At the end of 1886, the Hungarian painter Michael Lieb, who was known as Munkácsy (1844–1900), visited the United States. The content, form and intention of his work had a marked national character, linked to the desire for independence of the Hungarian people. As in other previous occasions, Martí avails of a feature article to enhance values very much in accordance with the ideas and criteria rooted in his own spirit. This article, published in La Nación, Buenos Aires, January 28, 1887, essentially focuses on the Hungarian painter’s masterpiece Christ Before Pilate.
Today we will follow all of New York to see the painting of Christ by the Hungarian artist Munkácsy. Painters, poets, journalists, clergy, politicians are shouting “Elhem, elhem!” meaning “Hurrah!” wherever Munkácsy appears in his current visit to New York. They cheer his name as if to enhance the fame and fortune of his canvas. Yesterday the city’s distinguished men gave him a banquet and upon the wall, above his head with its heavy shock of hair, “Istem-Hozot” or “God brought you to us” was spelled out in letters of flowers. The luxurious manner with which he was treated while traveling is reminiscent of the way Rubens lived — a man who wanted everything dripping with gold and silver, and who even enjoyed seeing the pomp and splendor of jewels upon feminine flesh itself. In Washington he was celebrated with great feasts, brocade tablecloths, all hung with red damask, the wealth of kings. But his sublime Christ, in the modest tabernacle where it is on view, is receiving even more honor than the artist. By some secret magic of the paintbrush, the white linen robe gives forth a great light which dominates and intensifies everything around it, restfully drawing together all varied movement of the whole, and investing with captivating majesty a solitary body from which the linen cloth hangs in graceful folds.
Ah, one has to fight to fully understand those who have fought! To fully understand Jesus it is necessary to have come into the world in a darkened manger with a pure and devout spirit, and to go through life touched by the scarcity of love, the flowering of cupidity, and the victory of hate. One must have sawed wood and kneaded bread amid the silence and transgressions of men. This Michael Munkácsy, now married to a rich widow who lends the charm of a palace to her house in Paris, was in his early years the “poor little Miska” from Munkács. He was born in a fortress in the days when the Russians were laying waste to Hungary, and when the entire lovely country of forests and vineyards looked like a cupful of colors shattered by a horse’s hoof.
Those souls never saw the sun. People were starving to death. Munkácsy’s mother died of hunger. His father died in prison. The robbers born in wartime killed all who remained in the house and left no one alive but him, close to the body of his aunt. The child never knew how to laugh. A poor uncle put him to work as a carpenter’s apprentice. He worked a 12-hour day for a peso a week. Some school children, grieved to see that sad but eager face, taught him to read and write, and he caressed those letters with his eyes.
Not knowing why, he began painting the chests in the carpentry shop with heroic scenes of Hungarians and Serbians wearing their shaggy helmets, close-fitting boots and curved daggers. Finally, his uncle began to prosper and sent him away to regain his strength. The place seemed like heaven to Miska, for there he saw a portrait painter who managed his colors so well that they brought to life at will all those heroes that the boy had painted upon the carpentry shop chests. Miska pleaded with the portrait painter so fervently that he succeeded in staying with him to learn to paint. He was such an apt pupil that within a few months he gave drawing lessons, and painted the family of a tailor so much to “Sr. Cloth Cutter’s” liking that the man paid him for his work with an overcoat.
In those days he was already an avid reader, and the heroic types and periods in history assumed the task of invading his soul with light — a soul that death, war, and the orphanage had clothed like a darkened funeral parlor. But the Hungarians worship Nature, with their stubborn black eyes, naked passions, open homes and free and joyous countryside. Their music is epitomized by Liszt, their poetry by Petofi, their orators by Kossuth. They drink new wine from wineskins, and love with a consuming ardor. When playing their spirited music they have the storm-tossed mane of a charger, the voice of a flower and the call of a dove. This is the land of those colorful Gypsies and their gay and picturesque caravans, their lovemaking with the scent of early fruits, their curly headed vagabonds who fall in love with the queens.
