Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)
ANNUAL REPORT • A 2008. ÉV - PÉTER ÚJVÁRI: Ferdinand Hodler—A Symbolist Vision
of dance and their impact on Hodler's figurai compositions; Gottfried Boehm analyses the principles of "ornamental composition" —previously discussed briefly by Bätschmann and Busch —through the example of selected landscapes; and Christian Klemm re-examines the œuvre from the aspect of colour and light. Péter Újvári NOTES 1 It was in those years that the norms of present-day Hungarian art criticism were first formulated by critics like Ernő Kállay and Lajos Fülep, who rejected German supremacy and its ideology. A "Germanized" Hodler could not be accepted according to their norms, which later also seeped into historical research through the appointment of Fülep as the sole professor of art history after WWII. A Hodler-retrospective in Budapest some 70 years later was therefore a test of our own intellectual and critical tradition, as was pointed out by Professor Ernő Marosi, himself a pupil of Fülep, in his opening speech to the exhibition (published in Elet és Irodalom, September 19, 2008). The art critic Júlia P. Szűcs also reflected upon the piquancy of this situation in her highly positive exhibition-review published in the leading daily Népszabadság (October 18, 2008): "Hodler is irritating enough to make us revise our biased opinions about him.... He simply found our sore points. We would like to hate him or forget him, so we must have a good reason to do so [yet] It's time to forgive Hodler and to realise that his fundamentalism was not rooted in ideology". A similarly "forgiving" tone can be heard in the review by Miklós Fáy in ArtMagazin (no. 1 [2009]) who describes in detail how he gradually came to appreciate the artistic qualities of Hodler's works as he saw them at the exhibition one after the other, despite his initial aversion to them. 2 The first two volumes on landscapes have already been published: Ferdinand Hodler. Catalogue Raisonné der Gemälde, 1/1-2: Die Landschaften, prepared by Oskar Bätschmann and Paul Müller with the assistance of Regula Bolleter, Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2008. English version: Ferdinand Hodler —A Symbolist Vision, edited by Katharina Schmidt, Berne and Budapest: ITatje Cantz, 2008.
