Veszprémi Nóra - Jávor Anna - Advisory - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2005-2007. 25/10 (MNG Budapest 2008)

NEW ACQUISITIONS, NEW RESULTS - Anna SZINYEI MERSE: Pál Szinyei Merse's Two New Sketches at the National Gallery

ANNA SZINYEI MERSE Pál Szinyei Merse's Two New Sketches at the National Gallery PÁL SZINYEI MERSE: SUICIDAL FAUST ON THE COAST, 1866(111. 1) Oil on canvas, 50.5x41.5 cm Signed below left: Szinyei Inv. no.: 2005.7 T PÁL SZINYEI MERSE: ON GREEN GRASS, 1873 (Colour Plate IX) Oil on cardboard, 23.5x28.3 cm Signed below left: Szinyei 1873 Inv. no.: 2006.2 T From its establishment until 2005, the Hungarian National Gallery was able to acquire no work by Pál Szinyei Merse (1845-1920). The last time its predecessor, the Museum of Fine Arts, had been able to increase its small, but high-standard collection of pictures by him had been in 1953; most of this group of works have been on show at our permanent exhibitions since then. In the past year, however, two new pieces will have captured the eyes of the attentive visitor, for, within no more than a few months, two valuable sketches by the master were obtained by our museum. The large-scale late landscapes that seldom appear at auctions and at very high prices, or the not particularly thrilling academic head studies or other early works had failed to enthuse those responsible for acquisitions. However, the two newly purchased and radically different pictures are capable of shedding new light on important points of junction in not only the oeuvre of the artist, but also the stylistic history of Hungarian painting. Turning up after over half a century of unknown whereabouts in the spring of 2004, the utterly companionless early sketch called Suicidal Faust on the Coast will doubtless cause many surprises.' (111. 1) It was missing very much from the 1990 exhibition Pál Szinyei Merse and His Circle, but we simply could not track it. In my monograph, I was unable to reproduce it in colour, and had to content myself for my analysis with a small-scale slide of it made at the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition in 1948. The sketch was painted in 1866, when Szinyei was preparing for admission to Piloty's class at the Munich academy with compositions of one or two figures taken from history, the Bible or world literature. In his earlier drawings, he had often started out from the works of the fashionable poet of the time, Nicolaus Lenau, who had some Hungarian linkage. This time, Szinyei chose to paint the last scene of Lenau's Faust. To the best of my knowledge, no other painter de1 picted this tragic moment of the Faust story so popular throughout Europe in the 19

th century and thus Munich, too. Lenau generally attracted more sentimental attitudes, but there is no work alike among the illustrations to Goethe's version either: no one undertook to depict this dramatically poignant message on being and nothingness except for the 21-year-old Szinyei Merse, who was otherwise brimming with life, but lyrical at heart, and who would soon take the way of impressionism. Even the Faust compositions of Delacroix have no semblance of the striking, demonic power of the Szinyei sketch, its close look at the battle between life and death.

2 The sinister mood is excellently rendered perceptible by the contrast of the red cloak of Lucifer flapping in the wind and the black clothes of Faust feebly falling away, as well as the animated spot effect of the figures bursting out from their sur-