Mária Bernáth–Ildikó Nagy, eds.:
Rippl-Rónai József gyûjteményes kiállítása
(József Rippl-Rónai’s Collected Works. Catalogue)
Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Galéria,
Pannon GSM, 1998, 537 pp.
The exhibition of the collected works of one of the best-loved of Hungarian
painters, József Rippl-Rónai, at the Hungarian National Gallery
was a feast for both the eye and the soul. It was also something of a revelation
both to the general public and to the art world, especially because the
last time that so many of Rippl-Rónai’s paintings were shown together
in Budapest was in 1961, the centenary of his birth.
József Rippl-Rónai (1861–1927) studied in Munich, and
from 1887 in Paris, in the studio of the fashionable Hungarian realist
painter Mihály Munkácsy. From 1889 on he was engaged in creating
a new and individual modern style. He was able to absorb the stylistic
influences of Carrière, Whistler, Odilon Redon and Albert Besnard
in such a way that his own experimental style became a unique version of
atmospheric symbolism, radiating a gentle, meditative melancholy. His reduced
dark colors and compositions with dreamy female figures became moderately
popular in the Paris of the early 1890s.
The young Hungarian scored a professional success in the Salon de Champs-de-Mars
in 1894 and gained friends and artist-allies such as the Nabis (Vuillard,
Bonnard, Maurice Denis), and even Maillol. He was briefly integrated into
the Parisian avant-garde of the 1890s through the circle of the Revue Blanche,
but he could not repeat his early success and began to feel more and more
frustrated in the French capital.
A creative crisis at the end of the 1890s and growing homesickness
brought about the decision in 1900 to move back to his hometown of Kaposvár
in provincial Hungary. His exhibitions in Budapest were total failures
and it was only in 1906 that he finally achieved success. However from
that time on he became extremely poular. His style—which went through different
metamorphoses after he resettled in Hungary—became a kind of decorative
Post-Impressionism with Fauve features. In his last years he practised
a lyrical, pastel portraiture featuring sensitive characterizations of
the human soul.
Rippl-Rónai is an example of the belated acknowledgement of
experimental modernity in early 20th-century Hungary, but at the same time
also of the fate of a great talent ahead of time. He lost his international
avant-garde role as a result of moving back to his homeland, and of trying
to re-establish himself in its conservative cultural-intellectual milieu,
which was so different from Paris.
The oeuvre lends itself easily to periodization: there are five stylistically
quite distinct periods, in terms of his use of color and form. The first
is his so-called “black”, Parisian period, followed by his landscape paintings
in Banyuls-sur-Mer; the third period is dominated by his Kaposvár
interiors; the fourth is the so-called “maize-like” or “dotted” period
and, lastly, there are his postwar pastels. They show the internal development
of a highly sensitive and loyal person, who does not, in fact, change a
great deal in essence; he employs different artistic devices, but the image
he has of the world remains the same; at most he narrows or broadens his
perspective. Domestic life, and the role of the woman, the mother, and
wife in it is something which Rippl-Rónai took for granted.
The material selected and the manner in which it was displayed by the
exhibition’s curators, Mária Bernáth, Mária Földes,
and Edit Plesznyivy, was appropriate to great masterpieces. The fine catalogue
too stands up to international comparison. The 237 works shown are presented
together with extensive reference material, while the twelve articles the
catalogue contains are supplemented by picture analyses, documents, and
a wealth of reference material, facts and figures.
Of the eleven authors, the primus inter pares is Mária Bernáth,
author of the introductory article, a comprehensive study of the artist’s
whole life and work, and of another dealing with his memoirs. As well as
being responsible for the design and content of the catalogue, she was
also one of the exhibition’s curators. Earlier studies by her, including
a small volume on Rippl-Rónai published in 1976, have made the artist’s
personality and his work familiar not only to those in the field but also
to the wider public.1
Just how much new research and original thought is distilled into this
catalogue introduction is made apparent even to the specialist only after
a thorough reading. It fell to Bernáth to undertake the most difficult
task, that of condensing into a few pages the essence of the artist’s oeuvre;
each significant phase in his work, the underlying, hidden spiritual and
intellectual motivation and the inner logic of the stylistic changes. At
the same time all this had to be set in its appropriate context, that of
the contemporary artistic climate and the trends in international art around
1900. Bernáth’s elegant and insightful portrait is at the same time
a persuasive defence of an artist who was not only denigrated by conservative
critics but also frequently belittled by those cultural dogmatists who
force individual talents to fit the Procrustean bed of avant-garde theories
that happen to be fashionable at the time.
