Kopócsy Anna: Új színben, Rózsa Miklós és művészönarckép-gyűjteménye 1932–1943 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2007/2)

SUMMARY Miklós Rózsa and His Self-portrait Collection 1932-1943 Miklós Rózsa was one of the most versatile and intriguing figures in 20thcentury Hungarian art history. He was a particularly broad-minded writer and aesthetician, a lawyer and banker, who made every effort, almost obsessive in his attempts, to bring about the emancipation of modern Hungarian art. With regard to 20th-century progressive art, his name is associated with two major enterprises. The first one was Művészház [Artists' House] which he ran to provide institutional framework for the manifestations of modernist aspirations before the First World War. The second one was the KUT [New Society of Artists], which was established in the 1920s almost spontaneously by artists formerly related to Mú'vészház, and of which Rózsa was art director between 1926 and 1932. For a while, it seemed that through KUT he was going to be able to realize one of his audacious aims: integrating modern European and Hungarian Art. It was with European integration on his mind that he established contacts abroad, especially with the many Hungarian artists living in Paris. As a result, the 1929 and 1930 KUT exhibitions had an international guality, featuring a good number of the Hungarian avant-garde artists working abroad (László Moholy-Nagy, Alfréd Réth, József Csáky, etc.). With an unprecedented gesture, he even invited modernist architects embracing Bauhaus achievements. Unlike the interior displays Art Nouveau had preferred, these exhibitions sought to represent no such unity of style. Nevertheless, the simultaneous display of the various branches of art was suggestive of a comprehensively modern lifestyle, likewise manifest in the constructivist designs of their catalogues, magazines and assorted publications. Making full use of his relationship assets, he sought to win members of both conservative and liberal circles, the ruling political and financial elite to support the cause of modern Hungarian art. In the meanwhile, he invited to KUT exhibitions even the young avant-gardists belonging to the circle of Lajos Kassák's magazine Munka [Labour], who, with their Dadaist work, were an outrage at the time not only to the supporters of the conservative artists connected to the exhibition hall Műcsarnok [Palace of Art] but also to the public at large. Such discrepancy could not be maintained further, and Rózsa could no longer elicit the uneguivocal support of even the KUT membership. Rózsa Miklós, 1934 (fotó, mgt.) Rózsa Miklós és leánya, Lilian 1930 (fotó, MTA MKI, Adattár)