Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement

By Éva Forgács

An engaging and insightful collection of essays and rarely-seen imagery that traces the development of modernism in Hungarian art, from birth to maturation and through several generations. Written in an accessible way for an international audience and reflecting on socio-political currents.

This wide-ranging collection by Éva Forgács, a leading scholar of Modernism, corrects long-standing misconceptions about Hungarian art while examining the social milieu and work of dozens of important Hungarian artists, including László Moholy-Nagy and Lajos Kassák and looks at several permutations of modernism, from the avant-garde to neo-avant-garde. A fascinating portrait of twentieth-century Budapest emerges from the book, which shows how it became a microcosm of the social and political turmoil raging across twentieth-century Europe. Forgács's text is as much a cultural history as it is a deeply satisfying dive into one country's unique art history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781954600256

Book preview

Enlightenment Versus the ‘National Genius’

Attempts at Constructing Modernism and National Identity through Visual Expression in Hungary

From the early years of the twentieth century through the immediate aftermath of Communism’s dissolution, visual expression in Hungary has been dominated by several constant themes. On the one hand, a trend toward salvaging a national identity overburdened and overshadowed by various empires claiming its land, and on the other hand, experimentation and modernization aiming toward European and international integration.

The specific problems of modernization in the socially, industrially, and culturally pre-modern country that Hungary was at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were manifested, among other things, in the distance that separated the thin crust of highly educated intellectuals, philosophers, and artists not only from the uneducated population, but also from the average middle class Bürger. The historic context in which modernization was unfolding further complicated the process, since modernization in Hungary came at the price of the Compromise with the Habsburgs in 1867, eighteen years after Austria had defeated Hungary’s revolution and independence war. The Compromise was a rational act of Realpolitik, which profoundly hurt national pride. It associated the long overdue economic progress and industrialization, as well as business strategies and urban culture, with foreigners such as Germans and Jews, the latter emancipated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1780 but only granted equal rights by the Hungarian National Assembly in 1849. The city of Budapest, which emerged as a modern, well engineered, and spectacular European capital between 1867 and 1910, was regarded with mistrust by the Hungarian nobility and gentry for its urban lifestyle and dubious cosmopolitanism, and was dubbed the sinful city. This appellation implied that modernization itself was seen as sinful. In the eyes of the Hungarian gentry, gambling away the family fortune was a decent, if regrettable act, while investing it in business was some appalling contrivance of foreign speculators.

The generation of upper-class Budapest Bildungsbürgertum born in the 1880s (the educated middle class) came of age in the first decade of the twentieth century. Its members benefited from the new liberalism, openness, and relative wealth of the country. They felt modernity to be their very personal cause, but what they understood of it was shaped by many specific local factors. The generation of György Lukács, Béla Balázs, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, the painter Károly Kernstok, and others were in many ways children of the Enlightenment, tied to it through their studies, reasoning, and cosmopolitan formation. Modernity, according to the 1918 Manifesto of Karl Mannheim, had left behind the positivism of the nineteenth century and had once again turned toward metaphysical idealism.¹ How this combination of metaphysics and utopian, communitarian spirit was expressed is the subject of this chapter and, indeed, underpins the concepts forwarded in this book.

A specific consequence of the privileged position held by these thinkers, composers, and artists due to their education and social rank was that they wanted to supersede the materialism of their liberal and often prosperous fathers and so, blended rationalism with messianic faith in a great new era they hoped to inaugurate. This faith was intellectual and secular, based on the power of the putative objectivity of knowledge. We are seekers of a higher, spiritual world outlook, and we are not to be confused with any sects, art historian and theorist Lajos Fülep wrote in his introduction to the new journal A Szellem (Spirit), which he co-edited with Lukács in 1911.²

As Mary Gluck describes in her admirable and finely-tuned book Georg Lukács and His Generation 1900–1918 about the pre-World War I efforts, expectations, and ideas of this generation, most of these young people were assimilated Jews who were slow to realize the increasing hostility of Hungarian society towards them, brought about by new, harsher economic competition and unprecedented social mobility.³ They were educated by the excellent professors of Budapest University, but unlike their teachers’ English and French cultural orientation, these young people read German literature, German philosophy, and attended the Berlin seminars of Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. They spent time in Italy and were generally well traveled. They were bilingual, often wrote and corresponded in German, and most were fluent in French and Italian as well. While they endeavored to create a Hungarian philosophical language,a Hungarian philosophy, and a new culture of essay writing, their Hungarian reviewers, even when they acknowledged the achievements of the young generation, never failed to point out the foreignness of their ideas, style, and syntax.

