A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 1988 (Debrecen, 1990)

Művészettörténet - Bíró Katalin: Egy parasztpárti politikus a népművészetről 1947-ben

Bíró Katalin A MEMBER (BIBÓ ISTVÁN) OF THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL PEASANTS' PARTY ON PEASANT ART IN 1947 At the beginning of 1947 it could already be felt that some sort of turning towards rigorousness would soon ensue in politics, that the meny-directing opportunities of changes in life would soon be driven to a narrower range of possibilities influencing also the spheres of ideology, art and other fields of culture. Partly to go before these promising changes or to prevent their expectable disadvantageous effects on the lot of the peasants' party, and, at the same time, to make the different standpoints unambiguous within the party itself, Bibó István published a series of articles in the party's newspaper called Szabad Szó (i. e. Free Word) from January to may in 1947. Not belonging though to the leaders of the organisation of the party, he was, nevertheless, one of its intellectual leading figures in the coalition period. One of the articles in february was titled Peasants's Party and Peasant Art and this sreated a little stir in the press, though at last all remained almost unnoticed. Veres Péter and Muharay Elemér, the authors of the two counter-articles published also in the Szabad Szó were themselves a leading personality of the party and an expert standing very close to the group of the populists' constituting the spiritual and organisational basis of the party, separately. The debate clearly expressed the different viewpoints of the populists' going back to more than a decade and a half, re-worded though in much sharper formulas according to the spirit of the age. In his writing Bibó István made an attempt at clearing up theoretically the basis of the possible answers to the following questions concerning everyday practical problems of the period: what opinion the peasants' party could form as regards the values of peasant culture and folk art; what kind of attitude the peasants' party could expect or encourage within peasantry concerning its own culture; whether peasant culture could be considered as a living and creative culture in the course of the radical and profound changes of peasant society in the period and in what way the values created up till the period

1 could be preserved. By his answers Bibó István's writing is such a contribution to the more than fifty year old series of theoretical constructions that endeavoured either to create or to reform Hungarian national art by means of folk art, which contribution contains thoughts effective even today and partly justified in everyday practice on the possibilities of the surviving of folk art's values. The present paper also touches upon why in Hungary in those times it appeared to be necessary for a political party to make clear ideologically its attitude concerning the question of the so-called national culture, national art in connection with peasant culture; what were its precedents in the publications of the peasant sociographers' and of the populist writers' in the two war period and which were those meeting-points when these authors dealt the questions above at length. The paper comes to the conclusion that Bibó 1st van's arguments in 1947 made use of Erdei Ferenc's views regarding peasant culture represented consequently from the beginning of the thirties, so in rough outlines the paper reviews the phases of the crystallization of Erdei's opinion till 1943. Thereafter it attempts to follow the train of thoughts in Bibó István's article collating this and other ideas concerning the same subject expressed in his contemporaneous writings. Bibó István in his work approached the question of peasant 350