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

profit, incorporating them intelligently in his painting.

46 Even when he was in France, he still had one foot planted in his native Hungary. If we compare a page from Rippl-Rónai's lithographed book, Les Vierges (cat. no. 168.) and the cartoon for Maurice Denis' stained glass window Virgins among rosebushes (plate 9). it would appear that the direct antecedent to Rippl-Rónai's theme is Denis' design.

47 Denis' virgins, however, walk in a lunar landscape, all their movements and contours referring to some mystic event beyond the visible, to an esoteric apparition for the initiated. Rippl-Rónai's virgins speak about something utterly different, though utilising similar artistic devices; and above all they evoke the style of secession itself.

48 The outcome is similar, when his efforts are compared with the art of Puvis de Chavannes. He declared: "Puvis influenced me greatly, perhaps more deeply than any other artist. I am moved to this day whenever I think of him, and I admire him as a demigod."

49 As mentioned above, this admiration had a great tradition among the Nabis. If one thinks of the timeless, static characteristic of Puvis de Chavannes's art, and of the temperateness of his colours, one can understand what aroused Rippl-Rónai's enthusiasm and made him feel he was Puvis' disciple. With regard to the essence of Puvis de Chavannes' work, however, the relationship appears more ambiguous: his world overladen with idealism, his dialogue with the gods, cannot have had much impact on Rippl-Rónai. Can this paucity of interpretative matter be laid to his charge? On the contrary: in my opinion, he clung to a more vital stream fed by many springs, presenting diverse influences shaped in his own image. He was a Hungarian painter in Paris, and he remained one even if his individually sensitive pictorial world was influenced by the visual impulses surrounding him. Had it turned out otherwise, he would now be amongst the great solitary figures of Hungarian art. Most interestingly, the isolation of Csontváry and Gulácsy was attributable, apart from their genius, to a non-artistic circumstance, the power of myth-creation that is often a feature of the mentally unstable person, which raised them above Hungarian normality. Notwithstanding their great esoteric passions, the artists of the Gödöllő colony remained largely within a domain of allegoric representation of dubious value in the 20th century, even if posterity has tended to identify their work, at least partly, with symbolism. Many of their pictures remain curiosities, rather than sources of moving aesthetic experience. Symbolism arrived in Hungary later than in the West, and carried different spiritual implications. Rippl is an organic part of our national culture exactly because he unwittingly carried in his genes the knowledge as to how far he could go, to fulfil his task in Hungarian art. RESTLESS YEARS "Soon I saw everything in colours" The turn of the century witnessed the most critical period in Rippl-Rónai's artistic career. "If I were a Frenchman, you would hear much more about me,"

50 he wrote later, purring his finger on the problem of a foreigner in Paris; he could only claim his rights with the greatest of efforts, and had to prove his worth several times over. From around 1896, a great assignment bound him to Hungary, namely designing and executing the furniture of the dining-room in Count Tivadar Andrássy's palace in Buda.

51 until late 1898, when the finished dining-room was displayed, he had been constantly on the road: at the Zsolnay factory in Pécs, in Wiesbaden where the glassware was made, in Kaposvár, Paris, Budapest, often in Tőketerebes, in Vienna, Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin and Jernye. All these places were visited in only three short years. Directing his intellectual energies to another field of art and having to organize the entire work across various frontiers undermined his calm working rhythm and at the same time turned him into an outsider in Paris; also, all this activity inevitably meant postponement of his plans to return home. His participation in the Nabis exhibition at Durand Ruel's in 1899 was practically his last attempt to break through in France: he expected it to bring him some success or recognition, but his commission in Hungary had left him with too little time to prepare himself. The reviews were unsparing in their condemnation.

52 In physical and mental distress, he decided in September 1899 to leave everything behind and move for more than three months to a friend of his, Aristide Maillol, who had been introduced to him by Knowles in the early years and who lived in the village of Banyulssur-Mer close to the Pyrenees. The stay proved therapeutic and one of the most homogeneous stylistic periods of the artist's career unfolded here, dp till now he seemed to have been going further and further up a blind alley. Whether he now tried to change his style out of bitterness caused by the lack of success, or out of a sense of "utter failure" is a moot point. On reflection, one can easily realize that, for a born painter like RipplRónai, the reduction of colour and thinly contoured graphic painting, all those restraints imposed for the sake of a sophisticated and perfectly unified appearance, must have been executed at the cost of great personal restraint, and even frustration. The style of his "black period" was only suited to the representation of a rather limited world, and in the past ten years he had exploited all its potentialities with subtle talent and refined taste. He could hardly continue on this path without falling into the danger of sterile repetition. Tearing himself away from the urban setting, RipplRónai now left behind him everything that had prevented him from getting down to painting. During his stay in Banyuls-sur-Mer he worked furiously, trying to construct new thematic and stylistic foundations for his art. It is a transitional time, a short, homogeneous and distinctive stylistic period within the œuvre. He was shedding the self-restraint of the past ten years, sometimes in a way that led to erratic gestures. However, he could not have found a better place to recharge his batteries: the savage and colourful beauty of nature, the perspective of mountains and lakes, brought to the surface the meditative observer in him. Viewing any of his land-