A feverish upsurge of publications, societies, recitals, meetings, and study circles appeared, wherein new metaphysical concepts were hammered out. In spring of 1904, Lukács, writer Balázs, composer Kodály, and lawyer László Bánóczi founded the Thalia Society, wishing to create a counter-cultural theater that would stage contemporary European drama, similar to André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris, and Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne in Berlin.⁴ The experiment was too cosmopolitan and too leftwing to last long, but it reflected the founders’ internationalist orientation. In 1906 the sociologist Oszkár Jászi organized the Free School of Sociology in Budapest. In 1908, radical university students formed the Galilei Circle to further educate themselves independently of official academe, and in the same year the literary monthly Nyugat (West) was launched with the purpose of grafting Western modernist literature into Hungarian writing. Similar activities continued in the next decade. In 1915, Balázs suggested forming the Sunday Circle, a regular, members-only society engaged in a series of discussions on philosophy, letters, and sciences. Its members, Lukács, Balázs, Karl Mannheim, Arnold Hauser, Frederick Antal, Bartók, Kodály, and others organized the Free School of Humanistic Studies in 1917, where they gave lectures to anyone who attended.

A desire, probably not quite conscious, to transcend the conflict between the universal rationalism of the Enlightenment and the inherent national emotionalism of Hungarian tradition engendered a search for metaphysical truth, in order to achieve a synthesis that could provide these thinkers with a solid ‘cultural home’. They optimistically trusted that this conflict between national and international could be surmounted – a belief which, for many, was intimately related to their positive faith in Jewish assimilation. Balázs, a converted Jew himself, pointed out in his 1907 Death Aesthetics that the artist had to look behind the world of appearances and catch the Ding an sich Leben,⁵ where Ding an sich (the thing-in-itself), used as an adjective, meant the deep seated, objective quality of a thing, unaffected by the local peculiarities of culture and context.

This conflict and the impossibility of resolving it was clearly articulated in Balázs’s first tragic drama written in 1906 titled Dr. Margit Szélpál, a transparent metaphor for the incompatibility of rationalism and the irrational emotionalism of deep-rooted national identity. The protagonist is a young girl from rural Hungary who gets a doctorate in biology in Berlin. But achievements and success in the sciences fail to make her happy, and she decides to return home to find her roots in order to experience a wholeness that scientific knowledge, she feels, has failed to give her. Her Berlin colleagues try to persuade her to stay, arguing for the superiority of enlightened knowledge, which opens up endless possibilities for everybody regardless of gender or national background. She rejects this reasoning, and returns to her village to marry an uneducated man with whom she’ll have a child. But she becomes unhappy, not belonging either to the supranational realm of the sciences, nor her original community. She will end up a wanderer, and as such, Balázs suggests, she will be able to fathom the depths of metaphysical existence, and explore a different dimension: that of the soul.

While working on this drama, Balázs intimated to his friend Zoltán Kodály that he was dreaming of a great national cultural revival.

The great Hungarian culture that we have to create […] would be a unified Sturm und Drang movement, a spiritual rebirth which would cleanse the present of its journalistic art and clownish science and would build in its place a fresh new art, a new science, a great new culture. I spoke to [Kodály] of the rehabilitation of art, of the religion of art, which would form the basis of the future culture. Its temple would be the concert hall, the art gallery, and the theater. I spoke to him of the redeeming power of art that people will improve and society will once again become healthy.⁶

Faith in the redeeming power of art, sweeping across the entire European culture in that decade,⁷ expressed – along with other articulate ambitions – the hope as well as the anxiety of making Jewish assimilation complete and irrevocable. Resolving the conflict between national myth and rationalist internationalism by transcending it would have been tantamount, the young intellectuals thought, to raising Hungarian culture to the level of European cultures with longer historical traditions.

