In the first decade of the 20th century, the various avant-garde tendencies exerted their influence in Hungary, too. In reaction to these, János Vaszary, an accomplished painter by 1910, decided to create a new style of painting. He...
moreIn the first decade of the 20th century, the various avant-garde tendencies exerted their influence in Hungary, too. In reaction to these, János Vaszary, an accomplished painter by 1910, decided to create a new style of painting. He drafted his principles in an article, Florence - Siena, published in the daily Az Újság, and in the text for his catalogue of his exhibition at the Artists' House in 1912. His ideas were rooted in the trends of his day that rejected naturalism and impressionism, and referred to Cézanne, Gauguin and the Fauves. His theories often corresponded with the ideas he had known from Matisse's essay, The Notes of a Painter (the French original being published in 1908, and its Hungarian translation in 1911). Vaszary envisioned an art he called style-investigating reconstructed art, which would be of lasting value, matching the styles of past periods. He deemed the art cultures of Antiquity, Asia and the Renaissance as normative, calling their simplicity liberating, and regarding their modes of representation as exemplary in their striving to grasp elements that are comprehensive, essential and typical. He was fascinated by the fact that the use of restrained poses could achieve highly expressive and efficient compositions. He felt there was potential for a new Renaissance in due course, and recognized that the cradle of the latest movements was France.
In 1910, he travelled to France, and studied the hand and head positions of Buddha and Shiva statues, Japanese ink drawings, and the concepts of vision in Chinese, Greek, Egyptian and Assyrian art. At the same time, he visited the sites of contemporary art, such as the exhibitions of the Salon des Indépendants, Marquet, the Gallerie Vollard. He made notes on the colouration and image-making techniques of Picasso, Cézanne, Marquet, Manguin, Van Dongen.
He made several hundred drawings in pencil and ink, differentiating Synthetic Lines from the rest, the former depicted male or female nudes and motion studies. The single- or multi-figure drawings recall characteristic artschool poses and compositional problems. The most beautiful pieces among these female nudes imitate the calligraphic play of lines in Japanese drawings in brush, while some of the male nudes break down a series of movements into phases. Because, in the opinion of Vaszary, the nude and its movement, its rhythm meant continuity with primitive art.
In 1911, Vaszary went on a tour of Italy. He continued his investigations in the public squares, museums and churches of Florence, Siena, San Gimignano. Here he had the opportunity of studying from close the colours of mosaics, faience, majolica, as well as the more gaunt, Byzantine shapes of early Renaissance works of art. He was also inspired by the extravagance of the baroque line, and the sculpture of the quattrocento and the cinquecento. With his newly found world of colour, he painted watercolours of the Madonna, Renaissance figures, multi-figure Arcadian scenes; he also produced landscapes drawing the lessons from his studies of Cézanne and Marquet, and made cover designs suggestive of majolica lustre.
In the meantime, on March 14, 1911, he joined the most progressive Hungarian art association of the time, the Artists' House founded by Miklós Rózsa. He took part in the various activities of the House, including freeschool art teaching from 1913 and arranging and curating major domestic and foreign exhibitions, selecting their material. It was at the Artists' House that he first presented his new art in 1912. The majority of critics justly compared these works of his with those of the avant-garde group Nyolcak (The Eight). Some put on fastidious airs, while others welcomed his daring, but demanded a more settled, matured art, and this critique was repeatedly voiced in connection to all his shows in the following two years. He summed up his experiments in a handful of major pictures displayed at the 1912 show, namely: Boys Bathing, Balance (Cat. Nos 89, 94), Dance (whereabouts unknown), Decorative Trees, or A Profile (Cat. No. 93). However, he exhibited the masterpiece with which he ended this creative period, the massive canvas entitled Temperate Gestures (The Resurrection of Lazarus, Cat. No. 95J only at the opening of the new building of the Artists' House in 1913. The composition with its several static, stylized, frontally posed figures bears some semblance to Picasso's monumental works from the early years of the century, but is also different in its strongly Byzantine-like style.
In the spring of 1913, Vaszary went to Paris to study the newest work at the Salon des Indépendants, taking a longer detour on the way to see Picasso's Munich exhibition. As a result of what he saw, he decided to follow new artistic ideals, and elaborated his programme in two articles ("Artistic Experiments, Theories", 1913; "The Signs of New Beauty", 1914). He rejected the approach based on the reconstruction of old styles and striving to decorativeness, and emphasized the problems of representing space and time. Under the influence of cubism and futurism, his new, reticent studies of nudes assert a clarified geometry. His multi-figure compositions, most of which are lost [Composition, Balcony), are evocative of tribal art and the works of Picasso, Modigliani, Brancusi. In a number of gypsum sculptures, he experimented with primitivism [Recumbent, Squatter), however only one has survived (Kneelef), this is his earliest known statue.
As the First World War broke out, he volunteered to be a war correspondent on the front, and thus his avant-garde experiments ended. The stylistic and motif treasury he had accumulated did not come to naught: its elements surfaced from time to time, interspersing and animating his art in the 1920s and 1930s.
