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

TANULMÁNYOK / ESSAYS - KIRÁLY Erzsébet: A kisváros és az otthon képei. Rippl-Rónai kaposvári intérieur-korszakáról

the opposite to the "Babel on the Seine". Back home from glacial civilization inclement for friendship and love, the artist seeks his peace in the familiar, intimate scenery of the home. Differently, of course, from the contemporary writers, Rippl-Rónai also perpetuated a small-scale world Kaposvár, with his home and family in the centre - presumably not independently of his Paris experiences. One's own home and family were the smallest but firmest units of human existence in an uninterrupted current of thought to which his art intellectually belonged at that time. The house is the framework for the family, and the family signifies continuity, sensible repetition, reviving expedience and order. The confessional titles of some works reveal much of Rippl-Rónai's relationship to his close surroundings. In the genitive grammatical forms, personal involvement is accentuated: My house, My home in Kaposvár, My home in the village. What endows a piece of furniture or a segment of a room with meaning is their allusion to the people moving around them: Stove with blue stripes, Room with a green armchair. The figures in the interiors are not elevated from their medium in the manner of portraits, but are shown in their symbiosis with their surroundings. The human figures are embraced by pieces of furniture all but merged with them and partly covering them. The transparent order of objects, the warmth of the furnishing is the setting for a life in seclusion. The pictures taking the "quiet hours" as their themes show states of mind and moods, rather than action. The painter presents people sitting alone or with someone else, immersed in contemplation, relaxation or slumber. Pictures like Meditation, When you live by your recollections (cat.no 70) or Dozing off together (plate 2) illustrate a disposition for relaxed calm, embedded into the frames of an interior genre scene. Motifs of reading or letter writing are also subordinated to this slightly elevated, pensive attitude. In the wake of an old artistic trandition, Rippl-Rónai also uses his figures retiring with a book, newspaper or writing-paper to eulogize the citoyens recharging themselves with the intellectual activities of everyday life. In his picture Christmas (cat.no 69.) the young woman bending over the writing desk is embedded in a festive moment of religious awe. Finally, pictures of the most appropriate male entertainment like smoking a pipe, drinking wine, also belong to the illustration of meditative states of mind, of actionless episodes. As the catalogues reveal, Rippl-Rónai painted far more of these than the extant stock. Both motifs are ancient, and to the Hungarian public mind, they are nation-specific. These forgivable addictions carried on in the cosy home were typical pastimes of the leisurly lords of feudal Hungary. As such, they were constant themes of our literature: the meerschaum pipe Rippl was to portray himself with in his famous old-age picture had a symbolic connotation since the last century, indicating torpor and inaction concealed behind the mask of meditation and philosophizing. Compositions such as Uncle Piacsek smoking a pipe (plate 1) or My father and uncle Piacsek drinking red wine (cat.no 83) also offer a glimpse of the painter's responsiveness to the humour in the tradition. The act and motif of drinking wine is rooted even deeper in the Hungarian customs and art. Literature assigned it a separate genre, the drinking song. The most famous specimens have endowed ordinary drinking with a more sublime content: namely, constituting the frames for the agony of persecuted patriotism. With his lean figure, white beard and threadbare elegance, uncle Piacsek, a protagonist of Rippl-Rónai's pictures, evokes the post1848 gatherings over some wine, the hayday of drinking songs striking the note of patriotic grief. The painter managed to conjure up the days of yore around his figure: Ferenc Piacsek, the retired forester, becomes the embodiment of the intimate, patriarchal past. He is seen as a figure from a tale in a room filled with colourful toys in c7nc/e Piacsek with dolls (cat.no 74) The lifeless puppets are also requisites of the past. They must date from his childhood, so they belong to him just as much as to children. Finally, Rippl also took old Piacsek as his model for his Old gentleman and a woman playing the mandoline (cat.no 71), by no means accidentally. The motif of the young lady making music in the home refers back to music-loving, day-dreaming Biedermeier again - that is, to uncle Piacsek's youth. The Kaposvár interiors are permeated by such and suchlike subtle, indirect archaisms. Rippl-Rónai showed his aged parents and uncle Piacsek in material settings completely homogeneous with them. Paradoxically enough, he applied his pictorial language of unlaboured elegance schooled on modern foreign trends to the depiction of the slowed-down, tired, resigned world of the older generations, sometimes with a mildly grotesque overtone but always with full emotional commitment. After Paris and the French scenery, the somewhat dreamy, xenolithic mood and state of the Hungarian countryside became Rippl-Rónai's natural medium of impulses exploited by him prudently. At the time of the deep crisis and reinterpretation of the ideal-moral-artistic values at the turn of the century, the Hungarian painter of European schooling retired into a traditional micro world at home in order to turn as much of its attractive fullness into pictures as possible. Actually, he devoted a relatively short time to the poetry of the palmy days of peace conserved in the small town. The death of his mother, father and uncle Piacsek, and his move to Villa Róma in 1908, put an end to a period labelled by the curator of the commemorative Rippl exhibition in 1937, Elek Petrovics as "the most fruitful years of his entire career". From a distance of 60 years, we can only reiterate his evaluation.