The great, early-twentieth century optimism of redemptive modernism, which had a specific meaning for the assimilated Jews in Budapest, was in fact precarious. As many dark-toned essays on the contradictions, disharmonies, and distortions⁸ of their situation as well as later historical events demonstrate, they felt, if only vaguely, the social vacuum in which they operated. Unbeknownst to them, there were in 1911, for example, plans to launch a modernist literary journal with the explicit intention to absolutely exclude Jews.⁹

Keresők – The Seekers

The first modernist art movement in Hungary paralleled the pursuits of Lukács and his friends. In 1909 the group of eight painters chose the name Keresők, The Seekers (changed to The Eight a year later). Seeking, a term also used by Fülep¹⁰ who confessed to be a seeker, or Forscher, as Kant had chosen to refer to himself,¹¹ best described their attitude. The group’s leader, painter Károly Kernstok, concurred with Balázs regarding the necessity of a new, unified art movement of those great new values which will be akin to the best art of all ages.¹² In his talk programmatically titled Investigative Art, which he gave in the Galilei Circle in January 1910, he outlined an agenda for overcoming the narrowly local and fashionably völkisch (populist) tendency in Hungarian art for the sake of a more profound and serious plan: to explore the underlying structure of reality. He emphasized that even the visceral and emotional creative work of artists has to be solidly grounded in some kind of intellectual framework. The painterly work of the stylistically diverse group reveals these artists’ admiration for Cézanne’s tectonic solidity and lucid structures. Another current in the group was the painting of monumental, aggrandizing visions of the coming new age identified with a once existing Arcadia.

Both Fülep and Lukács, as writers, emphatically supported these new developments. They worked closely together at this time, but their intellectual trajectories were soon to diverge. Fülep had anticipated and now welcomed The Seekers’ new art as painting with solid foundation, more solid than the individual.¹³ Lukács endorsed Kernstok’s program in a subsequent talk in the Galilei Circle, turning the question of anti-impressionistic painterly expression into an issue of cultural politics.¹⁴ He saw a correspondence between what he perceived as the casualness of Impressionism and what he judged as the shallow liberalism of his father’s generation, and sided with the more profound and penetrating art of the new painters; he confirmed that in the group’s work, "a new art […] and a new Weltanschauung [collective world view]"¹⁵ appeared, which aspired to a higher truth than the ephemeral world of appearances of impressionist painting.

In their work and thinking, The Seekers sought not only a higher truth but also to integrate Hungarian painting into contemporary European art. They no longer felt inferior, and thought that the time had come to present an argument for synchronicity between new Hungarian achievements and those of Western culture, and thus validate their work in the eyes of a rather reluctant Hungarian audience. They were apparently unaware that the segments of the Hungarian audience that hesitated to accept them did so exactly because of the painters’ European orientation.

Lajos Tihanyi (1885–1938), Portrait of Lajos Fülep, 1915. Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 95 cm, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. Photo Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.

The ‘national genius’

A parallel, but less visible narrative of Hungarian art entailed repeated efforts to present an alternative to the Western canon. Cultivation of the ‘national genius’ was, throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, a sub-current in Hungarian art and culture, addressing deeply ingrained, suppressed reservoirs of what was perceived as genuinely Hungarian. The adherents to this current were mistrustful of modernism, and, like anti-modernists in general, loathed urban life. They were not comfortable with its international ideals and idioms, which they would never accept as the dominant language of Hungarian art. However, ‘genuine Hungarian’ artworks had failed to constitute a mythical meta-narrative; they lacked the potential to become official or mainstream art, or even a decisive trend in counterculture.

