Adalékok Kondor Béla sors-történetéhez

In the course of my research in archives – in search of documents about the history of the Art Foundation of the People’s Republic (from 1968 Art Fund) – while leafing through the sea of files in the National Archives of Hungary (MNL OL) year after year, I came across so-far unknown documents on the life and fate of Béla Kondor which had been overlooked by the special literature so far.Some reflected the character of the period from summer of 1956 to spring 1957, more precisely to the opening of the Spring Exhibition. In that spring, after relieving Rákosi of his office, the HWP (Hungarian Workers’ Party, Hun. MDP) cared less for “providing guidance for the arts”, as they were preoccupied with other, more troublesome problems. In the winter/spring after the revolution started on 23 October and crushed on 4 November the echelon of the HSWP (Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, Hun. MSzMP) had not decided yet whether to strike a league with extreme leftist artistic groups or to pay heed to Memos Makris (Hun. Makrisz Agamemnon), the ministerial commissioner designing the reform of the artists’ association and organizing the Spring Exhibition and to leave the artists – so-far forced into the strait-jacket of socialist realism – alone. I found some documents which shed bright light on the narrow-mindedness of the dogmatic artistic policy trying to bend the artists toward its goals now with the whip, now with milk cake.I start the series of recovered documents with a ministerial file dated summer 1956 on the decision to purchase Kondor’s diploma work (the Dózsa cycle). The next piece of good news is a record of the committee meeting in February 1957 awarding Kondor a Derkovits scholarship. This is followed by ministerial letters – mirrors of the new artistic policy – by a changed, truly partyist scholarship committee which apparently revel in lecturing talented Kondor who was not willing to give up his sovereignty, so his works were often refused to be bought on state funds for museums.In addition to whip-lashing documents, I also present a few which offered some milk cake: a letter inviting him to a book illustrating competition called by the Petőfi Literary Museum and one commissioning him to make the sheets on the Heves county part of a “liberation album”.Next, I put forth a group of illumining documents – long known but never published in details: the files revealing the story of the large panels designed for the walls of the “Uranium city” kindergarten in Pécs and those revealing the preparations for the exhibition in Fényes Adolf gallery in 1960 and the causes of the concurrent tensions – including texts on decisions to hinder the publication of Lajos Németh’s catalogue introduction.The last group includes futile efforts by architects to get Kondor commissions for murals. They give information on three possible works. Another for Pécs again (this time with Tibor Csernus), for works for a “men’s hostel” and on the failure of the possibility. The other is about works for Kecskemét’s Aranyhomok Hotel, another failure. The third is about a glass window competition for a new modern hotel to be built in Salgótarján, to which Kondor was also invited, but the jury did not find his work satisfactory in spite of the fact that the officials representing the city’s “party and council” organs, and the powerful head of the county and town, the president of the county committee of the HSWP all were in favour of commissioning him.Mind you, the architects’ efforts to provide the handful of modern artists with orders for “abstract” works caused headache for the masterminds of controlled art policy, too. On the one hand, they also tried to get rid of the rigidity of the ideologically dogmatic period in line with “who is not against us, is with us”, the motto spreading with political détente, and to give room to these genres qualified as “decoration”. On the other hand, they did not want to give up the figurative works of socialist contents, which the architects wanted to keep away from their modern buildings. A compromise was born: Cultural Affairs and the Art Fund remained supporters of figurative works, and the “decorative” modern murals, mosaics and sculptures were allowed inside the buildings at the cost of the builders.Apart from architects, naturally there were other spokesmen in favour of Kondor (and Csernus and the rest of the shelved artists). In an essay in Új Irás in summer 1961 Lajos Németh simply branded it a waste to deprive Kondor of all channels except book illustration, while anonymous colleagues of the National Gallery guided an American curator to him who organized an exhibition of Kondor’s graphic works he had packed into his suitcase in the Museum of Modern Art in Miami.From the early 1963 – as the rest of the explored documents reveal – better times began in Hungarian internal and cultural politics, hence in Béla Kondor’s life, too. The beginning is marked by a – still “exclusive” – exhibition he could hold in the Young Artists’ Studio in January, followed by a long propitiatory article urging for publicity for Kondor by a young journalist of Magyar Nemzet, Attila Kristóf. Then, in December Kondor became the Grand Prix winner of the second Graphic Biennial of Miskolc.From then on, the documents are no longer about incomprehensible prohibitions or at time self-satisfying wickedness, but about exhibitions (the first in King Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvár), prizes (including the Munkácsy Prize in April 1965), purchases, the marvellous panel for the Grand Hotel on Margaret Island, the preparations for the Venice Biennale of 1968, the exhibition in Art Hall/Műcsarnok in 1970 and its success, and Kondor’s second Munkácsy Prize.Finally, I chanced upon a group of startling and sofar wholly unknown notes which reveals that Béla Kondor was being among the nominees for the 1973 Kossuth Prize. News of his death on 12 December 1972, documents about the museum deposition of his posthumous works and the above group of files close the account of his life.I wrote a detailed study to accompany the documents. My intention was not to explain them – as they speak for themselves – but to insert them in the life-story of Kondor, trying to find out which and how, to what extent contributed to the veering of his life-course and to possibilities of publicity for his works. I obviously included several further facts, partly in the main body of the text, and partly in footnotes. Without presenting them here, let me just pick one or two.Events around the 1960 exhibition kindled the attention not only of the deputy minister of culture György Aczél, but also of the Ministry of the Interior: as Anikó B. Nagy dug out, they asked for an agent’s report on who Kondor was, what role he was playing among young writers, architects, artists, the circle around Vigilia and the intellectuals in general. Also: what role did human cowardice play in banning the panels for the Pécs kindergarten, and how wicked it was – with regulations cited – to ask back the advance money from an artist already hardly making a living with the termination of the Der ko vits scholarship. Again: what turn did modern Hungarian architecture undergo in the early sixties to dare and challenge the still prevalent culture political red tape? It was also a special experience to track down and describe the preparations for the Hungarian exhibition of the Venice Biennial of 1968 and to see how much caution and manoeuvring was needed even in those milder years to get permission for Béla Kondor (in the company of Tibor Vilt and Ignác Kokas) to feature in the pavilion. Finally, it was informative to follow the routes of Kondor’s estate as state acquisitions and museum deposits after his death which foiled his Kossuth Prize.

