Veszprémi Nóra - Szücs György szerk.: Vaszary János (1867–1939) gyűjteményes kiállítása (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2007/3)

Tanulmányok: - SZÜCS GYÖRGY: „Kárpátoktól le az Adriáig". Vaszary János és az első világháború

GYÖRGY SZŰCS "From the Carpathians down to the Adriatic" JÁNOS VASZARY AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR As the First World War broke out, the Imperial and Royal Press Headquarters (K. u. K. Kriegspressequartier) was established, which included, besides actual war reporters, photographers and artists. After their appointment in the autumn of 1914, popular writers, such as the Hungarian Ferenc Molnár or Lajos Bíró and the Austrian Alexander Roda-Roda, and notable painters, like László Mednyánszky and János Vaszary traversed the fronts, the former writing their dispatches, the latter making quick sketches and watercolours to record yet unknown moods and often dreadful sights (Dead Hussar on the Limanova Battlefield, 1914). Soon, they filled their drawing pads with images of the new type of warfare: endless rows of service carts pushing along, trenches meandering in fields, modern technologies of warfare, or portraits of exhausted, morose, confused, sometimes relieved, or wounded prisoners of war in camps. The changed physical and psychological conditions of military life made Vaszary face challenges that were quite out of line with the reductive style of breaking away from actual sight and analysing the internal rules of a picture he had previously developed. As members of the Press Headquarters fulfilling propaganda and censorship tasks, the artists were compelled to submit a drawing or a sketch at the so-called picture collection centres {Bildersammelstelle) every week or two weeks; thus naturalistic landscapes, portraits and various genre pictures now received new emphases in their work. However, Vaszary realized that the Hungarian public was used to some degree of "completion" in the case of even sketches at exhibitions, and so he deemed his sketches as mere mnemonic devices, useful only to record important events or moments on the battlefields. Between 1914 and 1918, the Press Headquarters ordered an unprecedented amount of war pictures for documentation and propaganda purposes. In the introduction to the catalogue of the "war exhibition" in the summer of 1918, which followed a 1916 and a 1917 show, Major Georg Sobicka, the head of the artist group, reported of almost 9000 sketches and paintings officially gathered. The imposing number never convinced the doubters - neither then, nor later. Critics of poise - like Károly Lyka and Aladár Bálint - had been pretty sure at the beginning of the war that, in spite of all expectations aroused by the tense historical situation, historical painting outdated as it was would experience no renaissance. The demand of the general public for cartoon-like action-filled drawings and paintings was naturally and fully satisfied by various illustrated magazines and publications. In contrast, the critic of the art magazine MA (Today) called Vaszary - with a bit of exaggeration - "the only true artist of the war" amid the flood of kitsch issuing from "tabloid papers rehearsing school-book catchwords." No doubt, Vaszary's profoundly dramatic war pictures (Russian Retreat, 1915, Cat. No. 96) rival the gloomy, dream-like landscapes of Mednyánszky suggestive of decay even with no sign of tombs in them. At other times, Vaszary seems to have been drawn to József Rippl-Rónai's colourful, decorative approach, his detached attitude to war hysteria, and thus - smuggling red, blue and yellow spots in between briskly drawn black outlines - created the home and equally masterful versions of Rippl-Rónai's watercolour Le départ! They're off to the Station, for example in his Soldiers Travelling to the Front (1916, Cat. No. 252). After the northern, Galician, theatre of war, Vaszary was dispatched to the southern front, and filled his sketch books with the exotically dressed figures, the street scenes and "orientalist" landscapes of the Balkans, sometimes adding an in situ painting or two (Street in Ipek, 1916, Cat. No. 99). Vaszary's widely praised and severally exhibited picture of the period, Camel Caravan, Skopje (Cat. No. 101), witnesses a characteristic structural invention he would often make use of in later paintings. In pictures where he does not have the sky as a sort of heavy material tumble on the "active" foreground, he develops an actually architectonic or other structure in his delineation. He thus finalises Russian Prisoners in Barracks, 1915 (Cat. No. 97), with its precisely depicted carpentry, and Barges in Harbour, c. 1928 (Cat. No. 157), so as to achieve an almost abstract, autonomous network of colours laced from dappled lines and stripes. From the end of 1917, presumably due to the reorganisation of the Press Headquarters, Vaszary no longer worked in the artist group, and continued his military service as a reservist wearing the embellished knight's cross of the Order of Franz Josef on his chest; however, according to his wife's recollection, "he reached the age of fifty in the meanwhile, and was no longer sent to the front". In the lack of inspiration, he ceased painting new war pictures, and, taking a deep breath, he seems to have tried to summarize and revalue his years on the front. The results were displayed to the public at a one-man show he put up at the Ernst Museum in the spring of 1919. Several of the pictures on the walls still bore the war theme (Service Corps in the Uz Valley, Soldiers' Funeral). Strikingly, however, Vaszary also returned, on the one hand, to traditional "civilian" genres {Female Nude, In the Garden, Still Life), and, on the other, to his experiments in colour and form analysis of the pre-war years (Study in Colour, Yellow and Blue). His quest manifested itself most clearly in his gospel scenes; he was, as it were, thinking of a sort of personal station series that would be exemplary for others, as well (The Last Supper, Calvary). In the beginning of the twenties, he was not the only one to use the episodes of the passion story of Christ to give worthy expression to "the doomsday of mankind" - in spite of the fact that the irredentist propaganda in the wake of the unjust peace treaty saturated the press with ostentatious images of a "bleeding Hungary" and a "Hungarian Golgotha".