Each of the contributions examines the works of Rippl-Rónai
in a different and distinct context. Some of the studies (e.g. Edit Plesznyivy,
János Horváth, József Pandúr) reconstruct or
examine for the first time in published form events in the artist’s life
which have not hitherto been adequately explored from a scholarly point
of view. Others (e.g. Anna Szinyei Merse, Mariann Gergely, Katalin Keserû)
reopen the debate on the “perennial” issues so far unresolved, at least
among Hungarian art historians, such as the question of defining genres,
his “dotted” period or his relationship with the Nabis. Virtually every
one of the studies puts forward original ideas, or casts new light on the
existing information. Szinyei, for example, makes some brand-new comparisons
and connections and presents some little-known facts in her paper, a scholarly
piece of work, painstakingly researched and documented, while at the same
time wide-ranging, and also containing some hitherto unknown details.2
Finally, the volume also contains papers which discuss one or another aspect
of Rippl-Rónai’s oeuvre from a new angle. One such is Judit Szabadi’s
piece, packed with psychological insights, a study which at last goes beyond
the comparisons with the work of Cézanne which were repeated ad
nauseam over the past decades in connection with Rippl-Rónai’s portrait
of Aristide Maillol. Rather, the comparison she makes highlights features
in Rippl-Rónai’s creative approach and technique which are quite
distinct from those of the great master from Aix-en-Provence, illustrating
just how different the Hungarian painter’s personality and approach in
fact was.
Csilla Csorba discusses the complex, multi-layered relationship between
Rippl-Rónai and photography. Her text is illustrated with numerous
facts, figures and examples which underline to what extent the use of photography
was common practice internationally at that time, and to what extent it
influenced the work of painters. She also shows how important photography
was for Rippl-Rónai in creating an artistic persona for himself.
Erzsébet Király examines Rippl-Rónai’s “interior”
period in a new light, putting this oft-maligned style in a literary/poetical
context. Quoting what the artist himself had said to underpin her arguments,
she cleverly weaves into her analysis the titles Rippl-Rónai gave
his pictures, exploring as she does so the Hungarian literary precedents
and parallels to Rippl-Rónai’s desire to achieve a feeling of intimacy
in his work. The immediate world in which Rippl-Rónai lived and
moved is set out with great psychological sensitivity in Király’s
excellent analysis of the closely-knit, patriarchal family, typical of
rural Hungary, for which the artist always felt a deep yearning,
even when he was in Paris. Its domestic structure and measured pace of
living, its moral rigour and emotional bonds were unquestioningly accepted
by him as the “normal” way of things, without any need for inducements
or pressure.
The catalogue is in some respects a milestone in the understanding
of turn-of-the-century Hungarian art demonstrating as it were a gradual
change in attitudes as regards both the individual artists and the context.
We have always known that there are few Hungarian painters of that
period (and indeed in Hungarian art in general) whose work is comparable
in quality to that of Rippl-Rónai. Nevertheless, the renewed interest
in Hungarian Art Nouveau (Secession) in recent decades somewhat eclipsed
what Rippl-Rónai represented, at least as far as art historians
were concerned. In Judit Szabadi’s book on the Hungarian Art Nouveau, published
twenty years ago, the chapter entitled “Art Nouveau as Fate” contains sixteen
pages on Rippl-Rónai’s work.3 It was around that time that Art Nouveau
began to become fashionable in the Hungarian art world, and “Art Nouveau
feeling”, or “Art Nouveau vision” became the gauge of fin-de-siècle
modern style. Soon the term “Secessionist fate” appeared as no more than
yet another piece of empty rhetoric. The 1986 exhibition “Lélek
és formák” (“Soul and Forms”), which subsequently went on
tour to London, Miami, and San Diego under the title “A Golden Age”, was
intended to show the whole gamut of Hungarian Art Nouveau design, but quality
was unfortunately not one of the selection criteria for the material included
in that exhibition, and thus the few Rippl-Rónai pictures included
were not shown either to their best advantage or as befitted their calibre.4
Every artist who was influenced even to the slightest degree by the
Secessionist school was included emphatically under the umbrella of Art
Nouveau, which had been promoted to the rank of the defining artistic style
and Weltanschauung of the period. Anybody who was doing anything else was
regarded as somehow deviant, as was any approach to the modern style which
was not Paris-centerd. Although the Hungarian usage adopted the Vienna-oriented
term “Secession” rathen than “Art Nouveau”, Vienna itself, as an artistic
center, was regarded as second-rate, and either avoided altogether in the
specialist literature or discussed in very negative (or downright disparaging)
terms. The same applied to Munich, regarded as home to nothing but Historicism
and derivative, sentimental, genre painting.5 Rippl-Rónai fitted
perfectly into this Paris-centerd set of values (in which the artistic
achievements of Central Europe were always held in low regard, stifled
precisely by its own, Central European inferiority complex); not only was
he the most French in orientation of all Hungarian painters, his Parisian
period was a perfect example of a modernist style. Some of his contemporary
critics, however, already regarded the fact that he returned to settle
in Hungary in 1900 as a crucial problem; the fact, that he modified his
“Parisian” style and even eventually became popular made him even more
suspect! His real path was thus very different from the romanticized vision
of the artistic genius, ahead of his time but misunderstood, and even more
so from the avant-garde-centered and very deliberate “classical modern”
style which leads in a direct line to the abstract painting of the 20th
century. Instead, he painted from about 1902 radiating joyous harmony,
affirming life itself. All this, however, did not fit in with the principle
which held that the only credible role for art was a prophetic one; nor
did it fit the system of values resulting from this principle, according
to which representations of the physical world were to be avoided altogether
or art should at the very least be “ceaselessly critical of reality”.
