Gopcsa Katalin (szerk.): Egry (Budapest, 2005)

that are beautiful in and of themselves; we can sense the joy radiated by the hues saturated with light, while the village in the background serves to enhance the radiance of the golden field of wheat. In 1916, Egry, who had enlisted in the infantry, convalesced at the military hospital in Badacsony. He was in his thirtythird year at the time, and art historians writing about him like to point out that this was a turning point in his life, when "he found his true self in the bosom of his native soil". It was at the Badacsony hospital that he met his future wife Juliska Pauler who, shouldering the rejection by her family and the ensuing scandal, divorced her husband, Colonel Vizkelety, to marry the impoverished artist who was still little known at the time. His marriage and the move to Keszthely, as well as their summer visits to their wine press house in Badacsony (Plate 17), depicted in a number of paintings, proved to be another major turning point in his life and art. The painter has practically never written about his private life; and when he did, these modest and at the same time personal recollections are referred to in his written memoirs merely as "liberations from the closed form of pictorial composition". The painterly vision he discovered in the all-transmuting light effects and atmosphere of Lake Balaton completely transformed Egry's method of composition. Even his color palette changed. The painter Aurél Bernáth, who was an eyewitness, describes how Egry "abandoned his former manner with its 'sewer-colored' contours, opening up his path toward the magic of the Balaton. I was there at the studio viewing of his first Balaton painting. He painted it at the Keszthely harbor; this was a true Egry painting, transparent, light-hearted and nonetheless profoundly true". (Aurél Bernáth's opening remarks at the dedication of the Badacsony Memorial Museum.) Egry felt at home on the shore of Lake Balaton. According to Confucius, the sage favors the waters, the lover of humankind favors the mountains. 'Vet wisdom and love of humanity, water and mountain, can co-exist in harmony. Egry had found both in one place, along with the harmony of man and nature. His passionate empathy with mountains and waters, where the ego melds with the infinite without feeling a loss, is akin to that admiration of the seasons and meditative view of life that inspires Oriental landscape painting. Egry, who was probably not familiar with Oriental cultures, wrote about this as follows: "One of my most memorable experiences was the night I went out on the water with the fishermen. I saw nothing else but the magnificent starry sky and the reflecting waters, and felt myself to be in the center of creation. Living through this night made me take up the brush once again. I was no longer interested in impressionistic observations of nature, I had no intention to make 'cutouts'. The inspiration that moved me was almost without any subject; from now on my paintings would omit the limiting outlines. My colors became ethereal, and through them I endeavored to express my relation to the cosmos." In his compositions, Egry sketches out the basic features of the region, its archetypal mountain formations Badacsony and Gulács, as well as the twin pyramidal mountains of Fonyód with its reflections on the water's surface. He lets their colors glow, while the motifs hovering in space dissolve in a vision that suggest a sort of timelessness. One of the resplendent examples of this cosmic experience is Balaton Fishermen (Plate 24), the motif of the boat modeled with an almost sculptural sensitivity, while the vigorously gesturing figures of the rowers are moulded of a substance homogeneous with the lines of waves and light. The use of wave and light to create an intensive experience of space and form retain within them the feel of the nighttime universe that had such a formative influence on Egry. By now, our experience of landscapes has become altered. Our way of looking at a landscape has been transformed by satellite photos and aerial perspectives showing bird's eye views. When we see photos of the Balaton shoreline taken from helicopters, we rediscover the basic structures of Egry's paintings in the S-shape curves, sickle-shape arcs, gentle parabolas and hyperbolic bends. But the artist, just like his so-often rendered angler seated on a narrow dock offshore (Plate 25), observed these rhythmically repeated lines only from the reeds along the shore or at most from a nearby hilltop, where he would saunter up to watch the rapid atmospheric changes preceding or following rain that wrapped outlines in mist or sharply delineated the elegant arcs of the distant mountains on the opposite shore. Egry experienced not only the lake but also the life of nature, the way the changing circadian light restructured the view, and the way elemental atmospheric conditions created ever newer views for the artist who thought "pictorially". Witness his paintings, and even his titles: Starting to Rain; Raining; After the Rain (Plate 41); Sunrise; Sunset; After the Storm (Plate 28); Silver Gate (Plate 52). One of his most overwhelming experiences was that splendid spectacle of the world of the Balaton - the rainbow