Specifically, these ‘nationally representative’ artworks called upon the pagan origins of the Magyars suppressed by Christianity a thousand years earlier. References to the fragmentary legends of Attila, the Huns, the seven tribes of ancient Hungarians, and their unidentified country of origin suggested that Christianity, although a thousand-year-old, officially accepted religion of the overwhelming majority of Hungarians, was a forceful regulation and foreign discipline imposed onto them. With an entrenched ecclesiastic power structure in Hungary, religion could not be openly challenged, so the pagan past remained suppressed as a collective unconscious, reference to which evoked a collective dream rather than a specific idea. ‘Genuine Hungarian’ spirit and the evocation of a pagan past implicitly opposed the official cultural ideals of every political system in Hungary.

A strong representative of this quest was Tivadar Csontváry-Kosztka (1853–1919), a pharmacist-turned-painter, who was already in his fifties when he experienced a sweeping stroke of inspiration, which he understood as a prophetic mission to paint. His visionary, often large-size canvases were considered to be naive-primitive, according to some of his critics, or madly dilettante to others, while still others saw the long-awaited expression of the ‘Hungarian genius’ in them. Fanatically believing in a mission he had to accomplish for his country and for art, he traveled to Sicily, Greece, Lebanon, Syria, and further east, to find the original homeland of the Magyars. In 1910, exactly when Kernstok and Lukács had outlined a program for modernist painting in Hungary, Csontváry exhibited forty-two of his paintings in the Technical University of Budapest. Although the show’s reception was mixed, several reviews expressed tribute to his genuine talent, which the authors welcomed as the true manifestation of the new Hungarian art, its roots in ancient Hungarian-ness.¹⁶

Csontváry was a self-taught painter whose dramatically colored work offered a counterpoint to the learned artists who adopted French and German painterly idioms and took pains to emphasize the features common to both Hungarian art and European painting. Typically for Csontváry’s reception one of his critics commented on his apparent inexperience and crude painting style, Shouldn’t we keep such innocent prophets in higher esteem than the all too savvy, routine, and powerful daubers?¹⁷

Csontváry was mentally unstable, but this circumstance only added to the aura of holiness that enveloped him.¹⁸ Parallel to Kernstok and Lukács’s above-mentioned articles, in 1911 Csontváry published pamphlets about Who can, and who cannot be a Genius?¹⁹ in response to Wilhelm Ostwald’s infamous article, Die Züchtung des Genies (The Formation of a Genius). Csontváry was often compared to Le Douanier (customs officer) Henri Rousseau – an obvious parallel because of their ‘outsider art’.

The critic Ernő Kállai, however, pointed out that while Rousseau’s elaborate works were the products of a detail-conscious Western European painting tradition, and his work was infused by admiration for the small, trivial, everyday experiences of life there, Csontváry’s work reflected the lofty imagination and the suppression of the individual of the Hungarian plain. Csontváry’s pictures, Kállai claimed, lacked attention to texture and brushwork, and were roughly dilettante, uncultured in the West-European sense of the word.²⁰ He went further and addressed the political subtext of Csontváry’s case:

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853–1919), Lonely Cedar, 1907. Oil on canvas, 200 x 205 cm, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. Photo Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.

It is a typically Hungarian thing: Csontváry’s enchanting legends and fantastic apotheoses regarding his high-flying painterly imagination and his unbelievable technical incompetence remind us of the overwhelming rhetoric of our members of parliament, whose eloquence goes way beyond their actual economic, political, or cultural education.²¹

In 1916 Lajos Fülep wrote an extended essay titled Hungarian Art, in which he addressed the dilemma of Hungarian-ness and European-ness. As a result of purely theoretical considerations, he contended that only full-fledged national cultures can be valuable parts of European culture and sought to find the art that embodied the specific Hungarian contribution. He found it not in Csontváry’s paintings, but in the work of the nineteenth century Hungarian sculptor Miklós Izsó (1831–1875), in particular in his series of sculptures from circa 1870 (in fact maquettes) titled Dancing Peasant. At this point Fülep’s previously balanced arguments turned into fascination with the absolute sculptural idea taking on a national form,²² and the manifestation of the ‘national genius’ in Izsó’s work. Unlike Kállai, who judged the technical deficiencies of Csontváry as marks of inferiority, Fülep argued that Izsó

