A couple of years ago or so, a young French art historian - Emmanuel Starcky was his name - looked me up, hoping I'd be able to help him with a very special project. He was making the rounds of Hungary's museologists, collecting material for an ambitious exhibition along the lines of the past few decades' highly successful "Paris- Moscow" and "Paris-Berlin" exhibitions of turn-of-the-century and 1920s art. Now that preparations were on the way for the showing of an immense "Moscow-Berlin" collection, M. Starcky, who had moved to Dijon after spending some years working on the Late Renaissance collection at the Louvre, decided to launch a series of exhibitions of his own. Their focus: the less well-known artistic and cultural achievements of the countries and art centers lying east of Paris. An attractive scheme, but an impracticable one, or so it seemed to me, though my enthusiastic French colleague insisted that he already had much local support for the project, as well as the requisite backing at the provincial and national levels.
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The exhibition did boast a superior selection of paintings and sketches from the modern collection of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts: Paul Cézanne's Buffet, paintings ranging from Corot to Bonnard and Robert Delaunay - elegant, serene French art, fine examples of Realism, Post-Impressionism, and "delicate" Cubism, but by no means the paintings that most fired the imaginations of the art-loving intelligentsia of fin-de-siécle Budapest. Dijon was able to borrow none of the great paintings jealously guarded in various European and trans-Atlantic collections (perhaps that much money was not available). Still, there were some delightful surprises. For instance, the monumental Nave nave mahana - Jours délicieux painted by the mature Gauguin in 1896, of brown-skinned Tahitian women and children harvesting mangoes against a background of crimson and purple. The picture had been among those shown at the Impressionist Exhibition held in 1907 in Budapest at the National Salon, an exhibit aimed at acquainting the public with the best modern works in the private collections of the haute bourgeoisie, aristocracy and intelligentsia.
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The Gauguin painting represented the late
nineteenth century's yearning for far-off places, the wish to have done
with European culture, and get away from one's European past. But the organizers
of the Dijon exhibit were unable to borrow either a Post-Impressionist
or a Symbolist work of a similar quality, nor any of the early Expressionist
paintings put on exhibit in Budapest already in 1913. (There were two such
exhibits
in the Hungarian capital that year: the
Futurist-Cubist-Expressionist collection on display at the National Salon,
which had been shown within weeks and on show throughout Europe from Berlin
through Budapest and Prague to Odessa; and the so-called "Post-Impressionist"
collection of Cubist, Abstract and Orphic Cubist art exhibited at the Mûvészház,
which included works by Hungarian artists as well.) They had not managed
to acquire any of the three works that Wassily Kandinsky had himself sent
to the 1903 National Salon exhibition, which -
as the available
documentation testifies -
he considered already at that time
an important annual showcase of contemporary art. Nor were they able to
get Franz Marc's Yellow Cow. (No twentieth-century work found its way to
Dijon either from the Lenbach Haus in Munich, or from the New York Museum
of Modern Art.) Münster, on the other hand, had sent a picture by
Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky's companion: her Still-Life, depicting
the Virgin painted on glass, rustic carvings, an embroidered pouch, a blue
book, and on the wall, a painting by Kandinsky. The work is a wonderful
illustration of reverence for Bavarian folk art, of Fauvist colors heated
to Expressionist intensity, and of delight in seeing things with the naive
eyes of a child. This painting had likewise been exhibited in Budapest
at the turn of the century, and viewed, among others, by Lajos Kassák
and the future members of his circle. (Because of the strict adherence
to the exhibition's cutoff date, however, the Kassák Circle received
but passing attention, in the form of some early works by three later members:
József Nemes Lampérth, János Kmetty, and János
Máttis Teutsch. The Group of Eight, too, was represented by no more
than a painting each, and a few drawings expressive of the high esteem
in which they held Cézanne.)
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We arrived in Dijon, the erstwhile capital of the duchy of Burgundy, on a hot summer day under deep blue skies. (Arles is pretty close, we noted, studying the railway time tables, and thinking of poor Vincent.) The grocery store, the butcher, the photographer, practically every store had "our" poster in the window, with its reproduction of Károly Ferenczy's October (1903), the very image of peace and tranquility. At the various intersections, there were signs reading "Budapest 1869-1914," with arrows pointing to the Museum of Fine Arts of Budapest. (It was a great idea, and the way that a lot of Budapest-enthusiasts of every nationality, who would otherwise have just driven through Dijon, found their way to the exhibition.) Our hotel was small, charming, and unassuming. We later learned that the owners, too, were among the patrons of the exhibition. With time only to change, we were immediately whisked off to see it.
On the main wall of the first room, a large canvas of Pál Szinyei Merse. It had been discovered, after years of relentless search, by the monographer Anna Szinyei Merse, with assistance from a Hungarian-American private collector, who had been glad to loan it for the duration of the exhibit. The picture, Mother with Her Children, painted in 1868-1869, is clearly an antecedent of Picnic in May, 1873, the most famous painting of Szinyei, though a little more reserved, and with misty, grayish-brown background scenery of the kind Szinyei Merse was to use in his Lovers. But it already has the central juxtaposition of green and red, a motif whose elaboration was evident in one of the color sketches of Picnic in May on exhibit. The Szinyei canvases and sketches typified the bold tone of the exhibition as a whole. It was a tone even more evident in that "foreign prototype," Arnold Böcklin's The Springtime of Love, painted in 1868, and a fine counterpart to Szinyei's fauns and centaurs. Courbet's Realist Landscape (1867-68) was also in this first room, demonstrating the unique parallels between Realism and Naturalism as conceived in Germany, France, and Hungary. With the epithet "Munich-Paris-Budapest" at the entrance door, it was an auspicious beginning.
[...]