Mihály Munkácsy [antikvár]

MIHÁLY MUNKÁCSYMihály Munkácsy was one of the popular painters in Europe and America around the eighties of the last century. He had a brilliant career; at 26 he won the Gold Medal of the Paris Salon, and for a dozen years or so his name was on everyone's lips in French art circles. He was the most famous Hungarian after Ferenc Liszt, the musician, and Sándor Petőfi, the poet. But his triumph did not last long, nor did it go deep enough; impressionism, to which both he and his public were opposed, won in the end, and Munkácsy's fame was obscured, at 4east for a time. In Hungary, too, his artistic reputation suffered at the hands of adherents of modern schools.A new evaluation of his work came about 1920, when art historians, particularly the French, began to treat him more fairly and sympathetically.During the past few decades he has usually been considered as a painter of the Courbet school. He has many qualities which seem to justify this, such as his tonal treatment, his striving for plasticity and reality due to his intensive study of his models, and his search after texture which was never trivial or pedantic, never obscuring essentials in a mass of detail. He has, however, other qualities which place him outside the Courbet school, and these are due partly to his distinctively Hungarian aspirations, and partly to his German training at Düsseldorf.Before Munkácsy there had been attempts, founded on romanticism, to create a living Hungarian art, national in spirit. Munkácsy carried these attempts much further, with his dramatically powerful romantic realism, which became the dominant form of Hungarian painting in the nineteenth century. His Düsseldorf training, as well as his links with tradition, led him to a conception of painting in which the dramatic moment played a great part. At Düsseldorf he learned the method of character portrayal which enabled him to create vital and expressive figures. His use of theme and narrative he owes partly to the Rhineland school, and partly to current practice in Hungary. The Hungarian art historian István Genthon put it aptly when he wrote ; "This Hungarian painter mastered the new language of Düsseldorf comedies, and adapted it to write tragedies."Munkácsy's best works certainly spring from a deep sympathy with humanity. His composition may be the result of logical calculation, but his absorption in his theme lends warmth and directness to his message. He combines the German anecdotal method with the passionate earnestness of Daumier and Courbet. The Düsseldorf tradition gave him an understanding of Dutch painters, especially Rembrandt, whose influence enriched his work. Unfortunately, Munkácsy's technique was not always adequate to express his vision. At the Munich Academy he adopted the asphaltum technique, and though this gave tonal unity and balance of colouring to his painting, it restricted that striking inventiveness in the use of colour which we find so admirable in his works not painted with asphaltum.