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

INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH. PHD THESES AT THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - András Zwickl: Neo-classicism in Hungarian Painting in the 1920s

NEO-CLASSICISM IN HUNGARIAN PAINTING IN THE 1920s BY ANDRÁS ZWICKL Within the Hungarian painting and graphics of the first half of the 1920s, a group of characteristic works can be distinguished: in compositions that emphasize the mass of bodies, rely on the contrast of light and shadow, monumental acts set in landscapes, or heroically arranged portraits and self-portraits, appear. The nudes in these dark-toned pictures are presented in biblical or mythological contexts, with light pouring from above having an important role. This style was characteristic of many young painters born in the 1890s, whose career suffered a delay because of World War I. Late as their debut was, they immediately stepped forth with an individual style. Though the representatives of this style never really formed a group, the circle of the most important artists, whom Károly Lyka was the first to call the Szőnyi Circle, can be easily identified: István Szőnyi, Vilmos Aba-Novák, Erzsébet Korb and Károly Patkó. This style, also appearing on the international scene in the 1920s, is usually called neo-classicism. In the case of Szőnyi and the others, the epithet refers not only to the phrasing of the nude compositions or the figures, a formal idiom that utilises the achievements of Cubism and Expressionism while being of a more traditional flavour, but also to the choice of mythological or biblical subjects, the representation of a certain timeless world of ideals. The temporal borders of the style can also be identified with ease: the first characteristic works were made around 1919, the style of the group became less uniform after 1925, and the Rome scholarship of 1928 opened a new phase in the career of each. The Szőnyi Circle is not separated from the art of the previous generation by anything like a sharp caesura, the Avant-garde of the 1910s, the painting and graphics of The Eight and the Activists were immediate precedents. The local tradition was all the more important as Hungarian art in the post-war years was greatly isolated from the international scene. In the case of the Eight, the monumental nude compositions of Károly Kernstok and Bertalan Pór must be noted, while stylistically it is Róbert Berény's cubistic portraits and landscapes of reduced forms that can be associated with works by the Szőnyi Circle. The Kecskemét Artists' Colony had a key role in the development of the style with structural forms and compositions that emerged in Hungarian art in the mid-1

910s. Its representatives, whether belonging to The Young or the Activists, sought to produce a synthesis of Cubism and Expressionism. Of the group, János Kmetty, Péter Dobrovics and Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba had already stayed at Kecskemét, while Béla Uitz spent the summer there after the first exhibition of the group often referred to as the Seven. Stylistically, the immediate precursors of Szőnyi and the others were the Young, and a few of the Activists. The Pécs Arts Society, founded and influenced by Péter Dobrovics, was another important parallel; the works of its members (e.g. Farkas Molnár, Jenő Gábor) represented a similar neo-classicist style. The members, and most of the followers, of the Szőnyi Circle studied art at the graphics department of the