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
The building of the new Palace of Art on Place of Heroes, the 1890s and Erzsi Fejérváry all started to study painting in this school, before passing through the familiar stations of Nagybánya and Paris; in fact, if one is to believe certain personal recollections that are difficult to corroborate, the latter two artists were said to have continued their studies in Matisse's school. 4 In addition to his activity as a corrector at Nagybánya, after 1903 Károly Ferenczy had private students in Budapest, before taking up a teaching post at the Academy of Fine Arts (the former Mintarajziskola). 5 One of them was Tibor Boromisza, who in 1904 gave way to his master's persuasion and followed him to Nagybánya. This was Ferenczy's true home territory, not the capital, even though in due course of time his Budapest studio in Lendvai Street came to attract frequent visits by a number of young artists, including Dezső Czigány. 6 Museums, Galleries, Exhibition Venues "People in today's generation have no idea of the appalling conditions, in which artists had to live and work even as recently as 20 years ago. In those days, artists, whom the Aeropaga of the old 'Palace of Art' on Andrássy Street stopped from entering the ornamental gate, were lucky if one or the other owner let them put their works on display in the shop-windows of bookstores, print shops and glazing businesses, waiting for a miraculous opportunity to arise until the next rejection." 7 Written by Jenő Gellért in 1912, these lines referred to the lean years before the Millennium, when the National Hungarian Fine Arts Society enjoyed a near complete monopoly on choosing whose work should be shown to the public and whose should be not. In the first decade of the 20 th century, the Palace of Art (Műcsarnok) and the artistic style it stood for already became something of a swear word among representatives of the modern movements. It was hardly a coincidence, therefore, if the majority of them later on would never wish to have their works hung up on the walls of this prestigious building. Unlike Dezső Czigány, who had his works shown there with relative regularity, Károly Kernstok's last exhibition was in 1903, Béla Czóbel's in the winter of 1904, Márffy's in the spring of 1907, and Bertalan Pór's in 1909. As for Berény and Tihanyi, they never exhibited any of their compositions in the country's largest and most prestigious exhibition venue. The absence of these two artists was all the more conspicuous in light of the fact that by this time people's artistic career had been closely bound up with the institute of the Palace of Art: with the prizes awarded here and the favour of its particular audience. In the 1910s, the Palace of Art was unquestionably the country's most The jury of the Fine Arts Society in the Palace of Art, 1902 popular exhibition venue: nearly a hundred thousand visitors saw the three or four shows that the institute organized annually. 8 Now, when you take into consideration the contemporary population of Budapest, which hardly exceeded one-third of today's figure, then you will find this number especially impressive. The stylistic character of the exhibited works identified by title makes it clear that the radically modern compositions by the above mentioned artists were not put on display at the Palace of Art: the curators' audacity stopped at Rippl-Rónai's powerful colour compositions made at Kaposvár and Márffy's Post-Impressionist series brought home from Paris in 1906. Besides the conflicts of a theoretical nature articulated in contemporary press, which in some cases were probably coloured by material motives, the curators' method of arranging the exhibitions itself prompted many commentators to voice critical views. Trying to fit five or six hundred works by as many as two hundred artists into eighteen or so rooms, the organizers completely covered the walls with paintings, which made the thorough viewing of the artworks impossible. This was ground for genuine criticism even in consideration of the fact that the larger exhibitions in Europe sometimes vastly exceeded these figures. 9 Paradoxically, however, such an impromptu arrangement resembling the method of "wall-papering" favoured precisely the more comprehensive works that were composed of large and loud colour patches, as the pictures employing the traditional tones of galleries and the academic techniques of drawing were practically lost in the grey sea of similar works. Reading the contemporary critics, one cannot help noticing that the compositions of more modern concepts, works by Czigány, Márffy and Rippl-Rónai, drew comments from all the art writers, whether they approved of the works or not. While one could criticize the massively and solidly conservative exhibition policies of the Palace of Art endlessly, it is worth pointing out some of the positive aspects that it had to its credit. The 1903 Spring Exhibition with an international list of contributors was undoubtedly among the most important ones even in the Palace of Art's history: it was the first exhibition in Budapest to offer a representative sample of modern French painting. Among the seventy-one works all in one room, one could find compositions by Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissaro, Puvis de Chavannes and Maurice Denis, with a true masterpiece by Renoir, La Loge, taking the top spot. 10
