Gärtner Petra (szerk.): Csók István (1865 - 1961) festészete - Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei. A. sorozat 45. (Székesfehérvár, 2013)

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and so instead made use of the recently vacated old Kunsthalle. To the defense leapt the curious figure of János Hock, a priest and Member of Parliament, who saw this group as the future of Hungarian art. Hock, however, was less-than-enthusiastic about Csók, and that personality conflict would have long-lasting consequences for the Hungarian art market. Hock would become the leader of the National Salon, an emerging rival to the dominant Kunsthalle, and he would enlist Hollósy's school to exhibit there. But the leading members of this Nagybánya group, including Ferenczy, Iványi-Grünwald, and Csók, preferred the vastly more prestigious and lucrative Kunsthalle. Hock would ultimately be deposed in 1901, ironically right at the time of his greatest triumph, the National Salon's International Exhibition, featuring leading painters from France and Germany, and also including a few of his favored painters from Hungary. The exhibition took place while outrage rose towards a clumsily stage-managed review of Hungary's entries at Paris World Exposition which savaged Hock's enemies and praised his protégés. At this moment, Csók helped lead the cause of removing Hock and assisted the new president, Lajos Ernst, in recruiting his friends which launched the National Salon on its golden age from 1901-1907. When Csók and his modernist colleagues were expelled from the leadership of the National Salon in 1907, they reformed in to the MIÉNK, the first major grouping of modernist artists in Hungary.

Csók showed works at almost all the new venues and institutions in the rapidly pluralizing art market of early 20th century Budapest. He showed at the seasonal exhibitions of the Urania Gallery. He exhibited with the Könyves Kálmán Szalon, as well as at the Művészház [Artists' House] and also served on the jury for their Salon de Refuses in 1910. Eventually he gravitated towards the Ernst Museum, which was founded by the former National Salon president, and which would emerge as the leading gallery of the Hungarian art world (both primary and secondary market) for the next two decades. Csók had a curious knack for always being at the center of most major events in the development of the modern art market in Hungary.

XXIII.

GÁBOR RIEDER

Old apricot tree on the soc-real plain

The painful experience of 20th century cultural history is that the old artists made unwilling and uneasy compromises with the changing regimes. István Csók was one of those modern painters who served the party-state as something of an elder statesman after the Second World War. He assisted in the building of a new institutional structure in the Rákosi regime, but he only participated in the creation of socialist realist art for a short abortive adventure.

István Csók was elected president of the Hungarian Fine Art and Applied Art Association, i.e. the soc-real top organisation, on September 24,1949. He became the head of the organisation where party delegates sat next to Aurél Bernáth, Róbert Berény and János Kmetty. Csók proved to be an ideal man for the presidency since he was not engaged in politics. The popular, joyful, elderly painter was seen as apolitical even among the modernists at the beginning of the century; his western alignment and progressive point of view had always remained within the limits of consolidated, centrist modern middle class, thus it is not a coincidence that he could fill significant positions between the two wars.The power (and the partly opposing Bernath-circle) needed the honourable Csók as a "tool" to legitimate the doubtful steps taken by art-politics, for which he received the Kossuth Prize, first in 1948 and secondly in 1952 as a confirmation of his position. In the meantime a jubilee exhibition was organised for him and a street was named after him in Székesfehérvár. Csók maintained this distinguished status until the end of his life. A ceremonial dinner was held on his 90th birthday by the Association and he was elected president for life; moreover the showroom of the Art Gallery on Váci street in downtown Pest was named after him. His birthday was celebrated with a jubilee exhibition in the Art Gallery, a monograph was published by the Fine Arts Fund, and in addition, his memorial museum opened in Cece one year after his death.

In spite of all these facts, none of his works participated in the 1st Hungarian Fine Art Exhibition considered as the grand opening of the soc-real. However, a Csók triptych, War and Peace (XXIII.4-6), was displayed in the next-year soc-real muster (2nd Hungarian Fine Art Exhibition). The old master could not keep up with the Soviet thematic painting but he coped with the compulsory and challenging task of pattern-following by repainting the genre-picture of Gathering Hay (cat. 9), which he'd first made in 1890 in Munich.The Gathering Hay lacks any short-story-like or sociological messages; rather it is a genre-picture depicting the artist's peasant friends in Egres and focusing his painterly questions. The sketch of the new version is far more modern, the brush technique is much lighter and the master added two extra parts on both sides of the painting. A dead mother and her dead baby, surrounded by scattered books and the ruins of a building, are lying in the expressive and pathetic close-up in the left wing of the triptych, whereas, in the right canvas, a sculpture of a bird of prey is all attention while watching the order of simple wooden crosses hiding under the poplars in the shade. Despite the borrowing of the title from Tolstoy, the symbolism of the composition is not too complex. The work was not successful in professional circles but the official art politics of the day took notice: Csók received his second Kossuth Prize. Even his biographers mention that the elderly painter, who was suffering from visual problems, wished to close his professional career with this work.

Despite his privileged position, Csók never belonged to the well-paid circle of the socio-real artist elite. In order to survive, he