Miklós Izsó (1831–1875), Dancing Peasant (maquettte), 1865–1870. Terracotta, 28 cm tall, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. Photo Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.

transcends the Schadows, the Rauchs, the Schwanthalers,²³ who know a hundred times more than he does, who are a hundred times more conscious artists and a hundred times more cultured than he is, and who can easily solve tasks that Izsó is not able to solve, but at one point, and this is the most important, Izsó has a grasp of the eternal sculptural idea with the inspiration of a genius; so naked, and so fresh, unlike anybody else in his time. Only a barbarian can rediscover that which has been around for two thousand years.²⁴

This, Fülep concludes, is the particular bodily ideal and ethnic material of Hungarians, and Izsó had been a misrecognized prophet unappreciated by his own people because of inferior technical skills. This is exactly what the concept of the ‘national genius’ had to deliver: to make up for arrested or belated development in one sweeping stroke of inspiration considered an ancient, innate, and ingrained brilliance.

The year 1919, however, put an end to both the modernist discourse and Csontváry’s art. The modernists had to emigrate after the defeat of the Hungarian Commune in August 1919; Fülep became a recluse in a village and eventually a Protestant clergyman, and Csontváry died in the same year.

A fresh take on tradition

‘Genuine Hungarian’ tradition was understood in different ways by different groups in the interwar period. In mainstream art, the ideal of a barbarous pagan Hungarian-ness was hidden behind the pious neoclassicism of Catholic official doctrine. But two young artists had a refreshingly professional, enlightened approach to archaic tradition. Lajos Vajda (1908–1941) and Dezső Korniss (1908–1984) made attempts at reconciling modernist painterly expression and the ancient formal vocabulary of Hungarian folk art tradition by adopting the musical project of Béla Bartók, who collected folk motifs, into the visual arts. From 1935 to 1937 they set out to systematically collect and copy traditional ornaments found in the woodcarvings of peasant households, country architecture, fences, sticks, and other objects. Vajda was articulate about the purpose of this work not as the exploration of pagan myths and legends, but as a pragmatic effort to unearth an existing but overlooked reservoir of popular motifs and tradition. They failed, however, to win over other artists to this project, which regrettably remained isolated.

Vajda died in 1941, but those artists who founded a group known as the European School in Budapest in 1945, in the wake of World War II, took up his legacy. This group united all the modernist artists who survived the war. They did not share a stylistic approach or theoretical framework, but they all intended to represent and legitimize the universal modernist artistic currents in Hungary. They were united by the energy and optimism of the post-war period, which lasted until the Stalinization of the country in 1948. The group included Vajda’s widow, the painter Júlia Vajda, his friend Dezső Korniss, the surrealist painter Margit Anna, the abstract painters Tihamér Gyarmathy, Makarius Sameer, Endre Rozsda, Tamás Lossonczy, Ibolya Lossonczy, the sculptor József Jakovits, the re-activated Lajos Kassák, who launched a new art journal Alkotás (Creation), and many others. Their optimism was fuelled by the ideal of a culturally unified Europe – the emergence of which they thought was imminent. Europe and the old European ideas have been destroyed, they declared in a manifesto. The idea of Europe has, until now, entailed Western Europe. From now on, we have to reckon with a Whole-Europe. This new Europe can emerge only as the synthesis of East and West.²⁵

Attempting to find a psychoanalytical explanation for the horrors of the war and for artistic expression, a coterie of theorists in the group, Árpád Mezei, Imre Pán, and Pál Gegesi Kiss, presented Freudian and Jungian doctrines. As Mezei put it, they combined the concepts of psychoanalysis with theology and the ancient myths of mankind in an effort to achieve a new, inner synthesis, because the whole of Europe aspires to this synthesis.²⁶

