Bakos Katalin - Manicka Anna szerk.: Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben, Lengyel és magyar grafika 1918–1939 (MNG, Warszawa–Budapest, 2009)

III. KATALÓGUS - 2. HAGYOMÁNYKERESÉS - - Hit és vallás

Faith and Religion KB: "After generations of painters who created pictures on religious themes only for extraordinary occasions, the generations grown up during and after the war turned to the Bible as their chief source of inspiration."

20 The avant-garde artists reflected upon universal human, social and moral questions via the Christian iconography. Béla Uitz' dry-point Lamentation (1916) expressed the sufferings caused by World War I in the iconographic type of the pieta. Uitz' figures are his contemporaries; their gestures and mimic are highly expressive but since the artist adhered to the renaissance compositional scheme, the viewer recognizes the Passion scene, which endows this sheet with dignity and universal validity. Uitz' pictures on war themes were the outcome of his protest. Christ's passion has more general implications in the works of the "young etchers". István Szőnyi's etching Entombment and Jenő Tarjáni Simkovits' Lamentation evoke the Passion as the model of all individual suffering thus urging for acquiescence and offering consolation. Evil mocking and humiliating Good appears as an eternal escort of mankind in Nándor Lajos Varga's etching Casting Lots for Christ's Coat and Károly Patkó's Golgotha, and to that-time viewers this also symbolized the destiny of the Hungarian nation. István Szőnyi's Resurrection, a novel interpretation of the rising of Christ deviating from the traditional iconography, became the visionary formulation of revival and faith in the future. Just as the scenes of Arcadia were replaced by peasant themes, so the Passion scenes gave way to depictions of the naive and mystical religiosity of flesh-and-blood villagers. Aba-Novák's Mene Tekel Ufarsin and Szőnyi's Elijah's Translation into Heaven allude to thorough studies of rural life and deep understanding of popular belief. The wood engravers also used the Biblical stories as a repository of universally valid values. Kálmán Gáborjáni Szabó's series The Life of Christ (1927) and György Buday's illustrations to Mauriac's Life of Christ (1936) referred their own intimate religious devotion to people of their age. In their conception, Christian ethic was merged with social sensitivity and a sense of responsibility. The spread of the anticlerical views of the social democratic movement and the bourgeois radical thinkers, and the measures of the Republic of Soviets against the churches shook their foundations but in the 1920s they reinforced their missionary activity promising props to overcome the crisis of the change of values and offering to the man of the modern age the vision of a community functioning by firm, enduring norms. To disseminate its message, the catholic church wished to rely more extensively on art. There were few who connected this intention to the artistic revival, modernization, hence it made little progress. The emergence of institutions elaborating and realizing the church art conception tarried until around 1930. The multiplying competitions and exhibitions of church art revealed increasing spiritual involvement: the earlier empty rhetoric and power political representation was superseded by a more modern and authentic attitude. The holders of the Rome scholarship played a great role in this regard. Instead of the earlier practice of religious art materializing chiefly in works for exhibitions and concentrating on the aesthetic, the main aim after 1930 was creation for sacral use, e.g. decorating church interiors, making liturgical objects. A major contributory role was played by the revival of the cult of Hungarian saints, which presented moral examples and mediated national historical values. The commemorations of Hungarian saints also served the popularizing of the regnant political ideology, besides the religious implications. "In their propaganda, the cult of the Hungarian saints was charged with secular political references, with ideological actualities."

21 Christianity in Hungary was an important power constituent of the establishment and heyday of the Hungarian state, hence