Attila Sassy

Attila Sassy (born October 17, 1880 in Miskolc , † October 11, 1967 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian painter and graphic artist .

Life

Artistic beginnings, 1898

Attila Sassy began his artistic training in 1898 in Károly Ferenczy's private school .

Studied in Munich and Paris, 1904–1906

In 1904 he went to Munich to Anton Ažbe , where he learned "wet-on-wet painting", which you can "paint in and correct" over and over again. In the summer of 1905 he worked in the Nagybánya artists ' colony .

In 1906 he stayed again in his hometown Miskolc, where he illustrated the poetry collections of the writer Margit Kaffka . In the same year he returned to Ažbe in Munich and then went to Paris to study with Jean-Paul Laurens and Lucien Simon at the Académie Julian .

Sassy, ​​an early advocate of cloisonism, 1907-08

Among the Ažbe students, Sassy was an early advocate of Cloisonnian painting.

In Paris he took up the surface painting of the Gauguin students from Pont Aven and the Nabis . His "Nude with Black Stockings" can be stylistically matched to many French examples. With the Nabi Maurice Denis , who once said: "The syntheses of the Japanese decorative painters are not enough to quench our thirst for simplification", Sassy seems to have connected the urge to track down further sources for surface painting. His "portrait of his sculptor friend Ferenc Medgyessy" is a cloisonnist picture of almost archaic severity. It is eloquent testimony to the fact that open-minded painters from the most varied of nations conducted almost scientific typological research in order to be able to establish the new style in the art of great world cultures. In this case, the key to the painting is provided by a quote from Egyptian art , namely the depiction of the deity Isis . It can be found as "picture in picture" on the background of his painting and is overlapped by the bust of his artist friend Ferenc Medgyessy .

With the appeal to Egyptian art in connection with cloisonnism, Sassy took up tendencies that were already practiced around 1870 by Peter Lenz in the Beuron art school . Before Sassy, ​​for example, Paula Modersohn-Becker was inspired by Egyptian models. Four years after Sassy, ​​it was Franz Marc who felt particularly drawn to Egyptian art. Sassy used almost all the essential style elements of Egyptian art in his portrait with a consistency that goes beyond that of the adaptation of Japanese, for example by van Gogh , Gauguin or Jawlensky . Accordingly, the portrait appears lifeless in its flatness. The painter shows the faces of the goddess Isis and the sculptor Medgyessy in sharp profile. The parallelism does not allow a visual relationship. Sassy captures the unusual directionality from right to left in an ingenious way back into the picture through the compositional element of the diagonals, which lead from Medgyessy's elbow up the forearm over the contour of the nose and forehead to the upper edge of the picture. The original movement comes to a standstill and gives the picture an overall character of rigor and rigidity. This also contributes to the fact that there are no entanglements in the picture that could break up its flatness. The shoulders and arms, on the other hand, are depicted en face in the Egyptian style. Foreshortenings that would give the impression of plasticity are avoided with one exception: Sassy did not transfer the bird's eye of Isis to his friend. The overlapping of the sculptor with the portrayal of the goddess also creates the impression of parallel surfaces in the picture, as in the case of overlapping foils that eliminate the idea of ​​spatiality. The directness with which Sassy brought the Egyptian goddess Isis into his picture and thus reveals the source of his artistic inspiration without further ado is rare among artists of his time. It is true that he continues a tradition that can be found again and again from Whistler to Van Gogh for the adoption of Japanese motifs as quotations in Western European art. However, his “portrait of the sculptor friend Ferenc Medgyessy” is an extremely rare document that tries to legitimize modern Cloisonnian surface painting through Egyptian art.

Exhibitions, after 1808

In 1908 he moved to Budapest and studied with the sculptor Ferenczy at the Academy of Fine Arts . He began a lively exhibition activity in 1908 in the National Salon . His first solo exhibition took place in 1910, his last in 1943.

literature

• Katalin Sz. Kürti: Medgyessy - szemtől szemben . Gondolat Kiadó, Budapest 1983.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ KK, Śassy-Aiglon, Attila, in exh. Cat .: Paths to Modernism and the Ažbe School in Munich, Museum Wiesbaden 1988, p. 127.
2. ^ Lovis Corinth, The Learning of Painting, Berlin 1909, p. 57
3. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Jawlensky and his companions in a new light, Munich 2004, p. 47 ff.
4. ↑ KK, Śassy-Aiglon, Attila, in exh. Cat .: Paths to Modernism and the Ažbe School in Munich, Museum Wiesbaden 1988, p. 127
5. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, In the Vorfeld des Expressionismus, Anton Ažbe and painting in Munich and Paris, Wiesbaden 1988, p. 17 ff.
6. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, In the run-up to Expressionism, Anton Ažbe and painting in Munich and Paris, Wiesbaden 1988, from 19
7. ↑ Maurice Denis, Von Gauguin and van Gogh on Classicism, in: Kunst und Künstler, Vol. VIII, Berlin 1910, p. 86 ff
8. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Jawlensky and his companions in a new light, Munich 2004, fig. 140, p. 119
9. ↑ Katalin Sz. Kürti, Medgyessy Ferenc, Budapest 1983, pp. 25, 27, 33
10. ↑ Harald Siebenmorgen, I will never become a real Beuroner, Karl Caspar as a wall painter and the Beuroner Art School, in: Munich shines, Karl Caspar and the renewal of Christian art in Munich around 1900, Munich 1984, p. 254 ff
11. ↑ Ulrich Krempel, “And Cézanne! Of which you write. That's a guy. ”, Artistic elective affinities and the dawn of modernity at Paula Moderson-Becker, in exh. Cat .: Garden of Women, Pioneers of Modernism in Germany, 1900–1914, Sprengel Museum Hannover 1996, p. 33
12. ↑ Hans-Christoph von Tavel, Der Blaue Reiter: Challenge after 75 years, in: Exh. Cat .: Der Blaue Reiter, Kunstmuseum Bern 1986, p. 78 f
13. ↑ Hendrik Budde, Japanese Color Woodcuts and European Art: Painters and Collectors in the 19th Century, in exh. Cat .: Japan and Europe 1543–1929, “43. Berliner Festwochen "in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin 1993, p. 167 ff
14. ↑ Akiko Mabuchi, Le Japonisme: De L'eclecticisme à l'art modern, in exh. Cat .: Le Japonisme, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris 1988, p. 194 f
15. ↑ KK, Śassy-Aiglon, Attila, in exh. Cat .: Paths to Modernism and the Ažbe School in Munich, Museum Wiesbaden 1988, p. 127

Web links

• Sassy Attila (1880–1967) with Miskolc Városi Értéktár ( Hungarian )