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Modernisms. European Graphic Art 1900-1930. Hungarian National Gallery, June 18-September 12 - Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 16 October 2004-23 January 2005. �va Bajkay et al.: Modernizmusok. Eur�pai grafika 1900-1930/Modernismen: Graphik in Europa 1900-1930. Cologne, 2004, 334 pp.

What, exactly, makes for a good exhibition, or rather, how do we decide whether an exhibition is good? The decision can be irrational. Yet it is not. We could walk into an exhibition hall and have an immediate response of something vague and obscure; equally, we might enter a room (possibly the same one on a different occasion), and the first impression is captivating and stays with us forever. What we see need not be "spectacular" in the literal sense of the word-a number of small works of art in modest pastel colours could be just as effective. So could be an exhibition of prints and drawings, which are often kept out of exhibition halls, or relegated to remote and obscure wings in cramped conditions, as if no one would really expect them to draw a crowd.
Still, no doubt an entire exhibition made up of prints and drawings can be especially problematic. This recent exhibition in the Hungarian National Gallery is a case in point, as it is devoted entirely to prints and drawings-artworks on paper-from the first third of the 20th century. The novel title Modernisms, is apposite, as it encompasses the entire spectrum of the main modern tendencies of the time, from Paul Gauguin to the Neue Sachlichkeit. The only exception is Surrealism: its omission was probably justified on the grounds that neither the character of the collection nor the general concept of the show could accommodate it. The choice of the time limits (1900-1930) needs no explanation, since this was the period when modern art demonstrated its most dynamic development, giving rise to countless masterpieces all over Europe, in painting, sculpture and the graphic arts. These three decades were so rich in their achievements that art historians have still not been able to exhaust the subject, with more and more viewpoints and artworks emerging. (To give just one example, I should mention the recent Kandinsky exhibition in the Kunstforum in Vienna. Although Kandinsky's works are well-known, this exhibition revealed yet another new side of his, thanks to paintings that had, until recently, been hidden in provincial Russian museums and seldom made available to exhibitions abroad.)
The period was one of sweeping changes in Central and Eastern Europe in consequence of the First World War: the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with the political events that ensued, left a deep mark on every aspect of culture. Some of those who had enjoyed some degree of success before 1919 (R�bert Ber�ny, B�la Uitz, Lajos Tihanyi or L�szl� Moholy-Nagy, for example) left Hungary after 1919, some to return permanently in the second half of the 1920s.
Those among them who were later to achieve international recognition were able to continue their work in relatively favourable conditions (thus L�szl� Moholy- Nagy, who was invited to work in the Bauhaus, first in Weimar, later in Dessau). These artists, however, inevitably found themselves out of touch with the Hungarian art world and the best part of their oeuvre ended up in foreign collections.
The works currently on display at the Hungarian National Gallery come from different collections, with the two main contributors being the Hungarian National Gallery and the Staatsgalerie of Stuttgart, with the Budapest Fine Arts Museum also contributing from its graphics collection. Owing to their cooperation the works form a homogeneous whole, irrespective of holder or location. The emphasis is mostly on artists working in Germany and Hungary, although French artists also feature prominently (especially for the early periods); Dutch, Russian and Austrian artists are represented to a lesser extent. Hungarian artists are present, as is a solitary work from Poland; apart from these the art of Central and Eastern Europe is largely omitted. Rather than being a de-liberate choice by the curators, this was clearly owing to the fact that the Hungarian National Gallery has restricted its focus to Hungarian art and the Staatsgalerie of Stuttgart has obviously been concentrating on other regions in its acquisition policy.
