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

AT HOME AND ABROAD - KRISZTINA PASSUTH: Wild Beasts of Hungary Meet Fauves in France

the label "fauve" primarily referred to the style of the paintings, or more precisely to the flaming, harsh colours, which first "shattered" the exhibition halls of the Salon d'Automne in 1905. The discordant colours, and especially the dominance of red, took the critics by surprise and shocked the spectators. Thematically, the compositions did not challenge the value system of contemporary Post-Impressionistic painting, by then broadly accepted in bourgeois society. The French Fauves did not mean to offend, insult, or ridicule French society, in which they lived. If their paintings were at odds with both the expectation of society and the value judgments of contemporary critics, then that was certainly not intentional on the artists' part. In fact, when it came to his lifestyle, the Fauves' leader Henri Matisse was as respectable, consolidated and conventional an artist as one could possibly hope to find. The other leading personality of the Fauves, André Derain (along with Matisse), could be described as a genuine "pictor doctus", in the sense that both of them placed their faith in, and took their inspiration from, the classical art of the previous periods, which they used as a platform for developing their own artistic world.

4 So, how did they come to earn the epithet "fauves" ("wild men")? French society, including French art critics, was accustomed to the artistic offering of traditional salons: they grew up on, and felt comfortable with, the material shown in these salons. And when they first encountered compositions that were at variance with the dominant artistic ideas of the salons, they protested. They did that without realizing how deeply rooted the Fauve concept of art was in Mediaeval and Renaissance French painting, or in French Post-Impressionism, for that matter. As to the Hungarian Fauves, contemporary

—and similarly extreme

—criticism still not used this term in relation to them around 1906, regardless of the point that, at least as far as their intentions were concerned, this description would have been every bit as appropriate. As an art historical term, "Hungarian Fauvism" can be regarded as a retrospective label. At the time, the expression came up only sporadically, for example in 1910, when Artúr Bárdos mentioned Károly Kernstok's name among "the latest Hungarian Fauves".

5 Actually, this was not a description to be used readily even in connection with an artist accused of imitating Matisse's art. Generally speaking, it did not register with the Hungarian press that there was a radical group of young Hungarian artists whose artistic were are so directly related to a concrete art movement outside Hungary. Simply called "NeoImpressionist", or "Neos" for short, they were considered to be a Hungarian movement, despite drawing the occasional charges of "Gauguinism". (Contemporary art critiques in the United States also labelled the Fauve painters of America as "Post-Impressionists", especially after the exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionism", which was held in London in 1910.)

6 The possibility that the so-called Neos where not imitators or copiers, but active participants in a contemporary French movement never occurred

.,.to them. Fauvism has been looked upon as an exclusively French art movement until very recently. It was the exhibition Le fauvisme ou "L'épreuve du feu", held in Paris in 1999, which first presented the movement as a genuinely international affair with numerous non-French (Norwegian, German, Czech, Hungarian, Dutch, Swiss, Russian, Finnish and Belgian) representatives.

7 The new framework finally allowed the Hungarian artists to be included in what has become an international feast of Fauve painters, though admittedly not with their best work and not with a privileged status. Instead of being Neos, a small sect of rebellious and provocative artists within the Nagybánya colony, they came to represent the Hungarian contingent of a French art movement. Henri Matisse: La plage rouge, 1905 Private collection, deposit. Courtesy: Courtauid Institute of Art Gallery, London © Succession H. Matisse I HUNGART

'2006 André Derain: Le phare de Collioure, 1905 Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris © RM. VP. / Cliché: Joffre © HUNGART 2006 André Derain: Le port de Collioure (Le cheval blanc), 1905 Musée d'Art moderne de Troyes, Troyes © HUNGART 2006