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

TANULMÁNYOK / ESSAYS - SZABADI Judit: A festői személyiség és látásmód megnyilatkozása Rippl-Rónai és Cézanne modelljeiben

JUDIT SZABADI hough Rippl-Rónai was nearly twenty years Cezanne's junior, there was a parallel period in their lifeworks (between 1889 and 1900) when both painted pictures saturated with a mature aesthetic conviction and when the studios of both had the same Paris, or at least French, sky above them. At the same time, the choice of their models was conspicuously similar. While Daumier painted the outcasts of society, Degas portrayed brokers, ballet dancers, milliners and ironers, and Toulouse Lautrec painted the whores of brothels, the models of the two masters were taken from their close surroundings. They were mostly members of the family, parents, brothers, sisters, wives, children, uncles and aunts or grandmothers, as well as artist friends and themselves. All that notwithstanding, it is not the similar circumstances that invites a comparison between their oeuvres, but contrarily, it is the antithesis or at least difference between the two in their views of life and painting. However similar their choice of models may be, their attitudes towards their models were radically different, which derives, on the one hand, from the dissimilarity in their fundamental experiences influencing their thinking, and on the other, from what they were interested in man. There may lie the clue even to that otherness as the new foundation of art also conceivable as a turn in art history - meaning Cezanne's trail-blazing discoveries in painting - which is manifest in the visual representation of their models and the meaning conveyed by them. Their fundamental experience, which depends on mental constitution in the first place, is represented by a metaphysically interprétable picture by both Cézanne and Rippl. Cezanne's Painter at work (1874-75) which shows the master working on a motif of the landscape while he sinks into the ground as if he were part of nature resounds powerfully his awe of nature, and at the same time, nature is his model. Rippl's / am painting Lazarin and Anella in a park, Hepi and the others are hot (1910) is hallmarked by ceremoniousness and elegance: he is spiffy like a dandy even while painting his wife and foster daughter, in the company of his pets. The love of a slow but dignified way of living - Rippl is seated in an armchair - is coupled with aesthetic sophistication, which is sharply different from Cezanne's sizzling passionateness and from the lumpy, crude, suggestive representation of forms. At the same time, the outlooks deducible from the works are also implied The revelation of the painter's personality and vision in Rippl-Rónai's and Cezanne's models by their attitudes not only to their motifs but also to creation as such, an aspect that influences the manner of their characterization. The differences in their interests can also be confirmed by facts of art historical connections, for both oeuvres root in realism or the aesthetized trend of realism: the coordinates can be drawn along the extension of Manet's (in part Courbet's) and of Whistler's painting. Among the impulses Cézanne received important are those derived from Manet: impassibility, detachment and self-governed formal values are always positive features, while Rippl-Rónai progressed along Whistler's Japanizing, artful and decorative painting wallowing in atmospheric effects as well. These factors combined to influence their subsequent decisions in painting, including their choice of finding the model who was equivalent to their discovery of themselves. In the row of portraits starting with his father's (1863) (Antony Valabregue, three portraits of Uncle Dominique, Achille Emperaire, Paul Alexis, Zola) Cézanne only painted men, while from the Woman in white-spotted dress (1889) Rippl-Rónai mainly took young women as his models (Slender woman with a vase, Woman with a cage, Countess Tivadar Andrássy, Madame Mazet, Margit Piátsek, Relative of Cleo de Merode). The difference becomes striking when Cézanne also paints a woman, his wife Hortense Fiquet. Her portraits not only lack any female appeal - for Rippl, the woman is the enchantingly tempting and erotic creation of beauty, elegance, grace, exciting mysteriousness! - but their awkwardness, the naive to simple-minded expression on the face, the strangely numbed, stony glare show her on this side of animation (Madame Cézanne in a red dress, 1888-1890; Madame Cézanne in a yellow armchair, 1893-1895; Madame Cézanne in blue, 1896). The same polar extremes in contents can be illustrated by the two painters' representation of old women. (Rippl: My grandmother, 1894; Old lady with a bunch of violets, 1895; Cézanne: Old woman with a rosary, 1895). In Rippl's works, the melancholy of transitoriness, in Cezanne's the horror of a life without a way out shove their models in opposite directions - towards the extremes of tenderness and brutality. While their female portraits pregnantly reveal their differences in outlook, their male models tone down these contradictions. Obviously, Cézanne "handled" his