Passuth Krisztina – Szücs György – Gosztonyi Ferenc szerk.: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2006/1)
HUNGARIAN FAUVES CASE STUDIES - GERGELY BARKI: The Evolution of Czóbel's Fauvism in the Mirror of his Early Portraits
7. Béla Czóbel: An old woman from Bruges, 1905 Unknown location 8. Béla Czóbel: Portrait of Andor Dobai Székely, 9. Béla Czóbel: Self-portrait, cca. 1905-1906 1905. Unknown location Unknown location a laconic manner, without mentioning Matisse's name at all. 16 The reason for this must have been that Czóbel was closely following the events of the Paris art scene for years and in the sea of colourful Impressionistic paintings he paid little attention to the group of young artists rallying around Matisse. He was not overly surprised, since he knew the great predecessors and, as Ellen Oppler pointed out in her dissertation published in 1969, the appearance of the new style had not amounted to a revolution. In Oppler's view, the emergence of the new artistic style, i.e. Fauvism, was in a sense merely a variation of the previous art tendencies, especially Impressionism, or their revival. 17 She 10. Béla Czóbel: Little Girl, cca. 1905. Unknown location sheds light on the point that the stylistic definitions got mixed up in the heads of not only the art critics but also the artists, who after a time were unable to distinguish between the various elements, and had clear-cut definitions neither of Impressionism nor of the style of the newly emerging movements. 18 Czóbel himself would have been hard-put to list the most important specific differences between Impressionism and the first examples of the emerging new style, Fauvism. In his exhibition review mentioned earlier, he described the Fauves —without, of course, calling them that —as the followers of the great Post-Impressionist predecessors: "And of course, Gauguin and Van Gogh are also present, if not with their paintings then at least in spirit, which haunts most of the young artists' compositions in the salon." 19 Naturally, he also mentioned the third of the three forefathers, Cézanne, whose "primitiveness" he compared to Vallotton's. Although Béla Lázár, the editor of Modern Művészet, omitted parts of this passage from the published text, Czóbel wrote a letter to Lázár shortly after the paper's publication, in which he presented a more complex view of the event. 20 Even if we knew the original text in its complete form, and even if we knew the paintings that Czóbel had exhibited on that occasion, we would still come to the same conclusion: in the autumn of 1905 Czóbel was still not a Fauvist! The impressionistic tone of the title he gave to the landscape exhibited there (Soleil d'automne) also supports the above conclusion. 21 Similarly to all the other works he painted in 1905 in other genres, his portraits display the same eclecticism that was also evident in the case of the prominent masters of the period's progressive art, both French and Hungarian. The early Fauvist works by Matisse and his friends, who further developed, rather than rejected, Impressionism, had powerful links to the art of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Signac. Similarly to his French colleagues, Czóbel was greatly influenced by the retrospective exhibitions of Seurat and Van Gogh at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, 22 which helped prepare and inspire the subsequent developments in autumn. This is further confirmed by Czóbel's portraits from 1905, which, in sharp contrast with Matisse's
