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 - GYÖRGY SZÜCS:Dissonance or New Harmony? The Art of the Nagybánya "Neos"

Tibor Boromisza: Self-portrait, 1910. Cat. No. 84. rivalry. "I want to know who is stinking up the meadow now! These smells have kept me away from Bánya: the smell of Ziffer, Kornai, etc.," he wrote to his Nagybánya friend, the writer Józsi Jenő Tersánszky, during the summer of 1911, with his usual forthrightness.

21 These were the years when Mihály Kuczka, who had studied under Hollósy earlier, visited the school, especially Réti 's classes. Reading his diary, we can get a more or less clear picture of daily life there: how, in addition to attending the masters' classes and reading the magazines available in the cafés or ordered individually {Művészet, Nyugat, The Studio, Die Kunstwelt, etc.), it was the joint work with the "welltraveled" students and the late-night discussions at the cafés that provided the basic new impulses to the pupils. "Tonight Boromisza invited me and showed me all his paintings, some of which were completely at variance with nature, in the sense that everything is adjusted to his individual concept and the entire picture is put in the service of the effects of colours and lines. I saw a portrait there and it was phenomenal. It was all based on the contrast of strong, intensive colours. It shows his landlord reading a paper in the open; I also admired his selfportrait, with the head well drawn on the basis of a simple concept, along with his landscapes, which were all masterpieces in search of a new direction."

22 On a different occasion he wrote the following: "Last night at dinner we had a discussion about modern art with the magistrate and Jakab. He (the magistrate) could not get it into his head why Ziffer painted orange faces, violet hair and moustaches green as grass in his portraits."

23 In their campaign for the modernization of the arJózsef Nemes Lampérth: Self-portrait, 1911. Cat. No. 183. tists' colony and the introduction of internal reforms, some of the students set forth their ideas in writing. One of the rebels was Boromisza, whose reputation among his fellow students was high, while the other was György Lajos Harsányi, a similarly devoted but less talented painter. "In the afternoon Harsányi and I passed the time drawing and I made 8 sketches; after that he invited me to his place for a few glasses of Tokaji table wine and asked me to drink 'Brüderschaft' with him. He made extensive studies in art history. He has a whole pile of manuscripts," Kuczka recorded in his diary.

24 Beginning with the spring of 1911, Boromisza published a number of articles in the newspaper Nagybányai Hírlap, in which he strongly criticized the leaders of the artists' colony. These articles, together with Harsányi's expulsion from the artists' colony for allegedly speaking disrespectfully about János Thorma, caused the greatest stir not only in Nagybánya but, through Józsi Jenő Tersánszky who had written about it in the literary magazine Nyugat, also in Budapest.

25 Boromisza was forced to accept the fact that, while he was making a statement on behalf of all the young artists, of "the seekers-and-searchers, the rebels and the exuberant free spirits"

26 as he put it, some of the students stood up for their masters in an open letter, rejecting the claim that the polemics in the press had been about a fight between the young generation versus the leaders. "We are opposed to the idea of somebody's jockeying for position by using us, the young generation, as his means. We are completely satisfied with our present leaders; we thank them for their efforts and completely agree with all their actions so far; we