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

HUNGARIAN FAUVES CASE STUDIES - GERGELY BARKI: The Evolution of Czóbel's Fauvism in the Mirror of his Early Portraits

The question that we have to address is not whether Czóbel was a Fauvist, but when and how he became one: Was he a pioneer or was he merely one of the followers? We should also consider the problem of interpreting his legendary role as a "revolutionary" in the context of contemporary Hungarian modernism. In Hungarian literature, several myths linger on about the artist's Fauvist period. These have probably remained in circulation so as to counter-balance a national inferiority complex. Since in most of the cases it requires a great deal of research to trace the roots of these types of legends, and since it is much easier to make references to scholars of old, researchers have tended to repeat these legends automatically in their arguments. Instead of trying to demolish these myths, which would not seem appropriate as Czóbel's role as a revolutionary cannot seriously be questioned, we merely wish to scrutinize the information available, both old and more recent, in the hope of being able to draw the character of an immensely talented and extremely committed painter. Despite the fact that he arrived on the scene relatively late, he took an active part in the movement of the French Fauves. By contrast, he shone as a beacon in his own country, although not quite in the manner that it was earlier thought. The Myth of the "Primordial Fauve" It would now be rather difficult to trace the source of the myth suggesting that Czobel had been present at the explosive appearance of the Fauves and that he exhibited works in the Fauves' room at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, in the company of Matisse, Derain, etc.

7 To the best of my knowledge, Czobel was the first to write down the above claim explicitly,

8 which Philippe Clarisse than took at face value.

9 Since researchers have never refuted the claim, it spread like wild fire in the comprehensive studies,'

0 with the result that it eventually turned up in the monograph published a couple of years ago as an accepted fact.

11 It is a veritable fact that Czobel exhibited together with the Fauves, but so did nearly 400 other artists, as a total of 397 painters took part in the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris. Nevertheless, Czóbel's works were not shown in Room VII, which later became known as salle des fauves, but in Room XV a fair distance away.

12 But were Czóbel's works really conceived in Fauvist style? Not a single one of the three compositions exhibited there can be positively identified, although the title Coin du Marché can be linked to several of his known paintings.'

3 The most probable candidates among his known compositions were executed in a Post-Impressionistic style, thus do not support the claim that Czobel exhibited Fauvist works already back then. According to his own recollection, "It was in the Fauves' room that I had my first encounter with the Fauves or the Wilds. I had seen the paintings of Van Gogh and Gauguin before, under whose influence Fauvism came into being. The Fauves, and especially Matisse, exerted the more powerful impact on me. They transformed my vision and my goals."'

4 Therefore, Czobel did not claim that he had been in the first wave of the "revolutionary" Fauves. In another of his recollections he revealed that at that time he had merely been an outside observer of the new movements. Talking about one of the paintings that had caused quite a scandal at the exhibition, Matisse's La Femme au chapeau, he declared the following: "Matisse's green Woman with Fan first startled me and then impressed me. Not only because it did 5. András Mikola: Street in Paris, cca. 1906. Cat. No. 182. 6. Béla Czóbel: Square (On the Corner of the Market), cca. 1905-1906 Cat. No. 107. away with both the faithful representation of the actual sight and the old principle of composition, but also because his intense palette of pure, unmixed and robust colours augured something entirely new.'"

5 Czóbel even wrote a critical review of the exhibition, although we must point out that in doing so he failed to assign special significance to the emergence of the new group and covered the scandal only in