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

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

countryside still remained decisive throughout, as the concrete titles attest: Monte San Miniato, Florence, Chiostro San Francesco, Fiesole, Taormina, Monte Venere, etc. In 1922 Molnár and Stefan etched the Italian compositions into stone in Germany and made fifty copies of each lithograph, publishing them in a joint album of twice six sheets.

12 The album, made in Weimar, adequately illustrates their artistic transformation. Farkas Molnár's green composition Fiorentia is concrete in its title only. The work is almost completely abstract, a planar constructivist composition arranged around a tower motif. Although the artist put it at the head of the series, immediately after the title-page, it must have been the last work in the process of elaborating the influences of the avantgárdé trends. It mirrors the effect of the spirit of the German Bauhaus-school as the typographic composition on the front-page reveals. One can detect the influence of the preparatory course held by Johannes Itten and of the title-page of Oskar Schlemmers Utopia.

13 Thus, these artists covered the road from their naturalistic start to Constructivism, from Pécs through Italy to Weimar, in two years. When examining these artists' belated search for their own style, epitomizing the situation in Central Europe, one must not forget that they also sojourned in Vienna, in keeping with the 19th-century traditions of training. Apart from the MA circle, all they could sympathize with was the Kinetism of Cizek, a professor of the Academy of Decorative Art.

14 Not finding suitable climate in any of the successor states of the Monarchy in 1921, they logically chose the more democratic and open Weimar Germany. In the autumn of that year, upon the information of Alfréd Forbát, they enrolled at the Bauhaus, where another artist from Pécs, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) was already studying. There they found up-to-date education and a community whose spirit was beneficial for their free creative development. It was easy for them to fit in with this circle as they came from a multinational area and all spoke German. Around 1920 the masters of the German school, aimed at creating a unity of art and new technological civilization, were searching for new roads of creation along expressive, individual lines.

15 The Pécs group with Andor Weininger as a new member could easily adapt itself to these new experiments. As an organic step along the road of new attempts at abstraction, they made their lithographic album Italia in the free graphic workshop led by Feininger. This series has thus far been undeservedly ignored by research. True, a copy of it has only been acquired recently by the Hungarian National Gallery, indeed with a great delay. The composition, titled Fiorentia, constructed from rectangular geometric forms, reveals that the artists who left Hungary had stepped through the threshold of complete abstraction by 1922. They took this step under the influence not only of the preparatory course of the Bauhaus, but also of the De Stijl course in Weimar headed by the Dutch constructivist Theo van Doesburg. This process perfectly tallies with the road along which the second generation of Central European avantgárdé artists arrived in the early 1920s at the appropriate versions of Constructivism under the influence of French, Russian and Dutch experiments. Among the Bauhausler of Pécs, Andor Weininger's works were most markedly influenced by the extremely rigid Dutch neoplasticist dogmatism of form. The Hungarian National Gallery received as a gift in 1983 the large Composition made by the artist in 1922, in Germany, and enlarged into the authentic composition forty years later in his New York studio on the basis of palm-sized sketches preserved with great care during his subsequent emigration. The Composition, based on the dynamics of colour, was originally designed in three parts

16 and shows clearly how Weininger adopted the system of the Dutch movement transmitted by Theo van Doesburg and Vilmos Huszár. He, too, went beyond the ideas of decorating interior spaces with pictures and windows of contrasting colours in defiance to panel painting, and planned a Mechanical Stage Design from movable geometric colour elements in accord with the constructivist-functionalist turn within the Bauhaus. One of the last phases of this Abstract Revue is demonstrated by a large-sized watercolour of great importance now in the Hungarian National Gallery. The colour stripes of the setting and the wings that could be moved vertically as well as forward and backward are populated with separately designed puppets, the formal kins of Oskar Schlemmer's Figurinen. The documents in the Collection of Theatre History in Cologne and in the Department of Documents of the Hungarian National Gallery attest that Weininger was not interested in the movement of the puppets in the first place. In this regard there were ready models as in the Mechanical Cabaret (with puppets by Breuer, Kurt Schmidt, Georg Teltscher and Oskar Schlemmer) presented at the Jena Theatre during the Bauhaus week of 1923,