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

most prominent Hungarian writers, poets, philosophers, reform thinkers. They were among the first disseminators of the teachings of Ruskin and Morris, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Sándor Nagy made illustrations to the poems of Jenő Komjáthy, whom the poets publishing in the periodical Nyugat regarded as their forerunner. In his copperplates Genius and Cain, Nagy depicted new man breaking from the obsolete restraints, and represented himself and his wife as lonely rebels.

36 * In his etching entitled Genius the person confronting traditions (a naked man ploughing with a winged plough) ignores the opponents, even the excommunication by the church. In his later works, the ploughman has the features of Tolstoy and represents his ideas.

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7 His graphic works express several thoughts that were to appear in Endre Ady's poetry a few years later. The series of pen drawings entitled Go on and on compares the message of the early poems by Ady. It is no accident that Endre Ady asked Sándor Nagy to illustrate his book of poems entitled New Poems, published in 1906, though their life-courses later diverged. Mihály Babits might as well have modelled the protagonist of his novel Halálfiai [Destined to death], a follower of Ruskin, Tolstoy and Jenő Henrik Schmitt, after Sándor Nagy and Aladár Kriesch. In Babits' novel the youth admired the variant of socialism proclaimed by Morris as well as anarchism, arguing about Weininger's and Strindberg's attitude towards women and the idea of free love in the cafes: "...Lots of little socialists, anarchists and nihilists, Nitzscheans and Tolstoyans or Christians of a Christianity that priests of no religion would accept..."

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8 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 their bare feet, socialists wearing red ties... tame vegetarians and theosophists who listen to Jenő Schmitt at the Akadémia café in the evenings... You can easily guess what books they hide in their pockets: Nietzsche or Stirner, or Marx, or Baudelaire. From among our poets, Jenő Komjáthy or János Vajda."

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9 VIEWS ON SOCIETY Being followers of Ruskin and Morris, they believed in the redeeming force of art, in the union of social and artistic struggle, in reforms to be achieved via the "cult of beauty".

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0 When they were working out their concept of society comprising communities of people aspiring after perfection, they were in contact with the leading personage of the socialist movement also relying on ethic foundations, Ervin Szabó. At the parties of Mrs Elemér Békássy they could meet József Madzsar, Mihály Babits and the foster daughter of the art patroness hostess, the sculptor Irma Duczynska, who also visited Gödöllő.

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1 The social democrats' daily, Népszava published several of Sándor Nagy's works (Lord and peasant) and he illustrated the poems of the socialist poet Sándor Csizmadia. Some of his works in the first years of the century mocked the reign of Money similarly to Frantisek Kupka's and Théophile Steinlen's pieces. Such are a painting of intricate symbolism, Sheafbinders and the graphic sheet Mammon or the Worship of Money, as well as a drawing about the artist tempted by money, published in Művészet."

2 Körösfői-Kriesch's parable of the seven blind men, an unusually large lithograph, shows the blind adoration of money by people of various social status and occupations, inspired by Pieter Bruegel's painting The Blind. The impact of Tolstoy's social and artistic tenets came before Ruskin's in times. His cultural pessimism, his artistic view discarding trends that were unintelligible for the masses confirmed the Gödöllő artists' endeavour to turn their works into didactic demonstrations, as did Mihály Zichy, who first elevated drawing and illustration to a high rank in Hungarian art. His social views were also influenced by Tolstoy's "inner revolution" rejecting social fighting which claimed that "each person gets to know the truth for himself, pledges himself to it and acts by it."

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3 Körösfói-Kriesch thought that social inequalities could be eliminated on an ethical basis, by combining socialism with Catholicism: "it is impossible that an individual could be happy when his fellow human beings are not" because of the exploitation of the others, he wrote in 1903.

44 Followers of a philosophy based on self-development as they were, they also saw the improvement of the individual as the token of social progress. In the 1910s they deviated widely from the socialist movement. In an article of 1919 Sándor Nagy confronted Marx's ideas with Ruskin's, Lenin's Russia with the Russia of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. They were attracted to contemporary anarchism which declared ideas of polar opposition to what we understood by anarchism today. They illustrated a book on anarchism published in 1904 by Ervin Batthyány, József Mígray and Jenő Schmitt. They denied violence and believed in a socialised love religion as against revolution, in anarchy in which everyone is master of himself. Their "artistic republic" (Miklós Rózsa) was based on these principles. The younger generation expressed their social views and protests more vigorously. Jenő Remsey, who made his debut with his posters Courrieres and Moloch in 1906, also fought in the red army in 1919. He invited György Dettár (Détári), a designer of political posters, to Gödöllő.