Murádin Jenő - Szücs György: Nagybánya 100 éve (Miskolc-Nagybánya, 1996)

This book will be published on the occassion of the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the artists' colony in Nagybánya. The purpose of the authors was to reveal, in an approach not applied before, the history of the most significant colony of painters in Central and Eastern Europe.In writing their book, the authors did not aime at listing the facts already known, but at depicting the epoch from the sources available, as well as the time gone by at evoking the sites concerned. Our image of Nagybánya changed several times and in several ways during the past one hundred years It is quite natural that events and intentions when set in a wider spectrum, are seen today quite differentyly from the views of the cintemporaries. The dierect impression of the witnesses, however, always remains interesting; the way the one-time participants evoke, from a close-to-time perspective, all those things at the birth of which they were present, the things they had lived through, accepted or rejected. The researcher can use the abundance of sources. Recollections based on confessions, diary excerpts and letters alternate with contemporary documents keeping track of the many-sidedness of life at the colony of painters. By putting them together, as mosaics, you can draw a uniquely clear background picture. This is the way how the reader revisualizing the story - known to him perhaps only as a record of important data - reads through the novel of Nagybánya from the foundation of the colony untill the end. The establishment of the colony of painters in Nagybánya - the "Revolution of Nagybánya" - brought about essential changes not only in the Hungarian art. It transformed, remodelled the artistic life of the whole region. With its receptive ability and readiness to adapt various painting schools, it created a bridge over the gap that existed, as a phase difference, between East and West from the time of the Naturalism to that of the Avant-Gardie. This process, that can deservedly be called a historical one, is traced a bridge over our sources. How did the community of artists working at the colony in Nagybánya (and their social environment) live through the period starting with the provisional moving to Nagybánya, for the summer seasons, of the Hollósy School of Painting; how did they relate to the "classical" image of Nagybánya implied mainly in Károly Ferenczy' artistic endeavours; how did they feel about the appearence of the new school's representatives, as well as about the moving of some artists to Kecskemét, and finally a new movement of younger painters?