From 1900, contemporary critics of the Paris-oriented school (e.g.
Lajos Fülep), and later theoreticians of the avant-garde (Ernô
Kállai was among the first) began to write in negative terms about
Rippl-Rónai’s work. According to the logic of these two approaches,
his work had acquired a local—in other words Central European and therefore
provincial—feel. He even came close to being accused of conservatism because
his work was admired by some conservative critics and patrons of the arts
who dismissed the often poor quality experiments (albeit founded on the
noblest intentions) of the avant-garde.
In the seventies, when Art Nouveau became fashionable again in Hungary
too, the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk became its key term, with the consequence
that all Hungarian artistic endeavors of the turn of the century were viewed
from that perspective. The emphasis was on design studios, on the arts
and crafts and, for a long time, the importance of other art forms was
obscured by the “rediscovery” of the forgotten and previously underrated
works of the Gödöllô artists’ colony. Art critics at the
time attached particular significance to the fact that this artistic group
was looking in “the right direction”, i.e. not to Vienna or to Germany,
but to England.6 Every piece of work by these relatively minor artists
and designers was received with wonder bordering on reverence, and their
cult status was further enhanced by the fact that, because of their role
in the revival of folk art, parallels were drawn between them and certain
manifestations of the early Hungarian avant-garde’s exploration of its
roots which, both in architecture and in music (though in completely different
ways) succeeded in producing a genuine synthesis of the old, national peasant
traditions and the most modern experimental forms. Supporters of the phalanx
advancing in the name of the modern style emblazoned on their banner the
name of Bartók; from there it was a short step to applying this
brand to the artistic endeavors of just about any visual artist exploring
Hungarian form and style, including architects, designers, craftsmen and
painters who also designed for the industrial arts. Differences of quality
and of intellectual content were blurred in the interests of saving even
the more mediocre works from oblivion, since they were regarded as depositors
of Hungary’s former artistic heritage, a heritage of which very little
genuinely ancient was left.
Rippl-Rónai’s role in this respect too was ambivalent. Although
he was the first to design an Art Nouveau “Gesamtkunstwerk” interior in
Hungary, he did not fit either into the group of those experimenting with
the traditional Hungarian style, nor into that of utopian social reformers.
His dining-room design, an exclusive, private commission for the aristocratic
Andrássy family, renowned for their exquisite taste, remained a
one-off; moreover, only fragments of it survive, and it was very poorly
documented at the time.7 Although Rippl-Rónai knew the idiom of
French Art Nouveau inside out, he paid no attention to the properties of
the materials and his work was received with critical hostility.
Rippl-Rónai abandoned designing interiors but, rather unexpectedly,
took up painting them instead; these were not modern interiors, however,
but traditional provincial homes, which could have come straight out of
the Biedermeier. This change in style was only conservative in appearance,
however, not in reality, and only seemingly a concession to popular taste.8
When Rippl-Rónai lived in the midst of the Nabis, he hardly
ever painted interiors. Clearly, he did not want to resemble Vuillard or
Bonnard, even in his choice of subject, much as he admired their work.
In Hungary, the interior style and furnishings of people’s homes were so
different that he was able to tackle this theme, always close to his heart,
since the world of color and form typical of the Hungarian style in interiors
was so distinct from the French that a new and individual style was guaranteed
to come out of his inspiration.
Rippl-Rónai was open to contemporary trends from the outset,
but he was acutely aware of their inherent dangers for a receptive artist.
Even early on in his years in Paris, in 1889 (i.e., preceding his first
attempts at developing his own individual style), he wrote: “Nowadays only
those whose talent manifests itself in a direction and approach which resembles
noone else’s can even hope to aspire to the title of great artist. In other
words, to be original is what everyone must achieve. This is extremely
difficult; even artists of great genius generally only achieve this when
they are 40–50 years old.”9 These few lines, addressed to his mother,
shed light on just how sharp his perception of the artist’s situation was,
as well as indicating that he probably quite deliberately set about constructing
his own individual style and strategy for forging his own artistic personality.
