Veszprémi Nóra - Szücs György szerk.: Borsos József festő és fotográfus (1821–1883) (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2009/4)

BORSOS JÓZSEF, A FESTŐ / JÓZSEF BORSOS THE PAINTER - Nóra VESZPRÉMO: A Virtuoso Dancer at the Masquerade. On József Borsos' Style

NÓRA VESZPRÉMI tuoso Dancer at the Masquerade ON JÓZSEF BORSOS'STYLE In the specialist literature, József Borsos is widely acclaimed as a major representative of Hungarian Biedermeier painting. In writing this essay, my aim has been to investigate as well as to gualify this categorical claim. The term "Biedermeier" has several definitions in the specialist literature. Since the majority of them take 1848 to be the year that marked the end of this stylistic period, a fair proportion of the paintings by Borsos, who was active in the 1840s and the 1850s, would in fact fail to gualify as Biedermeier on that score. On the other hand, the last comprehensive exhibition on Biedermeier art in 2007 (Vienna, Milwaukee) defined Biedermeier by a single characteristic - an urge for simplicity - and arrived at the conclusion that it only lasted for fifteen years, between 1815 and 1830. In my essay, I have used a broader definition of Biedermeier, one that interprets it not so much as a style following strict criteria than as a period incorporating several tendencies. I have tried to find Borsos' place in relation to these tendencies. The other guestion explored in the essay is related: Where was Borsos' place in relation to the contemporary art scenes of Pest and Vienna, two cities that traditionally have a close and complicated relationship, in view of the fact that he was born in Hungary but painted the bulk of his oeuvre in Vienna? His works exhibited in Vienna in 1842-1843 earned the young József Borsos his first major successes. In the years that followed, his paintings usually won the critic's enthusiastic reception: he was freguently compared to one of the period's most renowned painters in Vienna, Friedrich von Amerling. Executed with the same virtuosity, Borsos'spectacular compositions (for example, The Emir of Lebanon, 1843, Cat. No. 5, ill. 9) did, in fact show remarkable similarities with the works of the Austrian master, who was appraised by numerous contemporary critics as a great innovator and the father of a more graceful, more splendid and more lyrical style of painting. These contemporary texts already hint at the reality of a subdivision in the Biedermeier period (without already using that word, of course): a more virtuoso, more dynamic and more magnificent direction replaced the simple and meticuolous style hallmarked by the name of Friedrich Lieder. Contemporary critics compared Borsos' painting to the works of the very same artists who painted portraits in a more representative manner, in stark contrast with the earlier ideal of simplicity: painters such as Franz Schrotzberg (III. 18) and Anton Einsle (III. 19), as well as Amerling himself. For the purpose of categorizing the analyzed compositions, contemporary art critics often used the terms "spiritual" and "lyrical" as counterpoints to "material" and "ordinary". They often made the claim that the technical "perfection" of the artworks, in other words the meticulous execution of details, would not automatically create an intelligent whole. It is rather telling that the critics freguently used the adjective lyrical in relation to Amerling, the painter who preferred gracefulness to attention to detail in his work. They also appraised Josef Danhauser's genre scenes using the same word. The things they wrote about Danhauser's paintings can faithfully demonstrate that the categories used by the Biedermeier critics often came from the vernacularization of the terminology of Romanticism: the other thing the critics were looking for in genre scenes beside the lyrical element was wit (Witz). For the early German Romantics, the latter meant the "explosion of the tied-up spirit": an almost involuntary gesture that can shed light on a hidden connection in the world in the manner of the flash-like effect of a bon mot. Although it does not have the same philosophical depth, the Biedermeier journalistic criticism viewed the same kind of witticism as the characteristic of the more sublime spiritual content reguired from art. Quite often the reason why they thought that Danhauser deserved praise was that he invested his compositions with a humorous element of multiple meaning: the ironic approach was especially characteristic of his genre scenes set in studio. His irony corresponded with the Romantics' notion of irony: it saw things