Adatok Ii. Lajos magyar király páncélos ábrázolásaihoz

Most of the posthumous portraits of Louis II, who died in the battle of Mohács in 1526, show him in armour. In some pictures he is wearing fictitious armour, but in other portraits he is clad in the armour which until 1939 was believed to had once been his, but actually had been made in 1533 for the Polish king Sigismund II Augustus and is currently kept in the Hungarian National Museum. The author of the study has examined the latter group of artworks. She describes the armours of Louis II, some only mentioned in archival sources or historical works. Some items that can certainly or presumably be attributed to him are kept in museums abroad. The first paintings in which Louis II is wearing the gilded ornamental armour were painted by István Dorffmeister in the mid-1780s. Since at that time the armour was on display in one of the gala rooms fitted out in Vienna’s Kaiserliches Zeughaus in the 1760s, the study discusses the history of the imperial armour and weapon collections and the conception of the arms exhibition in the Zeughaus at that time. After the demolition of the Zeughaus in 1856, the armour was transferred, together with the rest of the imperial collection of armours and weapons, to the war museum wing of the newly built Arsenal. The armour was presented by the Austrian catalogues of the museum as belonging to Louis II, and some items had illustrations added to them. The armour was introduced in Pest in 1876 at a historical exhibition for charitable purposes, and later in 1896 at the Millennial Exhibition. The Hungarian press also devoted articles to it, and several scholarly papers were written about the armour.The prototypes for some of the 19th century artworks depicting Louis II in the Viennese armour – most of them local monuments preserving the memory of the battle – were István Dorffmeister’s paintings. His battle scene showing the death of Louis II appears in a sketch of an unrealized monument, dated 1846; in the picture painted on metal that adorned the monument in Mohács in the 1860s and on the bronze relief replacing it in the late 1890s. The antecedents to another group of representations must have been the 19th century Austrian and Hungarian descriptions and illustrations of the armour attributed to Louis II. The ruler wears this armour in several book illustrations and on the statue by Ferenc Vasadi on the Danubian facade of the Hungarian Parliament building.Although these artworks presenting Louis II in Sigismund II Augustus’ armour do not satisfy the iconographic criteria of historical authenticity, they were up-to-date for their time, for instead of depicting the fictitious, often waywardly fantastic armours of earlier centuries, they presented the portrayed person in an existing armour made in his own era, that is, with a historically authentic appearance.

