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 - GYÖRGY SZÜCS:Dissonance or New Harmony? The Art of the Nagybánya "Neos"

Sándor Galimberti: Motif from Nagybánya, 1911. Cat. No. 129. even then it was published in an incomplete form for ideological reasons. Réti started to work on the manuscript already in the late 1930s. On the one hand, he wove his earlier articles, monographs and comprehensive studies into the material; and on the other hand he assessed the role of Nagybánya and the work of the successive generations with hindsight decades later.

58 On the period's conceptual apparatus he wrote the following: "The various forms of PostImpressionism were called Neo-lmpressionism in Hungary before 1910, while the artists associated with the new movements were referred to as 'Neos' in short. The painters themselves coined both labels and, especially in the case of the latter, the expression stayed in circulation among contemporary artists for some time as an atelier or café jargon. It was only the art writers who distinguished between the new movements by using the terms Expressionism, Cubism, etc. [...] As they had permeated contemporary art in successive waves for decades, I refer to these stylistic phenomena

—or 'isms' if you like

—with the comprehensive label of 'neo-modern', so as to distinguish them from the modernism of Nagybánya."

59 Therefore, according to the original interpretation that can still be of use today, the analogous term for "Neo-lmpressionist" in Hungary was "neo-modern", which

—at least as far as Réti was concerned

—served to separate the different grades in the modernity-concept of the Nagybánya artists' colony. The book abounded in verbal combinations that were often subjective and seemingly self-propagating, encompassing the entire spectrum of the possible terms used in describing the period: neo-movement, neoethics, fake-neo, neo-stylist, neo-decorative, etc. At the time of writing the book, Réti had a small card to jog his memory; on this card, he divided up the artists of the next generation coming after his as follows: "

Neos and half-Neos 1906. B. Czóbel, Ervin Frimm, 1907-1912 Géza Bornemisza, T. Boromisza, Valéria G. Dénes 1912 - Sándor Galimberti, Erzsi Fehérvári, (András Mikola?), Alfréd Rét, Armand Schönberger, V. Perlroth Cs., Géza Kádár, József Kornai, Mária Lehel, Irma Seidler, Sándor Ziffer..."

60 - almost the complete list of characters of the contemporary Nagybánya art scene. For the sake of philological punctiliousness, we need to address the problem of authorship regarding the term "Neo", free of any postfixes.

61 Réti was right in pointing out that in written or printed form the abbreviation could have appeared only some time after it had already been in circulation in everyday speech. Perlrott recalled the moment when, upon his return from Paris, he found himself in an open confrontation with the leading artists on account of his paintings executed in the new style: "and they got so mad at me that they started to ridicule me and my friends by calling us 'Neos'."

62 What we do know for sure is that in the jubilee catalogue published in 1912 Réti used this truncated version in the combination "neo-movement".

63 For a while all the evidence seemed to be pointing to Károly Ferenczy. It was suggested that in a letter written to Réti in early 1907, Ferenczy had already described Czóbel and Kernstok's work at Nyergesújfalu as "Neolike". In fact the passage in question reads as follows: "My understanding is that the Zobels [Czóbel and company] gather around Kernstok in Nyerges Újfalu in order to create a modern Nagybánya [my