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

TANULMÁNYOK / ESSAYS - BERNÁTH Mária: Egy közép-európai modell. Hatás és asszimiláció Rippl-Rónai József festői munkásságában

to the sentiments show him as an epic dreamer, not a sentimentalist. His meditative constitution and synthesizing approach could therefore never find a firm footing in a Munich governed by rigid artistic norms. Moreover, he was wretchedly poor. "... for me, things can't get any worse!... I haven't a garment to put on that doesn't show fellow-feeling for the poverty-stricken,"

6 he wrote to his parents. He kept bombarding the County administration of Somogy with applications for a grant, while also sending drawings to the papers; but Üstökös and Magyar Szalon published altogether only six of his drawings.

7 (Plate 1) He was on polite terms with everyone in Munich, but friendly with no one. He is known to have sometimes joined the cafe soirees of the Hollósy circle, but never became an insider, only establishing a few loose friendships. Of course, these cafe habitues were not yet the future Nagybánya painters but simple run of the mill genre painters studying in Munich who have almost all been devoured by oblivion. Rippl's sense of quality was already evident. Bastien-Lepage idolized by Hollósy had never appealed to him,

8 still less Hollósy's sizzling prophetic aura which, knowing the temperateness of Rippl's personality, must have seemed utterly repellent. Thus, like subterranean streams, the two currents that would fundamentally influence the course of Hungarian art in the future were already present in Munich. There is nevertheless a work created in those desolate times which points to the future. Typically enough, the pastel entitled Little girl with a racket (cat. no. 1.) was not painted in Munich, but at home, on the estate of his patron Adolf Somssich during the summer of 1886.

9 The stifling atmosphere and awkward composition of the picture indicate his development so far, but the palette and the sensuous execution anticipate the future. In regard to the structuring of the entire œuvre, Munich nevertheless fulfilled its role. "In Munich... I never had any other concern than that of becoming ever more perfect, in particular at drawing."'

0 But by 1886, the most important decision of his career was looming, although we do not know what prompted it. "I long to go to Paris," he wrote to his parents, "for I think it is the Mecca of Art."" With a tiny grant at long last in his pocket, he arrived in Paris in March 1887. He rented an atelier and went off with his rolls of drawings under his arm to knock at Mihály Munkácsy's door. The master was already in a critical phase of his career, held to ransom by the art trade, partly because he was unwilling to forsake his accustomed life of luxury. He was ill and tired, but had to continue to demonstrate his creative powers in the execution of enormous commissions. When Rippl visited him, he was working on the cartoons of the murals for Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. He immediately hired the Hungarian painter excellently trained in draughtsmanship, as his assistant. Rippl continued along the road of discovery that had led him from Munich to Paris. Instead of attending the drawing school, he copied Munkácsy's pictures,

12 and painted compositions of many figures. Munkácsy's immediate effect can be seen in his A game of bezigue,

13 although the female profiles of the picture are worth keeping in mind as they are soon to be assigned a distinguished place in his œuvre. (Plate 2) The most typical picture of the three years spent by the side of Munkácsy is the canvas entitled Inn at Pontauen (cat. no. 3.) which is an important point of reference for the incredible renewal that was to take place the same year (1889). Rippl enumerated in this comparatively large work all that he had so far learnt. The stylistic roots can be defined as an alloy of Munich genre painting and the work of Munkácsy. At this stage he does not seem to have had anything to add to this stylistic melange; nothing individual, nothing "Ripplesque" can be discerned here. This negative feature is the real point of interest, since it provides a condensed list of the attributes that he was unable to borrow from the storehouse of the '80s: the choreography of the Munich genre picture governed by strict rules, and the visual idiom possessed by Munkácsy which broke through the constrictions of the genre with a romantic fervour, enriching and legitimising it. The romantic and expressive attitude, the latter spiritually related to the former, is missing from the entire œuvre. The roots are thus obvious, only the sovereignty of the artistic performance fails. It is not a lack of maturity but a mistaken direction: he borrowed his impulses from areas that he was incapable of assimilating. The title Inn at Pontauen is misleading. The village of Pont-Aven in Britanny was to become the setting for the apotheosis of Gauguin's syntheticism in 1888-89. This highly important and decisive date suggests an obvious conclusion: if Rippl-Rónai went to Pont-Aven in 1889, he did so to meet Gauguin. However, Gauguin's pictures "were not accessible", as Rippl recorded at the time.

14 The idea of travelling to Britanny may well have been inspired by the exhibtion of the Symbolic and Synthetic Group opened on June 10, 1889, at the Volpini Cafe where Gauguin had 17 pictures on display. A sentence in a letter to Béla Lázár about an exhibition seen in a cafe probably refers to the Volpini show some years earlier.

15 However, I am convinced that if Rippl-Rónai wished to get acquainted with Gauguin, his trip to PontAven was a disappointment. What could he see in PontAven? In 1889 - one recalls the Grotesque self-portrait - Gauguin was in his most outre artistic phase. His painterly brutality, an abstraction stretching the boundaries of naturalistic painting, is very far from the realm of the painter of the Inn at Pontauen, and even of the Woman in a white-spotted dress. Had Rippl indeed seen any paintings by Gauguin in Pont-Aven, their shocking impact would have been recorded in his letters or his Memoirs. As for their first personal meeting, we should believe the date given in the Memoirs: he first met Gauguin in 1894, when his picture My Grandmother was put on display.

16 It was actually not Gauguin and his associates who discovered as a hidden corner of nature providing inspiration for their work. A large American colony of artists had been working there since 1866 (numbering over 100 by the 1880s), having converted a house for the use of artists; by the time Gauguin's company arrived, Pont Aven was teeming far more vigorously with life