Gosztonyi Ferenc - Király Erzsébet - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2002-2004. 24/9 (MNG Budapest, 2005)

STUDIES - Éva Bajkay: The Classicizing Trends of the 1920s and their Beginnings in Pécs Tradition and Modernity in the Pécs Arts Society

6. Farkas Molnár: Pietà, 1921. Private collection and quotes from the gospels, urging Man for peace, purification, love and order. These sentiments could be felt in Pécs as well, where topical treatments of biblical subjects became popular again. Works depicting the crucified Christ related the pains suffered through the years of the war, like Lajos Dabasi Kováts's traditional rendering, or Marcel Breuer's modern Pietà and Farkas Molnár picture of the same title (Fig. 6).

36 While the former, a graphic from 1920, was obviously made in the spirit of German activist Expressionism, the latter, an oil painting from 1921, is a peculiar exercise in what already had some tradition in Hungarian art, the marriage of Avant-garde and the classic order of form. In line with the universally strengthening trend of classicizing, it had less to do with Dobrovics's expressive Pietà (1916), which we know from a reproduction published in the journal A Tett, than with Károly Ferenczy's and Béla Uitz's interpretations of the subject, which they executed after Renaissance models. The central composition and the use of an iconographie standard, the representation of the dead and the resurrected Christ within the same picture, reveal Molnár's familiarity with the Byzantine tradition, and indicate his faith in the future.

37 Artists again turned away from the problems of their insecure present. The same attitude that during the war drove Dobrovics and other artists from Budapest to the asylum of the Kecskemét Artists' Colony, to seek Arcadian peace there, now became active again in a situation where the historical fate of Baranya county seemed unresolved. Jenő Gábor and Ernő Gebauer became the most conspicuous representatives of a late, manneristic version of this Arcadian tendency. Jenő Gábor graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts as a teacher of arts in 1915. He must have seen the pictures of the Kecskemét artists at this time, and following the method of The Young, he sought out his own paragons from books and albums of reproductions. At a time characterized by crisis and conservatism in arts teacher training, he too found encouragement in the art of 'Michelangelo, Leonardo, Signorelli, Greco, Grünewald, Cézanne, Picasso, sometimes Kandinsky, Feininger, the French Cubists'.

38 Soul searching and the turn towards the past prompted Gábor not only to use the common tools of archaizing, but also to overcome newer and newer artistic problems. Fleeing Körmöcbánya (today Kremnica, Slovakia) at the end of the war, he took up a teaching position in Pécs in 1919. Through his artist friends, he could keep up with the current developments. Beside his Pécs landscapes and portraits, his nude compositions are also noteworthy, thanks to their monumentalizing mode of expression. His female nudes, born in the modern 'ultramarine fever', just as his ink drawings, are characterized by slow and pathetic motion; he represents his people with a didactic mannerism, as beings connected to the throbbing universe. 7. Jenő Gábor: Orpheus, 1920s. Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest