Zwickl András szerk.: Árkádia tájain, Szőnyi István és köre 1918–1928. (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2001/3)
TANULMÁNYOK - GYÖRGY SZÜCS: Among the Décor of History - Pessimism and Quests for Intellectual Paths in the 1920's
to recognize that the artistic hubbub a metropolitan civilization tries delude itself with concerning the death of its own art. Artistic progress, personal impression, the illusions of 'new style' and 'never suspected possibilities' were pursued there, just as they are in today's European metropolises; we hear the same theoretical chatter, we see the tone-setting artists' pretentious behaviour, their performing feats like acrobats lifting "quintal" weights made of papier mâché; we see literators taking the place of poets, the shameless buffoonery of expressionism as a chapter in the history of art that organised art business, and made thought, feeling and artistic forms be debased to art industry." ' Spengler regarded the recognition of the workings of unavoidable fate (Schicksa idee), philosophical scepticism, as the only possible form of conduct; he nonetheless denied being pessimistic in his individual life: "I feel the constrictions of our times, and I am particularly beset by the awareness that we live in an age of epigoni, that we have no great men, no seminal minds; but I am not willing to brood over the decline of poetry as long as we have Shakespeare and Goethe among our intellectual goods. For the aberrations and confusions of the expressionists, I shall find consolation with Rembrandt. Shakespeare, Goethe and Rembrandt do not belong to the past. They are timeless possessions of learned mankind." 21 The mosaic-like image of the state of "contemporary" culture that could be gathered from Spengler's system of thought was all but promising, since, by purely dwelling upon his basic principles, not necessarily accepting them, one would come to the conclusion that the activités of a generation could little influence present processes, if the optimal one-thousand-year life span of a culture were regarded. His "philosophy of the future" influenced several thinkers of the period, among them Johan Huizinga, who entitled his famous book published in 1919 The Waning of the Middle Ages following Spengler. 22 He provided a diagnosis of the cultural malaise of his times with the experience of the first half of the 1 930's and the Depression behind in his In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1935). The first chapter on "The Mood of Decay" is the voice of a scholar speaking up for the protection of European cultural ïaditions and reluctant to disguise his disappointment, who, seeing the spiritual distemper of his times, is concerned for humankind falling back into "the barbarism of the ages". 23 A similar value judgement was passed by the wellknown Hungarian philosopher and university professor at Pécs, József Halasy-Nagy, who would have preferred to call his period the age of 'spiritlessness". In his view, related to the Spenglerian concept of civilization, the source of the troubles was the loss of human self estimation: "mass life" lead to the breakdown of consciousness of the individual; man lost his belief in a rationally ordered, and thus shapable, world. "It is therefore not be wondered that we witness the agony of all kinds of tradition everywhere. The lives of individuals linger on rootlessly: man is carried along by the drift of events he is unable to control. Our existence seems to be limited only to the present because we have cut ourselves away from the past and we feel the future insecure." 2 ' 1 The reflections on Spengler and the various trends generated by The Decline of the West could hardly be systemically examined here 25 , and this paper has only attempted to take into account those components of "public feeling" regarded as evident by the period, to flash light on the most important elements of the mood of its intellectual background and to outline its figures of thought, hoping that this would help provide a broader basis for interpreting political and cultural phenomena of Hungarian conservatism in the inter-war period. Naturally, the full intellectual panorama is not streaked so dark, as Spengler's theory of culture actually inspired many to practical action 26 or to embrace concepts that saw cultures not as closed, but as open, continually interpenetrating models. One of the most significant such enterprises was by Pál Ligeti, an architect who had studied painting at the Nagybánya painter's colony in 1903. In his book entitled Towards a New Pantheon, after reviewing Spengler's book and freeing himself "from under the evocative influence of the disintegration brought by the War", he attempted to create an independent cultural system. 2 '- Starting out from art history and reviewing a rich array of its monuments, he arrived at a final conclusion, a principle, that conceived of the succession of cultures as an undulatory motion; and he called the aesthetic modes of expression that had primarily determined Egyptian, Greek-Roman and Christian cultures the architectural, the sculptural and the pictorial respectively. The architectural middle ages, the sculptural renaissance and the pictorial modern era come in between in a similar rhythm. For theoretical support, Ligeti referred to the work of Alois Riegl who had called Christian culture optical (pictorial) and the Egyptian one tactile; while Greek and Roman art created a quality that presented both the pictorial and the plastic characteristics. 2 " Finally, Ligeti's book ends in an optimistic tone: he hopes the sequence of the three artistic principles will continued, the impressionism of the latest, pictorial age are already followed by signs (abstract painting, Bildarchitektur) that proclaim the coming of the next architectural era, thus mediating a desire for achieving a sort of "order again".
