Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 105. (Budapest, 2006)
ANNUAL REPORT - A 2006. ÉV - JUDIT GESKÓ: Van Gogh in Budapest
placed Raffaello. This also meant a new turning point in the long debate regarding the priority of drawing against painting. The rediscovery of Frans Hals gave way to the quick, straightforward painting technique that rejected full elaboration, while the elevation of Rembrandt was due not only to his artistic merits and characteristic use of chiaroscuro but also to his realism, as well as intimate and socially sensitive rendering of biblical themes. Van Gogh, a deeply religious Dutch protestant, and connoisseur of the Rembrandt paintings in Dutch collections, integrated these aspects into his individual style in the portraits he painted during his period in France. The socially sensitive genre painting characterized the initial phase of Van Gogh's art, on which, in addition to Rembrandt, Jean-François Millet made the greatest impact. In the second phase of his career, he acquired the concept and painting technique of the impressionistic landscape tradition, which helped him in his aspirations to renew landscape painting through intensifying his sensitivity to symbolism and metaphoric thinking and by teaching him how to highlight motifs and elaborate artistic content; however, this same tradition prevented him from rejecting the rhetorical and from creating an autonomous artistic form of expression. The tension caused by this is represented most markedly in his pictures painted at the sanatorium of Saint-Rémy, on the characteristic copies he made after the works of Rembrandt, Delacroix, Millet and Doré; paintings with which Van Gogh wished to cure himself. The ailing artist painted the works dear to him with his own special colours, using these great works as a yardstick to measure the strength of his own art, and to assist him in creating his unmistakeable, mature figurai painting. Another source of artistic inspiration for Van Gogh was his collection of Japanese prints that amounted to nearly five hundred works. At the exhibition this influence was represented by more than twenty Japanese woodcuts and books, on loan for the purpose of the exhibition from the Ferenc Hopp xMuseum of Eastern Asiatic Art, the Library of the University of Fine Arts and the Füst Milán Collection of the Art History Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In her article on woodcuts Mónika Bincsik, a researcher at the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Art, wrote that the thematic groups of the ukiyo-e woodcuts are regarded as the greatest treasures of Japanese culture and artwork: the female portraits, the representation of the w r orld of the kabuki theatre and the landscapes, which formed a separate unit, as well as the depiction of birds and flowers, which had a major influence on Van Gogh. Discovering Japanese art was akin to a revelation for a whole generation of French artists. Van Gogh admired the colour scheme of woodcuts, their composition, and the decorative style of drawing, which is clearly visible in his own still-lifes of flowers and trees. This influence, however, had another, none the less significant aspect as well, and as he wrote to his brother
