Stereotypes and What They Hide: On the Representation of Gypsies in Hungarian Painting

Stereotypes are a recurring theme of this blog. One post discussed the hopelessness of trying to relate personal love stories through stereotypes, while the latest post touched on the subject of stereotyping other nations. Stereotypes may be inherent to how we perceive (and thus represent) the world: in order to find our way among the endless number of things and people we encounter, we try to find similarities and contrasts between them and label them accordingly. But every time we squeeze an object into such a neat category, something individual is lost, and – if I am allowed to be a bit bombastic here (and I guess I am – this is my own blog) – I think that most problems in the world, whether large or small, arise when people confuse stereotypes with reality. If, when meeting someone, we content ourselves with noting personality traits that seem to prove the stereotypes commonly associated with their nationality, gender, age, profession, sexual orientation, etc., we prevent ourselves from getting to know them as individuals. I think this causes a lot of trouble in everyday life – but it is, of course, most dangerous and vicious when it serves as a basis for hatred. As you may have guessed by now, this post is about racism.

Miklós Barabás: Travelling Gypsy Family in Transylvania, 1843 (Magyar Külkereskedelmi Bank Zrt., deposited at the Hungarian National Gallery)

A Piece of Canvas Smeared with Colours: The Hungarian Painter Miklós Barabás on J. M. W. Turner

This is a blog that presents Hungarian art to an international audience, constantly forcing me to try to look at Hungarian art history through an outsider’s eyes. In today’s post, these perspectives will be hopelessly entangled: we will look at a Hungarian artist as he is looking at a British artist and is looked at by British art lovers. The previous post thematised the differences between Eastern and Western Europe through the sad story of the sculptor István Ferenczy – with a (hopefully) upbeat ending that stressed that the two are inseparable. This post will continue in the same vein, showing that, somewhere deep down, even differences can serve as connections. But first of all, let me introduce a new artist: the portraitist and genre painter Miklós Barabás (1810-1898), one of the most successful painters in 19th-century Hungary.

Miklós Barabás’ career can be seen as an antithesis to István Ferenczy’s. While Ferenczy saw himself as a struggling artist who suffered from the lack of patronage and a well-developed cultural life, Barabás not only made good use of the emerging institutional framework, but took part in building it up. Ferenczy finished his life in self-imposed solitude; Barabás, on the other hand, was venerated by the public throughout his long life, even if his art itself eventually came to be seen as outdated. It can perhaps be said that Ferenczy came too early – starting his career only a decade later, Barabás already had solid foundations to build upon. He was also helped by his optimistic, rational, resourceful personality: instead of aspiring to be regarded as a genius, he contented himself with being a good and successful artist, and relied on his excellent social skills to find patrons and further his career.

Miklós Barabás: Self-Portrait, 1841 (Hungarian National Gallery)

Looking Down Into the Abyss: Bertalan Székely and the Perils of Love

In my previous post I took a somewhat critical look at artistic ‘greatness’ understood as a quality that sharply distinguishes ‘great’ artists and their works from ‘ordinary’ people and everyday life. For art to move us, does it necessarily have to rise above us? Does it have to be a work of incomparable genius? Does it have to be monumental? Or can it be small, banal, personal? Can it, quite simply, speak about love? I will now be looking at pictures by an artist who filtered his personal experiences through some of the most trivial and commonplace products of the visual culture of his time, transforming those trivial images into something intimate and full of life. This perpetual oscillation between general and singular, public and personal, was crucial to Bertalan Székely’s (1835-1910) representations of domestic life.

The collision between greatness and intimacy is a productive force in Székely’s oeuvre. Today, he is widely known as a history painter: his scenes from 16th-century battles against the Turks are familiar to the Hungarian viewer not only as artworks, but as illustrations in history books. They are certainly great: depicting turning points in history, they are monumental in their sizes and awe-inspiring in their compositions, often recalling religious imagery, as in the case of The Discovery of the Corpse of King Louis II after the Battle of Mohács. There is, however, another facet to Székely’s art, much less known today, but – as evidenced by his notes and sketches – considered equally important by the artist himself. Besides the great events and heroes of Hungarian history, Székely also aimed to depict moments of everyday life; scenes so general, so universal that – according to him – any person from any country would understand them. To achieve this, he planned series of lithographs narrating ‘typical’ human lives.

Bertalan Székely: The Bride, 1869-1870 (oil sketch for a scene from the series Life of the Woman; Hungarian National Gallery)