Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)

Tanulmányok / Studies - Berecz Ágnes: Egy bizarr délután / A Bizarre Afternoon

dichotomy of allegory and genre, of painting and mural, present in Western art for centuries, with formal solutions characteristic of early 20th-century Modernism. In his foreword to the painter's autobiographical text, Zoltán Farkas - like most other authors on Rippl-Rónai - describes the master as "the artist of the eye," and his art as a manifestation of "an insatiable greed to see and represent," then adds that all this "is the flashing of an eye intoxicated with colors, an eye that suggests no desire or lust, only surprise and bewilderment."

5 The decorativeness of the painting, its orgy of colors, does indeed represent looking and seeing as a bodiless, purely optical act, yet the painted bodies and the relationships between them - hinging partly on the act of looking and seeing - overwrite and overwhelm the purely optical register of the picture. On the surface of My Models in My Garden in Kaposvár, looking and the body touch; and the eye returns to where it belongs, to the naked or clothed bodies of the viewers, of the models and of the painter. NOTES 1 Kruger, Barbara: Incorrect. In Remote Control, Power, Culture and the World of Appearances. Cambridge-London 1993. 220. Cf. Hollander, Elizabeth: Notes on Being an Artist's Model. Raritan 1986, Summer: 30. Quoted in Nead 1992. 57. Cf. Duncan, Carol: Virility and Male Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Art. Art Forum 1973. December. Republished in Duncan, Carol: The Aesthetics of Power. Essays in Critical Art History. London-Cambridge 1993. 4 Harrison, Charles: L'atelier des artistes. Transformation du répertoire. Les Cahiers du Musée National d'Art Moderne 1987. September: 29-46. Rippl-Rónai József Emlékezései In: Rippl-Rónai-Beck 1957, 14, 16. First published in 1911.