Nagy Ildikó szerk.: Rippl-Rónai József gyűjteményes kiállítása (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 1998/1)

TANULMÁNYOK / ESSAYS - KIRÁLY Erzsébet: A kisváros és az otthon képei. Rippl-Rónai kaposvári intérieur-korszakáról

ERZSÉBET KIRÁLY W ith some success at Paris exhibitions, the acquaintance with the Nabis and the friendship of Aristide Maillol up his sleeve, József Rippl-Rónai returned home to Kaposvár in 1901. He was nearing fourty. His native town chosen as his home at a ripe age was to remain his shelter - and a constant source of artistic inspiration - until his death. The small white house in the Main Street of the town was his home and studio. The first major series of pictures showing a panorama of Kaposvár life and scenery was produced here. This inspirational resource is behind the most original and fullest tableau of Hungary at the beginning of the century. This programmatic and personal depiction of the everyday life of a micro world revealed from the inside was unprecedented in painting. This was also felt by the press reviewers and art writers reacting to his exhibition in 1906. They hailed him as the poet of the home, the "stenographer" of life, who kept a colour diary. Only a fragment has survived of the ample crop of the first years spent at home. This of Rippl-Rónai's periods is hallmarked by the most intimate documents of his rural life, his interiors, rather than by the character studies that had become rarer and rarer. Despite the decrease in the number of works, the spirit of the "colour diary" has been preserved. This can in no insignificant degree be attributed to the revelatory titles given by the artist to his work, giving literary emphasis to the sight. Few catalogues of Hungarian art history offer such a good reading as that of the mentioned exhibition. The linguistic plasticity of individual items accurately defines the given subject-matter, while taken together, they are the vehicle of a thematic and intellectual unit. Some are descriptive, charged with strong lyricism: A quiet little room with pink curtains, Flowers on the table, a sick person in bed, Woman reading by a lace curtain (plate 3), Old woman dozing by the window, Rooms opening into one another, with windows, dolls. Other titles are narrative: Toncsi is whittling, the uncle is reading, A teeming crowd, The grass is being cut, Apricots are being preserved, The doctor at work. Some titles suggest anecdotes: Old husband, young wife, The secret letter. In these wordings, Rippl-Rónai also seems to have savoured the verbal appropriation of reality. The descriptive titles generate an atmosphere around the countryside and its people, the narrative ones tell about the events that take place there. One by one, they may as well be titles of poems or short stories. A literary value that equals the painter's pictorial ideas is expressed in them. In literature, more precisely in the song, the elegy and the short story of the period around the turn of the century and even later, an autobiographical, confessional, contemplative attitude was also prevalent, objectified in an intimate natural environment, a genre scene or interior to express tiny human experiences or the eventless existence as such. It is familiar to the Biedermeier variants of Austrian-German romanticism rejecting great passions, and their afterthoughts. Some contemporary English and French trends can also be cited in illustration. A common insight in all these pieces is that man cannot compare himself to the universe: he must get along as a tiny speck of the universe cabinned within constraints. This is how the narrow surrounds, the shelter as a modest but secure lot carved out of the infinite and turned liveable, becomes upgraded. In Hungarian poetry and prose, this stock of experiences passes down from Mihály Tompa through Gyula Reviczky to Károly Szász, and from András Fáy through Károly Kisfaludy, Kálmán Mikszáth, Károly Eötvös and Jenő Miklós down to Gyula Krúdy, respectively. The small town, the rural setting, the village appears most frequently as the predetermined or chosen milieu in this literary medium. This micro environment usually has clear-cut characteristics: it is the universe on a diminished scale, so to speak, featuring the existential problems in a condensed form. Innumerable forms of attractive or depressing small worlds were brought about by this creative attitude in the 19th—20th centuries, leaving their topoi behind all over Europe. Two of its pronounced literary examples could also be met with by Rippl-Rónai during his Paris years. One is that of George Rodenbach of Belgian origin, some of whose poems were illustrated by Rippl-Rónai, the other is his highly esteemed compatriot and friend, Zsigmond Justh. All Rodenbachs lifework, poems and fiction, is predominated by a vision: that of the dead small town. The venue of the poet's childhood, once prosperous and exuberant historical Bruges, became the symbol of the silent antithesis to the noisy city by becoming gradually depopulated and shrunken over the centuries. In his collection of short stories entitled The book of the puszta, Zsigmond Justh's programme is to present Pictures of the small town and the home ABOUT RIPPL-RÓNAI'S PERIOD OF INTERIORS IN KAPOSVÁR