Nagy Ildikó szerk.: Nagybánya művészete, Kiállítás a nagybányai művésztelep alapításának 100. évfordulója alkalmából (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 1996/1)

Kovács Ágnes: A müncheni Királyi Képzőművészeti Akadémia az 1890-es években

ture, painted in the style of Courbet's Realism and opposed this borrowed Historicism and affected genre painting already as early as the seventies. The advocates of the so-called Gedankenkunst (Hans von Marées, Adolf von Hildebrand) came forth during the eighties, as did the exponents of plein-air painting, who advocated the "sensuality of the eyes." Then, in the nineties, the "fleeting" painterly impression gave way to aestheticizing arabesques. Jugendstil, New Realism and Symbolism became the passwords of the experiment which engulfed virtually every realm of life and which aimed at the renewal of art during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The famous Academy of Munich, which from his foundation charted a course between the poles of conservatism and progression, was most often forced to side with conservatism in the battle between old and new. Yet there were forces in the Munich Academy, for example a few "anti-academist" students appointed to professorships, that helped these new ideas "filter through," thus facilitating a correspondence with the artistic endeavours outside of the Academy. The Academy thus became more than the educational institution, what its founders had intended to etablish in the interest of propagating the canonised artistic principles. Quite the contrary was true: it was precisely the involuntarily absorbed impulses wich were the most influential in its development. Even if the Academy was forced to play a negative role in some cases, it is undeniable that no individual nor group development would have taken place without it. This did not happen in the same way as it had before, when the given master had to be surpassed. The new occurred always in opposition to the "thickheadedness" of the prevailing Academy. The career of the Secessionists provided excellent proof of this. Not much after the Academy had invited the exponents of the new direction to teach in the institute, the formerly revolutionary artists became affluent and "official." Its purposeful internationality, which was carried out all along, contributed to the widespread reputation of the Academy at the time. It accepted students from many countries, especially from Eastern Europe (Bohemians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Slovenes and Bulgarians). The Munich Academy played an outstanding role in the development of Hungarian art. Between the 1860s and World War One, (and to a certain extent even afterwards), more than two hundred men and women attended the Academy, and even more lived and worked in Munich during that time. It is only natural that their experience there left its mark on their future career, but the extent of the influence of Munich's intellectual environment and Academy on Hungarian painting provided many issues for heated debates in the past as well as in the present. This essay tries to point out the dilemmas of the Munich Academy as an educational institution attempting to moderate the negative picture created by Hungarian art historians in the course of their partisan effort to support the modern directions.