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 - JUDIT BOROS: The Synthesizer. Vilmos Perlrott Csaba's Painting

background (the background is colourful, minutely detailed and decorative, the figure, with the exception of the face, is a homogeneous black patch); and the third addressed the presentation of the colour of black as a mass. The unusual compactness of the entire picture surface anticipates the thick texture of the still-lifes and interiors he painted after 1910, in a way offering an early evidence of Perlrott's individual vocabulary of forms. By the time he traveled back to Nagybánya in April 1907, the atmosphere at the artists' colony had already grown rather tense. Perlrott sensed the cool reception and Károly Ferenczy's hostile attitude, while his relationship with Iványi-Grünwald continued to be friendly. No longer a student at the free school, he worked as an independent artist at the colony. It appears, however, that some conflicts also existed among the younger painters, and Perlrott found that very hard to take.

27 This may have explained his absence from Nyergesújfalu, and also his decision not to join the group Nyolcak later.

28 Although we have no concrete evidence to prove it, we are almost certain that Perlrott saw the Gauguin and Cézanne exhibitions organized by the Nemzeti Szalon, where, besides the two outstanding masters, several other French painters were represented.

29 Almost immediately after the exhibition, Gauguin's powerful influence became clearly evident in Perlrott's works. The composition Mother with her Children evokes reminiscences of the monumental, sculpture-like postures of Gauguin's Tahitian women, while Sunlit Yard in Nagybánya (Cat. No. 199) demonstrates Perlrott's ability to emulate Gauguin's treatment of colours and surfaces. At the exhibition entitled Ifjúság (Youth), which was held in June 1907 at the Könyves Kálmán Szalon, Perlrott had five of his compositions shown, including the earlier-mentioned Mother with her Children (Mother with Child, according to the contemporary catalogue: 97/a) and a painting entitled In the Garden (97). Hypothetically, we can identify the latter with a work that has survived in fragments on the back of a composition now known by the title Nude Reclining.

30 He may have started working on the composition that treated the subject of Arcadia while still in Paris. Besides being related to one of Perlrott's earlier works, Clothes Drying, this particular painting seems to underpin the claim (as much as its fragmented conditions would allow any such conclusions) that the Hungarian artist had been familiar with the art of Puvis de Chavannes at the time of executing it. In the summer of 1907 he then used the same canvas to paint Nude Reclining, the strongest manifestation of the influence Gauguin had exerted on him. It is interesting that in the composition, which followed the postures and atmosphere of the Tahitian paintings, the body of the nude was executed in a manner that was alien to Gauguin's style and was more closely related to the method Renoir used for his female figures after 1900, i.e. a tightly packed series of brushstrokes. This serves to demonstrate the young painter's ability to experiment with several art tendencies simultaneously in search of his own means of artistic expression. Sadly, we do not know the other three compositions

—Two Women (94), Girl in Blue Blouse (95) and Girl in Red Blouse (96)—exhibited on the same occasion by Perlrott. It is reasonable to assume that in 1907 Perlrott showed at the Salon d'Automne the works he had painted at Nagybánya.

31 We have not as yet been able to identify the six canvases, which were simply referred to as Étude in the exhibition catalogue. The exhibition must have recompensed him for the injuries he had suffered at Nagybánya: the organizers put up his works at the best locations and after the exhibition he received an invitation to the Brussels spring show of 1908.

32 However, we have no further information about his actual participation in the exhibition. By the autumn of 1907 Perlrott had definitely been among the group of students formed around Matisse. By that time both Matisse and Derain had turned their back on Fauvism. These two artists abandoned the Fauvist mode of expression characterized by an organic vision, strong colours, free and clearly separated brushstrokes in 1907, while Braque followed suit in 1908. Together with Picasso, who had never been a Fauvist, Derain and Braque produced the first compositions of analytical Cubism after they had further developed Cezanne's geometric structure. In search of a new mode of expression, Matisse experimented with various ideas. While in some of his paintings he returned to his earlier, proto-Fauve style based on strong compositional structure, which could equally be described as proto-Cubist (one example is Nu debout, which he completed at the turn of 1906 and 1907), in other of his paintings he experimented with a synthesizing depiction of the human body, using schematic and expressive contours (Le coiffure, 1907; Le luxe, 1907) and temporarily dropping the Fauve colours. After 1908 he more or less returned to the Fauve palette, although he applied it within a different structure of forms. That was when he began to paint compositions, expressive and decorative at the same time (La desserte, harmonie rouge, 1908), which came to characterize his next period, when he took decorativeness to The editor Ödön Lőwy in his home, cca. 1935 Private collection