So what was there to be seen in the halls of the National Gallery? Almost nothing but first-class and, quite often, major works, by such world-renowned artists as Gauguin, Vuillard, Picasso, Kokoschka and Tolouse-Lautrec, Lajos Tihanyi and Otto Dix, to name but a few. The list of lesser known artists includes Ern� Barta, Ludwig Meidner and Hermann Finsterlin. The genuine surprises might have been expected to come from the Stuttgart collection, in view of the fact that we have had very little opportunity to see any of their exhibits in Hungary. Nevertheless, this is not so. Take, for example, the two Cubist Compositions by J�nos Vaszary: with their dynamism and energy they rank with the best Hungarian drawings from 1913. Another exhibit with an element of surprise is Mademoiselle Pogany, a pencil drawing, by Constantin Br�ncus�i dated 1911-1912, the blurred patches of which form a strange, stylised female figure. Here the Hungarian connection is provided by the person of the sitter, Margit Pog�ny.
She herself was a painter who exhibited both in Paris and in Budapest. She was one of the hundreds of painters who regularly showed their works at the Salon d'Automne or the Salon des Ind�pendants, without ever catching the eyes of an art critic. In Margit Pog�ny's case, too, it was not the contemporary art critics who spotted her talent during her stay in Paris in 1910, but the then still lesser known Romanian sculptor, Constantin Br�ncus�i, whose studio the young Hungarian visited. When she offered to sit for Br�ncus�i he agreed, but the sculpture was not finished during Margit Pog�ny's stay in Paris. Every time Br�ncus�i finished one of his clay models, he destroyed it.
By the time the drawing was completed in 1912 (along with the bust, which later became quite famous), Margit Pog�ny was no longer in Paris. Br�ncus�i captured her likeness from memory.

The real surprise comes not from the individual prints or drawings, but from the chance encounters, reverberations, analogies and historical connections unveiled by the preliminary research and the work of organising the exhibition. For example, it was a good idea to put a drawing by the Futurist Boccioni next to an early Self-Portrait (1912) by the Hungarian R�bert Ber�ny. With its tangled composition radiating an inherent tension, the picture has a Futurist spirituality that becomes obvious at a glance. Less obvious is the fact that Ber�ny was one of the few painters who reacted in writing to the Futurist ex-hibition held in Budapest.
R�bert Ber�ny was prominent in the Avant-garde. He was one of those who formed the group Nyolcak (The Eight), which held its first exhibition in December 1909. A short while earlier, in 1905, at the age of twenty, Ber�ny took part in the Fauves exhibition in Paris. With their lively colours and plastic figures, his dynamic compositions soon caught the attention of the critics. Around 1905 and 1906 his style of drawing was distinctly Fauvist; a few years later, somewhat surprisingly, he moved closer to the Futurists.
No less surprising for us is to find a fundamentally kindred spirituality between Rippl-R�nai's nudes in Indian ink and reed pen, of an easy, flowing style and Lajos Tihanyi's jagged nude, when they are placed side by side.
Besides Ber�ny, the other most talented member of the Nyolcak group was Lajos Tihanyi. One of the best portraitists of the period, he combined Expressionist and Futurist elements in his compositions, which were full of inner tensions and taut field lines. Over his repeated protests, people liked to compare his style of drawing to Kokoschka's; a certain affinity between the two artists undoubtedly existed. Tihanyi's expressive dynamism can be linked to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's female dancer in blue skirts, whose figure, along with the lightness of the transparent zigzagging lines of blue and green, also recalls Rippl-R�nai. By themselves, these established connections would not necessarily require that works produced either more or less simultaneously or by members of the same movement should be displayed side by side. Picasso's works, for example, would hardly bear the proximity of any of his Hungarian contemporaries, even if one could discover some kind of a link between him and a particular Hungarian artist. In contrast, the link between the Hungarian Activists (whose name was derived from the title of the German magazine Die Aktion, even if they started to call themselves Activists only after 1919) and the German Expressionists (Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, etc.) is so apparent that at first glance one might even think they belonged to the same group. The Activists' graphics made us familiar with the method of interrupting the black areas of the woodcuts with roughly worked lighter areas and white patches with thick black lines running across. Placed next to compositions by the Activists, or rather in their vicinity, the linocuts (a simplified version of woodcuts) by J�nos Mattis Teutsch and S�ndor Bortnyik seem to be in perfect harmony, as they speak the same language. In the same context, the pen and ink drawings of J�zsef Nemes Lamp�rth and B�la Uitz provide a more refined version of the same mode of expression. The description "woodcut-the language of