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
Henri Matisse: La Gitane, 1906 Collection Musée de l'Annonciade, Saint-Tropez, Photo PS. Azema © Succession H. Matisse I HUNG ART 2006 Ugly Pictures — Primitivism Although the term "Fauvism" was originally coined in the autumn of 1905, it gained general currency only after 1907, when Fauvism itself had already passed its peak in France, despite the fact that the "ugly", or even repulsive effect became an integral part and a new attribute of European culture in its own right around 1906. The poet, illustrator and draughtsman Gelett Burgess, who spent the winter of 1908-1909 in Paris and interviewed some of the most modern artists, became aware of this new quality. After a visit to the Salon des Indépendants, he described the shock and horror he felt upon seeing the pictures there. In his opinion, there were no limits to the brazenness and ugliness of the canvases: these were dominated by wild colours, awkward perspective and nudes with apparent pathological conditions, etc. He wrote about Czóbel's painting Le Moulin de la Galette (the present location of which is unknown) that "the savagery of colour escapes the camera. That colour is indescribable. You must believe that such artists that paint such pictures will dare any discord. They have robbed sunsets and rainbows, chopped them up into squares and circles, and hurled them, raw and bleeding, upon their canvases." 91 However, in the case of some of the French artists this "ugliness" was aggravated by a streak of aggression. This even applied to Matisse, ever so gentle, disciplined and well-balanced, or to Derain who was passionate from the start, or to Vlaminck, the instinctive artist who was known for the intensity of his style, or to Chabaud, only to name a few. Around 1906 the profusion of colours, a passionate way of expression and primitivism inspired by tribal art coexisted in the majority of paintings, enhancing and supplementing each other. Heightened expressivity was partly due to Van Gogh's influence, whose work Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck became aware of already in 1901, at the Van Gogh exhibition of the Bernheim Gallery, Paris.'-' The Hungarian audience also had an encounter with Paul Gauguin's art. Both Paris and Budapest first learned about primitivism through Gauguin's interpretation. Gauguin's works were first shown in the Nemzeti Szalon in Budapest quite early on, in 1 907. 93 The Hungarian artists and critics reacted enthusiastically. Hungarian painters understood the message of Gauguin's art: he was trying to find a way to connect with a culture alien to Europeans and his paintings revealed this desire. At the end, Gauguin's ideas gave more inspiration than his themes or the concrete elements of his style did. The few paintings and drawings, which did show marks of this influence (e.g. Lajos Tihanyi's Gipsy Madonna, Dezső Czigány's Funeral of a Child), were sufficient enough to prompt the critics to talk about painterly "Gauguinism", and not always in the positive sense. What the Hungarians knew about the existence of the so-called "primitive" art was conveyed to them mainly by Gauguin and not by those original items, which they may have encountered in the ethnographic collections of London, Paris, or even of Budapest. Tribal art, mainly African sculpture, was in the focus of interest of the Parisian artists after 1906; they could be seen, touched and felt in many places. In the beginning, it was easiest to acquire one in Marseille, where sailors brought them back from their trips, later they also appeared in the Parisian flea market. In the beginning of the century, antique shops and galleries started to deal in them, first at Boulevard Raspail or Rue de Rennes and at very affordable prices. One of the first artists to acquire one was Matisse in 1906, later he was followed by André Derain, Pablo Picasso and the others. Vlaminck discovered the painted African sculptures around the same time; later on, his collection became the basis of Derain's, to whom he sold it. All this together led to the development of a new set of ideas, which later came to be called "Primitivism". The harsh, agressively violent colours, and the proportions of the human body, which were alien to European art, the over-exaggerated facial expressions all played an important role in this process. As Jack D. Flam pointed out: "In fact, tribal art was one of the last of the non-European arts to engage the attention of European artists, and the French artists' interest in tribal art was a relatively late development in the European cult of the Primitive. " 94 "Around 1906, the progressive painters were seeking alternatives to an imagery burdened with optical effects, circumstantial details of the material world, and narrative. This coincided with a deep interest in new ways of combining the ideal and the real, and of synthesizing the conceptual and the perceptual." 95 They believed that they had found all this in African art, therefore they drew inspiration from it. The African "fetishes" influenced their visual forms and contributed to reshaping their attitudes, although the Fauve painters never directly copied the artworks, or never directly used their characteristic formal expressions. Even Matisse, who was among the first to adopt concepts of this newly discovered art form and who later analyzed it, 96 depicted a "negro" sculpture only once, in an unfinished picture, where this sculpture had no more importance than a vase, or than his own sculptures in his other paintings did. 97 The indirect influence of tribal art was most noticeable in some sculptures made around 1907-1908.