He certainly did not want to resemble anyone else even then, in 1889. There
is thus little sense in seeking direct parallels or looking for influences
in his paintings, or calling him to account for not being as decorative
or as abstract as Vuillard or Bonnard. From the very beginning he wanted
to be different, to be original, not to be comparable to anyone else, and
he did indeed succeed in this.10
An artist like this is unlikely to become a member of a group; at best
one may detect a loose connection in terms of taste, or on a very theoretical,
indirect plane, to one or other tendency in art. While his art was wholly
in keeping with his time, it is impossible to label him as belonging to
one specific stylistic category; as soon as he assimilated an influence
or impulse, be it stylistic, intellectual or emotional, he immediately
turned it around and transformed into something quite his own. He was well
informed, and his judgement when deciding what to draw on from his contemporaries
was unerring; he always took great pains, however, to ensure that it nevertheless
remained something absolutely different. In this respect, but only in this,
he may be compared to Klimt, who also possessed that rare artistic and
intellectual gift of being able to draw on the work of others, even elements
strongly or exclusively associated with the unique style of their artistic
originator, and immediately make the “assimilated” and adapted element,
be it painting technique, stylistic approach or subject matter, completely
and undeniably “Klimtian”. Whether this came easily and instinctively to
Rippl-Rónai, or whether it was a laborious struggle, we have no
way of knowing, although we may guess that it was his taste, his sophisticated
sense of color and form which enabled him to keep “inventing” new Rippl-Rónai
styles from time to time and turn them into “classics” in their own right
in a remarkably short time.
It was hardly the attitude one might expect of impassioned youth, this
awareness on the part of the twenty-eight year old Rippl-Rónai that
a long time should be allowed for artistic genius to prove itself beyond
doubt. Therefore when success arrived in 1906, at the age of 45, he must
have felt as if his dream had come true, since he had at last not only
achieved his long sought-after originality, but even the Hungarian critics
and the public had to acknowledge it.
The key to Rippl-Rónai’s extraordinary artistic career lies
precisely in the peculiar blend of his emotional and intellectual make-up.11
He was not a man of abstract concepts, of theories; he was more interested
in the real world and the place of real human beings in it. Such a deep
attachment to the world’s visible phenomena—call it realism, if you will—does
not of course prevent one from being sensitive to the delicate vibrations
of the soul; so Rippl-Rónai was able to convey every nuance of atmosphere
available in the symbolist panoply in the poetical female form of his earliest
period, his “black period”. The realms of the mystical and the ecstatic,
on the other hand, always remained alien, perhaps even repulsive, to him.
The fact that Rippl-Rónai later—when he had to describe his ars
poetica in writing—spoke of himself as an Impressionist, was perhaps not
so much due to stylistic similarities as to a deep-rooted psychological
affinity.12
During his Paris years Rippl-Rónai must have seen a great many
Impressionist paintings including several retrospective exhibitions of
Monet’s work. (Monet, in the 1890s, had assimilated the Symbolist sense
of nature at least as deeply as had the pantheists among the young symbolists.)
A few years later Rippl-Rónai would demonstrate a similar attitude
and feeling for the humanized landscape of the Villa Roma in Kaposvár
as Monet had for the garden at Giverny. Although their style, use of color
and brush technique are completely different, the same blissful idyll of
nature rendered feminine radiates from the garden paintings of both.
During his time in Paris, when he was lost in wonder at the world,
this kinship of spirit had not yet come into being; in his late twenties,
sensitive and open, still in search of his own, individual artistic voice,
he would not instinctively have sought contact with the older generation
of Impressionists but rather—probably due to the influence of his friend,
the Scottish artist J.P. Knowles—that of the younger, more modern artistic
experimenters, the Symbolists. He was ready to learn something from just
about everybody, with a view to being unlike anybody else. In the early
1890s the artistic direction he was most drawn to was that epitomized by
Carrière and Whistler, with its high emotional tension and yet at
the same time its restraint, hinting at the highs and lows of the soul
rather than explicitly revealing them.13 His character, (protected against
violent emotional outbursts by rigorous—one could even say obdurate—discipline
and by a kind of prudishness which in Hungary at that time was regarded
as a manly virtue), prevented him from succumbing to the more extreme,
unbalanced and irrational manifestations of Symbolism.
There are two fundamental, related strands running through Rippl-Rónai’s
oeuvre: women, and the aesthetically humanized—in other words feminized—world:
the family home and its extension, the garden. In this respect he is quite
different from his Hungarian contemporaries, with whom he shares at most
a love of nature. Interestingly, his feel for nature in his painting does
not derive from some primal experience of the wonder of nature such as
one has in childhood or in youth. (Such existentially determined spiritual
symbiosis is the privilege of nature’s mystics, of the likes of Caspar
David Friedrich or the Hungarian László Mednyánszky).
