This is a monographic study of the art of István Nagy, a painter of Transylvanian origin, whom his contemporaries also called the “Hungarian Van Gogh” due to his insociable nature and spectacular colours. István Nagy really had Van Gogh as kindred spirit, but his unique, nowhere classifiable and extremely prolific oeuvre consists mainly of a series of pastels, which not long ago for the first time managed to be collected in a monumental oeuvre catalog. The nearly 600-page album, edited by Tamás Kieselbach, provides an insight into the life of this strange, reticent, poor painter wandering in the mountains of Transylvania, who, like the composer Béla Bartók, created an independent formal language from his folk collection. In his fantastically coloured wild pastels and monochrome black charcoal drawings, he captures the ornamentation of the landscape and the closed world of ordinary peasants, which grew into a monumental one, in the footsteps of Millet and Seurat, but also utilizing the lessons of Hungarian modernism.

Abstract This paper focuses on the motif of permanent crisis and the “ghost” in Tsai Ming-liang’s art through a close analysis of films such as I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Hei yan quan, 2006), What Time Is It There? (Ni na bian ji dian, 2001), Vive l’amour (Ai qing wan sui, 1994), The Skywalk is Gone (Tian qiao bu jian le, 2002), The Hole (Dong, 1998), and the relevant discourse of Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, pointing out new, previously undiscussed connections between What Time Is It There? and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959). The aesthetics of the spectral is presented as a possible way of approaching films that not only reckon with the increasing immaterialization of the medium in the digital age, but also extend this to understand and represent new qualities of human relationships and existence in the world, using the motif of the ghost as an allegory of the medium and a “haunting” of traditional cinematic plot organization and narrative.

The conflict between Charles de Tolnay and Erwin Panofsky that grew unprecedentedly acrimonious in the history of the discipline – the so-called Tolnay–Panofsky affair – was more than mere personal bickering. The documents clearly reveal that the “affair”, which basically affected financial and professional positions, was based on embarrassingly ordinary, occasionally petty-minded questions instead of scientific arguments, and led to a break of relationship probably in spring 1943, also directs the attention to the science political consequences of the hierarchic establishment of American science financing and academia in general in the interwar years and the 1940s, and to differences between European and American scholarship. It can be gleaned that Tolnay’s efforts to be allotted raised stipends (often by a great degree, as the documents unanimously testify) and a confirmed position led to the deterioration of his relationship with the Princeton IAS leaders and community – in spite of the fact that the former leader of the Institute Flexner took Tolnay’s side, at times with threats to Panofsky and Oppenheimer and accusing Panofsky of professional jealousy. Though Tolnay received raised scholarship up to 4000 dollars for three years, the institute decided to part with Tolnay in 1948. In the background of the affair, however, one may discover conflicts based on the diverging views on art history by Panofsky and Tolnay rooted far deeper, in the elementary influences of the Vienna School of Art History and Max Dvořák on the one hand, and of the Sunday Circle and György Lukács, on the other. The art philosophical aspects and methodological consequences of these dissenting concepts of art history may bear significance for the practitioners of the discipline today as well.

Discussing the relationship of Max Dvořák and Johannes Wilde on the previous study (János (Johannes) Wilde and Max Dvorák or, can we speak about the Budapest School of art history), I proposed – indirectly – the provocative thesis that “there is no Dvořák without Wilde”. What justifies this polarized statement is the set of documents of source value found a few years ago in Wilde’s estate in archives of Budapest and London. Johannes Wilde cherished a profound relationship with his siblings, Ferenc and Margit, who did not have families of their own but lived with their mother Munisi until her death. They are the addressees of the letters of invaluable importance which Wilde wrote from Vienna and later from various stations of his forced exile. Wilde spent longer periods in Vienna twice: first, between 1915 and 1917, he was the student of the Vienna University department of art history led by Max Dvořák, and then, after the fall of the short-lived communist interlude, the Hungarian Republic of Councils, he returned to the Viennese capital as Dvořák’s protégé, colleague and friend. The few years spent side by side deepened their professional and personal relationship so much that when fate put an end to the life of the Czech-born professor still at an early age, Wilde was at the side of his death-bed and informed posterity of the details of this sorrowful event through his letters. In the this paper I am concentrating on the period of 1915–1917, starting with the moment when young Wilde left Budapest and the team of the drawings-and-prints department in the Museum of Fine Arts who knew Dvořák personally – Simon Meller, Frigyes Antal, Edith Hoffmann – upon his director Elek Petrovics’s encouragement who sent him directly to Dvořák to study. Lengthy passages are to be cited from the letters, since these weekly reports offer a direct insight into the life and daily routine of the Vienna School, particularly of the so-called Dvořák seminar and into Dvořák’s teaching methods.

