What Happens When You Spend Too Much Time in Paris

What Happens When You Spend Time in Paris - The Shift Into 20th-Century Modernity

4/2/2022

János Vaszary (1867-1939) hailed from a prominent Catholic family in Kaposvár, Hungary. How prominent? Well, his uncle was the Archbishop of Esztergom, which was a very big deal back in those days.

Vaszary began pursuing art quite early in his life, and displayed notable technical talent. Yet what makes him particularly interesting as a painter is the remarkable shift in style that basically cleaves the oeuvre of his work into two distinct Jekyll and Hyde-ish parts that I will refer to here as pre-Paris and post-Paris.

Vaszary's pre-Paris paintings comprise those he painted before he moved to the City of Light in 1899. Note the style and subject matter.

Peasant Girl in the Garden - 1893 (Not only my favorite Vaszary painting, but one of my favorite Hungarian paintings, full stop.

The Command Has Arrived (Farewell!) - 1894

And the following paintings exemplify the style shifts Vaszary employed later in his life during and after his return from Paris after the turn of the century.

After Bathing - 1903

French Riveria - 1920

Nude with Buddha - 1926

Woman Sitting in the Garden - 1930

The Morphinist - 1930

9 Comments

Luke

4/2/2022 21:32:57

That's quite startling. From the ones you selected, it appears that there's also a shift after WWI into that who-even-cares-anymore style.

Francis Berger

4/3/2022 18:47:31

@ Luke - That's a good observation. Modernism, as it relates to art, can be roughly summarized as a the loss of faith in the core institutions of Western civilization, and that certainly was prevalent after the carnage and devastation of the First World War.

Sue

4/3/2022 01:56:12

I love the first painting. It is so sweet.
Clearly he was spiritually degraded after Paris.
Its a staggeringly huge fall.

4/3/2022 18:48:53

@ Sue - Yes, and it seems to follow the same trajectory of so many other painters that lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Lady Mermaid link

4/3/2022 02:18:09

The shift illustrates a spiritual war that lies at the heart of the French nation. On one hand, France has a culture known for loose sexual morals with syphilis being historically known as "The French disease". The worst excesses of the Enlightenment are manifest in the bloodbath of the French Revolution. Those materialistic values still play a prominent role in the West today.

However, there is another destiny for the French nation. It can reject the French Revolution and embrace the legacy of Clovis, St. Louis, Joan of Arc, and the Sacred Heart. This is a France known as the "Eldest Daughter of the Church". I understand that the likelihood of an institutional church making a comeback is slim being that the leadership of most churches, including Rome have apostatized. However, the French people can regain their status as the Eldest Daughter of the Church in a spiritual fashion one man at a time.

4/3/2022 18:51:38

@ LM - True. France was very much at the forefront of the modernist movement -- the avant garde, as it were. American writers and artists flocked to Paris in the twenties to soak up the modernist ambiance. On the surface, France - as a nation - seems lost, but one never knows what spiritual possibilities lay hidden in the depths.

bruce charlton

4/3/2022 08:18:44

It looks like a pretty catastrophic personal moral (sexually-motivated) corruption - being manifested (and excused in a generic fashion) in the painting. A microcosm of the value-trajectory of the entire West.

4/3/2022 18:57:46

@ Bruce - Vazary is an example among many that fill that time. Hungarian artists flocked to France in much the same fashion as the Americans and Brits did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I am not familiar with the intimate details of Vazary's biography, but I do know that he was enamored by modernism, and that he worked actively to "make it new" in Hungarian painting in much the same way Ezra Pound had for poetry. I'm interested to know what, if any, personal moral corruption Vazary underwent. As you point out, the movement of his art through the years certainly point in the direction of some kind of severe personal corruption.

Nathanel

4/5/2022 12:18:01

I don't see anything wrong with the latter paintings? There is more to painting than photographic realism.

Although I think I agree with the sentiment you are pointing to in that there is clearly a distinction between before and after.

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What Happens When You Spend Time in Paris - The Shift Into 20th-Century Modernity

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