rebellion" (found in the catalogue) could be applied to their drawings and linocuts. The Dadaist compositions lent by the Stuttgart museum originate from roughly the same period. They include works by Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst and Francis Picabia, as well as an exquisite composition by Man Ray (Untitled), who used a technique that had just been discovered then (in 1919), creating a mysterious atmosphere by spraying paint on paper. Still in the same context, we find a folder by Lajos Kass�k (Dur Mappa, 1924), the style of which conveniently takes us to the next period, referred to by one of the authors of the catalogue, �va Bajkay, as "Attempts to Achieve 'Pure Art' or the Search for Absolute Form". Here we start out with a drawing, each by Malevich and Rodchenko, as the expressions of both Russian Suprematism and Constructivism and the accompanying new world view. They are grouped with works by Mondrian from the Netherlands in the West in the company of a beautiful item entitled Mechano-Facture by Henryk Berlewi from Poland in the East. Using brush and ink, the latter work sets the model for mass-produced visual elements made by machines in 1923. Decades later Berlewi's ideas re-emerged in Victor Vasarely's Op-Art compositions.
In the second part of the exhibition, the vocabulary of pure forms so distinctive of Constructivism is manifest in Rodchenko's 1919 compositions: closely related are B�la Uitz's Analyses (1921-1922), the abstract forms of which were evidently inspired by Rodchenko. The two distinct visual languages of this new style and new worldview reach their fullest development in two series, or folders. One was produced by El Lissitzky, an artist who at the time lived in Berlin: Proun. First Kestner Folder (1923); the other, also from 1923, was L�szl� Moholy-Nagy's Kestner Mappa 6 konstrukci� (Kestner Folder 6 Constructions).
The Kestner Society was a typical institution of the Germany of the time. It supported the most modern Avant-garde artists, by issuing numerous publications. As a further promotion of both their art and the concept of geometrical abstraction, the Kestner Society also published prints by these artists (i.e. El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy) in folders.
Lithography was employed for both folders, which were conceived in the spirit of geometrical abstraction, just then becoming the universal idiom. Both were born in Germany, during the few years when Berlin was the centre of the international Avant-garde. The exhibition's last section is devoted to the Neue Sachlichkeit. The thematic, and in certain cases socially aware, graphical works demonstrate the artists' return to figural representation, detailed execution and caricatured or
dramatic presentation. All this forecast the atmosphere of the impending changes in Germany. The new and colourful metropolitan life, which was wonderfully portrayed in Toulouse-Lautrec's music halls and Vuillard's intimate interiors as displayed at the beginning of the exhibition, was transformed into a totally different world within the span of thirty years. In this changed world, social conflicts and their visual representation became much sharper.
The concept of the exhibition was developed jointly by Ulrike Gauss, Head of the Prints and Drawings Department of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and Katalin Bakos, senior staff member of the Department of Prints and Drawings in the Hungarian National Gallery. They were responsible for selecting the works and arranging an exhibition, spanning an eventful historical era, into separate chapters; this also defined the structure of the catalogue. Leading Hungarian specialists �va Bajkay, Mariann Gergely, Anna Kop�csy and Enik� R�ka (Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings) contributed to the catalogue. Katalin Bakos is primarily responsible both for the idea of the exhibition as such and for the structure of the catalogue. She succeeded in assembling sheets that chance had made available in Budapest and Stuttgart into a coherent and logical whole. She classified the prints and drawings chronologically and also arranged them with stylistic and aesthetic considerations in mind. In this way new light was thrown on pre-viously unrecognised connections and analogies. The general introduction and the summary reviews were written by Ulrich Pfarr (Stuttgart Museum) and Katalin Bakos. The graphics of Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Bonnard and Vuillard for the chapter "Graphic Art at the Turn of the Century" were lent by the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, thus paying tribute to the shared historical origin of the National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts. The relevant chapter in the catalogue was written by Zsuzsa Gonda, senior staff member at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. The Budapest exhibition was arranged by Katalin Bakos. The exhibition will be shown in Germany between October 15, 2004 and January 25, 2005, in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Ulrike Gauss, who will be in charge of that exhibition, will have a free hand to make modifications to suit the location and to regroup the artworks within the various chapters according to her own ideas.