Ferenczy Károly kettős portréja Schönherr Antalról és Schönherr Gyuláról (1902)

In the autumn of 1902 Károly Ferenczy (1862–1917) painted a double portrait of Gyula Schönherr (1864–1908) and his father Antal Schönherr (†1905) in Nagybánya (today Baia Mare, Romania). Antal Schönherr was the police chief of the town, but his son had long been living in Budapest and pursued a serious career as a historian. After the onset of his career in the Archives of the Hungarian National Museum, he edited the periodical Turul rallying heraldic research, the periodical of book historical research Magyar Könyvszemle, the volumes of the Millennial Hungarian History, and he became the secretary of the National Inspectorate of Museums and Libraries set up in 1897. In 1896, at the age of 32, he became corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He supported the art colony of Nagybánya from its foundation. Károly Ferenczy was a friend of the Schönherr family in Nagybánya; he painted the double portrait as a present to Gyula Schönherr. Gyula Schönherr’s unpublished letters to his family reveal the process of portraiture (with references to the creative methods of the painter), the display and reception of the portrait in Budapest and its subsequent fate, the further contacts between Ferenczy and his painter friends and the Schönherr family. After Gyula Schönherr’s death the painting remained with the family, who donated it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1926, since when it has been in public collections.

A Tolnay–Panofsky-affér, avagy hűség az ifjúsághoz: A bécsi iskola, Max Dvořák és A Vasárnapi Kör

The conflict between Charles de Tolnay and Erwin Panofsky that grew unprecedentedly acrimonious in the history of the discipline – the so-called Tolnay–Panofsky affair – was more than mere personal bickering. The documents clearly reveal that the “affair”, which basically affected financial and professional positions, was based on embarrassingly ordinary, occasionally petty-minded questions instead of scientific arguments, and led to a break of relationship probably in spring 1943, also directs the attention to the science political consequences of the hierarchic establishment of American science financing and academia in general in the interwar years and the 1940s, and to differences between European and American scholarship. It can be gleaned that Tolnay’s efforts to be allotted raised stipends (often by a great degree, as the documents unanimously testify) and a confirmed position led to the deterioration of his relationship with the Princeton IAS leaders and community – in spite of the fact that the former leader of the Institute Flexner took Tolnay’s side, at times with threats to Panofsky and Oppenheimer and accusing Panofsky of professional jealousy. Though Tolnay received raised scholarship up to 4000 dollars for three years, the institute decided to part with Tolnay in 1948. In the background of the affair, however, one may discover conflicts based on the diverging views on art history by Panofsky and Tolnay rooted far deeper, in the elementary influences of the Vienna School of Art History and Max Dvořák on the one hand, and of the Sunday Circle and György Lukács, on the other. The art philosophical aspects and methodological consequences of these dissenting concepts of art history may bear significance for the practitioners of the discipline today as well.

Ahasverus Rottenberger metszete Buda 1598. évi ostromáról

Very few representations appeared of the capital of the Hungarian Kingdom, Buda seized by the Ottomans in 1541, over the 16th century. Until the unsuccessful attempt to recapture Buda in 1598 only eight engravings are known. The siege of Buda as a significant event kindled interest and reports appeared all over Europe, but only eight pictorial reports – or engravings – were printed. The article briefly describes all depictions printed until 1598 and those of the siege. The latter were unfortunately re-moulding of earlier depictions and conveyed more or less fictitious vedutas, with one exception. The exception is the print based on imperial master builder Ahasverus Rottenberger’s on-the-spot survey drawings the whereabouts of which was unknown for nearly a hundred years. The writing discusses the search for the artistically mediocre engraving of Rottenberger, before evaluating it from diverse viewpoints, e.g. of local history. Importantly, this is the first print to correctly represent the topographic features of Buda, thanks to the careful observation.

Lechner Ödön rajzai a szegedi városházához

The paper is about the set of drawings and documents by Ödön Lechner and Gyula Pártos for the Town-hall of Szeged dated to 1881–1883 (Hungarian National Archives, Csongrád-Csanád County Archives, Szeged [MNL CSML], Collection of Building Plans and Documents of the Municipality of Szeged, marked Lecher Ödön, Pártos Gyula: A Szegedi Városházhoz készített tervek, rajzok és iratok, [Plans, drawings and documents for the Szeged Town-hall], XV.2b. 45. d.-49.d). The elaborated theme includes ground-plans, rosette, baluster and skylight plans, detail plans of staircase and main cornice, plan of the roof of the main staircase, 37 drawings of ornamental sculpture, window pillars, window frames and rail chains, painter’s stencils signed by Ödön Lechner, two façade versions, tower detail, details of the main portal, drawings of the vault around the clock, of the ornaments of room doors and cornice elements. The building logbooks, list of submissions to the competition with code-names and the contracts signed with the building contractors are also valuable sources.In addition to eighty drawings of diverse sizes and techniques, the collection includes the construction documents, accounts, correspondence, building logbooks, planning competition calls, and a colour plan for the tiling of the Szeged Town-hall now in the Architectural Collection of the Kiscelli Museum of the Budapest History Museum (inv.no. 117). I evaluate the drawings both within the conception of an architectural work and also as separate graphic sheets, and try to describe their background in terms of the history of architecture, art and ideas.I am led to conclude that the Szeged Town-hall was the first project to manifest Lechner’s ambition to lay the groundworks of a national architecture based on the more abstracted and universal basic forms of folk art but keeping abreast of European tendencies. The drawings are invaluable in that they add more information to the chronology of Lechner’s artistic career and lend stress to the fact that folklore and local history researches, the intellectual approach, the synthesis of local and international achievements, a thorough knowledge of the history of ceramics, the redefinition of traditions played at least as important roles in creating the concept of a building as individual intention and creative imagination.The paper was supported by the Ernő Kállai Art Historical Research Grant.