Rippl-Rónai, already in the prime of his life and in the midst of
a great personal and artistic crisis, discovered the “redemptive”, or at
least healing, power of landscape, painting in the coastal Pyrennean region,
which was home to Aristide Maillol.14
Hungarian painting at the turn of the century tended to be nature-centered;
its principal theme was the symbiosis between human beings and nature,
in all its aspects. (The paintings of Mednyánszky, Ferenczy, Vaszary,
Iványi-Grünwald, most of the Nagybánya artists, Fényes,
Koszta, even the obsessive Csontváry and, to a certain extent Gulácsy
too, all fall into this category.) Inextricably linked with this theme
is the way in which women appeared in Hungarian painting. The iconography
of the female image at the turn of the century was neither rich nor varied,
and it was rare to see a woman demonized; women are most frequently shown
as a part of the natural environment, as an integral, organic part of the
landscape or the home.15 (In Károly Ferenczy’s Birdsong or Artist
and Model in the Woods, for example, the two are completely and totally
fused. This idyllic concept of woman, almost totally free of underlying
emotional problems, has one curious feature; the image of the woman (with
the exception of portraits) is only very rarely individualized. Women are
almost never shown as individuals, with their own personalities fully in
evidence. In this respect Rippl-Rónai is quite distinct; his female
models, both in his paintings from the 1890s and in those of his home life,
retain their individuality and character even in profile, even when turning
away from the viewer. They have an individual presence, their mood makes
itself felt. It has often been said of Rippl-Rónai that he was a
woman’s painter, though this was generally attributed to the Secessionist
cult of the female form. Why then was his approach to painting women so
different from that of his contemporaries?
Rippl-Rónai’s view of women—in my opinion—was principally influenced
by two factors, one being his home life, and the other his experiences
in Paris. He gained his fundamental spiritual disposition in his parental
home: mutual, unconditional trust, sincere and deeply-felt affection and
loving devotion towards his mother. His relationship with his unusually
intimate and loving family provided a spiritual gold-reserve enabling him—and
this can be seen not only in the finest works of his “black period”, but
also later when his painting became more ascetic and succinct, with minimal
recourse to stylistic devices—to capture some trait of his subject, his
female model, in such a way that the whole picture is transfigured by it.
His capacity for emotional empathy enabled him to perceive his sitter’s
passing mood or state of mind and he tried to capture this fragile, evanescent
emotion with the minimum possible formal means, beyond the limits of verbal
communication. His women are always full-blooded characters; even when
they do not give away much about the multifaceted nature of their being,
they have presence. He too was drawn to particular types of women, to particular
types of beauty rather than others, and he was especially drawn to those
who possessed a lyrical, tender, tremulously radiant beauty. The range
of female types he painted is of course much richer, and includes the vulgar,
the jaded, the coquettish, the defiant, the ageing and the broken-spirited
woman. Many of his pastel paintings of the 1920s, on the other hand, appear
to be dashed-off, simply depicting his model in the fashion of the time,
mask-like and empty, like a painted doll. In his best moments, however,
he was masterful at giving the most extraordinary glimpses into the soul
of his sitter. (E.g., the pastel portrait of Countess Tivadar Andrássy,
and My Grandmother.)
Rippl-Rónai immortalized the sensual magic of ornamentation
with true virtuosity, but this aspect of his work only represents the outer
surface; there is a deeper, more essential layer, which is the relationship
of one human being with another, and their rootedness in the world and
in their domestic environment. This Weltanschauung, so centered in domestic
life, shaped his perception both of people and of the world. For him the
question of whether to paint spirit or matter was not one of choice; they
were both manifestations, or states, of the same essence.
He met Lazarine Boudrion in 1888 and in 1890 they set up home together
in a rented house in Neuilly; he then brought her with him to Hungary and
finally, in May 1906, a few months after the hugely successful exhibition
which ensured his financial security once and for all, he married his loyal
companion, or “better half”, as he called her. He saw in Lazarine the companion
with whom he would set up home, and was especially receptive to the idea
that she should become part of his creative life too, a notion which was
virtually unheard of in Hungary amongst artists until then. In Paris in
the 1890s, when Art Nouveau came into being, the theorists and organizers
of arts and crafts in France gave a special place to women in developing
the new style. They drew heavily on the feminine rococo as the example
of French art par excellence. The cult of natural, organic forms enhanced
the notion of a symbiosis between woman and nature; at the same time, however,
the most important female role was regarded as that of home-maker, and
thus women were allowed not only to play an important role in aesthetic
education, but to develop their own artistic talents, at least in the sphere
of the arts and crafts. The Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs organized
two exhibitions of work by craftswomen and women designers, one in 1892
and the other in 1895, both of which were well received by the press and
public alike. The Art Nouveau circles which Rippl-Rónai also frequented
(Bing’s gallery, the Revue Blanche, the exhibitions of the Salon de Champs-de-Mars)
showed much craftwork, wall hangings and embroidery executed principally
by women, usually family members of the artists who designed them. Lazarine
spent months, even years at the painstaking task of embroidering the wall
hangings designed by Rippl-Rónai, though unfortunately only few
of them survive. The wives of many Nabis were also actively involved in
executing their husbands’ designs.17 The models’ situation too began to
change among these young avant-garde artists. Rippli Rónai’s friend
Pierre Bonnard, who came from a well-to-do middle-class background, also
lived together with his model, Martha, and later married her, just as Rippl-Rónai
himself had done with Lazarine Boudrion.18 The marriage of Maurice Denis
was famously harmonious and happy, and in general the Nabis were characterized
from the start by the way in which they cultivated domestic life and depicted
scenes of intimate, family life, featuring primarily the female members
of the household, their mothers, sisters, wives or mistresses. One of the
epithets used to describe the work of the group, “Intimisme”, refers precisely
to this choice of subject.
