Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 105. (Budapest, 2006)

ANNUAL REPORT - A 2006. ÉV - JUDIT GESKÓ: Van Gogh in Budapest

Theo: in Provence he sought to discover his own Japan. This marked his peaceful and intimate identification with Nature's beauty in the landscape of this part of France and his struggle as a painter to represent the Sun and its colours. The paintings of his last creative year represent the peak of his art. This was the time when Van Gogh applied the totality of his painting repertoire: the paring of the complementary colours on the extremes of the colour-scheme, the decorative character and balance of the composition based on the colours and his most personal characteristic, the movements of the represented flora and the brushstrokes with which the artist aspired to express his emotions. French painting conquered Central and Eastern Europe and England in the closing years of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries. The changes it initiated can be understood on three levels: it announced a new aesthetic ideal in contrast to that of academic painting and it changed the prevalent taste in art. From the sociological aspect of art it heralded and urged a new orientation: instead of the separate aims of national art trends, it called for a new orientation towards the central trends of European art. From the point of view of art theory it reinterpreted the development of art from the results of French painting and it showed the new directions for further development along these lines. This was one of the key concepts of the Edouard Manet exhibition and of the impressionists as well as of the art of the post- and neo-impressionists, which were on show in Hamburg, Berlin, München, Vienna and Budapest [at the beginning of the twentieth century]. In this way Van Gogh's fame reached Budapest and some of his works appeared at exhibitions and soon after in some Hungarian private collections. The Van Gogh paintings of the Kohner and the Nemes collections and the drawings of the Majovszky Collection were selected from the best and most characteristic works and they aptly represented Van Gogh's art for a relatively small section of the public. But his success was minor when compared to that of Gauguin or Cézanne even wdthin the circle that recognised the importance of his art and his particular artistic intensity. The debates in the press and the art critics introducing the art of Van Gogh and his contemporaries at the beginning of the twentieth century paint a telling picture of the intellectual trends in Budapest at that time. They also show how the rumour about Van Gogh's "madness" and the news that spread about his cutting off his ear contributed to the perception of his art as something odd and extreme. What made the conservative criticism even sharper was the fact that Van Gogh was the icon of young Hungarian artists, Ödön Márffy, Béla Czóbel, and Róbert Berény. The history of art criticism between 1901 and 1919 reveals the gradual acceptance of Van Gogh's art and the growing acknowledgment and understanding of the value of his paintings. This is reflected in the words of Iván Hevesy, written in 1919: "The last great impressionist painter was the first