Life flowers and overflows there, comes out of cannons and rules and preserves its regal aspect even in vice and effeminacy; all those vagabonds resemble princes whimsically disguised as beggars. Foreign ideas troubled Munkácsy as if they were bridles. His love of Nature was racial and inborn, and he preferred life to books. He found it absolutely necessary to create, and had that thirst for truth, unknown to the learned, that makes men great. Men are like the stars, for some of them give out the inner light and others shine with the light they reflect. How could Munkácsy paint his gloomy memories, but with the sorrows of his soul, the very colors that have given him no joy? One can see what he carried in his inner self; man places himself above Nature and alters her light and harmony at will. This is how poor Miska trained his impatient hand; and since he came from those who have their own intrinsic law and color, from which the artist in him overflowed, he always searched in his subject for the picturesque. But it was from his soul, which too seldom saw the sunlight, that he extracted the lugubrious tones so well fortified by his own superiority, from which only love and the kind of glory that attracts enlightenment were later to be separated. In that black bed of pitch, however shone the eyes of a Gypsy.
And did that courageous, direct, self-possessed man have to amuse himself by clothing mummies, by fondling masks, by grouping academies? Not at all. Life is full of enchantment and the picturesque. When he felt his strength mature and he was given praise in exhibition halls and competitions, that which it occurred to him to paint, with much uproar from the usually placid Knaus, was a living sign, a famous canvas entitled The Last Day of the Condemned Man. The man under sentence is praying face down upon a table whose white tablecloth sets off a crucifix standing between a pair of candles. His poor moaning wife leans against the dreary wall; their little daughter stands between them; at the door to the cell a soldier holds back the crowds. The painter put into that work all his poor man’s pity, the color of his solitary soul, his new man’s courage.
He was awarded the Paris prize; his art and his very existence have grown with legendary beauty and swiftness. Every one of Munkácsy’s canvases is an attack. He is a well-known artist in the outside world, but in his own home his wife’s affection gives him the courage to earn that fame. She praises his creations, returns to his hands the palette laid aside by his sense of futility or despair; she alights upon his shoulder like a hummingbird, to whisper into his ear in such a way that he fails to realize that her voice is not his own, that arm too high, that eye not attentive enough, that slightly brutal foot a slur upon her Miska. She drives away the last vestiges of his sadness. She softens his daring groupings, brings green and blues to his studio. Not the umber; that she cannot make disappear completely, for when a soul is baptized by darkness some salt is left upon the brow, like a diamond rose, and there is a pleasure in darkness. White does not attract him either, for this takes the painter out of himself with epic boldness.
Every day, the force of ideas nourished the creativity of this spirit that evolved the pulsating beings of his canvas principally from inside himself, with little aid from books, and because of his admiration for intellectual power he began to feel a deep affection for the blind and wasted Milton as being representative of the finest model of the strength and beauty of ideas. And then, to further emphasize his indigence and depression, he rose higher to a love for Christ before whose triumphant light he grouped the most fearsome and active power on earth: egoism and envy. He has intentionally brought together apparently insurmountable difficulties, and has been eager to make the human mind triumph by means of its own splendor. He has succeeded in investing an ugly figure with supreme beauty, and in dominating with a figure in repose all the ferocity and brilliance of the passions animatedly contending for that figure.
That is his Christ. This is his strange concept of Christ. He does not see him as charity, as charming resignation, as immaculate and absolute forgiveness not at all applicable to human nature. The plea sure of controlling one’s anger is applicable indeed, but man’s nature would be less lovely and efficacious if it were able to stifle its in dig nation in the presence of infamy, which is the purest source of strength.
He sees Jesus as the most perfect incarnation of the invincible power of the idea. The idea consecrates, inflames, attenuates, exalts, purifies; it gives a stature that is invisible but can be felt; it cleanses the spirit of dross the way fire consumes the underbrush; it spreads a clear and secure beauty which reaches the soul and is felt in it. Munkácsy’s Jesus is the power of the pure idea.
