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

up firmly, and plunge into the elaboration of his new painterly message with incredible audacity. As if he had picked up the clew dropped years earlier. He had retrieved the formal elements of style learnt in France years before and built them into his new practice of painting. The revival of the pictorial arsenal he had adopted from the form culture of post-impressionism served as a reassuring background to his experiments, enriched with the painting experience of the years that had passed since. He took possession of the glowing pure colours, slackened the plane surface into tiny patches, and gathered the forms into coherent units by daring, sweeping, dark contours. At first his themes still derived from the interiors, depicting his friends, family members in this new "dotted" style. Though the character traits of the person portrayed were still present in the pictures, Rippl-Rónai was increasingly absorbed by the process of structuring the picture. The depicted objects and pieces of nature were present in the composition with their encompassing forms and strong colours rather than their thematic meanings. The picture surfaces simplified to powerfully applied groups of colour patches, in which the reference to objects is no longer unambiguous. Our eyes accustomed to abstract painting do not even wish to unfold the objects from the hints at natural reality. With the autonomous painterly values and taut pictorial organization, the colourful flat surfaces inspire the all-round experience of complete works of art. Thus Rippl-Rónai set off on the course of painterly abstraction increasingly bravely, the first steps being still taken in Paris. This process was not a conscious commitment to non-figurativity. His intellectual disposition tied to the empiria inhibited him from taking that revolutionary step. The process of stylization, reduction did begin in his art, however. In that-time Hungary, it was highly problematic to recognize, accept and appreciate this. It was actually little known that there might be objective, analytic artistic attitudes that concentrated on formal problems raised by the specificities of the genre, and avoided the emotional or intellectual-speculative aspects going beyond the problems of form. Though in Rippl-Rónai's work this tendency lacked theoretical foundations rather asserted itself intuitively, sometimes at varying levels of quality for its immaturity, his environment did not even spot a germ of the radical change in the approach to art towards which his endeavours were also pointing. He stood completely alone in Hungary with his attempts at abstraction. The different accents of prevalent visual thinking and the different interests of artistic progression at home made his lifework pass unnoticed. The program of the avantgárdé group of the Eight active in the 1910s proclaimed a rational world view in art as against the impressionistic interpretation. The synthesizing artistic attempts based on Cezanne's principles and built mostly of the elements of Fauvism and expressionism did not appreciate Rippl-Rónai's autonomous drive at simplicity. Nor did the sociocentric art of the activists unfolding in the 1920s tolerate the individual artistic initiatives aimed, to boot, at the immanent problems of aesthetic appearance. Rippl-Rónai's elementary talent was not powerful enough to help him overcome the utter obtuseness surrounding him. Eventually, he got tired of it and for the last decade of his life, he resorted to a lighter artistic expression. It came as belated amends that one of his finest "maize-like" pictures, a detail of a park

1 was exhibited together with works by Matisse, Javlensky, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich - among others - in a cross-section of neo-impressionist movements through Paul Signac's oeuvre, showing also the Europe-wide trends in painting from the end of the last century to the 1910s, which highlighted the problem of autonomous artistic creation.

2 The liberation of colours, their decomposition into their constitutents and their arrangement in an independent pictorial structure abstracted more and more from the sight marked the first steps in the reductive process of modern visuality. Similarly to - and more or less parallel with - his contemporaries, RipplRónai also probed into the possibilities of up-to-date visual expression. ' / am painting Lazarine and Anella in a park, Hepi and the others are hot, 1910, cat. no.: 90. 2 Farben des Lichts. Paul Signac und der Beginn der Moderne von Matisse bis Mondrian. (Curated and the catalogue edited by: Erich Franz). Münster, 1996. 367-370. Cat. no.: 121.: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster (1 Dec. 1996-16 Febr. 1997), Musée Grenoble, Grenoble (9 March-25 May 1997), Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, Weimar (1 June-31 Aug. 1997).