Nagy Ildikó szerk.: Rippl-Rónai József gyűjteményes kiállítása (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 1998/1)

TANULMÁNYOK / ESSAYS - PRÉKOPA Ágnes: Rippl-Rónai József iparművészeti tevékenysége

taste, several memories of the artistic dialogue and mutual inspiration having survived, ranging from motifs they both liked (e.g. portraits in profile) up to embroidered tapestries executed in point lancé. Rippl-Rónai's output in decorative art can also be grouped by recurrent motifs. The first example of his nude compositions - his bathers - was the embroidered tapestry of 1894 entitled Idealism and Realism. The figures of the work received warmly in Paris reappeared between 1910-1912 in the designs of a series of decorative paintings. The most inventive unfolding of the nude sequence is the design for a triple stained glass window only one of which was realized for the Ernst Museum. Rippl-Rónai testifies to a degree of daring he never undertook in his painting: under the pretext of decoration, he handled colours in the Fauvist manner. The illustrations for the little book published by Bing (Rodenbach: Les Vierges, 1895) and several tapestry and stained glass window designs belong to his series of female figures shown in gardens. The most outstanding piece in the series is the embroidered tapestry made to adorn the Andrássy dining room, whose female figure first took shape in a painting. It was some time later that this female figure assumed its place against the background of the garden. The effects of the Nabis and Maillol played a significant role in the development of the final variant displaying the characteristics of the "decorative style". Among Maillol's works, the embroidered tapestry Le jardin enchanté must have been decisive. Similarly to other tapestries of his, this Maillol work is also characterized by some historicizing approach evoking the tradition of woven tapestries. Rippl-Rónai's work entitled Woman in a red dress marks a peak of Hungarian art nouveau also on account of its more concentrated composition, and its pure contrasting colours enhanced by the sweeping contours. There is a single Biblical theme, the Birth and death of Christ, in his oeuvre: a tapestry design displaying the most direct influence of the Nabis. Similarly, there is only one historical scene, a theme so unfamiliar to Rippl-Rónai, in his oeuvre: Astric handing over the crown with a splendid retinue, a tapestry design made for the one thousandth anniversary of the Hungarians' settlement in their country, an event that mobilized the entire Hungarian art life. Besides Maillol, Knowles and the Nabis, a few other artists also had some impact on Rippl-Rónai's decorative works. The influence of Puvis de Chavannes and Cézanne can certainly be demonstrated in the tapestry Idealism and Realism, whose suggestive composition of realism belonging to the frame theme of "toilsome physical labour" alludes to Millet's and Courbet's depiction of labour as its antecedents. In the tapestry Birth and Death of Christ the influence of Denis from among the Nabis is most palpable, while the Gauguin reminiscences so often quoted in research literature can only be seen in the later variants of the composition alluding to the Yellow Christ. Confronting the Biblical scene with the rural life of peasants in his own time, he achieved an anecdotal, tale-like atmosphere, as against the taut tensions of Gauguin's picture caused by the anachronism. Nor do his ceramics resemble those of Gauguin, who regarded pottery as a tool of identifying with the art of primitive cultures, thus making his ceramics for himself, as part of his personal world. In ceramics, Rippl-Rónai made decorative designs with the ornamentation emphasized, unlike Gauguin as well as, for example, Vuillard, who designed far more complex and figurai decoration. Vuillard's masterfully painted plates are not for using but ornaments in the classical sense of the word, even if the pretext to design them was functional. The floral pattern of a wholly individual flavour "cloudy stylization" as the critic of those days remarked - sounding the limits of ornamentation might as well be taken for Rippl-Rónai's sign-manual. This manner of decoration reached its full bloom in the dining-room interior that the main patron of the decorative arts in Hungary, Count Tivadar Andrássy asked Rippl-Rónai to design at the peak of his applied art activities. The Andrássy dining room clearly reveals a peculiarity of Rippl-Rónai's designs for applied art: he fundamentally composed in the manner of painters, reducing the sight to two dimensions, showing it as pictures seen from a main vantage point. Rippl-Rónai concentrated on the visual unity of the unified sight, unable to solve the construction of objects having their own spatiality, statics and aura. He usually designed groups of objects that did not require such knowledge, hence his decorative works are mostly surface ornaments or objects adorned on their surface only, that is, they are decorations existing basically in two dimensions, not being too far removed from a "painter's" point of view and thinking. Some elements of the dining-room furnishings (pieces of furniture, glassware) raised several problems which Rippl-Rónai was unable to solve alone, but he refused to comply with the aspects of the craftsmen executing the design, and came into conflict with them. The painter, advocating the principles of aesthetics, tried to overcome the requirements of materiality, but the outcome did not verify his ideas, and criticism also reproached him. Rippl-Rónai's works in the field of applied arts seemed utterly alien in the Hungarian visual culture at the turn of the century - to specialists and the lay public alike. Since most contemporary disapproval was levelled at his activity in this field, his zeal abated after the completion of the Andrássy dining-room. Though after his widespread and unequivocal acknowledgment (1906) he also made some designs for "decorative paintings", tapestries, stained glass windows, he no longer did so with the enthusiasm he gave vent to around the turn of the century. The contribution to the applied arts of one of the most progressive painters in the turn-of-the-century Hungarian art remained practically isolated. His spectacular and popular "decorative style" was closely related to art nouveau so it soon became outdated. His furniture pieces and glassware did not meet the requirements of functionality, while his ornamental style could not be improved on for the irreproducible individual flavour of his "cloudy stylization", and mainly, for the solutions probing into the outermost boundaries of form and ornamentation.