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

In the French museums, the Hungarians, like Rezső Bálint, for example, selected the same popular paintings for copying as their French colleagues did; in this way the decision was made without much ado, almost routinely.

65 When artists decide to copy a composition they are really interested in, they do not necessarily produce a refined and finished oil painting. Instead, they may only draw a quick sketch, or a series of sketches to be used as memos, notes for their own use. The largest number of such sketches has survived from Derain among the French artists, and from János Vaszary among the Hungarians, who drew most of them in 1910, upon his arrival in Paris. Instead of the old masters' compositions, Vaszary copied the sculptures of the Buddha and Shiva, producing very vivid studies of movement. During the period after 1910, which is known as his "synthetic phase", Vaszary was especially interested in the visual documentation of human movement. He gave his figures a thin, uninterrupted contour. We have reason to believe that he drew inspiration from Dunoyer de Segonzac, who produced an album in 1909 containing dancing female figures. Vaszary may have made the artist's acquaintance in 1910, when he arrived in Paris.

66 Dunoyer de Segonzac, who stood closer to Post-Impressionism than to the attitudes of Fauvism, became known for his drawings and his etchings. He had been a pupil of Jean-Paul Laurens in the Julian Academy before he quitted together with some other artists. He became a friend of Béla Czóbel as early as 1905 and their friendship lasted for decades. In some sense, his drawings of Isadora Duncan can be regarded as his most modern works. Nudes in the Studio Although the blossoming of Fauvism was definitely related to Collioure, its inception can apparently be traced back to the Parisian ateliers and schools. The original impetus was given by Gustave Moreau's lectures and the practical assignments of the Julian Academy. The actual transformation came with the nudes; it was in this genre that the young artists first experienced the power of colours and the pleasures of painting. Because what looks motionless and preset in the painting of one atelier, all of a sudden becomes full of movement, vivid colours and inner luminosity in the others'.

67 No longer supple and insipid, the compositions became wild and "primitive". On top of that, at least in some compositions, the female

—and occasionally even the male

—figure itself becomes wild and primitive. Originally, nude painting was not necessarily considered an independent genre. It simply constituted one of the highest stages of academic training for those students who had already mastered the earlier, much less inspiring phases. This was the general situation at those academies, where nude painting had a distinguished place in the training. According to Pierre Schneider, the result was that the expression "académie" acquired an identical meaning with "étude de nu".

68 At the academy in Budapest, it took some time before the pupils were allowed to paint a live female model.

69 For Hungarian students, Hollósy's school in Munich provided the earliest opportunity to paint nudes, followed by the artists' colony in Nagybánya. As István Réti reveals in his memoirs, those who ventured to become models were paid by the day.

70 Károly Ferenczy created Painter and His Model in 1904 using a live model. This example was then followed by others in Nagybánya. Models were relatively easy to find here, as there were a lot of Gypsy girls around the area who agreed to pose in the nude much more readily than the peasant girls. Their youth, natural behaviour and freshness made Gypsy girls better models than the often tired professionals at academies. For the young generation, however, painting nudes acquired a different meaning. "The novelty of the Neo movement lies exactly in this; the earlier relationship reverses, the nude studies are no longer made in preparation for a later composition. Instead, the study is regarded as a work of art in its own right," wrote András Zwickl.

71 What made this change in artistic attitude easier at the Nagybánya free school was that according to the evidence of a hand-written list of those who paid the models, in 1905, the year before the Neo movement actually started, the young artists collected money for the purpose of hiring more models.

72 Similar events took place in France. In the private schools of Paris, nudes not necessarily formed part of a larger composition: they played an important role independently, even much earlier, already around the turn of the century. According to Jack Flam: "In 1900 Matisse began to work in what might be called his proto-Fauve style. The paintings include a series of standing male and female figures, composed of heavily brushed areas with sharp colour and value contrasts, though the colour is not in itself as bright as in the Fauve period, and the value contrasts are for the most part modified at the contours."

73 To the best of our knowledge, similar finished paintings were not produced in the studios of Hungarian artists until as late as 1905-1906. Therefore, it is not justified to talk about a "proto-Fauve" period in Hungary. Because in the case of the French artists the representation and interpretation of the male, and especially the female model played an important role, the proto-Fauve attitude was the most prevalent in this genre. As Alfred Barr commented, substantial changes can be observed in Matisse's painting between 1900 and 1905. In his early paintings the colours are rarely arbitrary or decorative; instead, they always have a structural purpose,

74 which means that in his paintings Matisse conceived the figures as if he was making a sculpture after a model. This is partly explained by the fact that until as late as 1904 Matisse not only painted, but also sculpted in the studios of his friends.

75 In the opinion of Pierre Schneider, Le Serf (1900-1903) is actually a three-dimensional variant of L'Homme nu (cca. 1900). Therefore, the sturdiness, heaviness and structural soundness of Matisse's earlier pictures were required in order to guarantee that his later paintings characterized by weightlessness and buoyancy could retain the soundness of their structure and composition. Of course, the same also applies to the other young French painters and would-be Fauves, most notably to Marquet. Both Matisse and Marquet attached special importance to nudes.

76 Marquet painted Nu fauve in 1898, seven years before Fauvism was born.

77 Although the title was obviously given to the picture later, the vibration of its colours already signalled that something new was in the making. In his genuinely Fauve painting, Matisse peignant dans l'atelier de Manguin (Cat. No. 294)

78 Marquet recorded the setting, where the three friends, Matisse, Manguin and Marquet worked during the winter of 1904-1905, at 61 rue Boursault in Paris. They painted after the same model in the same surroundings. (Puy and Camoin were also there.)

79 These paintings were executed a few months before the landscapes inspired by Collioure, thereby preceding the birth of Fauvism. With a little exaggeration, we could say that, instead of being conceived in the sunshine of Collioure, on the seashore, Fauvism was born earlier, in the closed space of Manguin's poorly furnished studio, one of the