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

than any of the surrounding small towns.

17 This frenetic atmosphere may explain why Gauguin kept fleeing from here, now to Pouldu, then to Aries, once to Paris and then even further away. It has also occurred to me that Rippl might simply have set out for Pont-Aven to meet Munkácsy's American colleagues. It is now hard to know for sure what inspired him to go. (Plate 3) THE BLACK PERIOD "To express as much as possible with as little as possible" There are lots of uncertain data, assumptions, and indirect pieces of evidence that must be followed in trying to outline the artistic environment, and to define the spiritual ethos to which Rippl-Rónai clung in his early Paris years, like one on the verge of drowning. We see him first in a milieu in which his master, Munkácsy, remarks to him: "If Manet, that daubing idiot, gets the Legion of Honour, I will give back mine."

18 How was he to break out of such hidebound assumptions and make his own way? By 1889, he was in fact strong enough to break the old ties for good, both in a spiritual and intellectual sense.

19 In two or three years a singular and unmistakable artistic personality emerged in his painting, beginning with the Woman in a white-spotted dress (cat.no. 7.) and culminating in the climax of this period, Woman with a cage (cat.no. 19). Rippl seems to have started with a tabula rasa, which caused agonizing problems of assimilation, but in the end his solutions were always idiosyncratic. In his recollections and letters he took pains to stress his individuality and artistic sovereignty. When the performance of a fellow artist, whose work bore a certain stylistic semblance to his, was discussed, he rarely failed to point out that his own picture was the earlier of the two. His remarks concerning Van Gogh and Gauguin are often cited from his Memoirs: "... I am about the same age as them, I started ... my artistic studies about the same time, but elsewhere and [pursued them] along different paths."

20 Not every artist is so sensitive and averse to the assumptions of the influence of others. In Rippl's friend circle, Maurice Denis strongly protested when a critic wanted to describe him as an independent phenomenon from Gauguin: "I declare," he writes, "that it was Gauguin's work and teaching ...that has had a decisive influence ... upon me."

21 Of course, the French Denis could afford to accept the role of the disciple in Paris, protesting against such "slanderous remarks"; Rippl-Rónai, on the other hand, had to stand his ground in Budapest and defend his strongly condemned francophile tendencies. Rippl-Rónai scholarship has always and emphatically addressed the question of influences, since he is so sharply differentiated from his Hungarian environment. His alignment with French art is a commonplace, yet I think it is worth tackling this essential question anew, and from a different angle. Many people influenced him, and although the influence came chiefly from French culture, it was not only through Frenchmen that it was channelled. The investigation of influences is fundamental not only for the Rippl œuvre: an analysis of his assimilating activity might reveal some pieces of the mosaic stones imported by our culture, and ultimately illuminate the profile of Hungarian art more clearly. What did Rippl-Rónai notice in Paris, and what media facilitated his choices? In this fundamentally formative period of artistic development he met and made friends with a painter of Scottish origin, James Pitcairn Knowles, who lived in Paris. Although Knowles was a mediocre artist, he was an erudite man with excellent taste (plate 4). Few exerted such a deep influence upon Rippl as this Scotsman: his knowledge of, and sharpeyed orientation among, the new stylistic trends was a fundamental and decisive influence on Rippl. 'James Pitcairn Knowles ... was a different man, with different tastes from what 1 had known around Munkácsy: a man who suited me best in taste." "... I hardly knew anyone apart from my Scottish painter friend. We talked much about good painting, old and new ... we did research together, developed together."

22 A line lower, Rippl mentions Knowles' mystical ideas. It is not hard to imagine that a Scottish painter with a taste for the mystical, had fallen under the spell of the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1880s. The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites upon French art is so obvious that the point need not be laboured. Suffice it to recall their numerous exhibitions in Paris from 1855, and the enormous reputation enjoyed by Burne-Jones. The effect of Pre-Raphaelitism on Hungarian art - however indirect it may be - has been discussed in the Hungarian literature of art on several occasions. However, this connection has not yet been satisfactorily clarified in the case of Rippl-Rónai, and needs to be more deeply researched. If one compares, for example, the Pre-Raphaelite Walter Hovell Deverell's The Pet (cat. no. 19/1.) and Rippl-Rónai's Woman with a Cage,

23 one simply cannot overlook the direct influence. In Deverell's picture, the ample-skirted girl with a full figure shown in profile, is looking at the bird in a cage at eye level. But similar formal devices - with the emphasis on the word formal - can be identified in many less obvious cases, all of which shed light on Rippl-Rónai's contacts in Paris.

24 Besides his friend Knowles, Rippl-Rónai's other possible liaison is, in my view, with Albert Besnard, whose role has not hitherto been explored. In the 1880s Besnard spent several years in London, where he came under considerable Pre-Raphaelite influence. At the turn of the '80s and '90s, he was a successful and much sought after painter in Paris. Indeed, he was so successful that Rippl can only have made his acquaintance through Munkácsy. This seems to be proven by the date Rippl mentions concerning his contact with Besnard 1889 - 3

, and that he remembered this date so precisely must be attributable to the fact that he dated his meeting with him prior to his break-up with Munkácsy, that is, before 1890. Besnard's style must have impressed his young contemporaries. A few lines by Maurice Denis may be quoted in evidence: "...it might be a surprise to some prejudiced people to learn that I went with Edouard Vuillard to the High School of