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 - GYÖRGY SZÜCS: Nagybánya, a Regional Centre
Béla Iványi Grünwald: Casino Garden in Kecskemét, early 1910s. Cat. No. 144. out, after having gotten bored of feeling invincible, they discover that the world has taken a turn and nobody is taking notice of them anymore; their fame and prestige has been reduced to a mere name, which, having lost all its magic qualities, yearns for a place on the pages of art history; from a painful feeling they would not admit to others, they discover that these pages are already filled, and the great book is closed," Boromisza's friend, György Lajos Harsányi gave his recollections of the 1910s. 27 The founders of the artists' colony considered it an obvious accomplishment that the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts reorganized under Szinyei's directorship tried to integrate Nagybánya's Naturalist/ Impressionist tendencies by inviting new teachers, while the younger artists and the critics of a broader perspective warned of the dangers of the emergence of a new "Academy". 28 The spontaneous nature that initially characterized the Nagybánya movement went through gradual changes: Hollósy's departure in 1901 already indicated that the Bohemian lifestyle of the earlier period was irreconcilable with the ongoing process of institutionalization. In the interest of increased organizational efficiency and to ensure the professional handling of subventions and subsidies, but also to codify the rights of the founders, the Society of Nagybánya Painters was set up in 1911; Ferenczy, Réti and Thorma became leaders, while Samu Börtsök, Béni and Valér Ferenczy, Sándor Galimberti, Zoltán Jakab, Iván Komoróczy, András Mikola, Károly Réthy, János Tscharner and Sándor Ziffer were rewarded with core membership for their loyalty to the masters. 29 Interestingly enough, the role they played in Society of Nagybánya Painters did not prevent Börtsök, Ziffer, Jakab, Mikola, Krizsán, Réthy and Tscharner from also becoming founding artists of Művészház, a Budapest institution that had Béla Iványi Grünwald, a "renegade", as vice president. 30 The Nagybánya artists' colony can be credited for lending an entirely new character to the town by transforming its traditional small-town society and effecting its transition from a miners' and tradesmen's settlement into a painters' town. "Cobalt sky, painter, streams and lush meadows. Old houses, a painter, bathhouse guests. High spirits, leaden face of miners and, again, a painter! Is there anybody who could not already guess which town in Transylvania we are in?" - Géza Tabéry posed the rhetorical question decades later. 31 Secondly, it started off, and further developed, the movement of artists' colonies; although the breakup of 1909 was something of a shock, the splinter group under Béla Iványi Grünwald went on to set up the Kecskemét artists' colony, which took over the baton, so to speak, and in the next decade developed the new compositional and colour concepts of the Neo artists into a monumental style of painting. "The artists of the colony and the town's population are in apparent agreement that the