Johann Ignaz Cimbal „védjegye”, a VSG-monogram

Next to his signature, Viennese painter Johann Ignaz Cimbal often added a peculiar sign in his frescoes and oils. It is a combination of letters, appearing in a different form in each of the studied cases (Zalaegerszeg, Oberlaa, Zwettl, Peremarton, Tornyiszentmiklós, Nagykároly [ Carei]), which – and the poor state of the works – make the identification of the letters difficult. In most cases the sign reads VSG, so it is not the initials of the painter.In some Cimbal works the three letters also appear with iconographic meaning. On the picture of the King Saint Stephen side altar in the parish church of Tornyiszentmiklós the letters shining in the halo around the Holy Cross were identified as VSG earlier and decoded as “Vera Sacra Crux”. However, it is more likely that this abbreviation hides the same meaning as the monograms next to Cimbal’s signatures.Guidance to the elucidation of the monogram was provided by the ceiling fresco in the southern vestry-room of Székesfehérvár cathedral. The clearly readable VSG abbreviation appears in the corners of the triangle symbolizing the Holy Trinity, which leaves no doubt that it is in connection of the Holy Trinity. The most obvious explanation is the letters being the initials of the German words for the three divine entities, Vater, Sohn and [Heiliger] Geist.The attribution of the picture (Maria Immaculata) on the high altar of the parish church of Sárospatak to Cimbal was suggested on the basis of this motif, here in three corners of a triangular aureole around the Ark of Covenant. The attribution is also confirmed by style critical analyses. (Analogous are Cimbal’s Immaculata figures in Zalaeregszeg, Tornyiszentmiklós and Székesfehérvár.)The abbreviation alluding to the Holy Trinity, which is perfectly embedded in the iconographic fabric of some paintings, was also used by Cimbal independently of the theme, attached to his name. Inserting a sign referring to the Holy Trinity above his name must have been a religious gesture. Having completed a picture, the painter crossed himself, as it were, offering his work to God. He sealed his offering with the mysterious sign of God “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”. (A similar religious gesture must underlie the signature 70 of an early Cimbal work, the Saint Anne altar picture in Vienna’s Barmherzigenkirche. The abbreviation “Zimbal i. VR” is traditionally interpreted as “In veneratione” with the explanation that the painter made the picture as a votive offering.) Cimbal always created a new composition out of the three letters, so it cannot have been his aim to make a recognizable constant “trade-mark”. (For this purpose he used his name with the customary addition “invenit et pinxit”.) The linking of the three letters is not just a customary formal solution as in monograms, but it has a meaning: it symbolizes the unity of the three divine persons, just as the circle in the triangle in Székesfehérvár.An extremely expressive iconographic solution needs special mention, applied almost to each of his depictions of the Holy Trinity in Hungary. It is the sceptre held by the three coeternal persons (hence it has extreme length). As it occurs so frequently, it cannot be part of an occasional client’s wish but much rather it is the painter’s invention. Perhaps a comprehensive examination of the entire oeuvre will discover further examples in support of the author’s hypothesis that the Holy Trinity was a particularly favourite theme of Cimbal. It was again his personal devotion that led him to use the Holy Trinity monogram.The motivation behind commissions for religious art works in the period was first of all the client’s personal religiosity. The religious motifs of the artists can usually only be inferred from indirect data and in connection with few works. One such sign is that for the duration of painting the frescoes Franz Anton Maulbertsch joined the Scapular Confraternity of Székesfehérvár, while the group portrait on the organ loft of Sümeg permits the assumption that he took part in the devotions of the Angelic Society founded by bishop Márton Padányi Biró. His pupil Johannes Pöckel who settled in Sümeg was a member of the local Confraternity of the Cord. Unfortunately, no information to this effect is known about Cimbal.His signature and Holy Trinity monogram testify that not only the client but also the painter offered his work to God.