Passuth Krisztina – Szücs György – Gosztonyi Ferenc szerk.: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2006/1)
JACK FLAM: Foreword
JACK FLAM Foreword The artists we now call the Hungarian "Wilds" were related to other subjective, somewhat abstract art movements that emerged in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. And like those other groups of artists —the Fauves in France, the Expressionists in Germany —their undertaking involved both creation and destruction. The main part of their program was the creation of a new artistic practice, in which painters would use fresh formal means to express what Lajos Kassák called the "essential nature of things." But at the same time, their art was also a reaction against many of the artistic values associated with the grand tradition of European Renaissance painting, such as verisimilitude, literary subject matter, and narrative. In order for the new art to emerge, the encumbrances of the past had to be done away with. And the past in this instance included various forms of late 19th-century modernism. The "Wild" painters, most of whom were born in the 1880s, forged their styles in reaction against the previous generation of "modern" Hungarian artists, who were born in the 1860s. For them, the soft colors and sweet lyricism of József Rippl-Rónai, Károly Ferenczy, and János Vaszary embodied a version of modern painting that needed to be given a large dose of new energy. Their position in this regard was not dissimilar to the way the French Fauves reacted to artists such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Albert Besnard —painters of soft, idealized forms who were preoccupied by lyrical sentiments that often bordered on sentimentality. For the Hungarian "Wilds," as for their counterparts in France and Germany, the search for "the essential nature of things" involved a certain violence: in color, in drawing, and in paint handling. This roughness, this lack of artistic "good manners," distanced and distinguished them from their elders. It also brought them closer to the art forms of the past that they most admired —the archaic and primitive works from antiquity, the middle ages, and exotic cultures that stressed spirituality over material description and gave inner necessity precedence over supposed objectivity. Such an endeavor involved a paradox, in that these artists believed that the essence of things could best be expressed by giving form to an intensely personal, often idiosyncratic vision of the world. This subjective approach, of course, was very close to the one articulated by Matisse in his influential 1908 essay, Notes of a Painter, where he stated that he was "unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it." But Matisse also characterized his goal as transcending the temporal phenomena associated with individual visual perception: "Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation." This emphasis on the link between the work of art and the individual artist's inner life, on the importance of the unique perspective of the individual artist, can be related —in Hungary and elsewhere —to the widespread (and liberating) influence of Nietzsche. Within this context, the direct relationship between the form of the work of art and the Weltanschauung of the artist was held to be self-evident. The success of individual works would henceforth be judged not by "objective" criteria but in relation to the degree to which they manifested the authentic presence of the free individual spirit. Thus a new kind of bond was created between the aesthetical and the ethical: the relationship between them came to be regarded as inherent to the artistic process —and as inseparable from each other, and as complex, as that between form and content. The Hungarian "Wilds," like expressionist artists everywhere, were stylistically indebted to the French Fauves. But as this exhibition makes clear, the Hungarian artists developed their own, very particular kinds of expression, which in the end were very different from those of their French counterparts. On the whole, their color harmonies are harsher and their drawing and spatial construction are somewhat more literally descriptive than those of the French. Their emotional emphasis is also different. If a distinction can be made between "emotion" and "feeling," with the former being a somewhat anguished expression of specifically human passions and the latter expressive of a more generalized response to the harmony of the world, then I would clearly place the Hungarian "Wilds" on the side of emotion and the French Fauves on that of feeling. In fact, the emotional gamut in the paintings of the Hungarian "Wilds" is quite broad. It ranges from the uneasy sensuality often evident in the works of Robert Berény and József Nemes Lampérth to the boldly dissonant views of nature presented by Géza Bornemisza, Lajos Tihanyi, or Ödön Márffy. A similar sense of agitation and of probing the visible world for deeper significance is expressed in rather different pictorial terms in the works of other members of The Eight: Dezső Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Károly Kernstok, Dezső Orbán, and Bertalan Pór; and in the works of such contemporaries as Rezső Bálint, Sándor Galimberti, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, and János Maitis Teutsch. Though the works of these artists are linked by a number of common features, their individuality consistently makes itself felt. The works in this exhibition reveal both the pictorial inventiveness of the artists who gave rise to the first manifestation of the Hungarian avant-garde and their deep intellectual and emotional commitment to the implications of the new art. Equally important, this exhibition reminds us that these artists remained in touch not only with "the essential nature of things," but also with their own essential humanity.
