Nagy Ildikó szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 1989-1991 (MNG Budapest, 1993)

Bajkay, Éva: FROM MEDIEVAL CATHEDRAL TO THE MODERN MECHANICAL STAGE

cathedral is assigned almost emblematic meaning, which shows well that the modern experiments with form started from the traditional, perspectival construction of a picture. In Farkas Molnár's works the firm plasticity of objects reveals how the effects of the Italian traditions and the avantgárdé, coming through several filters, commingled in the art of Central Europe. Similarly to Alfréd Forbát (1897-1972), also of Pécs, Molnár had attended the University of Technology in Budapest and brought the benefit of his new connections in art to the local modernists. The rest of the Circle, Henrik Stefan (1896-1971), Andor Weininger (1899-1986), Jenő Gábor (1893-1968), Ernő Gebauer (1882-1962) and Lajos Cacinovic (1886-1973) tried to adapt the newly won results to their own characters. The exceptional creative cooperation in the artists' colony partly of Jewish and partly of Saxon and Croatian origin, also evident in the names of some of the artists, represented the peculiar cultural composition of Baranya county with its nationalities of Hungarians, Saxons, Serbs, Croats. The joint exhibition of the Circle, in early 1921 in Pécs, testified, besides the cubist influence, to the seeming triumph of expressionism arriving to southern Baranya from the North at a great delay.

8 Their modernism was tamed by the Latin cultural tradition and became more lyrical and representational, but even so it was a fierce onslaught on the bastions of 19th-century naturalism. Determined by these circumstances, their attempt was more closely related to the "neue Sachlichkeit" using chiaroscuro for plasticity, which replaced the elementary savagery of Expressionism in Germany in the 1920s. Just think of the expressive-classicistic approach of Alexander Kanoldt or Georg Schrimpf that might also be termed Neo-Nazarene.

9 In their view the slightly geometricized forms showed a peculiar plasticity due to the sharp contrasts of light and shade. In the same way, the artists of Pécs, with their unsettled identity, longed to see Italy instead of Paris when they were looking around abroad before the political change. Farkas Molnár, Henrik Stefan and Hugó Johan set out for Italy in April 1921. The impression of layers of houses in Tuscan villages built on hillsides captured their visual imagination most powerfully. That was the medium through which they could best express the essence of the external world and their internal artistic drives, the objective realities of space, weight and power as they had learnt from Cubism. To be more exact, they started from where Picasso and Braque arrived in their landscapes of L'Estaque and from the landscapes of the Galimbertis and the Hungarian activists (László Moholy-Nagy: Tabán, 1919; Béla Uitz: Countryside, 1918; Peter Dobrovic: Landscape, 1916). Similarly to art in Spain, the search for the essence in form as compared to the transience of the sight stopped somewhere midway in Central European art, largely due to the representational tradition of national art. That is also borne out by the material acquired in recent years by the Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Hungarian National Gallery. Out of the three painters Hugó Johan was the one to use colour most intensively in pictorial construction, in harmony with his more lyrical bent. His Dynamic Composition was inspired by the experience of the seaside. In the watercolour the clashing, almost abstract contrast between greens and blues aptly illustrates what Farkas Molnár put in the following words in a letter from Florence: "You become so sensitive here (Savonarola took his pupils here to lay them under the spell of hard words) that you can fully feel everything. And you are capable of recognizing, even in the extremest shoots of modern paintings the soil's fantasy-moving force that has brought rebirth and the same energy that is giving new impulse to the current revolution of art."

10 As Hugó Johan's drawing in pastel attests, they must have seen the Red House, which may have served as direct inspiration for Farkas Molnár's demonstrative "minimalist" design of a cubical house two years later, also in Florence.

11 Placing the essential thematic motifs in the upper section of the picture is just as logical after the mentioned models as is the emphasis on a man-made, and not natural, formation. The tendency of ever stronger geometricization was favourable for the townscapes. In Johan's oeuvre the drawings Bridge in Florence and Siena show most clearly how the sculptural effect of abstract forms in the service of autonomous pictorial construction grew stronger and stronger with the tonal contrasts along the edges. Following the cubists, they did not present the topography of the landscape in the traditional way, but summarized the results of going round the objects in a single composition. This compromise between visual impression and autonomous artistic creation characterized the Italian works of Farkas Molnár and Henrik Stefan. They built their cubo-expressionist Italian landscapes from random details of the sight so that the analyzed