Katalin Gellér: The art colony of Gödöllő 1901-1920 (Gödöllő, 2001)

GRAPHICS AND BOOK ILLUSTRATION Graphic art was the medium most often used by the Gödöllő artists, they produced decorative allegoric pamphlets expressing Tolstoyan, Buddhist, Theosophist tenets. The hero of Nietzsche's highly influential essay, Zarathustra, is shown by Sándor Nagy naked on a peak, plucking the sunrays of his lyre (1905). In several of his works made between 1902 and 1905 he was the first to visualize themes preoccupying philosophers and writers of the age. In his ink drawings he principally depicted the stages of the search for moral development and perfection. That was when he began to use nudity as a symbol of Man in the most advanced phase of selfknowledge. Nagy's views are akin to Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, where self-knowledge was regarded as inner vision and a comprehension of nature and the world. Sándor Nagy initiated symbolism in graphic art in Hungary, he produced imaginative drawings characterised by whimsical linear whirls of fantasy as well as line drawings of didactic tales. Yet his crammed, minutely elaborate graphic works that often required verbal explanation should be seen as forerunners of his surrealism. While Nagy often worked in ink and used thin "etched lines", Körösfői-Kriesch used thick contours in his synthesizing drawings and lithographs. Though neither Gödöllő nor anyone else in the country had a press like William Morris' Kelmscott Press, the Gödöllő artists were still innovators in book illustration. Most members of the colony excelled in draughtsmanship and book illustration. Elek Koronghi Lippich's volume of poems published in 1903 with illustrations by Körösfői-Kriesch and Sándor Nagy was hailed by contemporary critics as the first Hungarian Art publication. They joined the initiative of noted writers planning to edit the complete poems of Jenő Komjáthy who was hailed as the founder of Hungarian symbolism. In his series of illustrations to Jenő Komjáthy's poems (around 1905), Sándor Nagy formulated the unity of Man and Cosmos in romantic and secessionist symbolism. Sándor Nagy had already had an established renown as an illustrator: Endre Ady also asked him to design the title-page of his first book of poems (New Poems, 1906). The colony's members mainly illustrated works by writers, poets and thinkers whose ideas were akin to theirs. They also included books by representatives of the anarchist movement, Ervin Batthyány, József Migray and Jenő Henrik Schmitt. It is first of all their graphics and illustrations that prove that the colony members were active participants in the onset of the century fermenting with new ideas. What Dezső Kosztolányi wrote about the attendance of the Négyesi seminars also applies to them: "Tolstoyans who wear Christlike beards, a shock of hair combed back and leather sandals on Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch's and Sándor Nagy's illustrations to the poems of Elek Koronghi Lippich / Budapest. 1903. Pallas