At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Adolf Fényes occupied a prominent place among Hungarian artists committed to modernism. Marking the 80th anniversary of his death, the Museum of Fine Arts — Hungarian National Gallery is publishing a representative scholarly volume and organising a chamber exhibition that showcases his masterpieces.
Offering a selection from Fényes's oeuvre dating from the late 1890s to the early 1940s, the exhibition traces in chronological order the main stages of his career, and shows both the stylistic diversity of his paintings and the characteristic thematic categories into which they can be grouped.
The sequence of works opens with Mother, a dramatic piece from the Life of the Poor cycle, followed by the sun-drenched impressionist landscapes of the first decade of the twentieth century, his vibrantly coloured and popular figurative compositions, and the atmospheric small-town variations, including intimate street scenes from Vác and Szentendre.
The vividly coloured paintings of peasant interiors, created around 1910, along with his decorative and boldly contoured interiors and still lifes, reflect the influence of postimpressionist stylistic elements.
Finally, the interwar period is represented in his art though a series of stylised worlds removed from everyday reality: a biblical scene, a depiction of a siege recalling the days of the Kuruc rebels, and a foreboding cityscape sunk beneath heavy clouds. Objects on loan from the collection of the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest evoke Fényes's favourite pictorial motifs, as well as the rural and petty-bourgeois milieu of his years in Szolnok.
The National Gallery last held a retrospective exhibition of the painter's work over six decades ago, in 1960, so his extensive oeuvre is virtually unknown to the general public today. Prejudices rooted in the past persist to this day, and the public perception of him is still shaped by the politicised, one-sided assessments of the 1950s, which interpreted the paintings he created around 1900 as forerunners of socialist realism. On both his father's and mother's side, Fényes was descended from prominent Jewish religious leaders. For a long time, his artistic renown shielded him from discrimination on the basis of his Jewish background, but after the Arrow Cross takeover in October 1944, he was forced into the ghetto. He survived the siege of Budapest, but after enduring severe mental and physical ordeals, he died in the spring of 1945, at the age of 77.