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

Javlensky, from Qerstl to Munch or Procházka, not to mention the Fauves, more and more artists used this unusual device to loosen the facture of painting.

89 This "Fauvist" style in a broadest sense of the word, began to affect Hungarian painting, and Rippl-Rónai personally, without his being directly involved in it. The crux of the matter is, however, that via similar techniques of painting, the Fauves became expressive, their emotional intensity being transmuted into symbolic gesture. They did not paint the motif itself, - something from which Rippl-Rónai was unable and unwilling to break free, but they suggested the passion elicited by the motif with the help of their varied, and often brutal, instruments of painting. (Plate 18) If we place any of Rippl-Rónai's portraits painted in this period beside, say, Derain's Portrait of Matisse in the Tate Gallery (plate 20), we realize that it was not among the aims of the Rippl pictures to be expressive or to inflame the passions. His pictures were not produced out of a compulsive urge to communicate, nor do they reflect any alignment with dissonance; rather are they the friendly and playful reflexions of an artist viewing the world with contentedness. Alien to him is the attitude to life which Munch also put into words in the lithographed version of his picture The Scream, in order to make the state of mind stimulating the picture even more unmistakable: "I felt an immense cry throughout nature".

90 Nor was he any more in sympathy with the a priori drive to express himself of which Matisse had the following to say: "What I am in constant pursuit of is expression first of all. Expression, for me, is not manifest in the passion flaring up on a face, or in a passionate gesture, but in my picture itself."

91 Rippl-Rónai had control over his subject, as also over his emotions: the style had no significance beyond itself. (Plate 21) In truth, he paid attention to the artistic quality of decorativeness, and although he was moving in a border area, he never became Secessionistic: he was more diverse and far less arbitrarily joyful. Even in his most extravagant dotted pictures he continued to reflect upon the world, even in his most playful forms or techniques. A few of his pictures (e.g. Park with nudes, cat. no. 106.) - at least in the pliability of their contours - display some traits of Secessionism, but he never sacrificed the values that can be unravelled from the realistic image either to Expressionism or to Secessionism. This fact calls our attention to a significant contradiction. As far as the "dotted" pictures are concerned, it has so far been examined how Rippl-Rónai made use of the artistic technique of the Fauves. On further reflection, one recalls that dotting can be discovered in the pictures of several Nabi painters back in the early 1890s, for example pictures by Denis and Vuillard (plate 22). Rippl-Rónai recalled Vuillard's "many decorative pictures with tiny spotsand stripes".

92 He seems to have misunderstood something in the years 1906-7: the style of the Fauves led him back to the great intellectual adventure on which he had embarked in the 1890s in the company of the Nabis (plate 23). All that seems to have percolated down to him from the Fauves was the catalytic impetus to start in a new direction. No matter how Fauvist is the outward appearance of his dotted pictures, internally there is little more than a more dynamic reformulation of the principles learnt in the mid-1890s in Paris, now powerfully shifted towards decorativeness. The kinship is more essential than the examples provided by the Fauves would reveal. This period also remained more tightly bound (via the Nabis) to Gauguin than - if the point is to find Fauvist roots to Van Gogh. Matisse speaks of an "emotional intensity"

93 concerning his Fauvist pictures, Braque talks of "physical painting".

94 With Rippl-Rónai, the dots and strokes work as decorative motives of the handling, as the vehicles of purely decorative values, instead of expressive or symbolic ones. The pictures are "maizelike", Rippl-Rónai said. He never wanted to assume a pose alien to the core of his being. The term "maizelike" also highlights his matter-of-fact character: lest the viewer should attempt to adorn his works with enigmatic notions, he pulls him down to the earth. The contours of his dotted pictures isolate colour surfaces in a way similar to Gauguin's "cloisonné" technique,

95 stressing forms rather than signifying passions. Rippl had no intention of exploiting the meta-communicative potential of the contour. In his dotted pictures, space gradually dissolves perspective, the representation draws closer to two-dimensionality, to a planar image. Looking at his pictures, however, one becomes more and more convinced that his space becomes twodimensional in a different sense from Matisse's "espace spirituel".

96 It did not occur to Rippl to express something more, or rather, something different, from what he could show in the picture. His representation eschews the suggestivity which could offer the recipient this nonexistent yet spiritually present, space. This applies to the intense colours familiar from the pictures of the Fauves.

97 Rippl-Rónai's pictures proclaim his awareness that the Fauves had a predilection for using outre red and yellow colours that clashed. His stylistic repertoire also incorporated this new, over-heated pairing of colours, which no longer exploited the unambiguity of complementary colours. This, however, had the sole function of carrying colour dynamical information. Lajos Fülep's judgment of 1917 reverberates here: "a varicoloured surface instead of synthesis".

98 His pictures convey no passions, Rippl himself putting their motivation into the following words: "it is probably my current mood that requires this trumpeting of colours."

99 It can be said that after all there was indeed a basic kinship between Rippl-Rónai's and the Fauves' stylistic technique, and the Fauves did influence him. The technique had been acquired, yet his pictures remained static. Apart from being a matter of personal inclination, this passivity must be attributed to the fact that Rippl only acquired the Fauve technique at second hand, via the mediation of the Neoists. He seems to have shifted towards expressiveness (Paris interior, cat. no. 109.) after his tour of Dresden, Berlin, Munich and Paris in 1910, when he at last encountered the works of Die Brücke and the Fauves face to face.

100 What was synchronous in Rippl with the contemporary Expressionist trends generally was the postImpressionist artistic attitude. But in the years 1907-1910 several possibilities had been opened up