Nagy Ildikó szerk.: Nagybánya művészete, Kiállítás a nagybányai művésztelep alapításának 100. évfordulója alkalmából (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 1996/1)

Boros Judit: Hollósy Simon művészi hitvallása levelei tükrében

Simon Hollósy JUDIT BOROS Simon Hollósy (1857-1918) was the son of an Armenian merchant from Máramarossziget. He arrived in the Bavarian capital in 1878, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts for four years in the class of Gabi and Seitz. His quickly unfolding talent and industriousness soon made his name well-known among the students in Munich, so when he opened his free school in 1886, many of them signed up. Those who aspired to be accepted by the Academy studied in his studio in the beginning, but later it often happened that students left the Academy in favour of Hollósy's studio. His students later remembered him as an outstanding, suggestive master. In 1894 an official from the Ministry of Culture asked Hollósy's opinion concerning the foundation of a new academy of fine arts in Budapest. In addition, in 1895 his hometown commissioned him to paint a picture depicting the Castle of Huszt. The plan to visit Huszt, just a few miles from Nagybánya, led to the idea of spending the summer in the town. Hollósy was extremely happy to visit this small town and its beautiful surroundings. "Everybody who has a chance to be in Nagybánya should consider himself a happy man," he wrote in a letter to János Thorma in early 1896, not knowing that the following six summers would bring a series of failures rather than successes in his life. Hollósy started his career painting naturalistic genre scenes; the most outstanding of them was Corn Huskers (1885), which showed inspirations from Leibi and Hellmalerei. His Day-dreamer from the following year already involved the problem of treating tone painting together with the problem of light. The influence of Julien Bastien-Lepage was the strongest in his career at this time. Girl in with Green Hat, painted at the beginning of the nineties is an excellent example of experimentation with plein-air type colour-value painting. The Portrait of Gyula Kosztolányi Kann shows the influence of Impressionism. From this time on, Hollósy was, above all, interested in the spatial representation of forms basking in light, "on naturalistic grounds" we could say, quoting the phrase coined by Károly Ferenczy. After 1894 the only model he thought worthy of following was Nature. "You learn more from unspoilt Nature, and from watching how man lives in it, than from all the schools: old, new and newest," he wrote in another letter. It is no coincidence that this is the second time I have referred to one of his letters, since Hollósy's ars poetica is reflected in his writing equally as much as in his paintings. In 1901 Hollósy left Nagybánya, never to return. Until his death in 1918, he spent the winters in Munich and the summers mostly in Técső, a village along the River Tisza, together with his students. The Symbolist landscapes which have such an outstanding significance in his oeuvre were painted here.