Nagy Ildikó szerk.: Nagybánya művészete, Kiállítás a nagybányai művésztelep alapításának 100. évfordulója alkalmából (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 1996/1)
Csorba Géza: A Nagybánya-kép száz éve
A Hundred Years of a Concept: Nagybánya GÉZA CSORBA m he complex of noti• ons labelled Nagym bánya has a web of implications in the history of modern Hungarian art starting with the end of the last century. First of all it means the artistic institutions and organization that came into being in Nagybánya. These included as the immediate precedent Simon Hollósy's painting school opened in Munich in 1886 and first transferred to Nagybánya in the summer of 1896, where it struck root quickly and remained active until Hollósy left in 1901; the Nagybánya Free School of Painting 1 founded the next year, in which the four masters of the founding generation, István Réti, János Thorma, Károly Ferenczy and Béla Iványi Grünwald, who remained faithful to the town, continued teaching; the Nagybánya Painters Society established in 1911, which tried to provide an organizational setting to the life and work of the painters there under increasingly hostile external and internal circumstances until it dissolved itself in 1937; and all the societies or groups, institutionalized or otherwise, that worked in Nagybánya in the interwar period. Secondly, it denotes the artists' colony of Nagybánya taken in a broader sense than just the schools, i.e. the masters and pupils, implying a geographically fixed framework for a sequence of art historical events aggravated by historical happenings, organizational crises and ideological conflicts yet on the whole coherent, in which a functionally unique chapter of modern Hungarian painting was acted out. 2 The third implication of the Nagybánya notion, condensing its peculiar complexity, contains the movements of successive generations of Nagybánya painters to revive outlook and style, ranging from Hungarian Naturalism and Impressionism 3 rooted in the Hollósy circle in Munich and unfolding in the work of the first Nagybánya generation, through the current of the neos in the mid-1900s turning against them upon the influence of new French trends, to the endeavours of the third generation working between the two World Wars. 4 To this one must add the thus-far little scrutinized questions of the ramifications of Nagybánya painting and its spread at home and abroad. Only recently has research taken an intense interest in these topics. This image of Nagybánya growing in elaborateness and subtlety but still far from being final has evolved in generational and ideological polemics in the course of its now centennial hitory. The first Nagybánya concept, which had an undoubtedly important though not all-exclusive role in evaluating the art of Nagybánya and determining its character, was created by the painters of the founding generation. Of them, it was István Réti, a highly erudite theoretician with a writer's inspiration and philosophicial affinities, who created an indispensable, detailed chronicle of the Nagybánya colony, was the first to define the role of the movement launched by the first generation in Hungarian art and who endowed the "classical" Nagybánya concept with an esthetic apparatus current at that time despite its subRéti István: Önarckép, 1906 István Réti: Selbstbildnis / Self-portrait. 1906 (Kat. sz. I Kai. Nr. I Cat. No. 408.)
