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

ished for good, and that they were now interested in new artistic problems. Due to the growing use of light diluting the forms in the paintings and also to the atmospheric effects, the compositions became brighter and more colourful, and the brush works more flowing, all this pointing in the direction of a painterly PostImressionism. In an indirect way, the problems posed were solved by a cultural political decision. In 1 928 the best exponents of the earlier neo-classicist school, above else Szőnyi, Aba-Novák and Patkó, won the Rome Scholarship. Recently established by the Hungarian state, the scholarship meant to lay the foundations of a modern official art by paying for the chosen artists' stay in Italy for several years. However, it was precisely this Italian period that sealed the fate of the Szőnyi circle's neo-classicist period.

40 In addition to this latest change of surrounding, which itself was rather more comprehensive than the previous ones, another new development in the art of the Rome grantees was meant by a tempera technique re-discovered by Patkó. The changes had a liberating effect on the art of Aba-Novák and Patkó, and similar signs could be observed in Szőnyi's case, loo, but the latter left Rome after a few months of stay there and returned to Hungary; and although Szőnyi initially took part in one or two exhibitions of the Rome school in Hungary, he gradually returned to the reinterpreted traditions of the Nagybánya school as a representative of the Gresham circle of the 1 930s. Aba-Novák became the leading figure of the Rome School, but in addition to the monumental government and church commissions, he also painted colourful and lively genre scenes of popular life at the Szolnok artists' colony and in Transylvania. Patkó, although regularly taking part in the exhibitions, continued his career as a drawing teacher. In his ever-whitening canvases with broad patches of pure colours he, like Szőnyi, captured the scenes of rural life. Unlike the other members of the Rome School, who started a new type of classicising and were primarily affected by Novecento painting enriched either by the experience of Italian Quattrocento (Jenő Medveczky) or by the influence of Art Deco (Pál Molnár-C.) and the Neue Sachlichkeit (Béla Kontuly), Aba-Novák and his friends turned their back on their former style for good. By the end of the 1 920s it was not just the geographical differences that had left a mark on the various branches of NeoClassicism, but the changing times also. By the mid1 920s the first wave of Neo-Classicism, which in the form of a fashionable trend had affected numerous painters' art for various lengths of time, had subsided; after this a directly historicising trend came to prominence, which made its effects felt in the terminology regarding these schools. Therefore, the expression "Neo-Classicism" was attached to the art of the Rome School in Hungarian art history, while István Genthon and others used the designation "new Classicism" primarily in connection with the Novecento style of the Rome school's painters.

47 Several attempts were made in the 1960s to distinguish between the two kinds of Neo-Classicism. However, by the 1980s the dual meaning of the term "NeoClassicism" had become standard, resulting in a lack of clear distinction, and a confusion, between the two phenomena.

41

' Nevertheless, the objective and cool style of the representatives of the so-called Rome School is very different, and easily distinguished, from the Szőnyi circle's Neo-Classicism in the 1920s.

4

' In the words of Genthon who wrote in connection with Pál MolnárG, representatives of the new neo-classicist generation "avoid the use of atmospheric effects, draw in a hard and strict manner, almost as if embossing the figures on a tin plate." It is worth recalling Kállai's article written in 1925 about the Szőnyi circle, in which he emphasized "the role of solemn self-awareness and solitude-romanticism", dedicating a long analysis to the subject of "sensual impulsiveness," which "swept the form into wonderful expressive dashes."''

0 Genthon's summary about the Rome School, written ten years later, emphasised just the opposite: this "new classicism presents the Hungarian painter with extremely serious conditions; those who follow this course must renounce Romantic pathos and dynamic treatment and, instead of arranging the sight, they must give form to abstract visual ideas."'"' NOTES 1 Franz Roh: Nach-Expressionismus-Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei, Klinkhardt & Biermann Verlag, Leipzig, 1925 2 At the end of his book Roh makes the distinction between Expressionism and "Nachexpressionismus" with the use of dichotomic pairs (Roh 1 925 pp. 1 1 9-1 20.); in the first part of the illustration section he compares "Ex- und Nachexpressionismus" with the help of works arranged in pairs, (without numbering). 3 Roh op.cit. (no page number) 4 Art historians often use the term Neo-Classicism to mean 19th-centuiy Classicism. (Hugh Honour: Neo-classicism, Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, 1968); analogous examples can be found in the history of literature (József Pál: A neoklasszicizmus poétikája, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1988); the insistance on exactness quite often turns into its own parody (PeterOlaus Schuster: Neo-Neo-Klassizismus. Neusachliche Tendenzen im Vergleich Italien-Deutschland, in: Kat. Mythos Italien-Wintermärchen Deutschland. Die italienische Moderne und ihr Dialog mit Deutschland, Haus der Kunst, München, 1988. pp. 71-76.) 5 Mihály Babits: Uj klasszicizmus felé, Nyugat, 1925 (vol. III.), pp. 18-19. Kállai, who pointed out already as early as 1921 that "Italian new classicism has dangerous tendencies to re-introduce primitive Renaissance recipes," calls attention to another type of clas-