There he is in a loose-fitting robe, thin and bony. His wrists are bound, his neck stretched out, his tight lips partly open as if to make way for the final bitterness. One feels that evil hands have just been placed upon him; that the human pack of hounds surrounding him has begun to sniff at him as if he were a wild animal; that he has been harassed, beaten, spat upon, dragged by force, has had his robe torn to shreds, and has been reduced to the lowest and most despicable condition. And that instant of extreme humiliation is precisely the one which the artist chooses to make him emerge with a majesty that dominates the powers of the law before him, and the brutality pursuing him, without the aid of a single gesture or a visible muscle, thus making Christ emerge with the dignity of his garments, the height of his stature, the exclusive use of white pigments, and the mystical aureola of painters!
And there is no more assistance from the head, from the noble down cast eyes in their hollow eye sockets, from the sunken cheeks, the tight-lipped mouth revealing a human courage still, the calm and admirable forehead above the temples sparsely covered with hair like a canopy over the brows.
The secret of that figure’s singular power are the eyes! Anguish and aspiration are clearly seen in them as are resurrection and life eternal! The winds can strip trees bare, men can topple thrones, fire from the earth can decapitate mountains; but even without the violent and sickly stimulus of fantasy, one can feel that his glance, by means of his natural power, will continue to shed its fire.
All things will bow before those eyes which focus all the love, affirmation, splendor and pride that the spirit can hold. Jesus is near the four wide steps leading to Pilate’s council chamber, and Pilate appears to be prostrate before him. Pilate’s tunic is also white, but Jesus’s robe, through no visible trick of the brush, shines with a light quite unlike that of the cowardly judge.
Wrath runs rampant beside him, insolence is bold, the law is being debated, loud are the demands for Jesus’s death. But those courageous and inquiring eyes, those frenetic and impudent faces, those talking and shouting mouths, those angry upraised arms, instead of deflecting the strength and light of his fulgurant figure, focus upon it and put it into sharp relief by contrasting his sublime energy with the base passion surrounding him.
The scene is set in the vast and austere praetorium. Through the entrance in the background, which has just admitted the multitude, one can see a patch of glorious sky shining like the wings of Muzo’s blue butterflies.
At the left of the canvas the excited crowd pushed toward the figure of Jesus. The painter refused to place him in the center, to have that one extra difficulty to overcome. A magnificent soldier raises his lance to drive away a peasant, and the man shouts and waves his arms — an imposing figure! There is that bestial type among the people — beardless, with a large mouth, flattened nose, wide cheekbones, small gelatinous eyes, low forehead! He overflows with that insane hatred of despicable natures for the souls who dazzle and shame them with their splendor. And without any artful effort or violence in contrast, the painting most forcibly projects its two-fold moral and physical opposition: the virtuous man who loves and dies, and the bestial man who hates and kills.
At the right is the Roman Pilate, his white toga bordered with the red of the patricians; one can guess by the softness of the folds that it is made of wool. The modeling of Pilate’s figure is astounding; in a recess of the council chamber he seems to be alive. His eyes bespeak his trouble some thoughts, his fear of the populace, his respect for the accused, his hesitation in lifting one hand from his knee as if wondering what is going to become of Jesus.
Caiaphas the fanatic can be compared with the finest creation in art. His head turned toward the praetor, he gestures imperiously to the crowd that demands Jesus’s death; that white-bearded head rebukes and compels; from those lips come cruel and impassioned words.
Two doctors seated to the left in the council chamber look at Jesus as if they had never been able to fully understand him.
