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

TANULMÁNYOK / ESSAYS - GERGELY Mariann: Kései elégtétel. Rippl-Rónai József vitatott „pöttyös" korszaka

MARIANN GERGELY Th he available literature on József Rippl-Rónai's rich lifework is voluminous. However various the reception of the different periods in his oeuvre may be, the ultimate conclusion is nearly always the same: he was the first modern painter in 20th century Hungarian art. Many have interpreted in many different ways his artistic intentions, but only few have grasped the core to his motivation. The present writing aims to analyze the periods of the lifework as a chain strung up on the thread of a consistent artistic outlook; to illumine the epoch-making tendency already present in his art and typical of our century: the process of the radical purification, abstraction of presenting the sight in the picture. It is meant to emphasize the conviction that Rippl-Rónai was the first and only Hungarian artist in the period who came close to the self-reflecting attempts of autonomous uisuality. From the very beginning, his artistic course was determined by the awareness of his goal, signposted by instinctive insights dictated by talent and by conscious choices. He had the ability to orientate among the available artistic trends while he was perfectly clear about his limitations determined by his disposition. When his fellows were heading for Munich, he knew he had to go to Paris. It was a deliberate decision to use a narrow scope of instruments for painting. He tried to work as simply as possible, with stylized forms, embracing contours and a reduced palette. The Nabis discovered him and called on him to join them. He learnt and experienced much among them and put to good use the visual information that reinforced his ideas about painting. The precipitations of Gauguin's synthetisme mediated by the Nabis, the criteria of sweeping decorativeness and the concentration of pictorial composition applied widely are well known. But he could not fully identify with them. Symbolistic thinking was alien to him. He was treading his own path, preoccupied by asserting the essentialities of pictorial expression. He had his elaborate working method and he stuck to it. He also tried his hand at applied arts, designing, among other things, wall carpets. He adopted the "Gesamtkunst" approach of the fin de siècle in its most subtly refined form. He regarded the painting in its objectivity as an ensemble of colour patches appearing in space. His aim was not to decorate but to create a visual stylistic unity within the architectural space. He insisted on collaboration with modern architecture. These perspectivic ideas of global art rooted in secessionism, when maturBelated Amends RIPPL-RONAI'S CONTROVERSIAL "DOTTED" PERIOD ing in inventive contexts just think of the Netherlands, Russia or the Bauhaus in Germany - blossomed out towards a fundamentally new connection between architecture and painting. It might be just a bit too far-fetched to discover the germs of these revolutionary tendencies in our Rippl-Rónai. It is, however, indubitable that the character of his visual abstraction, his descriptive form-centricity devoid of ideological ballast and the claim of his twodimensional design to monumentality - all of which is to be discussed apropos his oil paintings of the 1910s - might as well point in this direction. To unfold in perspective his up-to-date ideas would have depended on large-scale, demanding commissions. Most regrettably, however, he met with failure most of the time. By the 1900s, before he returned from France for good, Rippl-Rónai had matured into a modern artist of autonomous thought, who stood up for his pictorial style. He was aware that visual arts were characterized by immanent laws, and artists were to elevate the artistic expression to the level of style which is of universal validity, by elaborating their own visual idioms. Similarly to his contemporaries, he realized that in the unity of the complex visual sight, the individual disciplines of art are closely interrelated in the modern world, that the artist did not think in separate genres but in relation to the intricate web of the whole. His was synchronous with the progressive outlook of his age. He was averse to theories, yet the openness of his artistic talent sucked up all new impulses. He was a creatively thinking person who wished to get along as a Hungarian artist, without having to give up his principles. Had he had the chance of being embedded in a spiritual context which encouraged professionally and existentially the recognitions he had arrived at via a lot of hardship, his lifework would have unfolded on a sweepingly monumental scale. Back home, he did not relinquish his great ambitions, though he was met with utter misunderstanding and hostility as an artist. His success at home, in his forties, when he was hardly able to make a living, was the outcome of his reluctant recognition that his creative ideas lacked any response whatsoever, he had to adjust his artistic course to the Hungarian conditions and adopt a more "popular" tone closer to the public taste. His interiors of pleasant atmospheres (1902-1906) brought him professional and financial success. Then Rippl-Rónai the daring experimenter could again step