The conflict between Charles de Tolnay and Erwin Panofsky that grew unprecedentedly acrimonious in the history of the discipline – the so-called Tolnay–Panofsky affair – was more than mere personal bickering. The documents clearly reveal that the ‘affair’, which basically affected financial and professional positions, was based on embarrassingly ordinary, occasionally petty-minded questions instead of scientific arguments, and led to a break of relationship probably in spring 1943. It also directs the attention to the science political consequences of the hierarchic establishment of American science financing and academia in general in the interwar years and the 1940s, and to differences between European and American scholarship. It can be gleaned that Tolnay’s efforts to be allotted raised stipends (often by a great degree, as the documents unanimously testify) and a confirmed position led to the deterioration of his relationship with the Princeton IAS leaders and community – in spite of the fact that the former leader of the Institute Flexner took Tolnay’s side, at times with threats to Panofsky and Oppenheimer, and accusing Panofsky of professional jealousy. Though Tolnay received a raised scholarship up to 4000 dollars for three years, the institute decided to part with him in 1948. In the background of the affair, however, one may discover conflicts based on the diverging views on art history by Panofsky and Tolnay rooted far deeper, in the elementary influences of the Vienna School of Art History on the one hand, and of the Sunday Circle and György Lukács, on the other. The art philosophical aspects and methodological consequences of these dissenting concepts of art history may bear significance for the practitioners of the discipline today as well.

Can concepts or artistic practices be transferred from one culture, one region, one land to another; and how much can another cultural context modify the meaning and function of a given artistic language, in the present case a language of painters? We can move nearer to an understanding of the problem if we bear in mind that cultural transfer differs essentially from comparison since it builds on the premise that there are no national cultures that have developed in an autochthonous way. These cultures have formed in the wake of influences, co-habitation, and motif adoption of many different kinds. Investigation of cultural transfers, then, emphasises similarities existing in social memory and not on differences. The art history of the time around 1900 has been recorded by way of the narrative of progressivism, in the paradigm of the centre and the periphery. The model itself is historical. We can and should remark upon on the material of past in its capacity as such and we may emphasise different aspects of it. Nevertheless, the material of the past is malleable only up to a certain limit. The historical marker of the art of the era under discussion is progressivism: we would be ahistorical were we to divest it of this tag. This paper presents the problems of cultural transfer on the example of Hungarian and French fauvism, involving the reception of renowned art historians and thinkers such as Adolf Hildebrand, Julius Meier-Graefe or Georg Lukacs.

In his well-known review of Hauser in the Art Bulletin E. H. Gombrich posed the rhetorical question: ‘has a social historian really nothing to say about Ambrogio Lorenzetti’ s Good Government…?’ The preceding passages reveal that Gombrich found him wanting in the concrete, objective confrontation with the art object, the scanning look of the art historian: ‘This special approach, we may infer, demands of us that we look on the more distant past from the outside as on an interplay of impersonal forces. Perhaps this aloof attitude accounts for the curious lack of concreteness in Mr. Hauser’s references to individual works of art.’ To crown his devastating judgment, he adds that the illustrations got apparently into the book later by favour of the publisher as ‘their captions have a strangely perfunctory character.’ Without taking a closer look at the art political or methodological aspects of the two art historians’ different positions, it is to be stressed that the publication of Hauser’s early art-related criticisms is a significant step, for it reveals a career start with daily reviews relying on face-to-face confrontations with art works, with the process of creating art. These beginnings go back to times prior to the Sunday Circle, to the reviews published in Temesvári Hírlap from 1911 (a symbolic date, the salient year of Hungarian modernism, of the group called the Eight) covering the theatre, particularly the highly visual stage productions of Reinhardt apart from fine art. Young Hauser’s admiration for the stage might have something to do with his professor Bernát (Bernhard) Alexander’s Shakespeare researches, as is his critique of impressionism related to the contemporary, and occasionally astonishingly critical response to the young Lukács. As Hauser’s widow recalled, it was not Mannheim who introduced the young critic to the Sunday Circle, but Hauser had known the Lukács family earlier as a private tutor. Though this piece of information has not been verified by other sources yet, but his early writings reveal the up-to-date knowledge of Lukács’ youthful ideas. This paper will add new data, facts and analyses to complement Hauser’s biography, also relying on the source material published in Enigma.