Beside Caiaphas an old man has his eyes fixed upon Pilate whose head is bowed. A wealthy Sadducee, white-turbaned and white-bearded, gives Jesus his total attention; richly clothed and self-satisfied, he is seated upon a bench, his right arm bent, his left resting upon his thigh; he is the detested rich man of every age! Wealth has made him swell with a brutal pride; humanity is his footstool, he is worshiped for his purse and its bulging contents. Between him and Caiaphas some priests argue about this legal case, one with a stern expression in his eyes, one with the assurance of a petty lawyer. Another, leaning against the wall as he stands upon a bench, calmly surveys the turbulent scene. Behind the Sadducee and close to Jesus, a marvelously realistic peasant leans over the railing in a violent posture to see the prisoner face to face. Above the peasant’s head and beside the column of the arch that wisely divides the scene, a young mother with babe in arms fixes her devout eyes upon Jesus — eyes and figure so reminiscent of Italian Madonnas. There in the background, to break the row of heads, stands a bearded Bedouin holding out his brutal arm to Jesus.
It is impossible to see this gigantic canvas without having one’s mind, already weary of so much inferior, patchwork and fallacious art, assaulted by the memory of that era of fixed ideals in which painters treated their churches and palaces in the grand manner.
That light from the captive Christ, which draws the eye to him as the inevitable end of one’s perusal of the canvas; that sturdy and spacious arch which instead of robbing the Christ of effect heightens and completes it; that forceful, new and lively group of men; that know ledge of how to make the most exquisite colors stand out from the somber background without the use of artifice — colors as warm and rich and mellow as those of the old Venetian school; that sure and harmonious concept in which none of the less important figures lose power and relief when subjugated to the central and principal one; those eloquent facial expressions that tell of their owner’s consuming passion; that masterful boldness of detail, contempt for artifice, contrasts and direct light; that truth, grace and movement, and the patch of sky which from a distance inflames and perfects them — all these things indicate that the poor Miska of Munkács village, who now lives in Paris like the king of painters, is one of those magnificent spirits, so rare in this age of pressure and crisis, who can intimately embrace a human idea, reduce it to its component parts, and reproduce it with the energy and intensity required of works that are worthy of the approbation of the ages.
Not in vain has this painting been shown triumphantly throughout Europe. Not in vain did Paris give the admirable Valtner the medal of honor for his brilliant etching of Christ Before Pilate. Not in vain, in this century whose chaotic and preparatory greatness could not be reduced to symbols, does this canvas of Munkácsy move and excite both the critics and the people at large, even if some of its figures are indeed violent, and if some of its composition may appear to have been added to the main idea as an afterthought, for decorative effect, and even if the artist’s faith in the religion he commemorates has been lost.
True genius never rushes to the admiration of men who need to be great in spite of themselves. But can it be merely a faculty for composing in the grand manner, a strength and brilliance in the use of color, a harmonious grace in arranging the figures, an impact of the work as a whole — can it be all this, in these days of rebellious beliefs and new subject matter, that assures such wide popularity to the familiar matter of a religion gone down to defeat?
This painting contains something besides the pleasure produced by harmonious composition and the liking induced by an artist who impetuously addresses and splendidly completes a courageous work of art. It is the man in the painting who delights and arrests one’s judgment. It is the triumph and resurrection of Christ, but as he lives his life and because of his human strength. It is the vision of our own strength in the pride and splendor of virtue. It is the victorious new idea aware that its light can free the soul without any extravagant and supernatural communion with creation; it is ardent love and disdain for self that took the Nazarene to his martyrdom. It is Jesus without a halo, the man subdued, the living Christ, the human, the rational and courageous Christ.
It is the courage with which the Hungarian Munkácsy — his artist’s intuition foreseeing what his study corroborated, understood and accomplished (for his passion and motives were always one), and ridding himself of legends and weakly portrayed figures — it is the courage with which he studied in his own soul the mystery of our divine nature, and with the brush and a free spirit stated that the divine resides in the human! But one’s fondness for the pleasing error is so forceful, and the soul so certain of a more beautiful figure beyond this life, that the new Christ does not appear to be completely beautiful.
New York, December 2, 1886