erechtheion Kore, perhaps with the creative help of Olga Máté herself. According to the photographs in an album in György Markos's legacy, around this time Olga Máté took photographs of men and women in light Greek costumes leaping and in free motion.

249 (Cat. IX-10, III. 18-19) It was this neo-classic interpretation that Olga Máté used to create her photographs of Fenella for Rippl-Rónai. The garden pictures of this 'collective' exhibition show motion as a moment frozen in time. The 'skincoloured' brushstrokes of the nudes are as important as the loud cyan yellow, red and green patches of the garden. The disjointedness and fragmentation of the movements of the figures renders the vitality of the bodies ambivalent and emphasises their abstract pictorial quality. The living bodies are statue-like

—similar to Gauguin's Tahiti prints

250 or Maillol's wood-cuts

—where the levelling of the pictorial elements (i.e. the uncertainty of perception) demands a more differentiated interpretation of the intellect from the viewer. (Cat. X-14) József Rippl-Rónai attributed a significance associated with civilisation to the new kind of philosophy of the 'collective' exhibition. Exhibiting his assembled oeuvre gave the painter an opportunity to present 'the filtration of his artistic manifesto'.

251 This subjective dimension lends these works, especially his nude paintings of 1910-13, a distinctly mythical trait, with which he autonomously echoes a Humanist painterly tradition. At the opening of his exhibition in Kaposvár in August 1910 József Rippl-Rónai drew a parallel between African and New Guineán art and Oriental prints with the novelty and significance of the art of Giotto and the Renaissance masters.

252 Following his arrival from Paris, the artist was part of the spiritual direction of the Artists' House, a member of both the board of KÉVE [Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists] and MIENK [Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists], and with Károly Kernstok helped to establish an independent academy. Rippl-Rónai established one of Hungary's most valuable modern Hungarian collections in Kaposvár (now owned by the Rippl-Rónai Museum) comprising works by his contemporaries. In the 1910s he also participated in assembling the modern Graphics Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in the course of which he was able to express his artistic ideas, 'in terms of which the history of early modern Hungarian art is being written'.

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' In our exhibition the century unfolds before us as an intellectual process: at the beginning we see Sarah Bartmann's body in Cuvier and Geoffroy de Sainte-Hilaire's book, and at the end the Congolese statue from Lajos Kozma's collection, which is today owned by the Ethnographic Museum. TRANSI, AT E D BY ESZTER SZÁSZ NOTES 1 Cf. the present catalogue. The concept and the text of the present exhibition are based on my PhD Dissertation (Imre 1999). The Venus de Milo came to the Louvre in 1820 and is thus also an 'invention' of the 19th century. Van Drill's statue from 1889, named Vénus de mille eaux, (Paris, Galerie de Paris) was published by Hofmann, Werner: Die Moderne im Rückspiegel. Hauptwege der Kunstgeschichte. Munich 1998, 204, picture 110 4 The expression is used by Deleuze, Cilles: Nouvelle harmonie. Le Pli. Paris 1977. Part IX. 167-189 5 Tóth Lőrinc's report from London is quoted by Mátray 1868, 4. On the founding of the French museum see n. 89. The French 'society of scholars' incorporated in the Institut, was granted a place within the concept of the Muséum of Paris; Kubinyi 1861, 3 outlines a notion analogous to this. Gusztáv Keleti begins his writing that was submitted as the statute of the Model Drawing School with the training of artists in France (Keleti 1870, 15), and renders tribute to the wisdom of French politics giving for over centuries 'a dominant role in the realm of good taste.' The text of the statute: Vienna, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv No. 10229. I would like to thank Katalin Majkó and József Mihály Kiss for their help (Library of MKE). h Clair, Jean: Marcel Duchamp ou le grand fictif. Essai de mythanalyse du grande verre. Paris 1975. Transpositions. Thanks go to Miklós Szalay (Zürich) for calling my attention to the story of Sarah Bartmann, cf. Arnold, Marion: My own and the Other. In Arnold, Marion: Women and Art in South Africa. New York 1996, 19-37, 160-163. Sascha Renner wrote a study on the subject in the present catalogue. 8 Clair indicates the beginning of the 19th century with the arrival of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum. Clair op. cit. (n. 6) 9 Cf. Vasoli, Cesare: L'estetica dell' Umanesimo e del Rinascimento. Momenti e problemi di storia dell' estetica. Milano 1959. Part I. 1. See Bauch, Kurt: Imago. In: Was ist ein Bild? Ed. by Boehm, Gottfried. München 19951994. 275-299. Imdahl, Max: Überlegungen zur Identität des Bildes. In: Identität. Ed. by Marquard, O. and Stierle, K. München 1979. 187-21 1 10 Hess 1971, 1-14.; Sinkó 1984, 169-174. Rabinovszky 1951 writes on the topic formed around academies, op. cit. 50-79. An important summary of Hungarian art education is Szabolcsi, Hedvig: Magyarországi Bútorművészet a 18-19. század fordulóján (Hungarian Furniture at the turn of the 18th-19th Century). Bp., 1972. 27-74. On the NeoPlatonic tradition founded in Paris by Leonardo see Goldstein 1994, 74-79.; Lewine, Milton J.: The Carracci: A Family Academy. Academic Art 1 971, 15-26. Also on male models is in op. cit. 19 ff. 'As early as 1608 a former Carracci student, Odoardo Fialetti, published a primer on the human figure, with engraving on Agostino's studies. Through such textbooks and other publications of engravings, Agostino's drawings transmuted into "academic" lessons.' Ibid. 24 11 Cf. Vasari, Giorgio: Le vite de' più eccelenti pittori, scultori a architettori. Milano 19621568. Similarly to Vasari Barabás in his Autobiography praises the mutual affection and respect between the teachers and pupils of the academy of Venice as opposed to the academy of Vienna. Cf. Barabás 1985. 84 Lagrenée writing in 1781: 'On ne commende point aux talents [...] les arts ont toujours été et seront toujours enfants de la liberté.' Goethe's friend and pupil, Heinrich Meyer wrote 'Art must feel free and independent, it must rule, as it were, if it is to thrive; if it is ruled and mastered, it is bound to decline and vanish.' Cf. Pevsner 1973, VI, 149 13 Pevsner 1973, VI-VII 1 Cf. Kovács, Ágnes: Tanítható-e a festészeti ('Can Painting be Taught?') A müncheni Királyi Képzőművészeti Akadémia története 1808-tól a századfordulóig. PhD Dissertation. ELTE BTK. Bp. 2001. 160 15 Quoted by Jacobs, Wilhelm G.: Der Zusammenhang der Gründungsurkunde der Akademie