Zwickl András szerk.: Árkádia tájain, Szőnyi István és köre 1918–1928. (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2001/3)

TANULMÁNYOK - ANDRÁS ZWICKL: The Pictures of the Ideal and the Real - The Arcadia Painting of the Szőnyi Circle

atmosphere set in landscape on the one hand and expressive and dynamic landscapes that at the same lime emphasised the tectonics of forms on the other. Although in different ways and to a varying extent, the influence of the Cubo-Expressionism of Fiatalok, his models, and the traditional representational painting of the Nagybánya artists is evident in his works/

0 Kállai vividly demonstrates the alternatives, both the possible and the real ones, of how to continue Uitz's "Expressive Naturalism": with his biblical and mythological scenes of nude figures, Szőnyi turns back to "composition as understood in the Renaissance sense" on the one hand, while his landscapes provided evidence for a shift towards "the view of nature, the rhythmic enhancement of colours, forms, spatial and light relations, in other words, towards Expressionism" on the other.

71 The common denominator for this seemingly irreconciable duality can be traced to the pleimair heritage and the naturalist style of the Nagybánya school. Szőnyi, who headed the students demanding reforms at the Academy during the Council Republic, was expelled from the Academy after its collapse. This did not mean, however, that he was actually marginalised on the art scene.

22 On the contrary, at the age of 26 he was the first in his generation to have his works accepted at the Palace of Art's Winter Show in 1919-1 920. He had such a great success that when the newly organised Szinyei Society issued its first Grand Prix, the Szinyei Award, he was chosen for it. This gesture can be interpreted as a symbolic handing over of the baton, since the Society wished to keep alive the first Hungarian plein-air-painter Szinyei's memory and the Nagybánya traditions, while also trying to ensure the continuity of these traditions and looking after the next generation of artists. Shortly after this, in 1922, the Society, whose membership mostly consisted of masters decades older than Szőnyi, made him a member, which suggests that they considered him as the continuator of the tradition the Society stood for. By that time Szőnyi had held his first major exhibition. He regularly displayed one or two of his paintings at the Palace of Art's (Műcsarnok) shows and had his first retrospective exhibition at the Ernst Museum in September 1 92 1. It had a favourable reception by the profession and the public alike. To use Kállai's words, Szőnyi "on his own has become the starting point, and also a tacitly acknowledged master, of an entire painters' school."" The newly discovered Szőnyi burst into the contemporary art scene with extraordinary speed. His monumental, representative compositions painted as early as in 1919 showed evident signs of the new neo-classical style. The various versions of the previous decades' classicising vocabulary of forms acquired a new meaning after the First World War. The war experiences of the artists who had seen action on the frontlines were transformed into shocking themes and compositions of dramatic power primarily in the painting of the elder generation. The younger generation's reaction was quite the opposite. While in Germany the horrors of war and the general disillusionment of the first years of peace were portrayed in their grim reality in painting, in Hungary Szőnyi and his circle turned their back on contemporary reality and in their compositions created an ideal world evoking the past. Besides their similar conception of reality, members of the Szőnyi circle displayed several individual characteristics in their parallely evolving careers. Erzsébet Korb, who was Szőnyi's junior by four years, attended the Academy of Fine Arts from 1917 to 1 91 9.

24 As the war caused no interruption in her career, she was able to take part in the National Salon's winter show with several works already as early as 1916, at the age of seventeen. Although her teachers at the Academy were among the founders of the Nagybánya artists' colony, her painting also revealed, beside the Nagybánya artists' nature concept, the spiritual/symbo ic approach of late Art Nouveau, which she had acquired from the leading master of the Gödöllő artists' colony, Aladár Körösfői KrieschC Korb and Szőnyi both left the Academy for good in 1919, just before it was renewed in 1920, once more in accordance with the Nagybánya traditions, thanks to the reforms devised and implemented by Károly Lyka and István Réti. As part of the reforms, the Graphics Department under Viktor Olgyai's direction was reorganised and became the incubator of a new generation of graphic artists, the so-called etching generation. Neither Kolb, who left the Academy on her own accord, nor Szőnyi, who was expelled, had been Olgyai's students, but unlike Kolb, whose drawings were mostly sketches and draft studies for her paintings, Szőnyi was an outstanding graphic artists who exerted a powerful influence on most members of the etching generation. Similarly to his paintings, his ink drawings and etchings displayed a twofold bonding: on the one hand he was inspired by old art, and most notably by Rembrandt's painterly style of etchings based on chiaroscuro, and on the other, he drew from some recent developments, such as Uitz and Nemes Lampérth's highly structured and dynamic Cubo-Expressionism of the 1910s.

26 After leaving the Academy, the three members of the Szőnyi circle continued to share a studio. A peculiar manifestation of their relationship with the previous generation, one that can also be interpreted as a symbolic handing over of the baton, was that in the autumn of 1919, Erzsébet Korb, Vilmos Aba-Novák and