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"

italics, Gy. Sz.]. I don't care what they are up to, but I have the feeling that Jancsi [Thorma] has begun to sympathize with the NeoImpressionists. I have not..."

64 Regardless of this, several sources confirm that Ferenczy, who held moderate views but could be scathingly sardonic in his criticism, liked to use the expression, although this has not been verified for the period before the 1910s. Dezső Rózsaffy recalled a discussion in a café, when Ferenczy remarked with good-natured sarcasm that this or that painter had turned a "Neo".

65 Miklós Rózsa, the head of Művészház, mentioned a similar episode, which evidently took place during the process of judging the artworks of an exhibition there. In the company of Csók, Iványi Grünwald, Kernstok and Szinyei, Ferenczy was also on the panel of judges. Watching the "NeoImpressionistic agitation of the young artists" with an air of condescension, he made the following remark in connection with one of the paintings: "this has the Neo style written all over it, I accept this!"

66 Considerably more enigmatic was the comment he inserted in the letter he wrote to his son, Valér, who dated the event as the winter of 1913-1914. In the letter Károly Ferenczy made the following remark about himself: "in other respect, I have plenty of the neo qualities in me, as well as an appreciation for it." Then he continued a few lines further down: "The nude I have just finished, which is the ideal of most of my men, is not nearly as neo as I would have liked it to be."

67 Unfortunately, the original letter is not available and, not knowing the actual context, we cannot readily verify what Ferenczy really meant by the word: whether he used it in an ironic or a sincere vein. According to the most likely interpretation, he meant it in the sense of some kind of an obligatory "novelty". In his earlier mentioned summary published in early 1914, Miklós Rózsa used the expression with apparent ease and familiarity in connection with the art of both Rippl-Rónai and the "Neos" replacing the Impressionists on the art scene.

68 The Survival of "Neo" After the end of the First World War, life went on at the Nagybánya artists' colony. Although the town (officially Baia Mare) was now under Romanian sovereignty, work could resume under the direction of János Thorma. Having reached artistic maturity, most of the young Neos, including Czóbel, Boromisza and Tihanyi, did not come back to the artists' colony. In addition to the active presence of some of the students who had studied here during the 191 Os, continuity was guaranteed by Ziffer's permanent settlement in Nagybánya. Prominent among the students was Dávid Jándi, whose self-portrait from 1912 prompted Mihály Kuczka to enter the following observation in his diary: "the head of a Saracen, illuminated by green floodlight."

69 Sándor Körösi, the art critic who worked for Brassói Lapok, recalled the same period: "I remember it vividly, almost as if it happened yesterday: once Jándi buried his head entirely in a bowl of a beautiful, rare shade of cinnabar... Many people, the 'sobers', thought he was insane, mad about colours."

70 Jándi's pastels revealed his partiality towards luminous yellows, glowing reds and deep blues; he preserved his distinctive palette throughout his career, although the "wild streak" in his artistic attitude somewhat softened during the years. We could make a long list of artists, including those young painters who accepted the pleinair and Impressionist tradition of the artists colony, who continued to employ "Neo" effects in their compositions to various degrees: Géza Kádár, János Krizsán, Hugó Mund, Oszkár Nagy and others. The work of the former Neos had come of age and had partly become an accepted tendency. In an article published in 1924, the journalist of Szamos resented the absence of several Nagybánya Neos, including Ziffer, Jándi and Mund, from an exhibition.

71 By contrast, Thorma saw the future of the artists' colony as hopeless: "There is nobody here, who could continue the teaching in the spirit we have established. And it would be a real shame, if the same Neo spirit that we have so far been able to keep out of the school would strike roots now. That would be a truly nasty end to our work," he wrote to Réti from Nagybánya in 1927.

72 In 1929, Artúr Elek welcomed Vilmos Perlrott Csaba

's return to the naturalistic style at his Budapest exhibition, where a good many of the compositions had been inspired by the old Nagybánya landscape. "For a long while, he was the first one who scented the new winds blowing from Paris and alerted others to it. At Nagybánya, where he had started out in his career, he was the first and the most determined representative of the horror called 'Neo'. In the vocabulary of the devoutly naturalistic Nagybánya artists colony, 'Neo' was equivalent with the tendency that turned its back on Nature, or more precisely, with the arbitrary representation of Nature, or even more precisely, with the distorted presentation of Nature."

73 Often considered to be exceedingly irritating and quarrelsome in the past, the "neo-modern" tendencies actually leveled out between the two world wars; despite the enervated and almost nostalgic rearguard actions, they became indirectly built into the teaching methods reformed by Réti and Lyka at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts, which really was the institutionalization of "modern academy" frowned upon by Fülep. The various tendencies became more distinct; their usage became consolidated and complemented with the new interwar developments. A good illustration for this is Ödön Gerő's article written in 1908, in which he listed the different stages of modernity in connection with visual perception: "The Naturalists [have a different visual perception] from the Impressionists, the Verists from the stylizers, the plein-air painters from the Pointillists, the ambiance painters from the ornamentalists"; he then went on to expand this list in his 1939 book by adding the isms gaining strength later: the Expressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Surrealists, the "Sachlich" and the "objectless painters".

74 Apparently, by the 1920s the arsenal of concepts and definitions used for the description and categorization of the art movements of the early 20

th century had reached a fully formed and stable condition. And the story continued

—not only in Paris but also at Nagybánya. One of the scenes described in the small book that was published in 1934 and featured easily recognizable characters behind the names illustrates the changing of time. Sitting in the drawing room of a town club, the naturalist painter Varga, the modern painter Spitzer, Kaufmann the art dealer and Rajner the journalist are arguing about modern art. "Kaufmann listens to the debate indifferently. While he personally favours naturalism, he knows that the audience wants modern art and therefore, from a business perspective, he is also compelled to be modern."

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