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

Academy of Fine Arts, reorganized after the war by Viktor Olgyai. Their etchings reveal the influence of Rembrandt, discovered for them by Szőnyi, and of the cubist-expressionist precedents. Aba-Novák, Patkó and Szőnyi became most successful in painting; other members of the so-called etcher generation included Nándor Lajos Varga, Jenő Tarjáni Simkovics, Gyula Hincz and Géza Bene. The new vision of the Avant-garde trends made different impressions on the members of the etcher generation, and they also had diverging preferences as regards genres: Szőnyi concentrated on landscapes, while Aba-Novák on portraits. It is not difficult to see how the painter members of the group adopted and developed the peculiarities of a style that had been matured on etchings: the colouring of paintings by Szőnyi, Aba-Novák and Patkó are usually kept within a fawnishtealish, sometimes almost monochromic, tone. Szőnyi's early etchings initially reveal the influence of Uitz, later, increasingly, of Rembrandt. The modelling is less 'Avant-garde' in his paintings than in his graphics. Despite their prosaicness, his monumental figures radiate calmness and power, the paintings are characterised by alternately idyllic or pathetic moods. Of the four, Szőnyi was the most prolific producer of landscapes, while the presentations and attitudes of his self-portraits provide a remarkably complex image of their creator. Aba-Novák's early works show the most conspicuous influence of avant-garde trends, especially cubism. In his etchings broken-up forms are built from shafts of light, and the early paintings also feature a system of intersecting bent planes, which give out the masses contained within smooth surfaces only gradually. His dark-toned pictures, in turn, tend to employ a narrower field and less figures. His portraits and nudes are not charged with the tension his prints are, but are instilled with a solemn peacefulness instead. The typical traits of Károly Patkó's etching style are bodies defines by closed lines, reduced almost to geometric shapes, a more homogenous treatment of rounded masses. His paintings too were initially dominated by massive, closed shapes. He and Korb are more indebted to old art, especially the Renaissance tradition, quite conspicuously in his portraits and self-portraits. Of the production of the four, his pictures seem to long back most openly to an old Arcadia. Erzsébet Korb's career lasted a mere six years, terminated as it was by her untimely death in 1925. She was the only one among the four not to come from the etcher generation. While her male peers had a penchant for the rehashed iconographie types of biblical and mythological stories, Korb sought to represent symbolic contents (e.g. Devotion, Awakening). Beside the plastically moulded masses, the other key component in the art of Szőnyi and the others is light, usually with a transcendental charge. Their use of light changed from the middle of the 1920s, and it had a marked consequence on their mode of painting, in that light transcended the bodies more and more, made them more permeable, surfaces became lighter and more colourful. Brushwork became more relaxed, shapes more homogenous, what was initially a dark painting admitted more and more often the play of light and shadow. Earlier earth colours and metallic cool hues were replaced by warm reds and greens, brownish surfaces were enlivened by the reflexes of complementary contrasts. While this shift is already discernible in the last pictures of Erzsébet Korb, whose career ended prematurely, in the case of Szőnyi, AbaNovák and Patkó (who was the first to use the technique), it culminated when they took up tempera painting during their Rome scholarship. Szőnyi, Aba-Novák, Patkó and Korb were not the only ones to work in this type of neo-classicism: the graphics or paintings of Imre Nagy, who started his career at the same time as the above, followed this style, and Antal Deli, Vince Korda and Dávid Jándi, of the same generation but working in Nagybánya (now Baia Mare), also made similar works. Neo-classicist tendencies can be discovered in the art of such artists as Gyula Derkovits and Jenő Barcsay, or Jenő Paizs Goebel and Ernő Jeges, later founders of the Szentendre artist colony. These artists represented a certain delay, as most were still creating in the style at the end of the decade, when Szőnyi and the others were already going through their transitory period, departing from neo-classicism, before their careers completely diverged. Towards the end of the 1920s, a new type of classicization appeared in Hungarian art: the hard-contoured, dispassionate figures of Jenő Medveczky, Béla Kontuly or Pál Molnár-C. showed the influence of contemporary Italian art. Yet the objective and cool style of the so-called 'Roman School', obviously of Italian inspiration, is distinctly dissimilar from the neo-classicism Szőnyi and the others practiced in the early 1920s. The opponents of the dissertation were Eva Bajkay and Júlia Szabó, and the degree was awarded 'summa cum laude' (2000). The exhibition of the Hungarian National Gallery, Árkádia tájain. Szőnyi István és köre 1918—1928 (In the Land of Arcadia. István Szőnyi and His Circle 1918-1928; September 23, 2001 - January 23, 2002), was based on the findings of the dissertation. A newer publication: Neoclassicism in the 1920s. Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. In: Robin Cassling and Gabriel Fragnière (eds.): Social Sciences and Political Change. Promoting Innovative Research in Post-Social Countries. P.I.E.-Peter Lang, Brussels, 2003. 207-214.