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

Georges Braque: Paysage à L'Estaque, 1906-1907. Musée d'Art moderne de Troyes, Troyes, © HUNGART 2006 the female bodies, is achieved by a system of separate, mainly horizontal brush strokes of primary colours. "Boromisza encircles his nudes with a brash, blue outline. These blue outlines epitomize the trees, their foliage and the shore, but they do not disrupt the harmony of the painting", as László Jurecskó pointed out.

86 Matisse invited Derain to Collioure in July, 1905 and their joint adventure began, in the course of which they produced countless oil paintings and drawings.

87 What was this adventure about? Derain respected Matisse, but he had developed the "Fauve style" already before 1905 quite independently. In the summer of 1905 he, too, was looking for something new, so with a bit of exaggeration we may say that Fauvism had matured as a result of the two of them making each other's acquaintance. We cannot reconstruct what exactly the young Hungarian painters noticed from all of this while in France. Even assuming that they were aware of the new developments at all, we cannot determine what they thought of it. Apparently, in 1905 they still had no immediate reaction to what they saw in Paris, or in any case they showed no signs of any reaction in their work. The young artists were trying to find their own ways, their own identities. Just like their Parisian colleagues, they revolted against their surroundings and the prevailing stylistic trend, which for them, around 1905-1906, meant the plein-air naturalism of the Nagybánya school of painting. They wanted to break free of the Nagybánya masters' approach, János Thorma, Károly Ferenczy, István Réti, Béla Iványi Grünwald, and they did so in a radical fashion. The state of affairs was further complicated by the fact that in the case of one or two compositions even the masters, most notably Iványi Grünwald and to a lesser degree Thorma himself, were willing to adopt the Fauve interpretation that the young Neos advocated. While the French painters created their own individual branch of Fauvism without any model or precursor to rely on, for the Hungarians, by 1906, that model, French Fauvism, already existed. While they absorbed its approach, in the course of 1906-1908 they managed to create a distinct (although not homogeneous) style of their own, Hungarian Fauvism, which is different from the French model. In the case of the Nagybánya artists, the clearest evidence for the existence of such a distinctive branch came via the landscapes. The themes the artists found around Nagybánya were naturally different from those discovered in the South of France. If we look at Braque's Paysage à I'Estaque,

88 for example, then the difference will instantly become obvious. The red colour, which Braque applied in broad planes, connects the background with the foreground; the red patches sometime change into yellow and the entire canvas is occasionally broken up by dark green brush marks. The clearly discernible, parallel