Gärtner Petra (szerk.): Csók István (1865 - 1961) festészete - Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei. A. sorozat 45. (Székesfehérvár, 2013)
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Csók encountered the newer works of the Fauves at the Salon des Indépendants and at the Salon d'Automne, which he visited regularly from 1906. While previously, he presented his own works exclusively at the official Salon, persuaded by his young Hungarian friends in Paris, he also showed at the Salon d'Automne from 1908, which was open to modern endeavours. Among his figurative works, his Pink Mill (cat. 45), Sleeping Socac Peasant Woman (cat. 46) and Socac Girls on the Shore (cat. 50) are his most successful "expressive folk genre paintings". The passivity of the figures and the reduced narrativity particularly rendered his portrayals suited to understanding the Socac girls clothed in colourful, patterned textiles as a neutral, decorative dash of colour, and to place them within the whole of his compositions. When he painted it, Csók placed his Chest with Tulips within a broader inter-cultural domain, rather than into the local-national position. At the second exhibition, MIÉNK, alongside his Hungarian Doll was its pair, Chinese Doll (Little Buddha statuette, cat. 40). His composition painted in 1909, entitled Hungarian Room, suggests this broader sphere of interpretation. The elegant lady wearing a boa, placed in the peasant interior, with the nude Thamar above, and the porcelain statuette of Buddha alongside, provide a confrontation of urban and folkculture,"West"and"East", modern painting and traditional folk art. Csók's atelier in Paris was a real "contactzone", in which Thamar, Parisienne, Buddha and the chest with tulips are the common denominator for the gaze of the Western artist. In the course of his changes and "transformations", Csók employs his figures again in compositions of diverse themes. These figures are at times condensed and constant visual signs, similar to the concentration of a pictogram, that even when placed in a milieu radically different from the original, they preserve their character of a quotation. The figures from his earlier folk genre paintings reappear in bourgeois genre pictures or in compositions applying the visual topos of 17th century Flemish genre paintings. Csók's"Flemish"genre pictures are most akin to the pasticcio genre from among the rich prolific range of artistic copies and transcriptions. The apparently weightless, demure world of his Flemish genre pictures, in a certain aspect, offers us the key to his life oeuvre. The role-playing character of Csók's composition is most clearly embodied in his stylistic reinterpretations. Viewed from this perspective, his Sárköz and Socac folk genre pictures can be liberated from a constraint for authentic ethnographic description, and they can reveal their true faces, which are essentially identical to the world of his Flemish interiors. Csók's painter's credo is summarised within the framework of his complex system of symbols in his self-portraits. In spite of the dominant presence of the nude in his Corner of the Atelier (cat. 3) painted in Paris, this is essentially a self-portrait: an account of a forty-year-old man, the ars poetica of an artist standing at the midway point of his life. The painter is present only as a reflection in the pictorial space, referring to the illusionistic, mimetic character of pictorial composition. Csók considered it the greatest acknowledgement of his career, that in 1911, one of the most celebrated galleries of the world, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, commissioned him to paint a self-portrait (IV.58). In the background of his Florentine self-portrait, Csók quoted a detail of his nude composition, known as Two Idols (IV.59), intended as a summary. The stainedglass window in the background shows the well-known episode of the legend of Saint Genevieve, in which the candle of the holy girl on her way to the church is blown out by the devil, but her guardian angel rekindles its flame. The saint, vowing eternal virginity, and resisting the devil's temptation, appears only as a visual quotation in sharp counterpoint to the unclothed female figure seated in an unworldly manner on a carved Chinese chair.The devil flag standing opposite the nude categorically indicates that the enthroned nudity is the progeny of the end of the century femme fatale, with her beauty serving satanic powers, while Genevieve is the pure woman, the embodiment of the femme fragile, who is assisted by the angel drawn on the glass window. By inserting into his work a painting in progress, Csók thus referred to the parallel presence of disparate spheres of reality: the artificial, the painted, and the experiential. Behind his own figure evoked sculpturally, the abstract, illuminated phenomenon is traced on the glass window, and between the two is the idealised nude figure of the fleshand-blood woman as idol. V. ILONA SÁRMÁNY-PARSONS The Young István Csók in his Era This study analyses the first significant creative period of the painter István Csók, between 1888 and 1893. It covers the years he spent in Munich and Paris, and locates his works within the contemporary stylistic and intellectual trends of German and French painting. It also seeks to demonstrate how rapidly the young painter achieved an international reputation through the outstanding quality of his work at that time. Csók began his career with works in the manner of plein air realism, inspired by Jules Bastien-Lepage, a style labelled "naturalism" by contemporary art critics and "fine naturalism" by Hungarian colleagues. His first large canvas painted in the modern naturalistic peasant genre (Potato Peelers, cat. 4), exhibited a remarkably virtuoso technique, approaching the precision of the Old Masters, but also exuded a cool "impassibilité".The painting, which showed three women peeling potatoes in a barren room with the light falling on them from behind, was shown in the Paris World Exhibition in 1889 and won an honourable mention for the artist. His next picture, the Gathering Hay (cat. 9), followed Bastien- Lepage more closely, both in its composition and in its subject matter, but the spatial arrangement is less successful than in Potato
