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

Szücs György: Nagybánya - változó időben

effervescence of spiritual life in the wake of these new efforts, the heated battle of opinions and convictions, although it dawned on me that these disputes that enlivened the cafés in the evenings and shattered the silence of the glittering paths in the dark grove implied the seed of a spiritual schism. The course of progress is marked not only by quiet evolution but also by tremours and revolutions. Life is born of a turmoil, the new image of the world emerged from chaos."

21 In his monumental book written at the end of his life, The Nagybánya Artists' Colony, he discusses the work of the neos, whose talent he acknowledges, as a "postlude" to Nagybánya. The approach that regards any art as "genuinely Nagybányaist" which was created until the leave departure of Hollósy, i.e. 1906 at the latest, may find its explanatory arguments in Réti's book on Nagybánya. However, when one speaks of Nagybánya art, tracing its history with all its upswings and standstills, one cannot stop short at the moment when the spiritual radiance of the town began to decrease and its effect was no longer so penetrating as it had been in the decade following the foundation. It must be realized that at the beginning there was a great distance between theory, the identification with nature and the pictures actually painted. Once, however, the painterly tools had become drilled in, routine, and last but not least teachable, the art of Nagybánya turned into Academism. Ferenczy's pupils from Budapest used Nagybánya as a summer practice camp from the 1910s; the high school reform of Károly Lyka and István Réti in the early 1920s brought the ultimate acknowledgement of the spirit of Nagybánya and at the same time set the level at which it could be superseded by the next generation. When the risk of the search has been lost, when the individual relationship with nature is not metamorphosed into a picture, the conservation of tradition, the uncritical reverence for the achievements of the founders comes to a head. The pantheistic approach of the early period is also discernible in the works of the lesser-known artists. In 1908 Irma Seidler expressed her jealousy that György Lukács had "the word as the channel of expression" whereas she was hard put to formulate her ideas about painting.

22 Sometimes, however, she managed to put to paper the intimate experiences of her encounter with nature. "At least I have gone so far with landscapes that the crystallizations of artistic impressions and the outcome of reflexions have become so strong and vivid in my mind that I keep encountering them in nature in the form of impression. Outsiders who do not know the synthesis may misunderstand it and believe that my motives are caused by impression. And it must be so. I'm afraid I can't express myself meaningfully, but I must say I see a landscape composed, so I see it with the power (and tools) of Impressionism."

23 The words of the forgotten painter Irma Seidler may allude to Ferenczy's view of nature, but oddly enough, her approach is akin to the ideas of Georg Simmel, who elaborated a theoretical framework for the problems of landscape painting. In his writing The Philosophy of the Landscape, Simmel, a friend of Lukács's seeks the answer to the question of how the "landscape" becomes a synthetic emotion expressing "nature" as such. The point of painting is to find a segment of nature which evokes not a single portion of scenery but rather the image of nature in its entirety.

24 Up to the First World War, the standard measure of contemporary art remained Paris, where artists could refresh their arsenals. Those who visited the French capital experienced a rebirth, so to speak, similar to the raptures of Aladár Kuncz, later the editor of the periodical Erdélyi Helikon: "When I was first filled with the air of Paris, I felt a terrible repugnance to the air back home. I was scared from the beginning of the moment I would have to drop off this cultural body, but now I am imbued with such a serene universal peace of life, which illuminates everythings with a tender light and brightens the path I am going to tread, the road of great passivity, all-planning, constant perception and perfect improductivity," he reported his state of mind to Géza Laczkó in 1909.

25 "I've been attending Henri Matisse's school lately and making good progress. I have the spirit to it, too. I've never spent a winter so usefully, I hope to make up for what I've missed so far in no time,"

26 Géza Bornemisza had written to his master István Réti in the previous year. In a short chronology, sentences thump as in a strange obituary: 1901 - Hollósy's last summer in Nagybánya, 1906 - Béla Czóbel's "ultra-modern" pictures from Paris. A closer look, however, reveals a more organic transition, even if it does not lack symbolic moments. Jenő Maticska was just as kind a pupil of Hollósy's as was Sándor Ziffer. Maticska, a close friend of Czóbel, died in February 1906, a few months before Czóbel's pictures were exhibited in the studio. Czóbel entertained the most radical ideas of art at that time: "Yes, to forget everything imposed upon me, to discard everything selected by others, to be nothing, to be born anew, so that the first sound may be my own babbling, which, when developed into a sentence whatever it may say - shall speak of me."

27 Maticska's ever more variegated art and Czóbel's pre-1906 painting were related. (For example, Maticska painted a pendant of Czóbel's Girl by the Window with Flowers, 1904.) Around this time, 1905-6, many had visited Paris, including Dezső Czigány, András Mikola, Géza Bornemisza, Tibor Boromisza, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba and Valér Ferenczy, so however shocking Czóbel's "howling" pictures might have been, the medium, the small group that could respond to the new spirit, already existed. Czóbel indeed "showed" his works in Nagybánya, never to show up there again. The neo élan was to be consummated by Sándor Ziffer committed to Expressionism, who had been taken both to Paris and to Nagybánya by Czóbel. Yet there was no direct link between Maticska, who died young before reaching the zenith of his art, and Ziffer. Maticska sampled the conclusions of the art of Hollósy, Ferenczy and Iványi, enriching the art of Nagybánya with sever-