Gärtner Petra (szerk.): Csók István (1865 - 1961) festészete - Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei. A. sorozat 45. (Székesfehérvár, 2013)
Resume
452 RESUME Thus art is a concept, approach and knowledge, which makes our world conceivable for the observer and in which the principle of sympathy may succeed. The privileges of the genius are conceivability, creation and their result: suffering. Neither the monumental Klinger-like fusion of beliefs in God, nor Schopenhauer's suffering that opened the unconscious domain were unfamiliar to István Csók. Richard Wagner's music, his philosophy of the Oriental, his religious reguisites and cultic relics were very much present in his life, especially in his adolescent years of undisciplined taste and for eternity they remained in the form of his object collection. According to Csók in his late memoirs, the Triumphant Christ has a liberating force of composition. Its theme is rooted in the universal tradition of a changing cultural canon. However, Csók could have found the dualism of Christianity and paganism in the national traditions as well.This effect was not told and was not known by posterity. In order to decipher it, we should focus on the central figures of the draft instead of the figures of Christ and Venus: the lying antigue, goat-hoofed deity and the nymph crying for him. This theme was brought up-to-date by Magyar Szemle (issue 16, 1898) because the poem Pan's Death by Gyula Reviczky, who had died 11 years earlier, had conquered the music world. That is the Budapest Philharmonics presented the symphonic piece by Ödön Mihalovich, the director of the Academy of Music, with the same title. Pan's death is the most well-known poem by Reviczky, who was walking the road of solitude at the turn of the century. Its popularity grew through public recitations, which were usual events then. The poem had various German translations then and Magyar Szemle published the original antique source De defectu oraculorum by Plutarch in the Hungarian language for the first time. This poem contains a wonderful legend of a journey in a ship on the Aegean Sea in the time of EmperorTiberius. When the ship was on the open ocean the crew heard an astonishing sound. The steersman was called by his name and was asked to announce the following three times:"Pan the Great is deadl'The steersman obeyed the command and the crew watched and listened as nature was plunged into bitter mourning. Reviczky's poem takes the antique god of nature and enriches it with a final point in the last verse whose source is, as was discovered by the Hungarian history of literature, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev. The Russian writer's hero in his piece called The Nymph (1878) is put in a mystical mood during a summer walk. A famous Greek ship comes into his mind as well as the ancient tale from the time of Christ's birth. He feels like celebrating aloud.The joyful nature around him resisted the thought of death somehow so that the writer shouted: "Resurrected! Pan the Great has been resurrectedl'To his words sounds of happiness ran surged through the green ridges of the hills and everything turned into a glamorous celebration: into the "laughter of Olympus". However, laughter fades away and like a burning point, a golden cross gleams on the spire of a church in the distance. The herd of nymphs disappears, to the greatest sorrow of the writer and the reader. Csók's motifs are together: Goddess Venus, Pan and his companions, and the vision of the cross. An influential reading experience must have affected our painter when he was looking for a great theme. The mourning of paganism must have been exchanged for the messenger of the new world: the hope of Jesus. However, the spirit of Pan is eternal; after the passing of happy antiquity he would be there in all grasses, bushes, stones and waterces forever, which might have motivated Csók. Other artists of the Nagybánya circle, who established a naturalist school, had a mystical attitude deriving from Romanticism. The fact that the artists stood before the landscape with "emotion" before painting it suggests that they had aesthetical and ethical aims which hid their humility, affection and timidity to the view and which was described by Károly Lyka as "the deep feeling of piety to nature". One of the painters wrote in 1898 that "our naturalism [...] is not a school of painting but an almost religious, pantheistic world view". Pantheism for them meant a point of view or aesthetics connected to the material with respect to ideas and this is what influenced Csók. One and only one religion existed in the school at the end of the 19th century: the worship of nature through art.The famous anti-academic attitude of the Nagybánya School is rooted in this notion, since the artist's ego has to directly experience the outer world, a process which does not need or stand for doctrines. Such a declaration of independence meant a new kind of responsibility for the artist, who was not tied to any institution or method.The external impulse had to be transformed into an inner need which was crystal clear for the Nagybánya School. The consistent performance of the "nature-studies", which were interpreted in a normative way, prepared the way for the new era of "clear picturesqueness" for their successors. However, they were put to the test by the tangible reality of the rich landscape when they stood before it, palette in hand. The common ecstasy was followed by individual experiments and innovations. We are talking about a colossal transformation from the academy in Munich to the nature-cult in Hungary in a relatively short period.These artists made significant discoveries: the structure of the landscape, the rhythm of its volume and lines and last but not least the light, the air and the shining sun, which changed their moods. There were times when pieces of work were destroyed in the struggle to achieve new modes of expression, from which they all suffered. István Réti wrote aboutthis phenomenon: "many of their paintings, which were began with great enthusiasm and then were left only halfway complete became victims of "morbus nagybányiensis": numerous great canvases, complete pictures, work of years which were cut in pieces. These were the proofs of inner catastrophes. Picture-ruins".
