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
Tracing the Lost Years Modern Hungarian painting, which was inspired by, and educated in, Paris, finally "settled" in Budapest in the mid-1910s. This belated conquest coincided with a period of acrimonious debates, which brought about the break-up of institutions, exhibition venues, coffeehouse tables and old friendships along the fault-line of traditions and modernity: an abyss extremely difficult to bridge. The resulting multiple fissures, which rapidly developed within a few years, can be explained by the peculiar over-saturation of Hungarian art life. In the first years of the 20 th century, not only did the great period styles come to pile up on top of one another because of the tardiness of local development, but also the successive generations were on the heels of each other. By the time long-awaited success finally came for Ferenczy, Fényes and Rippl-Rónai, the successive generation of painters, Czóbel, Berény and the others, had already been impatiently expecting their share of recognition, too. This typically Hungarian phenomenon has few better indications than Dezső Malonyay's book published in 1906, A fiatalok (The Young Ones). 43 The author presented the artists featuring in his book, Károly Ferenczy, Béla Iványi Grünwald, Nándor Katona, Gusztáv Magyar Mannheimer and József Rippl-Rónai, as "the five worthy labourers of the youngest Hungarian art", the "young ones", who —and this is only added by us —were by then well into their forties. In their endeavour to win recognition for modern Hungarian art, Kernstok and his much younger associates had to overcome a considerable handicap, whereby the towering figure of their predecessors cast a "shadow" over their early accomplishments, concealing the most interesting compositions they created before the emergence of Nyolcak not only from the eyes of their contemporaries, but also from posterity. On top of everything else, they held their early works in a low esteem, if not exactly burying the paintings, as Kernstok and Czóbel had done in the summer of 1907 in Nyergesújfalu, but either leaving their paintings in Paris or recycling them by painting over them, cutting them up or painting on the reverse side. Precisely for this reason, the present exhibition has undertaken an extremely complex task, one that almost has the nature of archaeological research: the organizers had to reconstruct the first, few-yearlong period of emerging modern Hungarian art from scattered fragments buried deep —sometimes in the literal sense. One of the first steps in this regard is the reconstruction of the scene, which met those artists within the generation of "chercheurs" [seekers] on their homecoming, who decided to settle in Budapest.
