Passuth Krisztina – Szücs György – Gosztonyi Ferenc szerk.: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2006/1)
FROM PARIS TO NAGYBÁNYA - PÉTER MOLNOS: Budapest: The "Paris of the East" in the Hungarian Wilderness
Drawing after live model in Mintarajziskola, cca. 1900 The examples of Berény and Czigány can, however, be generalized in so far as their stories faithfully demonstrate that the Budapest Mintarajziskola played a rather marginal role in the early formation of Hungarian modernism in comparison to either the Julian Academy of Paris, or Hollósy's school in Munich, or the Nagybánya free school. Of the several possible causes, the backwardness of the official artists' training in Budapest constituted only one, and not even the most important. A far more important factor was the bitter anti-academism of both the spirit of modernism and the people representing it. They preferred picking up things to learning from their masters, admiring and enthusing to systematic practicing and respecting: in short, they preferred life experience to learning in schools. In their case, the scene of learning and acquiring knowledge was the studio, nature, exhibitions and cafés, rather than an educational institution regulated by strict rules. Paris, with its streets and cafés teeming with artists, suited their aspirations far better than Budapest, a city just beginning its cultural revival at the turn of the century. Apart from Mintarajziskola, three more art colleges functioned in Budapest in the middle of the 1900s. The master courses of Gyula Benczúr and Árpád Feszty took on six to eight students each year, while Deák-Ébner's painting school had twenty pupils. As far as student figures were concerned, neither of these institutions came even close to Mintarajziskola, where the student population usually exceeded two hundred and fifty. 3 The College of Applied Arts, which drew inspiration from Hungarian folk art and had the ideological backing of the English Arts and Crafts Movement, provided the launching pad in the art career of Károly Kernstok, Dezső Czigány, Ödön Márffy, Sándor Ziffer, Lajos Tihanyi and Sándor Galimberti. Ferenc SzablyaFrischauf, one of Simon Hollósy's favourite students, who set up the first free school with modern outlook in Budapest, taught here after 1912. Szablya-Frischauf, who opened his private drawing and painting school in Damjanich Street in 1903, combined the teaching methods of his former Munich master with his own Nagybánya experiences, steering his students from a solid naturalist foundation towards a fundamentally realistic style, which also incorporated some of the decorative tendencies of Art Nouveau. Of the painters who later flirted with Fauvism, Rezső Bálint, Valéria Dénes Gusztáv Moreili, The classroom of ornamental painting at the School of Applied Arts, 1900 Ferenc Szablya-Frischauf: Self-portrait in the Studio, cca. 1905 Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest The exhibition of Ferenc Szablya-Frischauf and his students at Philantia on Váci Street, 1906
