Veszprémi Nóra - Szücs György szerk.: Vaszary János (1867–1939) gyűjteményes kiállítása (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2007/3)

Tanulmányok: - BOROS JUDIT: Naturalista életképektől a realista kompozíciókig. Vaszary János festői pályájának első korszaka

JUDIT BOROS From Naturalistic Conversation Pieces to Realistic Compositions THE FIRST PERIOD IN THE ART OF JÁNOS VASZARY The moment Vaszary started out as a painter, he realized that the challenge for Hungarian painting at the end of the 19

th century was naturalism, which sought to render a faithful image of reality as filtered through the personality of the painter. The problem was that an authentic work of art simultaneously faithful to reality and personality was also meant to conform to "stylistic" requirements, which in turn made abstraction indispensable. The process was quite different in idea painting, where the painter started out from some ab ovo given formal system acquired at various academies. It was this dual process, that of abstraction and of adapting an abstract system to concrete reality, that concerned Vaszary from the beginning of his career. From the autumn of 1885 to the summer of 1897, Vaszary studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest under Bertalan Székely, Gusztáv Keleti, János Greguss, Alajos Stróbl. He attended the Munich Academy between 1887 and 1889; it was here and at the Hollósy circle that he acquainted himself with an exceedingly detailed mode of naturalist representation. His first oil we know is from 1887, a Self-Portrait (Cat. No. 1), which follows the pose of Székely's well-known early Self-Portrait (HNG), its surfacing is suggestive of French naturalism aspiring to a detached mode of painting. In the autumn of 1889, Vaszary arrived in Paris, and, in November, he was admitted to the Académie Julian, to the class headed by W. A. Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury. He could hardly have withdrawn himself from the influence of the eclecticism of Bouguereau aspiring to formal perfection for the simple reason that this was the style closest to that of Jules Bastien-Lepage, the artist most admired at the Academy. Vaszary had already heard BastienLepage being praised at the Hollósy circle, and, no doubt, he had been familiar with his work, but his own compositions were far more detached and especially more abstract than those by the French master. At Alcsút in 1890, he painted the The Sons of Archduke Joseph (Cat. No. 4). A prototype of this can be seen in one of the best known paintings of the period, Whistler's White Girl (1862), not only because of the polar-bear hide seen in both, but the similarity of their contrived attitudes or poses. In the beginning of 1891, Vaszary left Paris for a longer period. Invited by his uncle, Kolos Vaszary, the artist spent a few months in Italy. In October, 1891 Kolos Vaszary was elevated to the archbishopric of Esztergom, and János Vaszary's family also moved to that town. This was the period of his first naturalist pictures. The Pannika series gives the impression of exercises in style. Its strict handling of form, its restrained, almost scanty use of colour witness an intention to correct the uncertainties in form and colouration of the former year. The strict proportions of the picture somewhat evoke James Tissot's conversation pieces painted in a quite different range of colour. In 1893 or 1894, Vaszary returned to Paris, and joined the class of JeanPaul Laurens and Benjamin Constant at the Académie Julian, who worked in a more conservative manner than Bouguereau. In Vaszary's naturalist studies of nudes, the figures of models in floods of light are characterized by comprehensive shapes and surfaces finely folding into one another - the detailed analysis of body parts was not a requirement. Solitary in the period, Woman in Black Hat (1894, Cat. No. 9) must have been painted as a study, a fleeting idea. This painting on cardboard and the pages of his Paris sketchbook attest his unbiased attention to the various tendencies of contemporary painting. He was well aware of the work of Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugène Carrière, and the Nabis. Vaszary was working in Hungary from 1895, but he may have stayed at home in the summer of 1894, too. This was when he painted The Call-Up Order Has Come (Cat. No. 20), which attests a shift in his painting of conversation pieces toward realism. Little Girl with a Basket of Tomatoes (Cat. No. 21), painted a year later, extends the limits of naturalist representation in the direction of decorativeness. The girl posed in accordance with naturalist attitude appears in front of a highly stylized, decorative natural background witnessing a knowledge of the painting of the Nabis and Vuillard in particular. Vaszary painted his pictures belonging in the historicist system of ideas and forms on commission by the Church. Apart from altarpieces, he turned out several portraits of his uncle, Kolos Vaszary, all of them in a classical pose, in ornate prelatial clothes and with the proper attributes. (Cat. No. 5) The way he painted the clothes reflects the influence of the then very popular portraits of Albert Besnard. After the symbolist paintings of the second half of the 1890s, Vaszary produced highly realistic compositions with rural, peasant subject matters. This may have been influenced both by the agrarian socialist movements of the late 90s and the preparations for the foundation of the Szolnok Artists' Colony. In his essay The Life of Colours, Lines in the December 1903 issue of Művészet (Art), he argued for clearly distinguishing between naturalism and realism. Naturalism indisputably deserved credit for freeing sensation from the constraints of historical styles and opening the way for asserting individual impressions; however, it overemphasized the primacy of natural pattern ("the so-called photographic, honest vision"), as a result of which naturalist trends could never lead to a style. A new style was therefore needed. Knowing the paintings Vaszary made at the time, the new style he did not name in his essay must have been realism. He painted his first realistic compositions in 1901; his Elders (Cat. No. 53) and a Study of an Old Woman for it were also made at this time. His first realistic landscapes and compositions witness that he went back to the works of Courbet to find a starting point. In comparison to the pictures of his naturalist period, the realist works bear a marked social message. Usually frontally depicted, his figures give the impression of resistance and opposition. This holds particularly for Share Harvesters painted in 1902. It was during this realistic period that Vaszary developed his powerful, harsh and saturated brushwork, which he would use throughout his expressionist period, too.