Béla Hamvas (1897–1968), another theorist and writer of the period who was connected to the European School, emphatically critiqued Western culture, which he saw in a state of decay in the absence of vigorous, living myths. Hamvas was representative of a theoretical current in post-World War II Budapest that regarded myths as the highest and the most authentic spiritual achievements of mankind – unintentionally reaching back to the young Lukács and his circle, albeit with different conclusions. On the top of Hamvas’ hierarchy of artists were those whom he categorized as God-seeking, with Csontváry among them as the artist who made a grandiose attempt at resuscitating a genuine mythology. Hamvas’ argument ran against the grain of the Enlightenment. He wrote:

The spirit of the myth is not transparent, it does not enlighten; instead, it is dark and terrifying. […] It is the mysterious, frightening spirit which convokes and holds together sects. […] Our mythical worldview has, ever since the pagan era, been always on the run from the church, or from the Austrians, or from other persecutors and has been forced into secret sectarian societies.²⁷

Hamvas along with his wife and co-author Katalin Kemény paid tribute to Csontváry as an artist who was in direct contact with the source of the pictures and who related to the lost Hungarian myth; the underlying contents of his paintings terrified the myth-less audience, which is lulled into the enjoyment of salon-aesthetics.²⁸

Many of the European School artists wanted to synthesize constructivist discipline and purity – the main legacy of the Hungarian avant-garde of the interwar period – with surrealist sensibility. Mention of Freud and psychoanalysis had an almost revolutionary aura in the Budapest of 1945, and the discipline was an important pillar of constructing a new, post-war, post-holocaust Weltanschauung. Abstraction and the surrealist tendencies, however, did not mix, and the abstract painters seceded from the group in 1946 to form the Avant-garde of the Danube Valley, soon renamed the Hungarian Group of Abstract Artists.²⁹

Lajos Vajda (1908–1941), Szentendre Houses with Crucifix, 1937. Tempera and collage on paper, 46 × 62 cm, Ferenczy Museum, Szentendre. Courtesy Ferenczy Museum Center, Szentendre.

These abstract artists made attempts to overcome an antagonism brought to attention in Balázs’s drama, which revealed the conflict of the Enlightenment and the ‘national genius’ in the opposition between science and the myth of the native soil. They started an ethnographic inquiry in 1946 – once again in the spirit of Bartók – and studied prehistoric masks and rituals, publishing an essay about an ancient but still ongoing tradition of a pagan ritual in the small town of Mohács in Southern Hungary. This examination of primal layers of the culture emphasized the Jungian collective unconscious rather than national or ethnic features.³⁰

The dualism of appealing to international modernism on the one hand and cultivating the myth of the ‘national genius’ on the other was further complicated after 1948, when both concepts were opposed to the totalitarian regime, and as such, both obtained an independent, progressive stance. Appeal to a national tradition and national character in art had been conservative when it happened to coincide with the official ideology of the conservative state during the interwar period, but it appeared progressive when directed against Stalinist totalitarianism. As Etienne Balibar proposes in his essay Internationalisme ou barbarie (Internationalism or barbarianism),³¹ the meaning of nationalism is not only different for dominating nations than for those that are dominated (entailing self-confirmation for the former, and political resistance for the latter), but nationalism or internationalism do not necessarily square with the ideology of an entire nation or an international community either. Both may represent the political and economic interests of various groups within or beyond a nation.³²

