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

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had his classic paintings copper engraved, just as he'd done before the Second World War. His sight was so bad that he could not prepare the copper engravings himself; instead, he had young artists or István Prihoda, who is known as the engraver of István Csók's works in the art business, do the job for him.

XXIV.

KATALIN KESERŰ István Csók

Opening speech for the Idols and Demons œuvre-exhibition Székesfehérvár, István Csók Gallery, 16 April 2011

I have built up my opening speech around a single subject, with which I attempt to expound comprehensively the life-work exhibition that is thematically multilayered, and even considering István Csók's varied styles, articulated across several periods. This subject is the relationship between the ornament and painting.

In my youth, when memorial houses were being established one after the other for 19th and 20thcentury artists (painters and writers) in Hungary, when I visited the house of István Csók in Cece, I saw an unforgettable picture. It seemed to be composed of only colours: pure, strong hues covered the surface, without cancelling out each other's effect. Albeit one first perceives forms, it only gradually materialised before me, that I saw a chest with tulips, with a doll in traditional dress and two jugs of flowers on it. This picture was István Csók's Chest with Tulips' (cat. 48)

Before a deep blue background above, purple below, the stylised (the stylisation refers here to the floral patterns appearing in various ways on the peasant artisanal objects - the chest and the jugs) and real flowers, and the motifs compressed in the fields on the costume of the doll are resplendent with the stylised. This 1910 painting, thus, was built up from four types of ornamental elements. The picture was shown first at the 1910 spring exhibition, before which István Csók wrote from Paris to Elek Petrovics: that he had painted a "still-life made completely in the Hungarian style", and it allowed him to insinuate that“a real endeavour [...] toward the Hungarian style occurred".2

In this letter, Csók also named a genre: still-life, in the framework of which he saw his artwork evolving, andin another letter, which he sent to art critic Béla Lázár, he also implied that following a long period of searching, he fulfilled his objective with this picture.3 (Presumably, his work, entitled Hungarian Still-life, at the 1910 exhibition is the same as the one entitled Chest with Tulips.)

It is an old question of Hungarian art history, whether a Hungarian style can exist, considering the commitment of styles until then to the era, and not to nationalities; albeit in the 19th century, following the scholarly framing of the history of styles, debates took place in connection with a number of styles, with respect to their (national) origins. At the turn of the 20th century, they thought of the "Hungarian style" in various ways. Ödön Lechner based this

explicitly on the motifs and decorative structures of folk art, in his architecture; in the applied arts the artists of the Gödöllő, and then the Kecskemét artist colony, were also occupied with the same "ideas",4 in different ways, about which, not much later, in 1916 István Csók began to consult with one of his Hungarian friends in Paris, art philosopher Lajos Fülep. He named those artworks a part of the domain of Hungarian art (with the emergence of the national problematics, i.e., since the 19,hcentury), in which some sort of universal artistic problem originates in a particular Hungarian motif or theme, and the resolution of the problem takes place in a way that is simultaneously universal and individual.5

We might refer to the development and transformations of the various ornaments at the turn of the century as a universal problem, the latter in the sense that from the ornament, there was a conversion into a substantive element (secession, or art nouveau) of some sort of high art type of composition determining its form and structure, as well as its meaning. In the (plain) painting style referred to as the decorative of the era (i.e., in the concept discovering the autonomy of the image, breaking away from imitative picture creation, and the reality independent of the reality of its flat nature), we can find the new, common parlance, with which Csók also experimented (pictures of Socac, 1900s), and without which it could have faded into the ornamental vocabulary and visual culture of various peoples, so that its own distinctiveness would have disappeared, and from which instead of an illusionistic spatial depiction, a new, abstract pictorial space could be born. From Kandinsky, through Csók's former fellow student in Paris, the Finnish Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and up to the Czech Frantisek Kupka, those artists of the turn of the 20th century can be mentioned, who chose this path, which appertained to the transplantation of the rich palette of folk art into fine painting.

The portrayal of nature and the rich palette of the world was also a penetrating new problem in the European art of the second half of the 19th century, at first remaining at the level of depiction (the impressionists). At the time when Csók painted Chest with Tulips, painterly solutions were maturing in the various expressionisms of painting (Les Fauves, Der Blaue Reiter) and in abstraction, without references to the folk arts. At the same time - in parallel with the problematics of narrative, figurative depiction being relegated to the background - in the interest of a fullness of meaning of the picture, each individual (folk art) motif (e.g., the flower) was rendered a symbol. Csók referred to his Chest with Tulips as a "symbol".61 suspect that - in view of the totality of depicted objects and motifs - he had a symbol of the Hungarian peasant cultural practice, together with the symbol of a lively nature, in mind, including its pageantry of colour. Csók's subjects and genres (the still-life, the interior), in which the ornament could take on the leading role, conformed to the genres of the universal decorative (symbolist) style of the turn of the century.

At the same time, Csók's style also differed from it. His motifs were painterly and untethered; as if he sought the painted colours'