Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)

III. RÉSZ: A KONFERENCIA SAJTÓVISSZHANGJA

however, photographs came into fashion, peasants did not always dare to place them in the holy corner, but hung them close to the door. Using the example of a folk holiday, L. Petzoldt (Austria), tackled the same problem in his paper, "On the Problem of Peasants' Customs Depicted in Pictures." According to G. Wolf (FRG), even such a trivial art as postcards of the nineteenth and twentieth century (until World War I) reflects numerous rites of European peoples. On the one hand, these postcards represent a reminiscence object, and on the other, they show the peculiarities of their utilization in rural communities. A. Hartmann (FRG), whose research is based on relatively scarce material, managed to demonstrate the importance of considering pictures not merely as illustrations of a random rite, but as socially valuable images. Precisely for that reason, he showed illustrations of dancing peasants in a book dating back to the nineteenth century, which characterize the Altenburg region by depicting the faces, gestures, and posture of peasants, thus creating their historic stereotype. According to Hartmann, what really matters is the peasants' stature rather than their clothes, that is, pictures serve as a confirmation of the ethnic self-consciousness of peasants. The same thought was expressed by M. Andersen (Denmark), who gave a wider coverage of the issue of peasants' visual self-affirmation in bourgeois Denmark of the nineteenth century. In so doing, he showed the striving to adopt an urban, primarily petit bourgeois interpretation of life style and behavioral manner which was particularly reflected in elements of clothing, rather than in the tendency to preserve ethnic traditions. R. Erzhabek (Czechoslovakia), in "Marginalia for Methodology of Folk Iconography," conducted research into Czech and Moravian manuscripts at the turn of the eighteenth century, the majority of which are believed to date from the national Renaissance period. Using the example of a book dating back to 1831, Erzhabek raised the problem of classification of these iconographie sources from the viewpoint of their utilization for present-day ethnographic research and solution of methodological problems in connection with their folk character. In the paper, "Hungarian Peasant as Oriental Theme," K. Sinko (Hungary), showed that among the reasons for the enduring survival of this topic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we have to attach the same importance both to the Hungarian national identity, which has its own special traditions, and to the oriental image about Hungarians, having been formed in western Europe, and which worked as a generator in both directions. According to Sinka, this oriental image still has a functional role; its survival in the modern media is reasonable. "Landscape as a Theme of Folk Pictures," the lecture by O. Danglova (Czechoslovakia), considered Slovakian pictures painted on glass, which were widespread in rural areas. Landscape as a theme gained popularity among rural artists and customers only in the twentieth century. Its representation of the picturesque stvle of the nineteenth century is introduced in a mediated form as an imitation of "better" provincial taste. Perhaps the most vivid example of the folklorization of the picturesque style in the rural environment was represented by mural painting and painting on glass placed in the upper part of the entrance gates of houses which can be found in western Slovakia in the region of Zahorie. Idyllic landscapes satisfied