Bakos Katalin - Manicka Anna szerk.: Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben, Lengyel és magyar grafika 1918–1939 (MNG, Warszawa–Budapest, 2009)
III. KATALÓGUS - 1. VÁROS. TÖMEG. GÉP. A MODERNIZMUS ARCAI - - Ember a városban
People in the City A. Street, Jazz, Sport B. Modern Woman C. City-Monster D. Workers E. Revolution F. War KB: "We are again interested in man, but instead of the exalted, or primitive man, in social man: the worker, the peasant, the bourgeois - as he lives and acts." 12 The cradles of modern Hungarian art were the rural art colonies; the new formal idiom was basically shaped by the genres of landscape, portrait and nude. Even the social rebellion of the activists was mediated by traditional themes, and it was Sandor Bortnyik alone in whose works the city and the city dweller, the proletarian stretching his hand out toward the sun from the dark slums appeared. Uitz elaborated a more abstract symbol of the constructive working class. In addition to genre pictures of poverty in the line of the 19th-century legacy, just a few artists like Károly Kernstok and József Egry turned to the urban setting in some periods of their creative life. The consolidation following World War I, the revolutions and the counter-revolution, and the period of social tensions rooted in the economic depression coincided with the ascendancy of life in large modern industrial cities as the theme of art, with its advantages and disadvantages, and its diverse social groups. Pál Molnár-C. captured the lively moments of modern metropolitan Budapest, the middle-class life of the "golden twenties", the bubbling fervor of the jazz age in his woodcuts. His virtuosic wood engravings were preceded by press illustrations, ink drawings for the evening papers, which made his name more familiar to the Budapest public than his exhibitions. These spontaneous, humorous snapshots of everyday city life shown from a modern angle constituted the basis for his autonomous works created in a more durable medium. The cubistic and expressive forms of the wood engravings served to capture the modern urban lifestyle, liberal clothing, new customs and pastimes, neglecting the seamy side. The figures of cafes, sports, dances, flirting, and outings depicted with subtle irony chronicle the middle-class social life for posterity. Sports and modern transport vehicles, travelling, tourism all fed the cult of speed, which is wittily captured in Lady Champion and Motorcycle. Pál Molnár-C. was the ideal choice for the illustration of Lőrinc Szabó's poem cycle From Morning to Evening. The Memory of a Flight (1937). A protagonist of Molnár-C.'s urban chronicle is the modern, emancipated woman. A woman looking out of a window is a severally elaborated motif charged with intimate lyricism, but he mainly approached this topic from a distance, with irony and often with a frivolous tone. In the Hungarian graphic art of these years, Dezső Fáy's illustrations for Szefi Bohuniczky's short stories Women and Lajos Kozma's for Sophie Török's book of poems, Woman in the Armchair, as well as Anna Bartoniek's woodcuts and drawings were the works concerned with female roles. The themes of the emblematic images in the publication László Reiter's Book Art are traditional and modern beauty, the individual and social role of the woman. The nimble-handed illustrator and poster designer of the 1910s, Marcell Vértes resumed his career in Vienna in 1919, and then went on to Paris. His portfolio entitled Dancing, released by Pellet publishers in Paris in 1924, was exhibited in 1925 in Budapest at the Ernst Museum. The colour lithographs such as Orchestra with a Dancer, Dancers with a Saxophonist are chronicles of the Paris night life in the tradition of Toulouse-Lautrec. The scenes radiate Vértes' humour, love