For the young generation of artists who emerged in the 1960s these categories gained slightly modified meaning. The formal discipline of geometric abstraction inherited from the classic avant-garde was carried on, but some of the young artists blended abstraction with folkloric motifs. Although this was a subtext within a visual language that was coded in the first place – geometric abstraction, ever since the 1920s, stood for international, enlightened rationalism and the dream of an all-European community – abstraction in this era had a clearly dissident stance. Painters such as Imre Bak, István Nádler, and Ilona Keserü – all of whom are discussed in later chapters – created syntheses of the puritan, universal, geometric vocabulary and the organic folkloric tradition in the 1960s. Parallel with the appearance of this new generation, the work of Csontváry, which was Hungary’s official art exhibit at the 1958 world exhibition in Brussels, was rediscovered in 1963 and presented by leading art historian Lajos Németh and several critics as the ultimate Hungarian oeuvre. Thus the dual discourse of the modernization of Hungarian art along with the reinstating of its primeval quasi-mythical currents was renewed in the 1960s. This gesture was revived in the 1980s in the organic architecture of Imre Makovecz and in the work of the sculptor Géza Samu, among others, who respectively evoked the architectural form of a tent and the original organic form of the tree as motifs in ancient Hungarian myths.

The Western discourse on reason, knowledge, religion, as well as the critique of society, and the modernists’ bottomless will to knowledge³³ engendered by the Enlightenment – knowledge being, as Michel Foucault stated, part and instrument of political power – has, since its inception, struggled with anti-modernist attitudes. However, in Western Europe, rationalism was channeled into the social structure of parliamentary democracy, and could hold up, except for the fascist period, to the challenge of the powerful irrationalism of Romanticism. In the eastern half of Europe, however, and in Hungary in particular, the absence of the Enlightenment downgraded Romanticism from passionate revolt into moody nostalgia. The hammering out of a national identity had, for its adherents, priority over everything else. The dilemma of identifying with the European tradition or reinventing a myth-based national profile was already anachronistic in the early twentieth century. Progressive modernism was sharply confronted with what Mark Antliff terms regenerative myths.³⁴

In the late 1960s and, in particular, in the early 1970s, a new and more relevant, modernized concept of what is specifically Hungarian appeared, which focused on both the distinct historic reality and the here-and-now experience. Conceptual art, object making, as well as painting and sculpture, articulated the specifics and uniqueness of the era of János Kádár’s communist regime in Hungary, which was already clearly different from post-1968 Czechoslovakia as well as the other Soviet bloc countries. Gyula Pauer’s series of Pseudo Cubes, 1970–1971, for example, the smooth surfaces of which were sprayed over with paint to make the cubes appear as if made of wrinkled paper, succinctly conveyed the experience that things are not what they appear to be. István Haraszty’s conceptual objects – for example, a compass which always points East, and a bird in an open cage, the door of which will be shut as soon as the bird approaches it in an attempt to get out, and many others – were initiatives of a sort of Hungarian Sots Art (socialist Pop Art), that, had they not been banned and thus invisible to the larger public, would have had the potential to create a satirical vernacular in Hungarian art, which is yet to be invented.

Paradoxically, postcolonial tendencies and globalization tend to validate such art currents that had previously proved to be anachronistic, because pointing out their regressive features would now appear not only politically incorrect, but, amidst the general cultural relativism of post-modernism, even unfair. However, it needs to be made clear that fascination with various forms of shamanism as authentic national tradition, which has resurfaced in the post-communist era in Hungary, opens up delusional roads to an imaginary past, and the nostalgic art that it engenders can only isolate the culture, not only from the international context, but from its own real identity questions too.

Notes

1 Karl Mannheim: Manifesto, 1918, quoted by Mary Gluck: Georg Lukács and His Generation 1900– 1918, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 10.

2 Lajos Fülep: Bevezetés (Introduction), A szellem (The spirit), No. 1, 1911, English translation in Gluck, p. 19.

3 Gluck, p. 10.

4 For more details on the Thalia Society, see Lee Congdon: The Young Lukács, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983, p. 16.

5 Béla Balázs: Halálesztétika (Death aesthetics), 1907, Reprint: Budapest: Papirusz Books, 1998, p. 17.

6 Béla Balázs: entry on August 22, 1905, in his Napló (Diary) 1903–1924, Budapest: Magvető Kiadó, 1982, p. 220.

7 For a detailed discussion of the Zeitgeist and the cultural context, see Thomas Harrison: 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, Los Angeles, Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1996.

