Passuth Krisztina – Szücs György – Gosztonyi Ferenc szerk.: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2006/1)
FROM PARIS TO NAGYBÁNYA - ZOLTÁN ROCKENBAUER: The Fauves by the Danube, or Could Nyergesújfalu Have Been Hungary's Collioure?
ZOLTÁN ROCKENBAUER The Fauves by the Danube, or Could Nyergesújfalu Have Been Hungary's Collioure? To what extent can Károly Kernstok's estate in Nyergesújfalu be regarded as one of the principal workshops of Hungarian Fauvism and the cradle of the first Hungarian Avant-garde art group, Nyolcak (The Eight)? Could it have been the fresh air, the Danube banks and, last but not least, the wine cellars that attracted a casual group of artists and intellectuals here, or were they in fact brought together by an urge to share their thoughts and, occasionally, to work as a team? Was it some kind of an artists' colony, a free school, or merely an intellectual background in the process of formation? This is a difficult question to answer. There is limited information about what really took place at the Kernstoks' estate between 1905 and 1914, and even that abounds in contradicting elements. It is a fact that after 1905 Károly Kernstok spent more and more time in the house and the surrounding estate, which he had inherited at Nyergesújfalu. Although the construction of the villa with a studio was finished only in 1912 (it was financed from the proceeds from the sale of the old building), a group of intellectuals, mostly with radical views, started to come down either for work or for the company and the lively conversation as early as 1906. Although the visitors, whether casual or regular, were mostly artists —Dezső Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Árpád and Masa Feszty, Gyula Kosztolányi Kann, Anna Lesznai, Lajos Márk, Ödön Márffy, Dezső Orbán, Bertalan Pór, János Vaszary and Márk Vedres—, such prominent figures in contemporary Hungary's intellectual scene as Endre Ady, Oszkár Jászi, Georg Lukács, Károly Lyka, Marcell Nemes, Pál Relie and Rusztem Vámbéry also turned up at Nyerges. Most of them had some sort of a connection to Nyolcak,' the group formed around 1910, but there were also people (Márk, Feszty or Lyka, for example), who visited the village by the Danube as personal friends of Kernstok. The news quickly spread in artists' circles that some sort of a group was in the process of formation at Kernstok's estate. Károly Ferenczy, who watched every initiative that was more progressive than Impressionism with a suspicious eye, wrote the following in a letter to István Réti, dated April 29, 1907: "I understand that the NeoImpressionists, Zobel [Czóbel], now will gather at Kernstok's place in Károly Kernstok in Nyergesújfalu, late 1910s Kuny Domokos Múzeum, Tata Nyerges Újfalu—they can do that, for all I care! —; I see the RippliGaugin-type [sic!] people as a separate group, from whom I sharply distinguish those people who are close to nature, and who respect nature intimately." 2 Although Ferenczy's comment suggests the embryo of an organized group, his fears turned out to be unfounded: what emerged at Nyergesújfalu was definitely not a "counter-movement". Of the Neos and the later Nyolcak, only Czóbel and Márffy are known to have been working regularly at Kernstok's place. Bertalan Pór, for example, recalled that "I went down to Nyergesújfalu only once.
