Passuth Krisztina – Szücs György – Gosztonyi Ferenc szerk.: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2006/1)
AT HOME AND ABROAD - KRISZTINA PASSUTH: Wild Beasts of Hungary Meet Fauves in France
Maurice de Vlaminck: La Seine et Le Pecq, 1906. Cat. No. 306. Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich © HUNG ART 2006 of the Fauve style went unnoticed then, and have remained largely unnoticed ever since. Therefore, the gesture of manifestation, along with the effect of the gesture, did not take place. Perhaps it was largely in consequence of this circumstance that hardly anyone has ever taken note of the presence of the Fauve style in Hungarian art and that it has almost never been discussed in the context of Hungarian art history. This is another justification for the decision to study Hungarian Fauvism embedded primarily in French, rather than Hungarian, art history. Anyone wishing to conduct a study of the roots, motives and origins of French (and in conjunction Hungarian) Fauvism, will eventually run into three theoretically different, but in practice very much related, topics: the role of painting academies and private art schools; the copying of old masters; the drawing, painting or sculpting of nudes using live models. All this took place, when —save a few exceptions —the artists concerned were very young. The average age of the French and the Hungarian Fauves, respectively, hardly differed. They were roughly of the same age and, therefore, it was roughly during the same period that they attended the art academies or conducted their studies, although the particular location may have been different: along the river Seine, or at Nagybánya, or in Budapest. Of the Parisian painters, Matisse was by far the eldest; he had had a long journey behind him by the time he became —at the age of thirty-five —a veritable "Fauve". Of the associated "hard-core Fauves", Derain was twenty-five, and Vlaminck twentynine, when they burst onto the French art scene. With regard to the Hungarian Fauves, the situation is almost analogous: Károly Kernstok, the "doyen" of the future art group, Nyolcak, was thirty-two years old in 1905, which was the right age for a would-be leader. The other great artist with the potential to become the charismatic personality of the Hungarian Fauves was József Rippl-Rónai, but he was already forty-four at the time, and that may explain why he did not get the role, which otherwise would have been very much to his liking. The other two principal Hungarian Fauves, Béla Czóbel and Róbert Berény, were even younger than their French counterparts: Béla Czóbel was born in 1883, and Róbert Berény in 1887, which meant that the latter exhibited his works at the Salon d Automne in 1906 at the age of nineteen. Therefore, the younger generation of the French and Hungarian Fauves had gone through a similar training, while the older ones —Matisse, Rippl-Rónai and Kernstok —all had a different art education.
