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

Csorba Géza: A Nagybánya-kép száz éve

creation not only inner picture-creating intuition, or imagination, but also simple reconstructing visual memory..."

22 This is the first occurrence in Réti's writings of the notion of intuition, one of the basic elements of the aesthetic system he drew up. Probing into the relationship between intuition and the view of nature, he also gives for the first time a more detailed analysis of Károly Ferenczy's development up to that point, declaring that he was the Hungarian representative of "pure painterliness" in Hungary. Réti makes no mention whatever of the neos, unless we sense an allusion in his statement that the painters of the first generation were saved from the influence of newer trends by their basically Naturalistic stance.

23 He put to paper his art esthetics in the first half of the 1930s in two treatises published first in the review of the National Academy of Fine Arts (A művészet és természet [Art and Nature], 1932, and A művészetek rendje és rokonsága [The Order and Relations of the Arts], 1934), later also published in a separate volume.

24 The theoretical edifice is erected on the esthetics of the Italian Benedetto Croce and the Frenchman Henri Bergson, two philosophers in vogue in Europe at the beginning of the century and also known in Hungary. Croce's Aesthetics, Theory and History was published in Hungarian in 1917. The theory unfolded in it rests on two pillars: "To see is to express, no more (no more, no less), to express... The painter is the one who sees what others only feel, or don't see looking," and "the imagination, the creative act... is intuition, a process that cannot be generated consciously".

25 Réti alloyed this intuition theory of Croce with Bergson's idea of "feeling like the object" to create his own aesthetics whose bottom line is the following: "Intuition is the common denominator with which ... the work and its reception can be brought into internal relationship and art can be understood in its unity. This understanding starts from the basic axiom that »art is intuition«, in Benedetto Croce's categorical formulation.

26 Three forms of intuition are implied by artistic creation. The first is the experience of attitude, the second is the inner, creative visual intuition, imagination, and the third is the Bergsonian empathie intuition, feeling in place of something represented."

27 He moulded this aesthetics into an organic whole with the painting of Nagybánya in the manuscript of his book published posthumously. His book A nagybányai művésztelep [The Nagybánya Artists' Colony], based on his former writings, presents István Réti's Nagybánya concept both in fine detail and in its self-containedness.

28 No fundamentally new elements are added, but the questions formerly merely touched on or explicated in brief are analyzed most sensitively here, including the pragmatic history of the artistic processes that took place in Nagybánya, the comparison of the Nagybánya movement with foreign trends of the period, the outstanding significance of the founding generation, that of Hollósy acknowledged with certain reservation and that of Károly Ferenczy appreciated unconditionally, and his evaluation of the neo movement, this time formulated more subtly but essentially based on his former views. Thus, the Nagybánya image created by Károly Lyka and István Réti is a self-sufficient, closed system of art theory, the theoretical framework of which derived mostly from generational sources and did not allow the new trends emerging in the mid-1900s to gain a footing. It follows from this that in the course of the subsequent development of art historical research and outlook this Nagybánya concept had to elicit controversy and its documents had to become objectively disputed. Its lasting worth lies in the fact that it laid the foundations of the chronicle of the Nagybánya movement simultaneously with the events, and it was the first to formulate the definition of Hungarian Naturalism and Impressionism. Even the most recent Nagybánya research acknowledges its source value in this regard. Although pressed for space, this brief overview could not evade this lengthier yet still very sketchy presentation of Réti's concept of Nagybánya, since nearly all the subsequent concepts can be compared to it, all take it as their starting point or point to contest explicitly or implicitly. As such, it serves as a stable point, a point of reference in the changing historical assessment of Nagybánya. In terms of its basic conception, Miklós Rózsa's book of 1914, prefaced in appreciative words by Károly Lyka, is the first to be mentioned.

29 With references to the philosophical currents of the period and sociological art research launched at the beginning of the century, he tackles from a historical aspect and in international contexts the intricate, complex developmental process of Hungarian Impressionism fed by various streams including Nagybánya, the most important source. In the book's chapter on the Nagybánya painter, he states the historical merit of Hollósy, defines Károly Ferenczy's place and style-creating role

30 and reviews his life-course stretching from Naturalism through Impressionism to decorativity. This and his evaluation of the painters of the first generation are still influenced to some extent by Lyka and Réti, but Post-Impressionism is a new element in his analysis and new is the the specific art historical explanation of the neo movement, which is embedded in the overall evolutionary theory of his book. Rózsa claims that the neos actually wanted to do the same as the impressionists, "to find an equivalent to life" with the deviation that "they wish to express the sight in an allegedly final reality, in a pure, abstract formal idiom."

31 "What is more", he writes, "it is clear that the same moral, philosophical, social, aesthetic and artistic phenomena which accompanied the start of Naturalist and Impressionist art are manifest - perhaps slightly more aggressively - today as well and that new Impressionism (Neo-Impressionism!) only marks a new turn of the wheel of progress which, it cannot be emphasized enough, also turns round itself once, while moving along. Beneath the new form, the Hungarian representatives of Cezanne's traditions returned to the old values, except that in the stylization of nature