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

died shortly after returning to Hungary a little over one year later. Vilmos Aba-Novák spent his last year in Olgyai's class, and Károly Patkó, first time in ten years, returned to work in Nagybánya during the Summer. This was also the year that brought them the first official recognition. Szőnyi's paintings were selected for the Hungarian exhibit at the Venice Biennial, along with the graphical works of Aba-Novák, Patkó, Nándor Lajos Varga, and Jenő Tarjáni Simkovics. Vilmos Aba-Novák was finally able to show his paintings to the public for the first time, and the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts purchased his painting Fetching Wood from the larger collection exhibited at the Ernst Museum in October. Parallel with this, two paintings by Szőnyi were shown at the Museum of Fine Arts' new acquisitions exhibition, including Man Reading, which had been bought by the Museum at the artist's exhibition in January. Other classicising tendencies outside the Szőnyi circle were also present in Hungarian art in the first half of the 1 920s. The 1 924 exhibition of KUT featured two artists who had earlier belonged to a provincial art group that arrived at a neo-classical style similar to Szőnyi's by continuing the Cubo-Expressionist direction of the 1910: through their master, Péter Dobrovics (Petar Dobrovic), members of the Pécs Artists Circle, a group founded in 1 920, were directly linked to the art of Fiafalok.

Ji The similarities between the ideas of the Szőnyi circle and the Pécs group can be conceived by taking a look at the biblical-mythological compositions of an expressionist setting and symbolic overtones by Farkas Molnár and Henrik Stefan, or by studying Jenő Gábor's Arcadian scenes of Renaissance inspiration.'

6 However, as their career soon took a decisive turn, with the result that most of them digressed from the direction represented by the Szőnyi circle. In 1921 Molnár and Stefán travelled in Italy in the company of Hugajohan. They captured their travel experiences in a series of lithographs one year later while visiting the Bauhaus of Weimar. In these lithographs they depicted the geometrical structure of the Mediterranean cities using the structured forms of Cubism, and the earlier nude compositions continued to linger on only in Molnár's graphical works for a little longer/

7 In the first half of the 1 920s the members of the Szőnyi circle often had joint exhibitions with Gyula Derkovits. The start of the latter artist's career was associated with another member of the older generation. Born in the same year as Szőnyi, Derkovits never attended the Academy of Fine Arts; it was during the few months of the Council Republic that Derkovits joined the painting school in Nyergesújfalu led by Károly Kernstok, the leading figure of the former artists' association Nyolcak. Derkovits, whose Arcadian painting was characterised by a classicizing amalgamation of Expressionism and Cubism, exhibited his early works in late 1922 in the Belvedere. His idyllic nude compositions composed of splintered planes and his religious paintings of modernised iconography partly show similarities with Kmetty's works and partly reveal an analogy with the Neo-Classicism of the Szőnyi circle. Derkovits' etchings bear the impression of the 1910s, and Uitz's art in particular, which influenced Derkovits not only through the style but also by the choice of themes/

8 Nevertheless, the everyday life of simple folks had been much more noticeable in Derkovits' art from the start, and from the middle of the decade onward his "peasant Arcadia" gave way to the depiction of the dynamic and hectic world of metropolitan life. Numerous artists turned to the Arcadian themes in the 1 920s, but il was the Szőnyi circle's Neo-Classicism that represented the most distinctive school, which inevitably came to bear an influence on the younger generation. Jenő Paizs Goebel, one of Szőnyi's major followers, caught the critics' attention at the beginning of the decade with a nude composition [Painter and his Model, 1923) that showed clear evidence of the Szőnyi circle's influence, although its more naturalistic approach was still related to the academic traditions, the same as Ernő Jeges' early paintings. After 1922 Jeges regularly took part in the Ernsl Museum's group exhibitions with his biblical compositions and nude paintings, which were displayed next to Aba-Novák's works, among others. Paizs Goebel and Jeges spent a longer period in France, working in Barbizon, as well as in Paris. In 1 92Ó, shortly after his return to Hungary, Paizs Goebel worked in the "Hungarian Barbizon", Nagybánya, which he had already visited ten years earlier, then still as a college student. For a while, Jeges' choice of topic revealed the presence of biblical themes, while Paizs Goebel went on painting nude compositions that showed the influence of Szőnyi's early period as late as 1929; during the next year, however, his career also took a new turn, when he started to paint his symbolically charged compositions of naive conception. The Nagybánya artists' colony played a crucial role in the formation and development of the Szőnyi circle's Neo-Classicism, but the relationship was broader than that between predecessors and followers. Although Patkó was the only member of the Szőnyi circle who visited Nagybánya after the war, there were several painters working at Nagybánya in the first half of the 1920s whose art fell into the category of Neo-Classicism. In addition to Aba-Novák and Paizs Goebel, Dávid Jándi, Vince Korda and