Nagy Ildikó szerk.: Rippl-Rónai József gyűjteményes kiállítása (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 1998/1)

TANULMÁNYOK / ESSAYS - BERNÁTH Mária: Egy közép-európai modell. Hatás és asszimiláció Rippl-Rónai József festői munkásságában

MÁRIA BERNÁTH The spell cast by RipplRónai's work has been unbroken since his breakthrough in 1906. One of the most intriguing questions raised by his œuvre is how this unflagging influence can be explained in the century of the revolutionary "isms", of the devaluation of the "harmonious" and the "beautiful". Since the turn of the century, œuvres once believed to be beyond the reach of criticism have been questioned and devalued. Rippl-Rónai's œuvre has survived it all. This suggests that he must have had a deep artistic instinct, and must have possessed a core of aesthetic integrity that has not lost its lustre, one that has always been needed and followed by others. There were many modern elements in the construction of his œuvre; indeed, it has withstood the erosion of time and remains remarkably modern. This, in my view, is first and foremost attributable to the fact that he salvaged modernity for Hungary, supplying an aesthetic approach that Hungarian art was still capable of assimilating in the wake of the plein air school of Nagybánya, namely Hungarian impressionism. His was a unique bravura. With a sure sense of judgement, he sought out and absorbed interprétable Western European stylistic phenomena that could be translated into marketable painting and that presented them enriched with Hungarian flavours. In short, he domesticated modernity in Hungarian art so that the imported stylistic language sounded Hungarian. At the same time, his profound love of life has lent his œuvre a magic radiance. In the following study, I attempt to explore what it is in Rippl's work that has such significance for Hungarian art. I concentrate on the painting, and within that, his method and stylish development rather than specific events in his career. I am therefore chiefly concerned with style, as illustrated by some of Rippl-Rónai's best known pictures. That is to anticipate my conviction that the laws valid for the most outstanding works also apply to the entire œuvre.

2 BEGINNINGS "For me, things can't get any worse" József Rippl-Rónai was bom on 23 May 1861

3 in Kaposvár. After mediocre school performance and apprenticeship at the Golden Lion, a pharmacy which still exists in the High Street of his native town, he obtained the "master chemist's" diploma. However, he soon gave up his secure job to become the private tutor of the children of Count Ödön Zichy. When he took up employment with the Zichys, he had already committed himself to painting and was in search of a patron to subsidize his studies in Munich. As his letters reveal, he spent all his free time painting. "Had it not been for painting, 1 might have escaped somewhere else I am sorry for the quickly passing yet boring hours and days wasted here,"

4 he wrote to his parents. He painted and drew, still unaware that the deep dissatisfaction he felt with his lot was fed by the frustration of one who was destined for something greater. The next stop was Munich, where, after some difficulty, he was admitted to the Academy, in February of 1884. Ludwig Herterich and Wilhelm von Diez, teachers of the "live model" class, instructed him in the most rigorous academic disciplines, mainly the precise copying of the model object. Obviously, this apprenticeship in drawing was no disadvantage to the aspiring artist. Later on, quick visual formulation and intuitive expression without modification became his primary artistic characteristics. It is a technique whose authenticity relies on sure draughtsmanship; but what taxed him most at that time was painting. His first, somewhat fumbling, attempts can be dated to 1889. Especially in the 1880s, Munich offered only one possibility to a young and mostly inexperienced painter who wanted to make a living by painting, namely: genre pictures. The dominant school of genre painting was strongly stimulated by tourism centered around art trade and provided a living for the host of painters flooding into the city. Rippl thus got involved in an experiment utterly alien to his being, and tried valiantly to meet the expectation of the Munich art world. With the knowledge of his entire œuvre, we can envision the bitter hours that lay behind his production at this time. He was, to say the least, ill-suited to learning the Munich trade of genre painting.

5 He was happier with making copies, since he could never hit the right note in genre scenes, nor force himself into a mode that was basically alien to his temperament. His humour - as will be explored later - was gentle and serene, by no means confrontational: by the same token, he eschewed the over-strained or tragic mode of representation. Nor was the sentimentalism then in fashion something that remotely appealed to him. His later themes appealing A Central European Model. Influence and Assimilation in the Work of József Rippl-Rónai TO THE MEMORY OF THE ART HISTORIAN ISTVÁN GENTHON "....that I haue provided the impetus for taking courage and asserting individuality is perhaps undeniable. "