The foundation, the history and the specific features of both collections are discussed in detail in the catalogue. The Hungarian material shows some irreparable gaps, which were created in the period of stagnation that followed the institution's initial prosperity. During the First World War, the Drawings Department of the Museum of Fine Arts acquired a number of masterpieces by contemporary artists (mostly thanks to the generosity and expertise of the collector P�l Majovszky), greatly adding to the Museum's reputation as a leading European collection. The ensuing political changes (after 1919) brought this initial dynamic development almost to a complete standstill. Later, after 1956, the Hungarian National Gallery took over the collection and storage of Hungarian drawings; as to the acquisition of drawings by foreign artists, it almost completely stopped at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. The next period of development came in the 1960s, but by then the financial conditions had become rather unfavourable. Although patrons of P�l Majovszky's calibre could no longer be found, a small but valuable collection of modern drawings was donated to the Museum of Fine Arts by Dr P�ter V�ghelyi, who also set up a foundation for the acquisition of a number of important works of art.
In enumerating all the factors that contributed to the success of this exhibition (and of the accompanying catalogue), we must look back beyond the last couple of years. The prints and drawings collection of the Hungarian National Gallery itself could not have reached its present state, and therefore it could not have published its material in the present form, had it not been for the acquisitions, research and exhibitions that had taken places in recent decades in very adverse circumstances. When �va Bajkay began research into the Hungarian Avant-garde and its international connections, it was not a subject supported by the authorities; in those days it was still easier to organise an exhibition on Avant-garde art (for example, the one on the Viennese and German connections of Hungarian Avant-garde artists) in the small town of B�k�scsaba, than in Budapest. The older catalogues did contain some new research results, just as the exhibition Wechselwirkungen. Ungarische Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik did contain some new results when it opened in 1986 (in Kassel but not in Hungary). Its catalogue must still be considered as one of the most important sources by Hungarian and foreign researchers alike. (The German counterpart of the Hungarian curator �va Bajkay was Hubertus Gassner.) Further progress was made possible when the entire bequests of important artists were returned to Hungary (works of artists such as B�la Uitz, Lajos Tihanyi and Anna Lesznai, or more recently, Gizella D�m�t�r and Hug� Mund, some of them with the assistance of �va Bajkay and others).
Finally, going back to the times when Avant-garde was still a taboo word in Hungary, I remember how the late J�lia Szab� tried to "dig up" the Avant-garde gems among the drawings and prints of the Hungarian National Gallery in the Curia building, where they were stored at the time. Those drawings, which once lay forgotten in various cabinets, are now on display in the ground floor room of the National Gallery, in the company of some of the best European Avant-garde graphic art. (Of course, it would be nice if we could occasionally see these drawings even after the present exhibition is over.) The well-designed bilingual catalogue and pamphlet deserve special credit. The exhibition was highly appreciated by critics and the public alike.

Krisztina Passuth
heads the Department of Art History at E�tv�s Lor�nd University, Budapest. She has published books on L�szl� Moholy-Nagy, including Moholy-Nagy, London, Thames & Hudson 1985, and on other figures in the Hungarian and the Central European Avant-garde.