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
13. Vincent van Gogh: Portrait of Père Tanguy, 1887-1888 Private collection 12. Béla Czóbel: Man Seated II. (Portrait of a Hungarian Student in Paris), 1906. Cat. No. 106. If the point of departure in our argument is that he returned to Nagybánya in the summer of 1906, we are justified in assuming that he brought back his most recent paintings, those that he had exhibited in Salon des Indépendants a few months earlier. Of the eight compositions shown there, we can identify four with some degree of certitude. Six of these were portraits or quasi-portraits. The composition entitled Interieur gris avec fille is believed to be identical with a painting we have mentioned earlier: made in 1905, it is presently known by the title Little Girl in Front of a Bed. It is also strongly suspected that the title Enfant en robe rose referred to another, previously discussed portrait of a little girl, the location of which is presently unknown. 29 István Genthon described the portrait Czóbel had painted of the painter Andor Dobai Székely as a characteristically Nagybánya composition reminiscent of the works Károly Ferenczy had produced during his pastose period. 30 This portrait, too, was shown at the exhibition. We know the composition only through a rather poor-quality reproduction (Fig. 8), which was probably the reason why it was not reproduced in any of the monographs about Czóbel and his oeuvre. In all likelihood, he painted the portrait of his young colleague in 1905 in Paris, as it was subsequently reproduced in the mid-February 1906 issue of Béla Lázár's magazine, Modern Művészet, already before the opening of the Salon des Indépendants. 31 By contrast, another one of the paintings left out of the monographs had been reproduced in June 1906 in Béla Lázár's other magazine, Jövendő, 32 as the illustration for a critical review reporting on Czóbel's success at the Paris exhibition. Since the painting itself, a self-portrait, went missing eventually, we know it only through this black-and-white reproduction. (Fig. 9) Along with other of his portraits, this composition was described in contemporary French papers as the manifestation of the most recent tendencies in painting. The anonymous author of Jövendő wrote the following in connection with the Czóbel portraits exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants: "Outstanding success was achieved at this exhibition by Béla Czóbel, who was greatly admired by all the French papers. The Paris edition of the 'New-York-Herald', for example, listed him among the most interesting people, drawing the amateurs' attention to Czóbel's portraits, which it regarded to be the 'dernier crie' [sic!] of the modern tendencies." 33 A few pages before in the same issue of Jövendő, György Bölöni had similar praises for Czóbel's successes at the exhibition. After discussing the work of the Fauves, i.e. Manguin, Puy, Friesz and Dufy, as well as following his analysis of Matisse's Bonheur de vivre, Bölöni turned to Czóbel's accomplishment at the exhibition: "Without yielding to the dictates of nationalistic prejudice, I must add a Hungarian name to the list of the vanguards: Béla Czóbel contributed eight compositions, which appear to form the substratum of modern tendencies. Although he appears heavyhanded, he draws with ease, brutally squeezing the character out of
