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

As far as we know, Hungarian artists did not directly react to this tribal culture, so alien to Europe. However, somewhat later, in 1928, Géza Boromisza, who was among those who went to Matisse's school, did reflect on tribal art. He brought home an African statue, which he had acquired in Paris. The same small figure shows up in one of his still-lifes made in 1928.

98 Apparently, his interest in "negro" art was exclusively linked to Matisse's influence, and none of his other paintings showed further signs of it. It was roughly during the same period that a new palette, which Philippe Dagen associated mainly with the appearance of the savage and the primitive, was developed.

99 In his opinion, it was this "Barbarian palette" that definitively distinguished Expressionism and Fauvism from Post-Impressionism. The violent, wild colours appeared to their best advantage in the portraits, and even more so on the naked bodies. The depiction of coloured bodies was fundamentally different in Western interpretation. "Red, especially yellowish red is the favourite colour of the primitives."'

00 The same colour appeared in its full wildness already in the early works of Matisse. Henri Matisse's oil painting, La Gitane is a female half-nude

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. The thickly layered, greasy paint lends remarkable plasticity to the figure in frontal view. The model, whose age it is impossible to tell, looks at the viewer with a strange, misshapen smile on her bright red face, marked by green shades and strong, thick black lines. Red and green colour areas on her body are in a constant dialogue. The paint marks are sketchy, almost as if the painter had deliberately smeared them over the canvas to fine-tune them to the wildness of the face. Even if we did not know the title of the painting, we would still be able to sense that this was not a customary nude and a customary theme. The forceful and aggressive representation of the Gypsy girl's nude figure creates an exotic and gripping alternative to bourgeois lifestyle. Although in the strict sense there is no Hungarian equivalent of this composition, Robert Berény's small sized Reclining Nude (Cat. No. 12) comes quite close to it. This painting also highlights a fragment of a female body, in which orange-red and vivid greens seem to engage in a duel. But the brush strokes are not so fragmented and blotchy and the experience of the exotic is also missing from it. Robert Berény's Nude of an Italian Girl (1907, Cat. No. 13) and Standing Female Nude (Montparnasse Nude, 1907, Cat. No. 11 ), as well as Tibor Boromisza's Nude Stepping (1910, Cat. No. 85) and especially his Study fora Nude (1910, Cat. No. 86) stand close to this strand within Fauvism in terms of their attitude and colour. Set in poorly furnished ateliers, Robert Berény's paintings radiate an atmosphere that is familiar from similar paintings made by Matisse, Marquet, Manguin and others during the same period. His colour range was also the same as that of the French artists. By contrast, the Neos in Nagybánya preferred to set their human figures in the greenery of the natural landscape, in the spirit of their influential masters. However, the same effects that in Ferenczy's paintings evoke an intimate and organic relationship between the landscape and the figures moving in it, tend to produce a clash between the colours and energies of the landscape and the naked body in the pictures of the Neos. The contemporary audience was quite shocked by these dancing and walking figures, above else by Lajos Tihanyi's Red Wrestlers (now lost). In André Derain in his studio, around 1908. The Architectural Record, 1910 Auguste Chabaud: Yvette, 1907-1908. Cat. No. 287. Musée d'Art moderne de Troyes, Troyes; donation Pierre et Denise Lévy © HUNGART

2006 Philippe Dagen's opinion, nudity became connected to new chromatics in the name of sexuality and primitivity.

102 An excellent case in point could be Van Dongen, who portrayed the mundane world of Paris: his