A historizmus mûvészete
Magyarországon.
Mûvészettörténeti
tanulmányok
(Historicist Art in Hungary.Studies in
Art History)
Edited by Anna Zádor,
Budapest: MTA Mûvészettörténeti
Kutató Intézet,
1993. 312 pp.
Aranyérmek, ezüstkoszorúk.
Mûvészkultusz és
mûpártolás Magyarországon a 19. században.
(Gold Medals and Silver Laurels. The Cult
of the Artist and the Patronage of Art in Hungary in the 19th Century).
Ed. by Katalin Sinkó,
Catalog of an exhibition at the National
Gallery, March-November 1995. Budapest:
MNG-Pannon GSM, 1995, 395 pp.
[...]
There were also political reasons for the post-war failure to do serious research on the "official art" of Dualist Hungary. Ideologically speaking, the entire era was suspect until the early 1980s, if not treated with outright hostility; Art Nouveau was already something of a fad by the time art historians finally began to concede that "the age of capitalism, with its equivocal effects" and "The Dual Monarchy, with its debatable results" might also be a respectable area of research.
The rehabilitation of the Dualist Era began in the early 1970s, as social historians published paper after paper acknowledging its economic and cultural achievements; art historians, on the other hand, continued to speak of the art of the period as "pseudo-art", and dismissed Historicist buildings as architectural fiascos. The attitude prevailed until the latter half of the decade, when work started on the "1890-1919" volume of the nineteenth-century section of the above mentioned series. It was the necessity of discussing the "obsolete antecedents" of a much-admired Art Nouveau that finally brought researchers face to face with the task of having actually to deal with the Historicist art of the turn of the century. It turned out to be a project which precipitated its wholesale re-evaluation, especially as regards architecture .
[...]
[...] Edited by Katalin Sinkó - who organized the exhibition and also wrote the main background study - the catalog is the fruit of decades of research. Each of the six studies it contains is printed in German translation as well; the well-documented illustrations include practically every one of the items exhibited, with colored reproductions of the major works.
After years of being pooh-poohed in the professional literature, the art of the Dualist Era - which has fallen into oblivion despite the fact that the works of its masters dominate the halls of the National Gallery - has finally been given its due in this exhaustive catalog. Katalin Sinkó's paper is a comprehensive overview of the development and operation of the - public and private - institutional framework of the fine arts in this period, with a close look also at the system of values that gave rise to these institutions, and the succesHsive changes in this value system. We see the Hungarian nobility and the middle class in the painstaking process of establishing its cultural institutions, and get an insight into the workings of the new system of competitions, bursaries, commissions and prizes, all of which delimit the scope of artistic activity much more than we like to admit, but which - since the time of our great-grandfathers - has been the lifeline of art.
The exhibition - and the catalog - also introduced the visitor to the high age of Historicist art, the period from 1859 to 1873, which had somehow got left out of the 1993 anthology. [...]
The first great Romantic history paintings, Viktor Madarász's Hunyadi László siratása (The Mourning of László Hunyadi - 1859), and Bertalan Székely's II. Lajos holttestének megtalálása (The Finding of the Body of Louis II - 1860), were painted simultaneously with the monumental history paintings of "official", mainstream French and German art (and, we might add, are artistically superior to most of them). Manet, the "standard" used by Lajos Fülep et al. to dismiss Hungarian Historicist painters as anachronistic, was ahead of his times, and certainly not the contemporary European norm.
Karl von Piloty's pioneering Semi at the Dead Body of Wallenstein, considered to be the first mature work of the Munich School of Historicist painting, was completed in 1855, while Jean-Léon Gérome's famous canvas of the assassination of Ceasar is dated 1859. Chenevald started working for the Pantheon in Paris in 1855, a time when Parisian critics were already sounding the knell for history painting in anticipation of its imminent demise. For all that, canvases and frescoes with historical subjects - of varying quality and popularity - were being produced throughout Europe up until the World War I.
[...]
History painting in Hungary - like Romanticism everywhere in Eastern Europe - was closely tied to the determination to create a national culture. On the Historicist interpretation, the function of history painting was not just to provide the historical chronicles with the missing illustrations, nor even - as French and English history painters did - to depict the pomp and atmosphere of times long past, or historical moments of drama or joy. In this region of Europe, where there were so many obstacles to nation states, and where Poles, Czechs and Hungarians alike - each in their own way - had made regaining their lost national independence a pivotal cultural issue, the events of the past also had a symbolic significance.
In keeping with the positivist perspective of the period, every object, costume and prop depicted in the two early canvases by Madarász and Székely shown in the catalog is historically accurate. Their artistic value, however, derives from the fact that both artists brilliantly avoid the two pitfalls of history painting: theatricality (cf. Piloty), and the dispassionate, reconstructive precision of the archaeologist, a degree of disinterestedness that can easily decline into banality (cf. Gérome).
[...]