A group of painters that fundamentally renewed Hungarian painting in the early 20^th century, The Eight, is virtually a legend. The only joint exhibition of the eight masters - Róbert Berény (1887-1953), Dezső Czigány (1883-1938), Béla Czóbel (1883-1976), Károly Kernstok (1873-1940), Ödön Márffy (1878-1959), Dezső Orbán (1884-1986), Bertalan Pór (1880-1964) and Lajos Tihanyi (1885-1938) - was organised by the Könyves Kálmán Salon in 1910 and was announced under the title New Pictures, thus indicating the radical change audiences were to witness in the fine arts, one comparable to the revolutionary volume of poetry represented by Endre Ady's New Poems. With the exception of Berény, the same artists had participated in the show by MIÉNK (Hungarian Association of Impressionists and Naturalists) the year before; however, their separation from this group as well as their new works marked a clear break with Impressionism and Naturalism. These painters were also "believers in nature" but instead of adhering to existing schools, they "drew inspiration from it sensibly", - to quote their words. They did not want to capture a transitory moment of life but rather the essence dwelling deep inside things. Thus, their models were Cézanne and Matisse.

Their paintings sold well; the progressive press was overwhelmed. Encouraged by the material and moral success after their 1910 debut in Berlin (when they exhibited together with Béla Iványi Grünwald) and the one-man show mounted by Bertalan Pór - which prompted the prime minister at the time, István Tisza, to express his protest against the ‘subversive artists' - the eight painters took on the name The Eight on 11 April 1911. Their next exhibition, in the National Salon, already ran under the new name. Czóbel, who had established himself in Paris in the meantime, did not send any paintings for this show which was clearly dominated by Róbert Berény with more than half of the exhibits being his works. After a year, on 12 November, The Eight only had four members, namely Róbert Berény, Dezső Orbán, Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi. At this point they did not openly express their differences, but in 1914 the group broke up. (They appeared together at the 1915 World Fair held in San Francisco.)

So who fathered the legend of The Eight? Mainly the members themselves, of whom many nostalgically remembered in their old age the times when, thanks to the group, they were seen as being more than just talented painters and the eyes of a nation rested on them. The legend was also sustained by all who embraced the strivings of The Eight: other artists, such as Ady, the editors of the periodical Nyugat (West), patrons (Ignotus, Hatvany) as well as composers like Bartók, Kodály, Weiner and Dohnányi, preparing the way for a revolution in music, and the Galileo Circle of political radicals advocating social change. The legend was even supported by those conservatives who felt their positions threatened, as well as by belligerent right wing publicists and caricaturists. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1917, the legend was kept alive by persecution, by those who were forced to emigrate.

A tradition to follow

In the grey social realism of the post-1948 era the legend was seen as a left wing tradition that could potentially be revisited and used to break out of the obviously limiting framework of artistic representation at the time. This is why the exhibition The Eight and Activists organised in 1965 in Székesfehérvár, the contemporaneous capital of Modern art, represented such a breakthrough. And of course Krisztina Passuth's still valid 1967 monograph The Painting of The Eight, which was published anew for the present show, must not be left unmentioned. A new generation of scholars has joined Passuth's research; their essays can be read in the impressively voluminous and richly illustrated new catalogue of the exhibition in Pécs.

The fruit of many years of research, the exhibition in Pécs (directed by Gergely Barki, Péter Molnos, Krisztina Passuth, Zoltán Rockenbauer and József Sárkány) seeks to reconstruct the three shows that The Eight staged and, more importantly, to present the oeuvre of these prominent 20^th-century artists when they were members of the group. The twofold objective creates a kind of confusion since the original Eight exhibitions included works by guest artists, such as Márk Vedres and Vilmos Beck - albeit it is not known why - and now scholarly research established that the fifty or so sculptures and figurines on display did not come up to par with the paintings neither in regard to inventiveness nor modernity. The same problem arose in connection with the designs for embroidery by Anna Lesznai, who was present at the time in all the fora of modern Hungarian art, and with the four pictures by Mária Lehel, which made their way into the contemporaneous show through the ‘recommendation' of her journalist and patron husband. It could be hypothesised that the organisers at the time intended to use these works of weaker quality to offset the legend of The Eight, but on the contrary, the show in its entirety underscored the feeling of greatness and the sense of an irreproducible miracle, even though some of the works by the great models (Cézanne, Matisse, Dufy, Vlaminck, Kokoschka, Picasso, etc.) virtually blended in with the Hungarian pictures.  

Demonic portraits, muscle bundles

The three levels of the Pécs exhibition are linked to the three original Eight exhibitions. The show opens with a captivating selection of still-lifes, interiors, landscapes and nudes in which even the same motifs are painted differently: Orbán and Czigány's stern perfection can be contrasted to Czóbel's playful virtuosity, Berény's wildness - exceeding that of the Fauves - and Márffy's elegance and expressivity. Pór's Family exuding profound sadness and Kernstock's monumental composition of a horse rider can be seen in this chapter. Today visitors might not understand these pictures stirred a scandal at the time, since what seemed to be avant-garde in the 1910s has now become classical, just like Ady's poems and Bartók's music. The works displayed here do not break out of but rather broaden the framework of painting.

The second and third levels of the exhibition clearly define the strivings of individual painters. The most demonic genius who almost instantaneously absorbed and sublimated the most varied -isms was Róbert Berény, whose portraiture of Ignotus and Leo Weiner is starkly different, yet both works come across as obvious masterpieces, as do his highly effective ironic self-portraits. The only painter comparable to him in this genre is Lajos Tihanyi. In contrast, Dezső Czigány's depictions of Ady fall behind in this ‘competition', while Márffy's splendid portrait of Mrs Kosztolányi, a composition far more rigorous and constructive than his Csinszka portraits, occupies a prominent place. Orbán and Czigány excelled in still-life painting, but every member of The Eight, with the exception of Czóbel, paid their tribute to the master, Cézanne, with their pictures of apples, pears, jugs and tablecloths, partly due to this genre selling well on the market.

Wanted Berény et al

The pictures of Bertalan Pór composed with bundles of muscle now come across as stilted and artificial, similarly to Kernstok's airy nudes of boys devoid of all sensuousness whether depicted alone or in groups.

It follows from the above that we cannot talk about a unified ‘The Eight style', but instead about eight excellent masters blessed with great drawing skills, sensitivity and a sense of colour who received their training or gained experience in Paris and not in Munich, who joined the Nyergesújfalu colony of Károly Kernstok and not Károly Ferenczy's in Nagybánya and who entered into a temporary alliance. Their community and fast break-up, as it seems today, were inevitable. Now that they can be seen together again, in Pécs thanks to the directors who managed to bring their works made between 1907 and 1912 (some of them believed to be lost) from various public and private collections, as well as Hungarian and foreign homes and galleries, we have the opportunity to better familiarise ourselves with each one of them.

After the Márffy exhibition, I am sure that a Berény, a Tihanyi or a Czóbel show would equally be met with success. In any case, the scholars carry on with their (re)search: the centenary event closes with the notice "Wanted: latent works by Berény et al."