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 - Lidia Klein: Lovagi és keresztény arculat... Lengyel-magyar művészeti kapcsolatok a két világháború közötti időszakban

create them and decisions are often made for reasons other than purely artistic. The motivations and goals, and also the conventionality of the choices, remain hidden in such a way that the audience of the exhibition have the impression of its representativeness, objectiveness and adequacy, legitimized by the scientific authority of the researcher who made the selection. Although in his works Clifford concentrates on ethnographic collections, we can observe the same mechanism in art exhibitions. // International Woodcut Exhibition seems to be a perfect example of an exhibition which feigns transparency and objectiveness but is in fact an ideologically biased construction. This phenomenon will become even more visible in exhibitions solely devoted to Hungarian art. Marginalizing the importance of themes is characteristic both for the creators of exhibitions and for the reviewers. In a description of the Exhibition of Hungarian Art in the Warsaw's Zachęta in 1927, the author begins his review by his praise for a study for Christ before Pilate created by Mihály Munkácsy, and concludes by saying that "Hungary knows what progress in Art means, namely the so-called newest trends, sometimes referred to as Futurism, or elsewhere Modernism, or even prettier: Cubism, the difference being usually in the name", and warning the readers that "caution is advised while gazing at these things."

6 Leaving out, disregarding or making ironical comments on avant-garde phenomena in Hungarian art and at the same time underlining the significance of religious and folk themes was strongly conditioned by political reasons, and constituted an element of the cultural policy of the period. Polish artistic press from the years between the wars provides many articles which clearly show the shaping - dependent on political goals - of the image of contemporary Hungarian art. In a newspaper report from the Hungarian Exhibition at the Friends of Fine Arts Society in Cracow in 1939 (also presented at the Warsaw Zachęta), we can read that "the opening of the exhibition happened at a historical moment when we acquired a common border with Hungary which had never divided us in the course of our 1000-year history of being neighbours."

7 Other reviewers also focus their attention on the community of Hungarian and Polish art, for example taking particular notice of a painting of Aba-Novák "presenting episodes from the history of friendship between Poland and Hungary in its historical development."

8 The theme of friendship between the two nations is the main issue of the exhibition also for Stefania Podhorska-Okołów, who in an article for the Polish-Hungarian Review wrote that the overriding impression created by the exhibition was "the closeness of that art to ours". Further on, the author points out the features which influenced this closeness, and states that "spiritual kinship stems from the fact that both Hungarian and Polish art grew out on a ground of Christian and knightly ideals (...). The whole exhibition had a high propagandist importance. It presented the artistic output of our brother nation to the Polish general public, and showed us its knightly and Christian aspect, a soul very much akin to ours by tradition, temperament, elan, the cult of heroism, freedom and greatness."

9 Although from our present-day perspective avant-garde tendencies were an important phenomenon in the Hungarian art of the 20-year period between the wars, they cannot be used as a proof for closeness and brotherhood of the Hungarian and Polish nations. If we look at this problem through the prism of Polish-Hungarian relations, the fact that these tendencies were marginalized by creators of exhibitions or critics is not surprising. The exhibition Dialogue in Black and White I Dialog czarno na białym, presented in Budapest and in Warsaw, is based on different choices and draws our attention to other problems. It shows the image of Polish-Hungarian relations in a way that is dissimilar from the above-mentioned exhibitions and articles, and the aims that the creators of the exhibition want to achieve are totally different. Looking at the question of artistic relations between Poland and Hungary in the interwar period, besides the way in which people wanted to see the art of the two countries, one can observe a more universal problem. One can notice how in various ways, dependent on politics or other non-artistic aims, one can not only see but also create the canon of the history of art. Lidia Klein