Bakos Katalin - Manicka Anna szerk.: Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben, Lengyel és magyar grafika 1918–1939 (MNG, Warszawa–Budapest, 2009)
II. HÁROM SZÓLAMBAN A LENGYEL ÉS MAGYAR MŰVÉSZETRŐL, MŰVÉSZETTÖRTÉNETRŐL ÉS TÖRTÉNELEMRŐL - Tokai Gábor: Lengyelország és Magyarország művészeti kapcsolatai a két világháború között
In the autumn of 1933, the Báthory festivities gave rise to mutual visits to pep up contacts. The prince primate of Hungary and Miklós Kállay, minister of agriculture, travelled to Cracow and Warsaw, and the return visit by the Polish primate and minister Janta-Połciński soon followed. A bilateral cultural agreement was signed by Gyula Gömbös during his visit in 1934. In 1935, minister of culture Bálint Hóman visited Warsaw. During his visit, the Hungarian Institute was opened there and an official memorandum was drafted on the establishment of a Polish Institute in Budapest, which eventually opened in the spring of 1939. A broader foundation was built for the cultural contacts by the publications aiming to introduce each other's country. A representative bilingual Hungary-Poland album came out in honour of prime minister Kosciatkowski's visit in 1936. The richly illustrated, sizeable volume aimed to introduce the two countries to one another through a loosely edited dialogue of Polish and Hungarian essays on nearly all aspects of life. The four art historical writings in the volume mainly concentrated on definite historical periods, while Tibor Gerevich's writing was concerned with the Polish-Hungarian artistic relations in the 15-16th centuries. Károly Lyka put the School of Rome artists supported by the official cultural policy in the focus, while Władysław Tatarkiewicz laid the stress on the artists of the Rytm group. In his essay on church art as a specific Polish phenomenon, Tadeusz Pomian Kruszyński also touched on his contemporaries in art. Archivist György Komoróczy, one of the volume's contributors compiled a short easy-to-read summary of the huge volume of studies with the title A mai Lengyelország [Poland Today]. 5 The brevity of the book published the next year did not belittle its significance: the author used several original sources, too. 6 Mutual exhibitions were held to introduce a country's artists to the other. In Poland, exhibitions abroad were organized by Warsaw-based TOSSPO (Tow. Szerzenia Sztuki Polskiej wśród Obcych - Society for the Promotion of Polish Art Abroad) 7 , in Hungary the "executive committee of foreign exhibitions" exhibited art works abroad from 1920, and the committee of foreign exhibitions of the Hungarian National Art Council did so from late 1 922. 8 The main targets of the two countries' artistic relations were not primarily each other, but the orientations were similar. 9 Both countries held most of their foreign exhibitions in German-speaking areas, Italy and the Scandinavian-Baltic region, followed by England, Holland and Belgium in equal proportion. The debut of the artistic relationship between the two countries was the exhibition of Polish graphic art at the National Salon in 1926. 10 It was not accidental: in the post-war years there was keen interest in graphic art in Hungary and besides, an itinerant exhibition was easier to stage. The selection picked by the Art Society of Warsaw toured Helsinki, Oslo, Copenhagen, the Hague, Brussels, Paris, Prague and Belgrade before it arrived in Budapest. 11 The preface to the catalogue, the greater part of which covers the years 1890-1914, was written by Witold Bunikiewicz. 12 He devoted less than a page to post-war art, stressing the importance of the woodcut and a reliance on folk art. The organizers emphasized the modern traits of Polish graphic art but refrained from presenting extreme trends. A summary review appeared of the exhibition in Magyar Grafika with the initials r.m. (probably standing for Mariusz Rabinovszky who wrote for the periodical several times) 13 , calling attention mostly to the room of woodcuts: "The woodcut is the only original and important area in Polish art, and in this field our graphic artists have also a lot to learn from them." In his judgment the representatives of the other media were of average quality. A far more polite and detailed review appeared in Magyar Művészet written by Emil László Budai. Highest appreciation shows across the lines about woodcut artists again, and the author sometimes gives himself away directly: "[...] we Hungarians hardly have a woodcut artist on a par with Polish Skoczylas," or "as for copperplate etchings [...] the Polish exhibition does not impress us so deeply, mainly because we also have quite a few good etchers." 14 The follow-up of the successful Polish graphic exhibition was a Hungarian selection presented in Poland in the next year, followed in 1928 by a representative showing of modern Polish art in the National Salon 15 . The introductory study of the catalogue was written by Mieczysław
