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"

Lajos Tihanyi: Interior, 1908 235. Lajos Tihanyi: Interior, 1907. Cat. No. 244. "I asked him to explain the difference between Impressionism and Neo-lmpressionism; the latter stylizes and forms nature; it does not pay much attention to nature, only to the picture; it uses large patches in the composition, both in colour and in drawing, transforming nature. An example is Van Gogh, etc."

35 The task of categorizing a particular composition caused difficulties not only to the artists, but also to the local and Budapest journalist of various levels of education. In grappling with the problem, they either employed metaphors of visionary power and adjectives borrowed from the vernacular, or tried to describe the unusual, surprising and occasionally even irritating compositions with the help of terms mostly picked up from foreign journals. The journalist and poet Simon Kemény compared the young artists participating in the 1906 Salon d'Automne of Paris to Gauguin, adding the following conclusion: "The most recent generation, that of the Neo-lmpressionists, are no more modern than he was: they are merely wilder and less mature."

36 Talking about the 1906 Budapest exhibition of his fellow-teacher, Iványi Grünwald, István Réti was pleased to make the following conclusion in 1909: "At the time of this exhibition, he had not yet taken the path of ornamental painting rooted in Neo-lmpressionism".

37 József Pechán received a special mention for being a "colourist of brilliant palette" by a journalist reviewing one of the 1910 exhibition of Művészház in the magazine A Hét, two more Nagybánya artists were mentioned in the same article: Jenő Szigeti, who was praised for his "powerful talent in decorativity", and Ernő Götz B. who was described as "a passionate admirer of stylized linearity."

38 The above quotes should make it apparent that the various approaches were rather subjective, and although we have no reason to doubt that the various authors tried to use their own terminology consistently, the overall picture of the period's conceptual arsenal is rather confusing. Naturally, the majority of the art writers made an attempt to develop some kind of a consistent terminology, but the resulting concepts often failed to anticipate the rapidly unfolding events and the huge volume of works produced. As early as 1908, Károly Lyka tried to explain the most obvious changes in an easy format consisting of dialogues in the magazine Új Idők, where the "ultramodern" painter, the sculptor and the sociologist were talking about the limitations in art representation. "There are some limitations that have already been challenged. I do not even mention the limitation, which requires that people should not be shown with purple eyes or onion-green hair. This limitation has already been brought down, praise be to you, oh Master! ", the fictitious sculptor enthused.

39 On the other side, the vehement attacks launched in defense of "healthy" Naturalism and Impressionism continued; for example, the painter and professor István Bosznay called the new movements of "hyper-modernism" a travesty, an empty decoration, a confusion of colours and an "ugly cult" in the conservative journal Magyar Figyelő, which had been established to counter-balance the progressive magazine Nyugat ("West").

40 Interestingly enough, it was Béla Lázár, rather than Lyka, who in 1910 set out to demonstrate the contradictions of the term "Neolmpressionism," which was the most popular label at the time, using the relevant writings of Denis, Signac and Matisse, in an attempt to lead the Hungarian terminology back in line with the international terminology. In his reasoning, Neo-lmpressionism was nothing more than a variety of Impressionism. More specifically, it was a technical method, which consisted of "applying paint in the forms of tiny dots, slashes or commas to the canvas, in the hope of effecting the mixture of the appropriate shades on the retina. " By contrast, the new art was based on an aesthetic concept that was totally opposed to the idea of recording external impressions: the artists already have a definite concept and a clear mental vision and they "shape, form and create internal harmony with