Gärtner Petra (szerk.): Csók István (1865 - 1961) festészete - Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei. A. sorozat 45. (Székesfehérvár, 2013)
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1 ■ L. 464 RESUME own spatiality generated from their colour values and material nature. In some of his pictures related to the European art historical tradition - just as in his Comer of the Atelier (cat. 3), displaying the indispensable element of Flemish interior and genre painting, the rich carpet of the decorative parade - the flat ornamentation of the carpet in part becomes a concluding element of the picture frame. In our example here, the view of the woman's body winding into the space is of particularly powerful effect, before which (in the foreground of the picture) the drapery that intensifies the narrowness of the pictorial space frames a separate, soft spatial layer. At othertimes, the painting of drapery, bound to its tradition, balances with the softness of the undulating pattern of the fabric, between the picture plane and the depth of the image. (Parisian Lady, cat. 24) We might refer to his mode of painting as the painting of fields (he called himself an impressionist, and his painting was often compared to that of the impressionists).7 In 1915, he wrote to Béla Lázárthat he did not make distinctions between plein air (i.e., generally landscape) and interiors.8 And truly, he painted a composition that in 1913 was so unusual, it could have been said to be uniguely taut, with its interior still-life placed within a landscape (Breakfast Table, cat. 97), thus melding the two genres.This was a sublime artistic notion, and truly, no one says of it (as the painter hoped), that "Oh, look! We've already seen this from the French!"9 The "local motif" vanishes in this picture, but remaining as its particularity is the vitality, that (with its colourful, generous bouquet of flowers, unified with the tree) embraces the various pictorial and living spaces. István Csók was born in 1865 in Sáregres, in Fejér County. During the course of his long life, he always retained, in various ways, the rich, opulent painterliness of his ornamental motifs, in the carpet (Züzü with the Rooster, cat. 71 ), flower (Arcadia and garden pictures) and Oriental (Little Buddha Statuette, cat. 40) motifs in his still-lifes, interiors, nudes and genre pictures, and in the pulsating, but tight, particular pictorial space he created for them. Composed as genre pictures, he painted his first significant works in the international style - of French origins - of his years of study in Munich Lord's Supper ("Do This in Memory of Me", cat. 7). With a series of "fine naturalist", tonal genre pictures, he set off on his career that was prominently successful both in Flungary and internationally. In 1951, he repainted his early picture, Gathering Hay (cat. 9), at the centre of his War and Peace (XXIII.4-6) triptych. We might consider the original Gathering Hay as the folk genre picture version of the great work by Pál Szinyei Merse, May Day,10 which he saw when he arrived in Budapest (in 1882), providing his earliest art experience. With this picture, Csók placed himself and his artwork into the history of Hungarian painting engaged in fundamental questions, both of European rank and universal picture creation, indicating - with the colours outstanding from the tones, with which he characterised the folk attire-the roots of the palette and his own painting vocabulary, folk art and ornament. In the first years of socialist Hungary, the triptych was highly esteemed, and he received the Kossuth Prize for it. At the time, Csók's pictures were popularised everywhere, and they were popular. Then, it was as if his person had disappeared from common knowledge, as, in the Hungary closed behind the iron curtain, the artists making Hungarian art that could fit unhindered to the art of the "West", i.e., without Hungarian problematics, were made classified examples. Thus, the question of a "Hungarian style"also was relegated to the background. In István Csók's exhibition today, we can appreciate both the Europeanness and the Hungarianness, primarily the units created with individual artifice in his painting, and the new qualities of painting itself born in Csók's art. The exhibition arranges his life-work in chronological and thematic order, with the shaping of new groupings of pictures aligning discoveries in the sphere of scholarly research (e.g., Nirvana, cat. 38, displaying Far Eastern effects), to which, at times - groupings of objects also ranked as discoveries also belong (Csók's Far Eastern furniture and objects from the East Asian Museum), thanks to the thoroughness of the research and its extensive nature. The show, rendered more visually exciting with other interiors and objects, belongs to the series of renowned exhibitions of the Székesfehérvár museums, innovating the tradition with a novel approach. Thanks are due to the curators, the staffs of the King Saint Stephen Museum and the Municipal Gallery - Deák Collection, and all those public, institutional and private collectors in Hungary and abroad, who contributed with their loans to the completeness of this exhibition unravelling the threads of art history and reworking them, at the gallery bearing the name of István Csók. 11962 Cece. 2 3 Jan. 1910, Farkas 1957,51. 2 23 Feb. 1910, Ibid., 52. 4 Csók wrote to Béla Lázár on the Hungarian style: "for now, it is only an idea". Ibid., 53. 5 Fiilep, 1971. Preface; On the relationship with Fülep, e.g.: Csók, 1990,156-158. 6 Letter to Béla Lázár. Farkas, Op.cit., 52. 7 Ibid., 45. 815 June 1915, Ibid., 55. 9 Letter to Béla Lázár. Ibid.; On the other hand, the picture type dividing the interior and the streetscape or landscape with a separating wall, at the same time, integrating them, was known. 10 Farkas, Op.cit., 7.
