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

Tanulmányok: - PLESZNIVY EDIT: „Aranykor". Vaszary János művészete 1896-1910 között

measures and thus, so to speak, break out from within their frames. The peasant figures of these canvases are immune from all pathos, sentimentality and historicist garnishing. LANDSCAPES: THE ITALIAN, FRENCH AND SPANISH ITINERARY IN 1905 The landscapes painted at the turn of the century, mood paintings recording atmospheric phenomena, witness Vaszary's connections with Szolnok painting. However, their primary predecessors should be sought for in the art of László Mednyánszky, Jakob Schindler and Tina Blau, the masters of Austrian Stimmungsimpressionismus. The moods of day periods and weather-induced lights fostered the creation of emotionally saturated visions, foggily dim landscapes with characteristically individual atmospheres. Lake Balaton had a prominent place in Vaszary's landscape art. In the first decade of the 20

th century, he painted it and its surroundings several times a year, almost annually, but Balaton bathers and sailors regularly turned up in his paintings of the 20s and 30s, too. A cycle of landscapes with a fresh look emerged as a result of a two-month study tour in Italy, France and Spain in 1905. He had engaged his fiancée, Mária Rosenbach, in the spring of that year, and his letters to her now provide a rich source of information on the inception of these pictures. Immediately on the spot, he captured the fascinating details of Mediterranean towns on small-scale wooden panels. These pictures brought about a stylistic change in his art. His brushstrokes became severed, and his spectacles decomposed into impressionistic spots. The powerful lights and contrasts of Southern Europe liberated and empowered his colouration. In 1906, he displayed almost three dozens of these at his first one-man exhibition at the National Salon. It was a hugely successful show. PICTORIAL MOTIFS IN VASZARY'S APPLIED-ARTS WORK In the spirit of Art-Nouveau "Gesamtkunst" aspirations, Vaszary worked in several genres of applied art in the years around the turn of the century, designing furniture, dishes, ceramics, windows, and tapestries. His carpet entitled Little Girl with Kittens (Cat. No. 335) was awarded a diploma at the 1902 international applied art exhibition in Turin; and at the 1905 Venice international show, his applied art works and paintings were represented with equal emphasis. In 1906, his applied-art works received a diploma at the Milan international fair. Vaszary produced several designs for carpets with compositions drawing on folk life. From among the many, the series entitled Spring Stands out. (Cat. No. 327-329) The buoyant female figures performing cultic dances bear a relationship with the works of the Nabis group. The synthetic vision and ethereal figures are mostly suggestive of the world of Maurice Denis, but József Rippl-Rónai's symbolist graphic series, Les Vierges, can also be thought of as a prototype. Vaszary established contacts with the most significant Hungarian ArtNouveau group, the artists' colony of Gödöllő', whose members sought to work out a modern national idiom, and he produced several carpets in its workshops. He befriended one of the masters of the colony, the architect and applied artist Ede Thoroczkai Wigand, who was to design the plans for Vaszary's Tata studio house in 1911. Vaszary also maintained relations with the other outstanding figure of Hungarian Art-Nouveau architecture, Ödön Lechner. He made the ceramic image for the façade of Lechner's Saint Elizabeth Church in Pozsony (Bratislava) built in 1907-1913, being one of his last ecclesiastical works. LATE ART NOUVEAU - ON THE BORDERS OF FAUVISM, 1909 In 1909, Vaszary produced a group of stylistically eclectic works. Lively colours, accentuated brushwork, determined contours characterized a group of these, while in another, he returned to the formal and thematic repository of Art Nouveau. Woman with a Cat (Cat. No. 77) recalls fin-de-siècle precursors, the elongated shapes of Whistler's compositions and the canvases of Rippl-Rónai. The confusing anachronism and stylistic contradictions in these works have resulted in an uncertainty in their dating in the literature. His emphasised colouration, which appeared first in his landscapes made during his Mediterranean tour in 1905, had a role in these 1909 works. The surface treatment and approach to view in these paintings bear a relationship with Fauvism: their structures built up from animated coloured spots have their parallels in the works Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain. Vaszary never reached the crude "decorativeness" of the new generation of Hungarian artists, the "Hungarian Fauves", but he did make use of the formal innovations of the new painterly vision. Scholars have often emphasised Vaszary's frequent renewals and returns, and this is particularly true of these few years when new visual possibilities cropped up to initiate a radically new period. In only a short while, he would mostly focus on the internal structure of presentation, the analysis of space and structure.