Rippl-Rónai, who was able to come and go as he pleased in his
friends’ studios, was certainly familiar with the decorative, “domestic”
pictures painted by Vuillard and Bonnard in the 1890s, which were almost
exclusively paintings of indoor or garden settings. Although he himself
painted few such compositions during his years in Paris,19 as soon as he
had managed to realise his dream and set up his “intimate home” in Kaposvár,
he too tried his hand at this subject in order to recharge his emotional
batteries and find a new form of stylistic expression. Similarly intimate
vignettes of bourgeois life depicted not as anecdote but as a state of
mind, as an ambience, which typified his third, “interior” period, were
already to be found in the work of Manet and the impressionists, but there
are also wonderful examples in German painting, e.g., in the work of Menzel.
The Scandinavian artists who spent time in Paris in the 1880s also liked
to paint scenes of this kind (e.g. the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer
and the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammarsho/i), although for these “northerners”
home often meant a place of suffering, alienation or interminable loneliness.
(Munch)
Outside the Nabis (and here I am referring mainly to Vuillard, Bonnard
and Félix Valloton), few turn-of-the-century artists espoused this
style. Perhaps at that time the most popular, and certainly the best known
exponent in Europe of the type of domestic scenes which give the family
almost reverential treatment was the Swedish painter Karl Larsson (1835–1919),
who made drawings of his numerous offspring as they grew up, decipting
them in every conceivable situation, humorous, intimate, and sometimes
sweetly sentimental. Similarly, the German artist Uhde often used his own
daughters, and the nursery in general, as his subjects.
Among the different nations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, images
of domestic interiors are rare; there is only one Viennese contemporary
of Rippl-Rónai, Carl Moll (1861–1945), who devoted many paintings
to his own domestic life. A student of Schindler’s and one of the Vienna
Secession’s most important figures and leading lights besides Klimt, Moll
had come via Stimmungsmalerei (“mood painting”) to decorative domestic
scenes immortalizing his recently acquired home, one of the houses in the
Hohe Warte artists’ colony designed by Josef Hoffmann. Moll’s house was
one of the finest examples of the early, elite style of the Wiener Werkstätte.
This artist, patron of the arts, and painter, clearly wanted to preserve
as faithfully as possible the stylistic and aesthetic ethos of modern spatial
design (e.g. the play of light from a window on the set dinner-table),
the ingeniously simple elegance of the rooms and the harmony of life centered
around and suffused by aesthetic principles. In his compositions it is
rare to find members of his family shown with their individual characters
in full evidence. It is as if the culture of materialism in this case really
dominated over the people. (Cf. Adolf Loos’ vitriolic criticism of the
Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte for their obsession with style
to the exclusion of all else, turning those who commissioned their designs
into museum curators in their own homes.) This is why these images are
often lacking in the immediacy, intimacy, and informal homeliness which
gives Rippl-Rónai’s interior paintings of the same period their
heart-warming atmosphere. Rippl-Rónai’s images of his family home
in Kaposvár, his “mood-interiors”, are full of human warmth and
feeling, and of women going about their domestic duties.
The seven years of plenty, which began in 1906, brought with them a
comfortable living and the bliss of happiness and contentment; they also
lent a new impetus to Rippl-Rónai’s painting, and marked the beginning
of his “maize-like” period. Sorrow vanished, and with it the poetic evocations
of sadness; there was no more room for melancholy. His goal now was to
convey vibrant, palpable life in its entirety. His home and its extension,
the garden, still had a key role, but it was no longer a humble two-roomed
house, but the Villa Roma manor, with its joyful Mediterranean ambience.
The inner movement of his brushstrokes, which seem to take on a life of
their own, fuses into a unified field of color on the canvas. The colors
glow from within, while the use of form, color and light all proclaim the
glorious harmony between human beings and nature in one joyous symbiosis.
For all its southern feel, it is nevertheless a Hungarian landscape
and, looking at the paintings of his “maize-like” period with Hungarian
eyes, the red, white, and green of the Hungarian tricolor seem always to
be present. One gets the feeling that the turn-of-the-century Hungarian
“golden age”, in which so few were really able to participate, was perhaps
not just a dream after all.
The last major period in Rippl-Rónai’s work came after the First
World War, when he mainly painted portraits using pastels, and these convey
quite a different feeling about life. Even Rippl-Rónai, whom life
had favored with good fortune, could not escape the traumas which inevitably
affected every member of the Hungarian intelligentsia: war, an end to financial
security, the Treaty of Trianon. His artistic response to the great losses
and failures heaped one upon the other was a beautiful profession of faith
in true alliances: to paint the portraits of those who were the guardians
of values, that is the writers. His pastel portraits of poets, and writers
like Mihály Babits, Zsigmond Móricz, associated with the
journal Nyugat, including its legendary editor, Ernô Osváth,
capture the essence of their creative character better than any photograph
could, and they represent the pinnacle of twentieth-century Hungarian portraiture.
