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

Aba-Novák Vilmos: Felsőbányai körmenet Vilmos Aba-Novák: Prozession in Felsőbánya / Procession in Felsőbánya (Repr.: Uj Szin 1931) al masterpieces, while Ziffer was the consistent practitioner of powerful colour effects. Ziffer became the mechanic of the clockwork set into motion by Czóbel, as it were. Taking another angle, one comes to Pointillism, a common mode of expression with old Paul Signac or Henry Edmond Cross in France in the first years of the century. This kind of "grainy" painting was tasted by Ervin Plány, a painter who died young, and Béla Balla (In Autumn), Géza Kádár (Hay Gathering) and Tibor Boromisza (Bathers) around 1908-12. Knowing that Ziffer labelled his works painted around that time "decorative Impressionism,"

28 one can sense a strange interaction between the mechanically severed trends of Impressionism and Expressionism in the years of the first decade after 1906, and this became the foundation for the artistic style of the Kecskemét colony. One border crossed by "Nagybánya painting" was thus the one demarcated by Pointillist pictures constructed of tiny dots of paint. Some well-known works of this kind include those of Samuel Mützner, a pupil of Anton Azbe and Simon Hollósy in Munich before studying at Academy Julian in Paris, in keeping with the customary "scenario". Yet the decisive influence overcame him in Giverny, where he was able to work with Monet in 1908. His Landscape of this year clearly shows the influence of the French master.

29 As for Hungarian artists, Ervin Plány reached a similar divisionist technique in his In the Garden (1907-9).

30 The picture shows a moment of spring, green trees casting lilac shadows on the yellow pebbles. Subtle greens hide among the flower beds of the park, including red flowers, and the darker shadows of the background also consist of masses of dots. Sunlight has perfectly diffused the surface, which coalesces into a vision in our eyes only. The picture might as well be condemned as belated, if one failed to remember that, for example, Matisse was still painting Divisionist pictures (Luxe, calme et volupté, 1904-5, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) around 1905, parallel with his Expressionist works. A later work by Plány, a favourite exhibit of Art Nouveau shows, Flower Garden from 1910 (Kecskemét Gallery) had already shifted towards decorativity. The "presence" illustrated by these few pictures is characterized by strong lyricism, decorativism, or to put it more critically, by a sort of showiness, while the other border line, the Cubistic approach, focused on pictorial structure, the rational calculation of scenic elements without crossing into the terrain of non-figurality. Sándor Galimberti and Valéria Dénes, working next to Matisse searched for the cubic forms of landscape (townscape), occasionally assembling geographically remote motifs. "I knew a Hungarian couple. When I once visited them, I don't remember on which floor, I found a scaffold built of tables and ladders in their flat, the woman and the husband on top of it both were painters - painting roofs," recalls the sculptor József Csáky without mentioning names, although the Galimbertis are easily to identify.

31 It was to be Vilmos Aba-Novák of the next generation who seemingly "carelessly" but actually consciously subordinated the elements of reality to composition. In his picture Procession in Felsőbánya the church of Nagybánya is almost adjacent to that of Felsóbánya,

32 while in Market at Csíkszereda people in Romanian costumes worn around Nagybánya appear.

33 The third demarcation point is the art of Sándor Ziffer, who lived in Germany during the First World War and arrived with his Expressionist works at the gate of a Kandinskian turn in the early twenties. Kandinsky had stepped into the realm of pure abstraction around 1908-10 from a terrain where visual elements were still recognizable in his landscapes. The same moment can be detected in Ziffer's pictures painted around 1925, but back in Nagybánya he did not make "the great leap" that took place in the art of Vilmos Huszár, Alfréd Réth and Lajos Tihanyi, who had left Nagybánya. The artists who lived in Paris around the same time were, however, attracted to different stylistic stages of painting: Lajos Tihanyi, for example, chose abstraction, while Ferenc Gáli (François Gall) adhered to a colourful lyrical painterliness all through his life.

34 It is interesting to note that after a stay in Barbizon (1924-25), Jenő Paizs-Goebel and Gyula Czimra visited Nagybánya, but their style puts them in the category of the then fashionable Neo-Classicism expressing itself in blocks. This Neo-Classicism was represented in Hungary by Károly Patkó, Vilmos Aba-Novák and his tender "plagiarist", Lajos Fonó, but they also share kindred stylistic traits with Dávid Jándi, Vince Korda, Antal Deli, Jenő Pászk, Imre Nagy and Sándor Szolnay. "Mister Czimra is one of the masters of painting who have represented the genius of Hungarian art in Paris several times..." commented the journal Nagybánya.

35 Later both became decisive figures of art in Szentendre, but in Nagybánya they were only occasional visitors. In the 1920s it was still Paris that gave new impulses to those who visited it. "However hard it is to make a liv-