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

NEW ACQUISITIONS, NEW RESULTS - Marianna KOLOZSVÁRY: A Maticska-turned-Nagy

ginning of the century, he banished himself from the civilized world for nearly thirteen years in order to find himself wandering in nature, often starving and shivering, always in feverish, endless labour. The work under discussion is a characteristic example of this way-seeking aspiration. The academic influence still makes itself felt, a kind of refined naturalism characterizing the picture, which fits in well with a whole series of paintings produced in this period, such as: Wooden Cottages in Transylvania (1910), Blooming Flowers (1913) or Street in Csíkmindszent (1911). At this stage of his craftsmanship, he did not really go beyond the objective depiction of momentary sight. As though speaking of this very picture, Hans Loew, Nagy's first critic, wrote of his 1910 works: "He usually applies wanner colours in the forefront of his pictures, and contrasts these with an either darker or lighter background of colder colours."

2 As in his oils painted in this period, the said work is characterized by a graphicalness, a naturalist conception, an almost odious working out of details over the whole surface of the picture. (It should be born in mind that István Nagy was far more ahead in his graphic work at this time, and would soon give up working in oil, which did not suit his type of sensibility). Now, this was just what - according to conservative art criticism - the works of Maticska lacked at this time: "There is too much paint and little drawing in the pictures he submitted."

1 Wide strokes of brush were particularly characteristic of the Nagybánya painters, and creating atmosphere by spots of paint is contrary to the István Nagy painting discussed above. Jenő Maticska had no time to bother with detail; perhaps it was his fate (impending tuberculosis) that forced him to work in sweeping gestures, as his friend Jenő Tersánszky Józsi would later recall in the literary magazine Nyugat: "The quaking urgency of his nightly fevers seems to throb in his strokes of brush in order that he can give what he can give as long as the mood resounds, because the want of breath is coming, and night is due with its racking coughs."

4 With his presentation, Maticska was capable of making the simplest landscape or motif look interesting. In this work, however, István Nagy's aspiration to grave pithiness and dramatic expressivity, which would later characterize his landscapes in charcoal and pastels, was not yet mature. Nevertheless, even this picture absolutely exemplified the narrow-perspective depiction of landscape that he would come to apply throughout his life. In fact, this is what unifies his whole oeuvre, for, even when painting the endless expanses of the Hungarian Plains, he would depict nature in such a narrow frame as a Székely would see it looking out from a deep valley through crags. Maticska, on the other hand, with his own sense of space and atmosphere, would mostly prefer to interpret the Nagybánya landscape from the Rozsály hilltop close by. The most significant difference between the two painters is in their relationship to nature, whereby their landscape painting cannot be confused. Maticska, a young man from Nagybánya, the town, who admired nature somewhat from the outside, looked for the picturesque and intimate in it, and man seems to be always present in the landscapes of his pictures, even if he is not directly depicted in them. István Nagy, on the contrary, was a son of the mountains of Csík, who lived together with the land, and experienced landscape in a wilderness of tree-rending winds. As a result Nagy, bowing in reverence to the forces of nature, developed a cold, balladic landscape depiction, which pervades also the picture discussed, and which he would only allow to mellow at the end of his life with a kind of folk-tale warmth. In the light of the above, the picture entitled Landscape can without doubt be attributed to István Nagy; it is a characteristic depiction of nature in oil from his so-called way-seeking period. Drawing the lessons from this, he would shape the uniquely, unmistakably Nagyesque landscape in the course of the following decade. NOTES 1 Murádul, Jenő. Maticska Jenő. Bucharest: Kriterion, 1985, p. 41, colour picture no. 6. For further colour reproductions see: Nagybánya művészete (The Art of Nagybánya: Exhibition on the 100"' Anniversary of Founding the Colony). Catalogue concept by Csorba, Géza, and György Szücs, ed. by Imre, Györgyi. Budapest: HNG, 1996, cat. no. 315., repr. p. 415; Réti, István. A nagybányai művésztelep. Budapest: Novotrade, 1994, picture no. 66. 2 Loew, Hans. "Nagy István festészetének kezdetei." In: Korunk [Kolozsvár] 1958, no. 2, p. 2. Reprinted in: Solymár, István. Nagy István. Budapest: Képzőművészeti Alap, 1977, p. 22 3 -F.-B. "Amatörök kiállítása Kolozsvárt." In: Ellenzék [Kolozsvár], December 16, 1901. Reprinted in: Murádin, op. cit. (see Note 2), p. 26. 4 Tersánszky Józsi, Jenő. "Még néhány 'Nagy Balogh'-ról." In: Nyugat, 1920, nos. 7-8. Reprinted in: Murádin, op. cit. (see Note 2), p. 37.