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

- the ideologues thought - the improvement of its prestige would reinforce the legal grounds of the revisionary endeavours aimed to recover the detached areas of the country. Popularizing the events beyond the frontiers spread these ideas abroad as well. There were graphic competitions connected to the veneration of the saints of the Árpád House. The events condensed around two major events, St Emeric's year (1930) and St Stephen's year (1938), but works were created in tribute to the canonization of King St Ladislas in 1192 (1942) and the Blessed Princess Margaret (1943). Dezső Fáy's engraving Saint Emeric commemorated a saint who was hailed as the paragon of Christian upbringing. King Stephen I

's and Queen Gizella's son who died at the age of 24 was given thorough Christian education of the highest level in the age, and he made a vow of chastity, according to the legend. The catholic church set him to the youth of their admittedly critical period as an example of obedience and rejection of pleasure-hunting. Fáy depicted the mystic evocation of the prince preserved in the legends in a subtly archaizing style. Like Fáy's work, József K. Győrfy's woodcut Saint Margaret of the Árpád House was also made for a competition announced on the occasion of King Béla IV's daughter's canonization in 1943. To fulfill their vow, the parents submitted Margaret at the age of 3 to the Dominican nuns during the period of Mongol invasions. Margaret remained faithful to her commitment even when she had a chance to return to secular life and make an advantageous political marriage. József K. Győrfy's sweeping composition unites the medieval depictions of saints manifest in the apparel and the attribute with the modern portrait. The face is not idealized but appears like a real portrait; the dynamics of the cubistic analysis of space suggests ecstasy. Pál Molnár-C. proved most successful in making prints on religious themes. His woodcut illustrations to Artúr Keleti's Annunciation (1927) which earned him a name as a wood engraver were not yet engraved by himself. He was faced with the challenge of wood engraving when the Limited Editions Club (a society of bibliophiles in New York) commissioned him to illustrate their bibliophile publication Fioretti - The Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi. At the time of the commission he was in Rome where Kálmán Gáborjáni Szabó taught him the secrets of woodblock printing. Molnár-C. became a virtuosic wood engraver to produce lots of wood prints on religious themes. His album of 6 wood engravings on New Testament scenes appeared in 1932. In the period there was a boom in books on Hungarian history and church history not based on scientific background material but on legends. One was Cécile Tormay's Hungarian Legendary containing the source publication of the legends of three Hungarian saints, published in 1930 with 30 wood engravings by Molnár-C. He was also the illustrator of the publication In Memóriám S. Stephani (1938) depicting the outstanding events associated with the state-founder Hungarian king's reign in stage-like scenes. The costumes of historical authenticity, the careful elaboration and subtle archaizing must have satisfied both the conservative expectations of the clients and the demand of connoisseurs for aesthetic values. Molnár-C. was personally attracted to the figure of Saint Francis. His painting submitted to the altar picture competition called in the commemorative year of St Francis (1927) was his first work on a religious theme. Later he paid tribute to the advocate of humbleness, chastity and love with cycles of prints, recalling the ethereal atmosphere and naivety of Italian trecento depictions. "Molnár-C. admired ideal beauty. He recognized in the Franciscans' love of nature the metaphysical unity that symbolized the interlocking of earthly and heavenly beauty with authentic vivacity even in our modern, secularized, and materialized society."

22 AM: Jan Maria Bocheński, a catholic logician and philosopher, wrote that the Polish Catholicism is generally a static Catholicism, to a great extent based on tradition. A static religion is a defensive function of a society: it exerts pressure on an individual by numerous, often even absurd, orders and