Hungarian Fauves on tour
MúzeumCafé 8.
“After the south of France, Hungarian Fauves set the north ablaze!” Thus wrote one reviewer in October about the exhibition Fauves Hongrois 1904-1914 when it reached the second venue of its tour. The first was the small Pyrenean town of Céret (population 8000) where the exhibition, which opened in May, was unexpectedly successful, attracting more than 60,000 visitors. The starting point of the one-year tour – the result of cooperation between Hungarian and French art historians – was the 2006 exhibition Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya in the Hungarian National Gallery. Krisztina Passuth headed the Hungarian team researching works related to Fauvism. Paintings by Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and Dufy demonstrating an international parallel came from France. Céret and near-by Collioure came into prominence at the beginning of the 20th century. The area was originally noted for its sumptuous cherries, but in the end it was artists, at the time regarded as good for nothing, who put them on the map. While Collioure by the sea was mainly favoured by the Fauves – including Matisse and Derain – Céret surrounded by hills was frequented by the Cubists and Expressionists of the École de Paris – Picasso, Gris, Kisling and Soutine. The Museum of Modern Art in Céret was the location for the crowd-drawing Hungarian exhibition in the summer.
Cateau-Cambrésis near the Belgian border is no less interesting in terms of art history since it is the birthplace of Henri Matisse. Having become world famous, Matisse founded the local gallery where, besides his work, paintings by Auguste Herbin – initially a Cubist who later created mainly geometric abstract canvasses – represent the major attraction today. Now for four months the most exciting early-20th-century Hungarian paintings, some 150 in all, are on display at the Matisse Museum before the exhibition moves to Dijon where it can be seen from March to the middle of June. In the early years of the last century many young Hungarian artists studied at the French academies, visited exhibitions and galleries representing a new spirit and debated in coffee houses, getting involved with Fauvism, the most modern school of art at the time. A number of them commuted between Paris, Budapest and Nagybánya.
During several years of research, previously unknown masterpieces were discovered. The freely rendered, boldly decorative and expressive canvasses of Béla Czóbel, Róbert Berény, Ödön Márffy, Csaba Vilmos Perlrott, Géza Bornemisza, Sándor Ziffer, Sándor Galimberti, Valéria Dénes and others, as well as paintings based on colour contrasts by József Rippl-Rónai, István Csók and Béla Iványi Grünvald – who began creating their artistic oeuvres in diverse ways – aroused the interest of French art historians working for museums with the result that local versions of the Hungarian exhibition have been created. The three exhibitions in France are different from the one shown in Budapest and they also differ from one another. Only Hungarian works were scheduled for Céret and Cateau-Cambrésis. In contrast, as was highlighted in Budapest the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon will focus on the French correlations.