A Feverish, Youthful Poetic Frenzy: Art, Nationalism, and the Pleasures of Terror

In 1856, the young artist Viktor Madarász (1830-1917) displayed a strange painting at the exhibition of the Art Society in the city of Pest. The large canvas bore the title The Dream of the Fugitive during the War against the Turks, and showed a young man and a soldier sleeping while two ghostly apparitions – an old man in chains, dressed in white, and a horrid, dark, winged figure with a cape and a skull-like face – hover above them. The painting received much attention from the critics, who did their best to try to interpret it. A month later Madarász helped them out by hanging an explanation next to the painting. As it turned out, the title – which mentions no specific person and refers to the war against the Turks – was only a ruse to avoid censorship: the real subject of the painting was the struggle against Austrian rule. The sleeping youth was none other than Imre Thököly (1657-1705), the future leader of an uprising against Austria, who had just fled from his family’s castle – under siege by the Austrians and defended by Thököly’s father, a rebel himself. Thököly the elder had died that night, and the picture shows his ghost appearing to his son in a dream.

In 1856, Hungary was still a province of the Austrian Empire, and the emperor’s army had just defeated the Hungarian revolutionaries in the War of Independence of 1848-1849. No wonder Madarász feared censorship (the arbitrariness of which is demonstrated by the fact that it was possible for him to hang his text next to the picture; what is more, one of the newspapers published it – this is how we know about it). Today, The Dream of the Fugitive counts as a history painting, one of the many depictions of national history produced by Hungarian painters in the second half of the 19th century. 19th-century critics assigned a vital role to these paintings: they were supposed to help forge a community by addressing the nation as a whole and representing significant events of national history, while also conveying ‘national character’. But did The Dream of the Fugitive, with its unrealistic subject and blood-curdling imagery, satisfy those demands?

Viktor Madarász: The Dream of the Fugitive, 1856 (Hungarian National Gallery)

Painting Unmentionable Love: Károly Ferenczy’s Homoerotic Aestheticism

The retrospective exhibition of Károly Ferenczy (1862-1917), one of the most well-known Hungarian painters, opened at the Hungarian National Gallery last December and is on view until 17 June. Ferenczy’s importance in the history of Hungarian art has hardly been contested in the nearly 100 years that have passed since his death, but the exhibition still manages to show him in a new light. Previously, the painter was mostly seen as one of the founding fathers of the Nagybánya (today Baia Mare, Romania) artists’ colony – an independent school whose members are often (quite imprecisely) dubbed ‘Hungarian Impressionists’. Hence, Ferenczy was known to the public as an Impressionist or plein-airist, as a painter of sunny landscapes. The current exhibition (curated by Judit Boros and Edit Plesznivy) presents the many facets of his oeuvre as equally important, giving due space to his portraits, nudes, and Biblical scenes, which had formerly been decried as examples of the ageing painter’s ‘new academism’. This shift of emphasis leads to surprising results. Maybe painting the effects of light wasn’t the central concern of Ferenczy’s art after all. Maybe he was preoccupied with something else – with the human body, with sensuality and desire, and with the representation of unattainable ideal beauty.