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 editorial room of Budapesti Napló, 1907 From the left: Gyula Erős, Ignác Pfeffer, Géza Lengyel, Miklós Rózsa, Lajos Biró, Ede Kabos, Géza Csáth, Gyula Hegedűs, Dezső Kosztolányi Besides the artists' cafés of contemporary Budapest, we should also mention Három Holló (Three Ravens), a cheap little pub near Café Opera, as another scene of emerging Hungarian modernism. Regularly frequented by Endre Ady, the place became a buzzing locale of Budapest intellectual life. 30 According to numerous eyewitness accounts, it was here that Ady wrote most of the pieces that he later published under the title Új versek (New Poems), an epoch-making volume of poems in Hungarian progression. It was also here that Ady met such outstanding figures of the Budapest scene of writers, journalists and artists as Ede Kabos, Béla Révész, Ignotus, Ernő Osváth, Dezső Kosztolányi, Gyula Krúdy, Béla Reinitz, Béla Balázs, György Bölöni, József Rippl-Rónai and Dezső Czigány. 31 The membership lists of all three coffee house tables called attention to the fact that in studying the history of the rise of Hungarian modern painting, we must cross the strict boundaries of fine art and must take stock of all those "bridgehead positions", where the new ideas were being forged in early-twentieth-century Budapest. As the examples of Három Holló and Balszélfogó faithfully demonstrated, in these "bridgehead positions" the Budapest press, which was just then experiencing its golden days, played an outstanding role. The Budapest Press and Modernism The increasingly diverse exhibition scene only provided the youngest generation of innovative artists with the means to show themselves. However, the road to gaining recognition and to procuring the favour of the public led through the media and the progressive groups of the intelligentsia. Even though the majority of the paintings were not produced in Budapest, the fight to gain recognition and acceptance took place here, in the frenzy of metropolitan culture. Although around the year 1900 only about twenty percent of the country's total population lived in the capital, half of all the newspapers and magazines were printed here. The Budapest press was the most important agent in the campaign for the new art's acceptance. The progressive tendencies in Hungarian literature were closely bound up with modern art in the first decade of the twentieth century: at every possible public forum of progressive Hungarian literature, efforts were made to introduce and promote modern art. In this regard, the art magazines proper played a much smaller part than the political and literary magazines of liberal attitudes and modernist outlook. Standing out in importance among the political dailies was Budapesti Napló (Budapest Journal), a paper founded by József Vészi. The greatest accomplishment of both Vészi, who edited the paper for a full decade, and Ede Kabos, who succeeded him, was that they managed to get an excellent team of contributors, recruiting such authors as Géza Csáth, Dezső Kosztolányi and Endre Ady. Up until the launch of Nyugat, Budapesti Napló remained the most important platform of Ady's work; it published his legendary "Sunday poems" as well as his regular reports from Paris. Among the art writers, we must mention Miklós Rózsa, who published a lengthy study on Gauguin, and György Bölöni, who was the first to report in one of his articles on the 1907 Salon d'Automne that "two of Czóbel's paintings were hung in the room showing the works of the Fauves."
