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 Marinot: Etude d'atelier, 1904 Cat. No. 301. Musée d'Art moderne de Troyes, Troyes; donation Pierre et Denise Lévy © HUNGART 2006 Naturally, Hungarian painters also had ample opportunity to develop their technical abilities as well as their artistic methods through the practice of copying. In addition to the Louvre in Paris, after 1906 they also had the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest at their disposal. The most probable reason for the relatively small number of copies produced in Hungary was that neither the academy nor Hollósy's private school had teachers like Moreau, who could have convinced the young people about the usefulness of copying. In addition to this, due to the fact that it was even less possible to sell copies at home than in Paris, even those copies which were produced in Hungary have been destroyed or their intellectual value has become questionable. As Géza Lengyel, the art critic, argued in 1908 in Nyugat, the most prestigious progressive literary journal of the time, "What we can accept from our predecessors with confidence are the brush, the canvas, the paint and the chisel. Then everything starts all over again, eternally."

57 Géza Lengyel actually did not criticize the principle of copying; he only despised mere technical accomplishment and virtuosity as opposed to the principle of the innovative expression of one's self. According to Emese Révész, "He accepted nothing else for a raison d'être, but the individual transcription of the admired masterpieces; instead of punctilious copying, he encouraged the application of such genres as the interpretative pastiche or the paraphrase."

58 As to which Hungarian artists produced copies and what they thought about the idea of copying, this problem can be reconstructed only fragmentarily. It seems that the ones most attracted to this activity studied either in Munich or in Paris, with the most notable examples being Béla Czóbel, Ödön Márffy, Géza Bornemisza, Rezső Bálint and Gitta Gyenes. When Béla Czóbel painted Self-portrait with Palette in 1902, he did not have any specifHenri Matisse: Marquet peignant un nu dans l'atelier de Manguin, 1904-1905 Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © Photo CNAC

I MNAM Dist. RMN I © Jean-Claude Planchet © Succession H. Matisse I HUNG ART 2006 ic Rembrandt portrait in mind; instead, the picture radiates the atmosphere of Rembrandt's works in general.

59 One side of a face barely shines through the dark brown tone of the painting; the rest is kept in the shade of a crumpled hat. Rembrandt's world is perfectly captured in the painting, which in the same time evokes the feeling of the dark brown, oily colours of Henri Matisse in the same period. Similarly to Czóbel, Ödön Márffy also produced copies, of which we know the two paintings he made after Frans Hals and Titian, respectively. Thus Márffy had chosen two artists who were highly esteemed in the Louvre and obviously inspired several contemporary copiers. He painted the Titian copy in the beginning of the 1900s

60 and the copy of Frans Hals' Gypsy Girl in 1905,

61 as he mentioned in a dedication to his brother and sister-in-law: "in the Louvre I painted a copy of Bohémienne by Frans Hals."

62 Márffy's main motive to do this copy was that he wanted to refer to it in his application to the Council of Budapest for an extension of his fellowship.

63 István Csók had a similar materialistic motive, when he wrote to Béla Lázár from Paris the following: "the little money I have inherited is gone. Having been used to living in prosperity all my life, now I am almost driven to distraction by the thought of how am I to paint without money? [...] Hoopla! I've got it! Heureka! I am going to sell my paintings. Just like any other sensible painters, Mieris, Ver Mer [sic!] and all the rest, I shall paint just to make money, to earn enough to be able to paint Corner in a Studio, Thamar, Vampires, Nirvana [...]."

M Besides the artistic considerations, the hope of being able to sell these copies did play a role in the case of not only the Hungarians, but also of the French Fauves, even Matisse.