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

for a style, shelved his ambition to "catch up" and painted for a few years what was most familiar and natural to him, using his innate artistic gifts. Indeed, he said as much himself: "At home, it was the intimate life that provided me with inspiration."

65 Whether one likes it or not, between 1902 and 1907 he detached himself from Western Europe and became a specifically Hungarian painter. If posterity would take into consideration the extent to which he influenced the overall development of Hungarian art at the beginning of our century, instead of exclusively wishing to judge his art in terms of its relations to the Western European model, we would be able to assess the significance of this period of Rippl's more realistically and give it its true weight. The clue to this period is provided on the one hand by his personality and the course taken by his life, and on the other by his specific ideas about art. In Kaposvár, where "an hour could last a century",

66 he organized his own "paradise on earth". "... Vegetative existence, sensuous warmth, the stopping of time, a permanence that does not evanesce, a lasting natural state, social life without action and conflicts, equilibrium. ... To divine the gentle law of nature, and to embed in it a human existence liberated from passions and desires," Werner Hofmann

67 all but appears to be analyzing Rippl-Rónai's pictures when enumerating the characteristic features of bourgeois sentimentalism. "I think the only thing that can document our lives is the environment we live in,"

68 Rippl-Rónai wrote. The people shown liberated from passions and desires in his interiors are his close kin, each having "a typical characteristic like the objects of nature, like stone, iron or wood ..."

69 unlike Vuillard's light-drenched windows or the visible light source of his lamps,

70 his rooms have no light from the outside, the things in them are what they are by themselves. Whenever there is a window, it is covered by a curtain, and there is no lamp anywhere. In this way Rippl brilliantly projects isolation, the interdependence of people and objects, and turns a concealed emotional glow into something infinitely suggestive. Before analyzing the bridging role of Rippl-Rónai's interiors between Western European and Hungarian art, let us first note the technique of this brief stylistic period between 1902 and 1907, which had changed so conspicuously since the "black" period, and which best exposes his attempts at assimilation. To a certain extent, the new theme of the interior is implied by the forms adopted to realize it. First of all, there is the replacement of the elongated standing format with the traditional size of canvas, the effect of which was to stress quotidian reality. Secondly, and most notably, Rippl seems to have revelled in the new possibilities of spatial illusion after the near-flatness of his "black" period pictures, which stressed the decorative effect. To achieve this end, he deployed all his painterly cunning and artifice. The deepening of the perspective is done by opening a door from one room into another room

71 (e.g. White wall, brown furniture, 1903; When you Hue by your recollections, 1904; Uncle Piacsek with dolls, 1905, etc. cat. no. 67., 70., 74.). Deepening of the perspective is also achieved in some pictures (as in the above-mentioned) by showing the rooms diagonally, or portraying a model looking in a mirror (e.g. Lazarine in front of the mirror, 1902, cat. no. 57.) where the interior perspective appears in the reflection of the mirror. Thirdly, unlike in the "black" period, his forms are no longer starkly contoured, since a quite novel way of creating forms has been adopted. Finally, one should mention the colours of his palette, one of the most distinctive characteristics of this period. He did not use local colours in the pictures painted in France, since his self-imposed concentration on creating a new style found its outlet in the puritanical negation of colour. (In this regard, he departed substantially from the Gauguin-Nabis line.) Now, that he had been forced to give up the dream of being the most up-todate of artists, he took all the time he needed to mix exactly the right hues, just as the impressionists had done before him, or the contemporary naturalists did. Searching for antecedents, one finds that the Nabis interiors may have inspired a similar mood and themes, but not the painterly technique, and not the style itself. Rippl's interiors have most frequently been compared to those by Vuillard.

72 If you look at some of Vuillard's pictures, (e.g. Two women by lamplight from 1892 [plate 11] and Evening interior from 1893 [plate 12]), the difference between the two painters immediately strikes the eye: specifically, the lack of the Impressionist schooling with Rippl is immediately apparent. Instead of a logical and gradual growth, the synthetism of his Paris period influenced by art nouveau bursts from him. After the period with Munkácsy, he became post-Impressionist, so had not learned the lessons of the Impressionist exhibitions of the '70s and '80s, unlike his French friends. In my interpretation, the sublime artistic sophistication of the Vuillard pictures mentioned above rests on an ingeniously elaborated contradiction. The oscillating surfaces, the vibration in the handling suggesting momentariness - which is the essence of the Impressionistic manner of painting - appears to contradict the block of dark-dressed women suggesting eternity and calm. There is no denying that the "painted matter" of Rippl-Rónai's interiors is far simpler, more down-to-earth. He is even less tied to the other Nabis painters. Let us focus on the interiors. The naturalistic styles were heavily weighed down by the representation of people: several ventures of the post-Impressionists could be cited as attempts to paint man and his environment in a homogeneous whole. To quote but one obvious example, these were the principal aims of the Nagybánya colony of painters. Other artists also beyond the purview of Rippl's Nabis colleagues were preoccupied with an identical struggle, understandably enough, it was easier to reject Impressionism beyond the borders of France. Indeed, only non-French painters were truly successful in doing so - either by moving in the direction of Symbolism (e.g. Khnopff) or in that of Expressionism (e.g. Munch). In any case, it was difficult for such artists to emulate the achievements of Impressionism. In an early Khnopff interior (Listening to Schumann, 1883), a realistically executed figure disturbs the harmony created by the woolly softness of the