Köpröczi Rózsa: A grafikus Szőnyi. Rajzok, vázlatok, tanulmányok (Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága – Szőnyi István Alapítvány, Szentendre – Zebegény, 1996)

12. VÁZLATOK / SKIZZEN / SKETCHES Turning over the leaves of the maps we can come across a characteristic group of studies: those depicting moments taken from the streets of Zebegény. It belonged to the typical topics of Szőnyi to represent men and women standing about next to each other and talking without any special purpose. Though he was not sprung from the village people he chose as his models, he admired their calmness and unspoilt relationship with Nature. This world concept was close to his meditative attitude, he created a particular world saturated with the elemental joy of existence and the admiration of simple things and happenings. The environment and the face of figures are just marked, the only means of characterization is posture. The gestures caught appropriately and the characteristic outlines express everything Szőnyi thinks about them as well as about his own place engaged in this order. Although only an outsider can view phenomena in such a summary and distance-keeping manner, his outsider's objectivity is full of love and poetry. The women and men standing irresolutely, being in an accidental relation to each other, evoke the multifigure paintings of Courbet, who used long-forgotten, archaic compositional methods in his canvases of several figures. Each figure is isolated strictly and lined up in a co-ordinate and additive way. In Szőnyi'

s pictures the members of the loosely connected groups can also be inverted. The relations of the participants are inscrutable. The figures seem to be dissolving in contemplation. "Their instinctive calmness neither torn nor disturbed by consciousness is saturated with eastern philosophy"* - wrote Ernő Kállai. While observing village life he was attracted not only by passivity but also by dinamism, which is testified by a whole series of excellent studies and compositional sketches. The artist seems to elevate village people working in the fields, gardens or yards. The scenes represented with various techniques evoke either the vibrating wheat-fields of Van Gogh or the work done in the dignified, quiet landscapes of Millet. The chosen tecnique, which always suits the topic perfectly, enhances the effect. * Kállai Ernő: Szőnyi István, 1941. p. 288., Művészet veszélyes csillagzat alatt, Bp. Corvina, 1981.