“A woman can become beautiful—fantastically beautiful—very quickly,
but how terrifyingly quickly the tender, blooming colors are lost, as is
the charm of everything, of our lives, of our zest for work, of the things
which give us joy.” These words, written in 1923, convey the artist’s sadness
and aching sense of resignation. In his younger days Rippl-Rónai
was capable of great compassion and tenderness when he portrayed elderly
women whose faces no longer bore any trace of their former beauty, but
now he preferred to paint the glory of transient beauty, even where there
was no sensitive spirit within. Here however we have an ageing master eternally
youthful in his love of beauty, as represented by women. Ultimately, Rippl-Rónai’s
oeuvre is a poetic profession of life’s sweetness, but there is always
a half-hidden grain of sadness, which steals into our hearts because we
know that everything is transitory.
The diversity of styles and his virtuosity in expression are only the
surface of his art, which always turned toward the bustle and intimacy
of life around him, albeit occasionally somewhat idealized, even just a
little stage-managed. There is no other artist whose brush has rendered
Hungarian provincial life at the turn of the century in such a sun-drenched,
sensual, rich, and tranquil manner.
It is to some extent irrelevant in which corner of Europe a great artist
chooses to base his infusing of the ephemeral with poetic significance.
If the artist is able faithfully to portray life in all its melancholy-tinged
sweetness, then he will be loved and understood everywhere. This is the
secret of the Vermeers, the Bonnards, and the Rippl-Rónais of this
world.
*Taken from Budapesti Könyvszemle—BUKSZ, Winter 1998, pp. 382–389.
1 Mária Bernáth, Rippl-Rónai, Szemtôl szemben
Series, Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó, 1976. In recent decades many books
on Rippl-Rónai have been published besides this one, mainly volumes
of pictures accompanied by an introductory essay, some by highly competent
art historians; but even with all their belletristic virtuosity they fail
to match up to the originality and academic rigour of Bernáth’s
synthesis. (See, e.g., István Genthon, Rippl-Rónai József,
Budapest, 1958, 1977; Katalin Keserü, Rippl-Rónai, A mûvészet
világa Series, Corvina, 1982; Judit Szabadi, Így élt
Rippl-Rónai (How Rippl-Rónai Lived), Móra Ferenc Kiadó,
1990.
2 Anna Szinyei Merse, “Rippl-Rónai in France and his Relationship
with the Nabis Group.” Catalogue, pp. 49–69.
3 Judit Szabadi, A magyar szecesszió mûvészete
(The Hungarian Art Nouveau), Budapest: Corvina, 1979, pp. 41–56.
4 Lélek és formák, (Soul and Forms) Budapest:
Exhibition Catalogue, MNG (Hungarian National Gallery), 1986; A Golden
Age, Exhibition Catalogue, London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1989; Miami, 1990;
San Diego, 1991.
5 The anti-Viennese attitude of the Hungarian art world at the time
was due not only to a tradition of political opposition to the Habsburgs
but also to a tendency on the part of Hungarian art critics at the turn
of the century to overcompensate, born of a fear of Viennese cultural and
artistic domination, which led to the outright rejection of any initiative
emanating from Vienna. (See, e.g., Károly Lyka, Lajos Fülep).
The eventual international recognition of the Viennese Secession and the
fact that Vienna is nowadays acknowledged to have been an independent center
of art and culture in its own right at the turn of the century, ranking
alongside Paris as a cradle of the modern style, is at least in part due
to the fact that British and American cultural and art historians “discovered”
it in the seventies. It is also partly due to a series of exhibitions
launched in Venice in 1984, and shown in Paris, and then in New York, Tokyo,
Madrid, etc., in 1985 under the title Traum und Wirklichkeit (Dream and
Reality), drawing huge crowds and prompting art historians to undertake
proper and thorough research to reassess the cultural and artistic life
of the Imperial City at the turn of the century. International “reappraisal”
of Munich’s status came even later, in the specialist literature in the
eighties, when several studies were published which employed an altogether
new approach, revealing a dynamic artistic life in that city at the turn
of the century, and this in turn meant adjusting the old image of Munich
which had emphasised its conservative tendencies and the supposedly negative
influence of the Munich Academy of Art. See, e.g., Maria Makela, The Munich
Secession, Princeton, 1987; Friedrich Prinz and Marita Kraus, eds., München–Musenstadt
und Hinterhöfen. Die Prinzregentenzeit 1886 bis 1912, Munich, 1988;
Die Prinzregentenzeit. Catalogue of the Exhibition in the Munich City Museum,
Munich, 1988; Peter-Klaus Schuster, ed.: München leuchtete, Munich
1984.
