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: Róbert Berény, the "Apprenti Fauve"
41. The Nude Seated in Armchair in Virgil Ciaclan's Bedroom Private collection 42. Robert Berény: Sketch for Nude Seated in Armchair, 1911 Cat. No. 53. Berény's painterly qualities and temperament better that his 'distortedly drawn' pictures." 48 In addition to art critiques, the papers also published caricatures of Berény's nudes of "distorted anatomy", 49 while some of his Hungarian colleagues also took note of the strange spectacles imported from Paris. 50 The same exhibition featured his large canvas painted in 1911, Nude Seated in Armchair (Fig. 40, Cat. No. 18), which is a twin-sister of the Fauvist nudes he had painted four years earlier, faithfully representing the direction Berény's painting rooted in Fauvism took following his resettling at home. At the last exhibition of the Nyolcak in 1912, Berény's break with French-conceived Fauvism already became clearly evident following another one of his stylistic changes. Although he continued to abide by the principle he had laid down in his written declaration a year earlier, whereby "everything [...] should be expressed through colours," 51 through his own invention of using "colours fading into one another and colours separated from one another," 52 he no longer aspired to achieve decorative effects: rather, he wanted to render the spatial relationship between objects and their surroundings visible. 53 By this time his characteristic compositions of a stereo-metric system, which at the same time had a strong psychological charge, had already shown closer ties with German Expressionism and the art of the Austrian artist, Kokoschka. Following the First World War, between 1918 and 1919, he set up a painters' school in his own studio, where he placed the main emphasis on nude painting, in accordance with the spirit of Parisian art academies. 54 After the fall of Hungary's Soviet-style Council Republic, i.e. during the time he spent in emigration in Vienna first and Berlin later, he was less interested in painting, concentrating instead on his inventions, as well as on psychoanalysis and the composition of music. He was allowed to return to Budapest in 1926, where, after a few-year-long progressive spell, he turned to naturalistic painting. After the end of the Second World War he accepted a teaching post at the Academy of Fine Arts. He died in 1953 in Budapest. 40. Róbert Berény: Nude Seated in Armchair, 1911 Cat. No. 18.
