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

purchased a house on Kaposvár's Róma Hill. He was perfectly aware that he was now free to do anything: a guilty conscience for not recognizing his talents earlier now ensured that all doors were opening to him. Liberated from the pressures of poverty, he savoured the triumph of the legalization of his artistic authenticity and the elevated position that followed from that. He settled again in front of the easel, and with rekindled playfulness and invention boldly set about the business of experimentation. After some initial hesitancy, his new style all but burst out of him.

82 undoubtedly, the assimilatory ambition, which had put a stamp on his "black" period and interiors though it was not necessarily governed by conscious intentions - stimulated him the least in this period, which was so different from all that had gone before it. To understand this, one has first to examine the anatomy of his "dotted" pictures, before recollecting the effects that had touched him when his pictorial armoury was evolving. The gradual emergence of his "dotted" period will be illustrated by two pictures, one from 1906 and the other from 1907. The most conspicuous feature of his My brother Ödön (1906) is the close-up of the model, where the subject almost fills the entire picture field. (Plate 19) The hat of the figure shown in profile touches three edges of the picture: indeed, one gets the impression that the bearded man clad in white has a too narrow space assigned to him. The almost uncomfortable tightness of this composition is striking, and this is one aspect of his style that the subsequent, mature pictures of the "dotted" period will often repeat. The more advanced his new stylistic profile had become, the more typically crowded are his compositions, especially the figurai ones. The represented figure fills a large surface, as it were pushing closer to the viewer, the background being only sketchily indicated, rendered insignificant, or forgotten entirely. There is novelty too in the rendering the clothing: seemingly, he wants to trace the contours, but his brush keeps faltering, lest the powerful lines should be detrimental to the carefully constructed pictorial unity. He feels his way with his brush, the sweep of the contours thus being broken, and this groping hesitation is also typical of the rendering of the material of the suit and the hat. There are no dots yet, and he takes care to lead one brushstroke into the other, thus lending an organic pulsation to the entire surface of the picture. Or, to put it in another way, instead of dotting, he applies white and blue spots that rival each other in intensity. The clothes are virtually Impressionistic, which is a rare pictorial device in Rippl's œuvre.

83 Rippl-Rónai took the next step a year later, in 1907. The most intriguing feature of his well-known My father and uncle Piacsek drinking red wine (cat. no. 83.) is his attempt to sever his ties with the harmonious and conventional compositional scheme of the period of interiors. This is nevertheless still an interior, and the spiritual unity of the two figures is still perceptible, but the picture clearly suggests that the painter was struggling to combat these very qualities. The familiar depth of perspective of his interiors characteristic of earlier years vanishes, and the picture is almost wholly twodimensional: the figures and objects are torn from their environment by hoop-like contours of increasing brutality. By 1910, his pictures had become completely flat (Lazarine and Anella, cat. no. 96.). The closed contours embraced relatively homogeneous surfaces in 1907, but this painterly texture continues to slacken: a year later, he fills the areas enclosed by the hoops with thick brush strokes, crude dots that have no contact with one another. There is no need to stress that this procedure has nothing to do with divisionism. His slashes, his heavy and large dots, are self-contained pictorial elements. In this period beginning with 1906-1907, the colours of Rippl-Rónai's pictures in oil become fiery. The painter's underlying recipe is as follows: "The point is that under no circumstances shall colours be superimposed. All colours are there in the tubes, you just simply get them out the way they are."

84 The epochmaking words of Gauguin's recipe for the use of colours echo across a distance of twenty years: "How do you see this tree? - As yellow? - Right, take yellow then; the shadow is bluish - paint it in pure ultramarine; the leaves are red - use vermilion."

85 This affinity with Gauguin will be returned to later. What stylistic effects can have influenced RipplRónai when he had mentally prepared for innovation at any cost? He had always received inspiration from Paris, but now he was keeping an eye on the external changes from Hungary. His changed situation, however, stimulated him to plunge into the fray. He wanted to remain the leading figure of the modern artists at home, and not the grand old man of early-20th century painting. He took a step in the direction he most obviously needed to. It is as well to bear certain some well-known facts in mind at this juncture. Béla Czóbel, who had exhibited with the Fauves in the Salon d'Automne in 1905, had imported to Nagybánya the stylistic effects of the Fauves, thus stirring the by now turbid waters and launching the movement of the so-called Neoists in Hungary (plate 17). Rippl-Rónai wrote about the "Salon d'Automnes plan"

86 in a letter and praised Czóbel, although he was rarely so benign towards his fellow artists. In addition to Czóbel, he made friends in 1907 with Márffy,

87 who had also exhibited in the Salon d'Automne a year before. Réti described Czóbel's pictures, which had been brought back from Paris, in the following words: "they are like posters, bright pointillistic patches of colour filling the spaces inside thick colourful contours."

88 Outwardly, the two formulae seem to be identical. Most interestingly, Nagybánya utilized Czóbel's imported style quite differently from Rippl-Rónai. The Neoists of Nagybánya adopted modernization on naturalistic grounds, while Rippl was not bound by obligations coded in gestures and could handle the new stylistic elements far more freely. There were other channels, too, to call Rippl's attention to "dotting" in the pictures of an increasing number of painters from the very beginning of the century, representing a strange afterlife of the Impressionist imprints of reflexions, of Van Gogh's brushwork and Seurat's division of colour. From Kandinsky to