Gellér Katalin - G. Merva Mária - Őriné Nagy Cecília (szerk.): A gödöllői művésztelep 1901-1920 - The artist's colony of Gödöllő (Gödöllő, 2003)
GELLÉR, KATALIN: INNOVATION AND TRADITION
PROPHETIC TASK OF THE ARTIST, THE TENET OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE The Gödöllő artists were in close contact with the philosopher Jenő Henrik Schmitt, who served as town clerk with Árpád Juhász in Zombor in his youth, and spent a long time in Germany later. In line with romanticism charged with religious devotion, he ascribed the artist a prophetic role and defined the goal of art as the search for a contact with the universe. Schmitt's teachings influenced several Hungarian artists at the turn of the century including Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, but his "word for word" followers were in Gödöllő: Aladár Körösfőí-Kriesch, who wrote about the pre-Raphaelites as apostles in his book on Ruskin, and Sándor Nagy, who depicted his painter friends as the followers of Saint John the Baptist, the seekers of "true Christianity". 4 5 in the new religion, everyone became deified in his own way, with Christ and Tolstoy as paragons of "self-redeeming man", of perfection. As Joseph Péladan, the leader of the Rosicrucians said: the artist was a "priest", "art was the great mystery". 4 6 At the beginning, the influence of the pre-Raphaelites meant the adoption of Ruskin's and Morris's social views instead of a direct stylistic impact. 4 7 The appearance of the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement launched by Morris can be retraced to the late 1890s, but their influence unfolded after Walter Crane's exhibition in 1900. Even the "discovery" of the Kalotaszeg region in Transylvania is partly attributable to Crane. The pre-Raphaelite inspiration came as a wave, after Körösfői-Kriesch's journey to England in 1908, for example, but the English orientation can be discerned as late as in Sándor Nagy's frescos of the 1930s as well. The idea of prophesy, the profession of self-deification was also associated with Nietzsche's teachings. At the climax of the Nietzsche cult in Hungary, in 1905 Sándor Nagy published his copperplate of Zarathustra. The naked human being on a peak, plucking the sunrays in divine ecstasy is the symbol of outstanding man rising to self-consciousness. 4 8 * His illustrations prepared for Jenő Komjáthy's poems were also in part conceived in the spirit of mental liberation and a sense of cosmic unity bearing the imprint of Nietzsche's ideas. Sándor Nagy's interpretation of the German philosopher was close to that of the Nietzschean philosophers rallying around the periodical Az Élet: "the victory of the future, of free and homogeneous man, of the individual over the masses, the free development of all individual talents in opposition to mass nivellation [...] the triumph of the joy of life, the embodiment of the human powers, and hence the highest level of culture," József Diner-Dénes wrote. 4 9 Sándor Nagy's image of Nietzsche was similar to that of Gyula Juhász, who was just as keen on the Tolstoyan tenets, Ruskin and Komjáthy as the Gödöllő artists, but he blunted the edge of Nietzsche's extreme individualism, for example, he did not translate Nietzsche's term Übermensch as supernatural man or superman, but as "excessively human" 5 0. What Sándor Nagy emphasised was not the philosopher extolling Dionysian instincts but the artists-teacher disseminating the truth. IN THE LURE OF GNOSTIC AND THEOSOPHIC TEACHINGS "You must certainly know the teachings of theosophy. The radiating fluids, the plastic shaping of mental figures are all drawn according to the theory of theosophy," Jenő Schmitt wrote to Sándor Nagy in 1901. Schmitt invited the painter to Holczer's café after Sándor Nagy sent a poem to the anarchist periodical Állam nélkül. 513 2 Their spiritual cohesion is also evidenced by Schmitt's letter to Mrs Sándor Nagy, in which he called the Gödöllő colony "the little community of the holy Gnosis". 5 3 Schmitt's philosophy was based on the revival of the antique, Socratic teaching of self-knowledge. After his acquaintance with gnosticism 5 4 he wished to enlarge his views developed after Hegel and Feuerbach into a world religion. There is no information about the Gödöllő artists being involved in Schmitt's evangelising among the peasants of the Great Plain, in his Nazarene movement also supported by Zsigmond Justh, but they shared his Tolstoyan and anarchist views. Probably upon their influence, Schmitt defined education for self-knowledge as the aim of art: "art gives man a presentiment of his divine being, his infinity..." he wrote in his book entitled Művészet, etikai élet, szerelem [Art, ethic life, love]. 5 5 He described the physical world as "planar, linear and punctual appearance", and space as "the form of organic life", the form of man. In his copperplates, e.g. the Komjáthy illustrations, Sándor Nagy conceived of the human figure similarly to Schmitt: the body is "the mirror of a circle of rays that illuminates the infinite". 5 6 Sándor Nagy got acquainted with theosophy during his crisis in Paris, and he became an enthusiastic reader of the green pamphlets Le Lotus Bleu published by H.P Blavatsky. In his recollections of Paris he cited Dzijan's book about the creation of the world, which guided him to self-knowledge, to the discovery of his own soul. 5 7 Also influencing such outstanding avant-garde artists as Kandinsky, Mondrian,