6 Katalin Gellér and Katalin Keserü: A gödöllôi
müvésztelep (The Gödöllô Artists’ Colony),
Corvina, Budapest, 1987. A “catching-up complex” (Nachholkomplex) seems
to be an inevitable concomitant of belonging to a small Central European
nation, i.e. to be forever frantically trying to emulate those European
countries which are situated on the Atlantic coast. In terms of the visual
arts, this has affected both artists and interpreters of art; but while
it has inspired some artists to spellbinding results and has brought into
being many a fine example of synthesis of regional and global thinking,
among art critics and in the scholarly literature it has resulted primarily
in the misinterpretation of works of art or in their being unjustly over-
or underrated. The aesthetic appraisal of an artist’s oeuvre has constantly
been modified by the current political climate and the precepts of emotionally-charged
ideologies, with the result that artists have almost inevitably been categorised
over and over again in a dogmatic and narrow-minded manner. Class-centered
or national ideologies have also influenced preferences in art and colored
their appraisal. It has taken until now for a more tolerant, more pluralistic
view to take root, forcing even those who think in terms of categories
to acknowledge and recognise the value of Rippl-Rónai’s idiosyncratic,
yet sensual and material-centered painting as an alternative of modern
style and appreciate those who strike out on less well-trodden paths.
7 The study on the artist’s design work, notably the Andrássy
dining-room, whose planned rescontruction is sure to bring a few surprises,
is one of the richest in new information and previously unknown facts of
all the studies in the catalogue. (See Ágnes Prékopa, "The
Design Work of József Rippl-Rónai", pp. 91–111.)
8 It is interesting that this shift is one of the subjects most discussed
in the exhibition catalogue; many of the contributors feel that Rippl-Rónai’s
change in style needs defending even now, as if it were not the sovereign
right of any artist at any time to adopt an old tradition, genre or theme,
even if the majority of his/her contemporaries or the preceding generation
have done it to death. Artistic freedom comes into conflict with the pressure,
amounting almost to compulsion, to comply with the demands of “modernity”.
9 István Genthon, “The Unpublished Letters of Rippl-Rónai”,
in Almanach of the Fine Arts, I, Budapest, 1969, p.139.
10 The fact that it was his objective, and stylistic ideal, to be individual
and truly original, and just how important it was to him that his work
should not be comparable to anyone else’s is vividly illustrated by his
later efforts to ensure that those discussing his work should not be able
to detect any influence by other artists.
11 In the history of modern art it is rare indeed for the lack of recognition
over a period of decades not to cause trauma or bitterness, or leave the
artist damaged in some way. Rippl-Rónai somehow survived the increasingly
oppressive burden that his lack of success represented, and remained unbroken
even by the depression brought on as a result of the failure of his exhibitions
in Paris and Budapest. The mirage of fame and of a possible breakthrough
which appeared briefly but brightly before him with the success of his
painting My Grandmother, evaporated again in the second half of the 1890s.
The love which surrounded him at home with his family, in Kaposvár,
and the faith demonstrated by those loved ones that his talent would be
recognised some day, prevented him from going under, from losing confidence
and giving up the struggle. This also played a part in his decision to
move back to Hungary.
12 Early this century the concept of Impressionism had not yet crystallised
into a consistent form. Any innovative artist endeavoring to present real
phenomena in a manner which was optically faithful and yet at the same
time fresh and new, and who considered himself modern and in tune with
his times, could consider himself an impressionist.
13 Bernáth, highly perceptively, senses that they had a significant
influence but is unable to provide adequate evidence in support of her
theory. See Catalogue, p.16.
14 After the rather lukewarm reception given to his exhibition in Paris
in 1899, he spent a considerable time as Maillol’s guest in Banyuls-sur-Mer,
where in a very short space of time he painted numerous land- and seascapes.
Of the very few landscapes which date from earlier than this, his Alföld
Cemetery is the most notable. Its unusual subject makes it much more than
simply a decorative landscape painting; with its line upon line of black
crosses in the snow, it conveys a sense of foreboding; the words of the
poet Mihály Vörösmarty come to mind: “most tél
van, csönd , és hó és halál” (It's winter
now, and death and snow and stillness”). Transl. by Peter Zolmann. In:
In Quest of the Miracle Stag: The Poetry of Hungary. Ed. by Adam Makkai,
Chicago–Budapest, 1996, p. 234.
15 Ilona Sármány-Parsons, The Image of ‘Woman’ in the
Painting of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the Turn of the Century, USA,
forthcoming.
16 For further discussion of this topic, see Deborah L. Silvermann,
Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989, pp.172–207.
17 For example, the wives of Aristide Maillol, Kerr-Xavier Roussel
and Paul-Elie Ranson all embroidered.
18 Bonnard Catalogue, Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 26–27.
19 E.g., Two Women in Mourning, 1892 (Cat. No.16); Women at their Embroidery,
circa 1894 (Cat. No.29).
http://www.c3.hu/scripta