Gömöry Judit – Veszprémi Nóra - Szücs György szerk.: A Művészház 1909–1914, Modern kiállítások Budapesten (A Magyar Nemzeti galéria kiadványai 2009/2)

FÜGGELÉK - András Zwickl: "The House of Modern Art"

THE HOUSE OF MODERN ART" ANDRÁS ZWICKL On the 4

;h of December 1909, a new art society was founded in Budapest with the name Művészház, Artists' House, and, in no more than a few days, it opened its first exhibition in its showroom in a street in the very heart of the city (9 Váci utca). At this time, there were several institutions in the Hungarian capital that could boast a significant past in exhibiting art. A rather conservatively minded Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle, Art Hall) ran by the OMKT (Hungarian National Society for the Fine Arts) dominated the Budapest art scene. In 1894, artists who had opposed the monopolistic position of the OMKT founded the National Salon Art Society with the intention, among others, of establishing a place of exhibition "where artists could display and sell their pictures and sculptures in the framework of an art fair." In response, the Art Hall attempted to introduce policies to support purchases, but it continued to exclude newer trends. It thus banished the young artists who had resolved to set up their own organisation in 1897. These "decamping" members of the Nagybánya Artist Colony could return to the Art Hall only years later, after having achieved success individually; nevertheless, they could not achieve wide-ranging recognition for new trends in painting. The National Salon was setting of their aspirations to autonomy, housing modern exhibitions from 1901, when Lajos Ernst became its director. The first major retrospective the National Salon arranged was the one for Károly Ferenczy in 1903, and, in the following years, in the framework of a series called Modern Hungarian Artists, it put on one-man shows for several masters who would later found the first society for modernist painters, MIÉNK, in 1907 (the acronym reads "ours" in Hungarian, and stands for the Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists). With the advance of progressive forces, it became obvious that the National Salon had only a limited willingness to receive modern artists growing in number and organisation. In the wake of the opening of the new exhibition hall of the National Salon in 1907, conservative forces led a counter-attack, dismissing the leadership of the society, its chairman Károly Ferenczy and his supporters, including Miklós Rózsa, who had been its secretary in the first years of the century. In the meantime, conflicts within MIÉNK came to a head between the first and the second generation of Nagybánya artists. The latter, the young "neos" of Parisian, fauvist inclination, displayed their work separately in the course of a travelling exhibition in Transylvania organised by György Bölöni; seceding from them, too, the Seekers would present their work at neither the Art Hall nor the National Salon, but at an art-dealer gallery. Beside the artists' own organisations and state cultural policy, art dealing also began to have an increasing role in shaping modern Hungarian art, targeting a newly formed social stratum of private collectors. Moreover, this affluent bourgeois layer was increasingly responsive to certain modernising aspirations, and thus art dealing had an indispensable share in educating a new art-loving public, promoting art and developing tastes. The press had written abundantly on this topic already at the turn of the century; Miklós Rózsa himself stating in the Art Hall magazine bearing the same name (Műcsarnok) that, in contrast to the German situation, there had been not one "noteworthy art dealer" in Budapest, and that artists "obviously feel the lack of art dealers back at home, but it is no fault of their own that reality has not yet materialized their desires." It was the Könyves Kálmán (Coloman Beauclerc) Salon that gradually became an art dealer's shop in this modern sense. Starting in the book and art-magazine trade, the Könyves Kálmán Hungarian Publisher Co. had taken to art dealing in 1903, opening its gallery near the Opera House (Nagymező utca) and regularly arranging exhibitions by contemporary artists. In the beginning of 1909, following the one-man show of József Rippl-Rónai, it arranged a highly successful auction, and the put on an exhibition entitled Youth, featuring, besides the "neos", many young artists who would later present their work at the Artists' House. Few weeks after the founding of the Artists' House, it opened the exhibition of The Eight under the title Seekers on the 31

s1 of December 1909. However, in the spring of that year, progressive forces had suffered a major loss in the National Salon: Lajos Ernst, the successful director of the institution since 1901, and several artists of modern persuasion were ousted from the leadership. Miklós Rózsa discussed the strained situation in the press, and, as a solution, suggested establishing "a modern artists' house", which, in his view, would facilitate "the emancipation of the various trends from one another" in Hungary, as it had done in various foreign contexts. In no more than six months, in December the same year, Rózsa himself fulfilled this