Johannes Wilde, noted Michelangelo researcher and deputy director of the Courtauld Institute in London, earned fame, among other things, for being among the first to use the X-ray to examine art objects. This paper highlights Wilde’s close friendship with Max Dvorák, (who died in his arms in 1921) and his correspondence documenting his daily contacts with the Viennese school. Wilde is among the Hungarians, like Arnold Hauser and Charles de Tolnay, who won world fame. Beside revealing the daily life of a Hungarian art historian and his colleagues (Elek Petrovics, Simon Meller, Károly Tolnay, K. M. Swoboda, Strzygowsky, Schlosser) in wartime Vienna, his correspondence is a primary source to study the little-known support of Austrian aristocrats (Count Khuen-Belasi, Count Lanckoronski, Count Wilczek) for Hungarian artists. The periodical Enigma released a four-time selection of the 3,000 letters (some in the Hungarian National Gallery, some in London) with the Wilde siblings’ epistolary diary of the Budapest siege of 1944. The study is about these new sources, the Wilde-Dvorák friendship, Wilde’s contact with the Viennese School and the Sunday Circle, and raises the question again whether a Budapest school of art history can be outlined.

The intellectual-emotional community or even symbiosis of the friends György Lukács and Leó Popper was fuelled by irresolvable antagonisms as well. Popper's concept of form, “form as event” inevitably withstands any attempt at historicizing or theorizing. Popper's was a deeply anti-theory aesthetic attitude, which reveals a lot about the ethos of the psychology of creation, but the first and foremost tenet of this morality is “the will of form will be done”. The will of form and not the will of the thinker, however close one may come to the morality of Lukács's demand for the detachment of the personality. The contradistinction between life and work becomes the antagonistic opposition between “work as life” and thinking. This opposition is timeless, supra-historical. Popper's principal intellectual legacy is not the idea of double misunderstanding, even if Lukács promotes him to be a forerunner of the aesthetics of reception and “an anticipator of modern hermeneutics”. A very talented person needn't even be present when he creates – this was Popper's opinion.

Summary László Mednyánszky's work is investigated in the present study in the context of Austrian “Stimmungsimpressio-nismus”, an artistic phenomenon, which corresponds in contemporary Hungarian art criticism to “Stimmungmalerei”(painting of sentiments, proposed 1886 by G. Keleti). The cult of French Impressionism has overshadowed in the art history of Central Europe a late 19th-century school of nature representation, based on sentiments and considered later as a provincial phenomenon. László Mednyánszky's paintings can be compared with the main representants of Austrian “Stimmungsimpressionismus”, and in fact he had contacts with painters as Emil Jakob Schindler, Robert Russ, Hans Canon, Wilhelm Bernatzik and Tina Blau. Inspite of his very deep knowledge about impressionist painting, he was mainly influenced by Barbizon painters, and in the first line by J. F. Millet. In the second part of the study figurative paintings by Mednyászky, representing poor people, are analyzed. Their relationship to the tradition of Ribera, Daumier, Géricault and mainly of Millet corresponds to a literary inspiration due mainly to the famous roman Les mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue. The great influence of this kind of literature is witnessed by friends of Mednyánszky.