- Ödön Márffy
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The native form of this personal name is Márffy Ödön. This article uses the Western name order.
Ödön Márffy (born Budapest 30 November 1878; died Budapest 3 December 1959) was a Hungarian painter.
Biography
Following a short basic training, he managed to get a grant to study art in Paris from the autumn of 1902. He started as a student of Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian, like several modern-minded Hungarian painters after him, but a few months later, ostensibly for financial reasons, he transferred to the École des Beaux-Arts, where Fernand Cormon was his teacher. With classmates they often went to Ambroise Vollard’s famous art dealership together, where Márffy was most impressed by the pictures of Cézanne, Matisse, Bonnard, Rouault and Braque. He claims to have met Matisse in 1905, who had been sent down from the École des Beaux-Arts, but would return there from time to time, and even to have visited him in his studio once. His stay in Paris was crucial for his artistic development and later career not only because of his familiarity with French painters and students, but also because this was where he became friends with Béla Czobel, Róbert Berény and Bertalan Pór, later members of the Eight (Nyolcak), and this was where he met philosopher of art Lajos Fülep, writer and columnist György Bölöni and poet Endre Ady. It was in 1906, the last year of his stay in France that he first exhibited at the Salon d'Automne of Paris.
Back in Budapest, in March 1907, Márffy exhibited the works he made in France in the Uránia art dealership, in the company of Lajos Gulácsy, at a show that received very good reviews.
The success of this exhibition brought him the friendship of József Rippl-Rónai and Károly Kernstok. Rippl-Rónai – who had lived in France and was one of the Nabis – not only invited the young painter to Kaposvár, but it was thanks to his substantial support that Márffy could become a founding member of MIÉNK (Magyar Impresszionisták és Naturalisták Köre – Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists). Károly Kernstok, another well-established painter, invited him to his Nyergesújfalu estate, where Márffy’s fauvism came to maturity.
From late 1909 Márffy was actively participating in the works of the group of artists who seceded from the MIÉNK, and were to become famous as the Eight. The group was formed by Róbert Berény, Dezső Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezső Orbán, Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi in 1909, though they adopted the epithet “the Eight” only in the Spring of 1911. They opened their first exhibition on December 30, 1909, at the Könyves Kálmán Salon (Budapest), under the title New Pictures. Their second exhibition – already entitled The Eight – opened in April 1911 in the National Salon. While the Eight as a group had only three exhibitions, their activity was of immense significance, with an influence that went far beyond the visual arts, involving new Hungarian literature and contemporary music was, in the case of the Eight, more than entertainment or publicity. The list of contributors reveals that literature was represented by those associated with the journal Nyugat (Endre Ady, Dezső Kosztolányi), and music was by the most modern composers: Bartók Béla, Kodály Zoltán.
Between 1909-1914, Márffy’s painting was constantly transforming. The exalted, fauvist brushwork gave way, in his landscapes, nudes, still lifes and even his portraits, to an increasingly rigorous mode of composition. The disciplined, constructive approach would be loosened up in the second half of the decade by increasingly expressionistic solutions – thanks in part to his encounter with Kokoschka.
Ödön Márffy married Endre Ady’s widow, Csinszka in August 1920. The marriage brought emotional and financial security. By the 1920s, Márffy had become an acknowledged, much sought-after painter who exhibited regularly. He could afford to travel, he often went to paint in Germany and Italy, took part regularly at the Venice Biennials, and exhibited, among other places, in the United States, Italy, Poland, Vienna, Nuremberg and Munich. The only member of the Eight to work regularly in Hungary, he had considerable authority in the local scene. In 1924 he became a founding member of the KUT (New Society of Visual Artists) an umbrella of modern endeavours. In 1927 Ödön Márffy was elected to the head of the organization for a decade.
Meanwhile, his style grew softer, more accessible, as well as airier and more decorative. Though his canvases long retained the fauvist colours and remnants of the constructive space structures, and he would return to his earlier vision for the sake of the odd picture or two, by the end of the 1920s the vibrant colours were replaced by a scumbled, misty, more relaxed atmosphere, and the style became smoother, more decorative, more palatable for a middle class audience. The vision of the landscapes, garden and seaside scenes, nudes and still lifes he made between the wars resembles the approach of the École de Paris painters, especially of Kisling, Pascin, Van Dongen and Dufy.
After th Second World War he was among the first to join the European School, founded on October 13, 1945. Though his painterly style, even his views on art, were distant from the approach of the European School’s young painters – who were attracted partly to the Surrealists and partly to the abstracts, and who can in many ways be linked to the art of Corneille and the Cobra group.
Ödön Márffy died in the Kútvölgyi Hospital on December 3, 1959, three days after his 81st birthday.
References
- Rockenbauer [Zoltán]: Márffy. Catalogue Raisonné. Budapest/Paris, Makláry Artworks, 2006. (with English summary) ISBN 9632299671
- Fauves Hongrois. (1904–1914). Paris. Ed. Biro. 2008. (Catalog in French) ISBN 9782351190470
External links
Categories:- 1878 births
- 1959 deaths
- 19th-century Hungarian people
- 20th-century Hungarian people
- 19th-century painters
- 20th-century painters
- Hungarian painters
- Alumni of the École des Beaux-Arts
- People from Budapest
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