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
10. Farkas Molnár: Machine Man Seduces the Woman, 1923. Private collection expressionistic, using light to reference cosmic dimensions, much in the vein of Dobrovics's early programme. With endless dimensions of reason, emotion and energy, Michelangelo was Molnár's chief paragon. The ars poetica he related in his letter received its pictorial representation in his Archers (Power Fig. 9). 46 In mythology the arrow is understood to make the wound of love, but in Molnár it appears to be a weapon demonstrating power. The two archers, whose bodies are modelled to be beautiful in the classic manner, symbolize male power defending motherhood. Units of light-filled surface, made plastic by contrasting edges, provide the structure with an inner rhythm. Molnár probably painted the picture at the time Pécs was under Serbian occupation, and his fear for fellow humans, the need for protection was very actual. By the middle of 1921 the struggle for power in Pécs became intensive, and the short period of florescence in the cultural life of the town came to an end. It has a symbolic value that Molnár represented those living under threat as antique heroes, ready to strike back. Made monumental, his male nudes are a symbolic statement for the importance of life. By using archetypes much favoured by Renaissance and activist representations, Molnár establishes a passage between past and present with this image of motherhood and protective masculinity. At the end of a transitional period in history, in the autumn of 1921, Molnár, Stefan, Johan and Weininger set out, via Vienna, to what was then the capital of open-minded and democratic art, the Bauhaus in Weimar. It was in October 1921 that they enrolled at the school whose modern curriculum was so much unlike that of the out-of-date academies, including as it was, from the very first semester, not only practical workshop exercises but an entire programme for the complex training of the new man's mind and body. The programme of reforming man was based not on the European antique tradition, but on principles informing Oriental cultures, characteristically infused with the 20th-century myth of machines, metal and industry. This was a time in post-monarchy Central Europe of exuberant enthusiasm and great vivacity. Neophytes were naturally eager to find new opportunities for creation. The biocentric lifestyle, yoga breathing, detoxification, eurhythmies were as much part of Johannes Itten's course as the study of Renaissance masters or formal analysis. 47 During its early period, instruction at the Bauhaus aimed to further the formation of versatile, free personalities. While they were learning from the greatest contemporaries - formal analysis from Kandinsky, the new way of natural studies from Klee -, past masters were not neglected, and everyone had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the aesthetic norms at their own pace. The method first appealed to the new students from Pécs, who felt it was inspiring, but romantic zeal soon gave way to a respect for reality and practices. 48 Having free access to the well-equipped workshop of the Bauhaus, they turned their Italian drawings into lithographs, somewhat geometricizing the original motifs, in a style resembling that of Feininger, who was at the time the leader of the studio. 4 '' In his later activity as a graphic artist Molnár used figures with clear outlines, which did not follow the abstract shapes of the Bauhaus master, Oskar Schlemmer, or Paul Klee's visionary line compositions, but were studies in the rather speculative relationship of space and man, stillness and motion, machine and figure, employing fictive characters in fictive spaces, denying, as it were, the marriage of Renaissance anthropocentrism and innovation, mentioned in the introduction. A good example is Machine Man Seduces the Woman (Fig. 10), an etching from 1923. After 1922, space for Molnár was an abstract world of architecture, a street designed or a form resembling Malevich's extraterrestrial architectons. Compared to the geometric Italian cityscapes of the lithographs, this new, Utopian world was completely calculated and geometric. Equal in their theoretical purity, objects and humans heave against one another among new vanishing points and ethereal vanishing lines. In the cold needle Lovers at the Haus am Horn he clearly violates the Renaissance rules of perspective and vision, allowing the modernist approach to have the upper hand. United by organic lines, the couple prominently fill the left side of the picture field, while the right side contains a small house
