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

Csorba Géza: A Nagybánya-kép száz éve

speak about them, and speak about them as topical issues... With their emergence, the chance has arisen to create universal European and national Hungarian art".

42 Thus, besides incorporating organically the movement of the neos seen from a larger historical perspective, this Nagybánya concept includes two moments anticipating future research: one is the continuity between the work of the first and the second generations, the other is the connection of the neo\ initiatives with the subsequent avantgárdé trends, which is not enlarged upon in detail here. These issues had not been scrutinized in detail in research literature until quite recently. Still other criteria were applied in the analysis of the character of Nagybánya art just a few years later in the book of Ernő Kállai, examining modern Hungarian painting with a characterological and style-critical method based on the philosophy of history and society.

43 He finds that "the entire development of Hungarian painting shows the unlimited reign of the sensuous temperament throughout",

44 and he fits the characterological definitions of Hungarian Naturalism and Impressionism beginning with Hollósy into this conception.

45 The neos also have an organic place in Kállai's Nagybánya tableau, and if he criticizes them, he does so from the platform of the new avant-garde outlook, not from the old one.

46 The first direct, also highly subjective and violent, almost irritated attack against Réti and with him against Hollósy was launched by Ferenc Lehel, a painter-turned-art writer, in his own periodical in 1934.

47 Lehel denies all their painterly and educative merits, charging Hollósy with a lack "even of schoolroom" drawing skills. With reference to the one-time dispute of Réti and his followers with the neos on the question of style, he disapproves of the rejection of style

48 and categorically condemns those who continue the classic Nagybánya tradition as they refuse to realize that "the revolutionary innovations of Naturalism have been followed by several even more revolutionary innovations". He sharply distinguishes between Millet and Bastien-Lepage in the Naturalist tradition of French painting, basing on this difference of quality his "two Nagybányas"-theory, featuring, on the one side, Károly Ferenczy's and Béla Iványi Grünwald's progressive "pioneering Post-Impressionistic" art, and on the other side, Hollósy's and Réti's conservativism. "One can hardly appreciate enough Ferenczy's consciousness", he writes, "in emphasizing the synthetic character of his form", which is "a declaration for Gauguin's broad sweeping line as against Lepage's meticulousness which Hollósy and Réti could not get rid of even in their pictures produced under Ferenczy's influence".

49 One of the Nagybányas then is that of Ferenczy: "...the genuine, more valuable revolutionary neoprimitive approach surpassing Naturalism and Impressionism... The other Nagybánya, the conservative and less valuable one, is Réti's, who disseminated his retrograde teachings, encroaching upon the former's trail-blazing prestige, all through his life".

50 Prior to World War II, one can hardly speak of Nagybánya research proper in the sense of systematic, objective investigation of the theme on the basis of source materials and factual data. Instead, views and positions derived from various art concepts were presented and confronted, which is to say, the development of the Nagybánya image took place on the plane of attitudes and approaches in the first place. After the war, Gábor O. Pogány was the first to warn of the need to reinterpret Nagybánya in his book on the progressive traditions of Hungarian painting

51 and more emphatically in his article in Szabad Művészete

1 In the meantime, Lajos Kassák had also raised the issue again, looking at the question of the legacy of Nagybánya from the angle of avantgardism.

53 He traces the roots of modern Hungarian painting to two sources: Károly Ferenczy representing a German orientation, and József Rippl-Rónai standing for the French orientation. The art historical role of the neos, he claims, was to trigger off the process guiding modern Hungarian painting from the former to the latter. He acknowledges the significance of Nagybánya without reservations, but regards those painters as its heirs who respect "the innovative spirit" of Károly Ferenczy in the first place, and not "his form of expression".

54 The dogmatic art policy of the first half of the 1950s nearly completely erased Nagybánya from the stock of traditions. To be more precise, selecting from the traditions of 19th-20th century Hungarian art for ideological purposes, it qualified the Nagybánya heritage as undesirable and relegated it into a sort of vacuum. The one-time disputes, the conflicts of the conservatives and the innovators, lost ground. For the first time though in an utterly arbitrary and absurd way - all the questions of the antagonism and incompatibility between the first and second Nagybánya generations had been "solved", since the official evaluation dictated by the art policy locked the conservatives and the neos into one and the same camp, condemning them under the aegis of an ideology for different reasons: the former for their "bourgeois class limitations", the latter for their "formalist" stylistic ambitions. All this notwithstanding, István Réti's book - though truncated for ideological considerations - appeared as early as 1954 (see note 2), and the Nagybánya research put on an ascending course in the latter half of the decade could increasingly avail itself of the scientific tool of exploring, interpreting and applying the sources. This marks the beginning of the revision of the former Nagybánya interpretations on the basis of a more ample source material and of the exploration of the many blank spots in the map of the Nagybánya concept, as well as of the nearly non-existent monographic elaboration. The first all-round monograph was written by Lajos Németh on Simon Hollósy.

55 He outlines Hollósy's career embedded in the description of the most diverse problems of the first generation's period, paying marked attention to the conflicts between the master and his fellow artists which existed from the very beginning. Analyzing these, he con-