Passuth Krisztina – Szücs György – Gosztonyi Ferenc szerk.: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2006/1)

FROM PARIS TO NAGYBÁNYA - PÉTER MOLNOS: Budapest: The "Paris of the East" in the Hungarian Wilderness

While the Palace of Art, besides organizing mammoth shows, only started to put on exhibitions for individual artists or groups as late as 1904—mostly in the form of auctioning off artists' bequests

—, Nemzeti Szalon (National Salon), Budapest's other major exhibition venue established in 1894, had decided to complement its regular Spring, Summer and Autumn exhibitions with a series of retrospective and collective exhibitions already before the end of the century.

11 Although the foundation was originally motivated by a struggle for positions between cliques, with most of the founding fathers being no keener on embracing the most recent artistic ideas than their colleagues staying with the Palace of Art, Nemzeti Szalon nevertheless remained one of the strongholds of modern art in Hungary after the beginning of the century. Its exhibition policies were based on a continuous balancing act between indisputable artistic values and popular demands. Nothing could characterize this paradoxical situation as well as the list of works exhibited at the 1907 Spring Show. In stark contrast with the exquisite French selection, which included major works by Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, the Hungarian material was very poor, indeed, even by Hungarian standards.

12 In all probability, this was the unique historical moment (and at the same time a typical Hungarian moment, as it resulted from a painful compromise), when one of the most vitriolic critics of modern art in Hungary, the painter László Kézdi-Kovács, appeared under the same roof as his arch enemies, including Matisse, who had two of his drawings shown, and Jean Puy, who had four paintings. However, the year 1907 marked another important event in the history of modern Hungarian painting: the formation of the art group MIÉNK through a palace coup famously described as the "struggle between the old-fashioned and the loonies".

11 All three exhibitions held in the Nemzeti Szalon by that short-lived art society, MIÉNK, before its breakup in 1910, featured works displaying Fauvist stylistic marks. Béla Czóbel's emblematic composition, Two Painters/Painters Outdoors (Cat. No. 108), was shown at the first exhibition, while Márffy's Boy and Girl on Green Bench (Cat. No. 169) was exhibited at the second in 1909. Besides the two "great institutions", several smaller exhibition venues existed in contemporary Budapest, and more than one of them played an important part in launching the careers of some of the "Hungarian Fauves". "Urania was a one-storey exhibition venue consisting of 4 or The façade of Nemzeti Szalon, 1908 5 rooms on the corner of Apponyi Square and Veres Pálné Street."'

4 The exhibition venue was opened in 1906 under the direction of Ákos Tolnay, Benczur's student of mediocre talent. It was here that Ödön Márffy was first introduced to the Budapest public in the form of a very successful exhibition.

15 Apart from this one-off event, this short-lived institution did very little to promote modern Hungarian painting and eventually became a state-subsidized depository of paintings endorsed by the Palace of Art.

16 One of the few exceptional occasions was the interior design exhibition held in the spring of 1908 under the title Műhely (Workshop), where József Rippl-Rónai and László Márkus put together modern interiors by selecting from the design works of young painters, sculptors and craftsmen.

17 The featured artists included Adolf Fényes, Károly Ferenczy and József Rippl-Rónai, as well as some representatives of the younger generation, such as Lajos Gulácsy, Béla Czóbel and Ödön Márffy.

18 In 1908, Uránia merged into Könyves Kálmán Rt., the most important art dealership enterprise in contemporary Budapest, which, in addition to holding auctions and selling books and prints, occasionally also engaged in organizing exhibitions, thus contributing to getting the modern tendencies accepted by the Hungarian public. The standard of the exhibitions and the style of the works exhibited naturally offered a wide variety, ranging from Ritta Boemm right down to a group exhibition that the future Nyolcak held under the title New Pictures, where a number of compositions caused vociferous scandal, including Márffy's Female Bathers (Cat. No. 170), a composition showing the influence of Matisse.

19 The gallery, which was enlarged from the proceeds of the 1906 Rippl-Rónai exhibition and auction, gave home to one of the most important exhibitions of the following year, the introductory show of the Young Hungarian Artists. Imbued with a new spirituality, the paintings by Mikola, Márffy, Perlrott, Czigány and Egry gave the Budapest audience their earliest taste of the artistic accomplishments that the new generation of Hungarian painters just returning from Paris had learned from the example of Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse.

20 However, the firm's financial success derived not from the exhibitions it organized, but from the artistic prints it sold from a catalogue, which at the same time provided the most accurate and most revealing picture of the artistic tastes of the Hungarian, and most notably of the Budapest, audience. According to a comprehensive catalogue The exhibition of Műhely in Uránia, 1908