8 Letter of Karl Mannheim to Georg Lukács on his plans to write an essay about Dostoyevsky, […] for I feel that his life, his world, is extremely similar to ours, with all its contradictions, disharmonies, and distortions. Lukács Archive, Budapest, English translation by Gluck, p. 27.

9 Dezső Kosztolányi: Letter to Lajos Fülep, December 1908, in Dóra Csanak, ed.: Fülep Lajos levelezése (The correspondence of Lajos Fülep), Budapest: MTA MKCS 1990, p. 133. Kosztolányi gives a detailed description of the planned journal, explaining why it needs to stay clear of Jews.

10 See note 2.

11 Marie Rischmüller, ed.: Bemerkungen in den Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Notes to Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime), Kant-Forschungen, Bd. 3, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1991, p. 38.

12 Károly Kernstok: Kutató művészet (Investigating art), in Nyugat (West), Vol. 3, No. 1, 1910, p. 96. English translation in BW, pp. 121-125.

13 Lajos Fülep: Új művészi stilus, 3 Rész (New artistic style, Part 3.), Új szemle (New review), April 1908, p. 207.

14 György Lukács: Az utak elváltak (The ways have parted). The talk was published in Nyugat, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1910, pp. 190-193. English translation by George Cushing in BW, pp. 125-129.

15 Ibid.

16 R. J.: Csontváry Kosztka Tivadar, in Vagyunk (We exist), No. 4, 1910, pp. 164-165.

Róbert Berény (1887–1953), Street, 1906. Oil on canvas, 80x139 cm. Private Collection.

17 B-t: Csontváry Kosztka Tivadar kiállitása (The exhibition of Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka), in Népszava (The people’s word), May 31, 1910, p. 8.

18 Csontváry’s writings reveal advanced paranoia and hazy fantasies about the decay of the world due to modern culture (smoking and drinking in particular), and his prophetic mission to restore the original 1500-years-earlier conditions.

19 In Világ (World), December 1911. Reprinted in Gedeon Gerlóczy, ed.: Csontváry emlékkönyv (Csontváry memorial book), Budapest: Corvina, 1976, pp. 60-65.

20 Ernő Kállai: Új magyar piktúra (New Hungarian painting), Budapest: Amicus, 1926; republished by Budapest: Gondolat, 1990, p. 139.

21 Ibid.

22 Lajos Fülep: Magyar művészet (Hungarian art), 1916, republished by Budapest: Corvina, 1971, p. 63.

23 The reference is made to German sculptors Johan Gottfried Schadow, 1764–1850; Christian Daniel Rauch, 1777–1857, and Bavarian sculptor Ludwig Schwanthaler, 1802–1848.

24 Fülep: Magyar művészet (as in note 22), p. 62.

25 Az Európai Iskola Manifesztuma (Manifesto of the European School), Budapest: Európai Iskola füzetek, 1945, n. p.

26 Árpád Mezei: A szürrealizmus (Surrealism), in Árpád Mezei: Gondolatok és elméletek (Thoughts and theories), Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó, 1984, p. 27.

27 Béla Hamvas and Katalin Kemény: Forradalom a művészetben (Revolution in the arts), Budapest: Misztótfalusi, 1947, p. 52.

28 Ibid., p. 54.

29 See A Forgotten Group, pp. 138-155.

30 See Kázmér Fejér: A mohácsi busók (The busó of Mohács), Budapest 1946. Busó is an ancient word for the masked spirits haunting and parading in the carnival.

31 Etienne Balibar: Internationalisme ou barbarie? (Internationalism or barbarism?), Lignes, No. 17, October 1992, pp. 21-42.

32 Ibid.: The Liberal International represents, in many respects, a Western nationalism, while the Socialist International represented Soviet nationalism, each with their dissidents, of course, p. 25.

33 Jürgen Habermas: "Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Foucault’s Lecture on Kant’s What is Enlightenment?" in Michael Kelly, ed.: Critique and Power. Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1994, pp. 149-154, this quote: p. 153.

34 Mark Antliff: Avant-garde Fascism. The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909– 1939, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007, p. 6.