Veszprémi Nóra - Szücs György szerk.: Borsos József festő és fotográfus (1821–1883) (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2009/4)

BORSOS JÓZSEF, A FESTŐ / JÓZSEF BORSOS THE PAINTER - Nóra VESZPRÉMO: A Virtuoso Dancer at the Masquerade. On József Borsos' Style

lovers": a young female with an elderly man, and a mature woman with a young male. In Curiosity (Cat. No. 107), another of his paintings exhibited in 1856, a group of girls furtively sneaking into the room of a man are depicted in the act of drawing back the curtain to reveal an erotic painting on the wall. Borsos portrayed these girls at the moment they were losing their innocence, learning the forbidden knowledge that would eventually lead to their downfall. To many critics, these paintings appeared to be lascivious, which is hardly surprising in view of their themes. What is surprising, by contrast, is that Fortune-telling by Flowers (Cat. No. 108), a painting more readily interpreted by present-day viewers as an abstract idealization, elicited the same censure by some of the painter's contemporary critics. This may have been because of the sensual representation of the female characters, of their individualized faces, flesh-and-blood womenhood and bright dresses that Borsos bestowed on them. In general, he paid a focused and intense attention to all things material. But that, in turn, meant that he neglected the lyrical and spiritual contents. A freguent charge against Borsos was his consuming interest in beautiful surfaces at the expense of content and the composition as a whole. In this regard, his critics usually mention that he originally made a name for himself as a still-life painter and that he was unable to make the transition to a„higher" genre. We can see some analogies between Borsos' paintings made along the lines of Fortunetelling by Flowers and the works of Franz Xaver Winterhalter, one of the greatest masters of Neorococo, especially when it comes to Winterhalter's monumental painting of Empress Eugenie among her ladies-in-waiting (1855, Musée Château de Compiègne, ill. 32), which went on display in Vienna in the spring of 1856, drawing a great deal of attention. Because of Winterhalter's emphasis on beautiful surfaces and fine materials, he drew strong criticism that closely resembled the charges levelled against Borsos. In addition to the characteristics mentioned above, there is another notion associated with Neorococo: it was considered to be the style of the aristocracy. From studying Borsos'critical reception in Hungary, it appears that the reason why he was unable to get a strong foothold in the art life of Hungary - despite the fact that he regularly exhibited his works in his country of birth - was that his painting had been closely linked to the culture of the Imperial city, in part precisely on account of its frivolous, Rococo themes and artistic attitudes. That this was so becomes immediately apparent, when we compare the critical reviews of Girls after the Ball, published in 1851, with another work shown at the same exhibition, by Miklós Barabás, the most recognized artist of the period, who lived in Budapest (III. 33). Even those critics who otherwise bestowed lavish praises on Borsos'work make the point that Barabás was a Hungarian artist, and a well-respected figure in his home country who painted familiar topics - in this particular instance his daughters. In Borsos'case, by contrast, the prominent element was his strangeness, which was incidentally attributed to his alleged "Frenchness", rather than his "Vienneseness". In contemporary usage, "Frenchness" as a derogatory term meant debauchery and a striving for effects and insincerity. The aesthetically conceived charges relating to the superficiality of still-life painting and the moralizing criticism censuring hollow sensuality converged towards the same conclusion: Borsos wasted his artistic talents on unworthy goals. In the eyes of many, he lost his innocence the same way as the characters of his paintings did. After 1861, when he moved back to Pest and took up an interest in photography, Borsos'accomplishments as a painter faded into obscurity. It was only following Béla Lázár's scholarly research in the 1910s that his name re-entered the public consciousness, this time already as a prominent artist of Hungarian Biedermeier painting, who could not be omitted from the history of Hungarian art.