The genre of landscape has been present in the Szőnyi group's art from the beginning and in respect of style it has been realised in a great variety of forms: Szőnyi's landscapes made between 1917 and 1920 are also the manifestations of this versatility (Line of Trees, Nagybánya Landscape, Landscape).. He painted his piece entitled Landscape With a Horse two years after his last sojourn in Nagybánya (Baia Mare, Romania), but it still reflected the landscape representation trends characteristic of that school. The black and dark green shades and tones of the Double Portrait reappear in this picture, and the composition cut up by the tree in the foreground - a motif so often appearing in other Szőnyi pictures as well - with its slanted axis and the softly arching lines speak of calmness here too. In his India ink drawing made in the same year as the painted piece, Szőnyi arranged similar motifs one beside the other, however the perception of the drawing constructed based on sharp light-shadow contrasts was much more animated. The highlighted tree motif can be seen in the centre of a charcoal drawing made in Nagybánya in 1917 also. Here the tectonic representation mode of the cubo-expressionism of the 1910s can be detected.
One class of the early landscapes of the Szőnyi group is characterised by this type of representation that emphasises geometrically simplified block-masses. The tree-foliage constructed of sometimes heavy, congested blocks and sometimes from splintered elements and shell-like surfaces played a significant role in Vilmos Aba-Novák's landscapes. The bright patches in his picture titled Park resemble the partial-forms of statue-like nude representations: Aba-Novák strived to homogenise the forms and materials, whether it is the human body, drapes or landscape. The precedents of this type of pictorial perception can be observed in the art of János Kmetty, whose "main intention was to turn various objects and motifs within the composition into a uniform material make". Aba-Novák wrote about this time period: "I started to draw and paint as a self-educated artist in the winter of 1919. I started from scraps everything. I was completely dissatisfied with all that I had acquired in the Art Teacher Training School - the feeble remnants of the Bertalan Székely-Lotz tradition and in some respects the Nagybánya ideology - from 1912 to 1924. I now studied the form in the most abstract sense. I sort of flirted with cubism."
In another characteristic group of the landscapes it is not so much the enclosed mass items and the mineral-like hard surfaces that are emphasised in the course of translating to picture the forms of nature, but rather it is the organic and amorphous 'body' of the land in the process of continual transfiguration - but still appearing as a homogeneous material - that is growing and taking shape before our eyes. The summarising presentation is coupled with an expressive charge in Szőnyi's picture titled The Hills of Zebegény, a reproduction of which can be seen in the book titled New Hungarian Painting 1900-1925. In his ecstatic analysis Ernő Kállai let himself be carried away by the engaging animation of the picture: "The swell of the hillside rushes across the space. Its mad ride catches the trees that look as if a windstorm bent and twisted them to the left. In the left corner of the picture a slender tree is looming against the sky on the hillside, and a flood of lights appearing in an almost physical density pesters the ground in a shower from that specific point. The foliage drenched in this shower of light, the swirling clouds and writhing furrows are washed together as if in a beautiful, drunken embrace."
Szőnyi's overlooking, sun-bathed plein air landscapes testify to his Nagybánya education, but one can follow the process through which the harmonisingly balanced or sometimes tight and dynamic compositional solutions are gradually replaced by "sensual impulsiveness and relaxed picturesqueness". His previously reserved use of colours gets heated up and his neutral brushwork is replaced by wildly whirling paint beams; the bodies melting into one another are condensed into a homogeneous organism. Szőnyi depicts the village from an unusual angle in his picture entitled Zebegény. The landscape is constantly moving, the forms of the trees and buildings that protrude from the ground are imbued with an inherent light; the glowing, lava-like oranges are woven through with the sprouting green of the living vegetation.
Closed-up, coherent surfaces dominate Károly Patkó's sunshiny Felsőbánya (Baia Sprie, now in Romania) landscape; the reserved orange-green harmony of the foreground is complemented with the deep-burning blue and red shades of the background, and a clouded sky bathed in sunshine - a motif that will become more emphatic in later paintings - is stretching behind the broadly arched regular forms. And in Aba-Novák's composition of similar view-cut the focus is clearly on the light effects appearing in the sky that takes up a growing proportion of the canvas surface.
Whether cubistically solid or expressively animated, the landscape compositions of the Szőnyi group all give the main role to the prevalent, all-penetrating light. This light sometimes scans and plastically models the compact bodies after hitting them, and at other times 'enlivens' the landscape by penetrating everything and dissolving the boundaries of the forms, but common to both types, the sunshine is more than simple lighting, as it carries spiritual connotations. Although in Erzsébet Korb's pictures nature is always present in the background, hardly any stand-alone landscapes of hers are known. In her Landscape it looks as if the outpouring sunrays, the hills melting into the fog and the trees-bushes condensed into compact, rounded forms were awaiting the arrival of a portrait sitter or some nudes. Korb's picture could even be placed parallel with the pictures of the activist artists, for instance it could be a distant relative of one of László Moholy Nagy's early landscapes: both pictures give the same impression, as if light was pouring forth from the land itself, as if the land were a spiritualised creature radiating to the external world all the accumulated energies ready to break out from within.
Szőnyi depicted a typical local motif of the Zebegény landscape, i.e. the railway viaduct in several of his pictures. This painting displayed in the second exhibition of the New Society of Artists is a reflection of a completely different attitude than that characterising his My Wife and Me painted in the same year. In contrast with the double portrait of greasy brushwork and dark shades, this painting is imbued with expressive-dramatic backlight, the radiating light beams loosen up the forms and break up the uniformity of the vision. Szőnyi is able to combine the semicircular arches of the viaduct made with engineering precision with the eccentrically curved tree trunks of the foreground with great virtuosity - arbitrarily distorting the forms somewhat - and the various overlapping space layers of the composition are connected by the light effects. The widening stripes of the shadows that seem to reach toward us, point toward the centre of the picture, just like the little foot-bridge, and the emphatic patch of the viaduct reflected on the surface of the stream flowing in a diagonal angle seems to break up this illusion of the perspective.
Imre Nagy's landscape broken up by pouring out sunrays was made in the same year as Szőnyi's Viaduct. Similar pictures can be found among the artistic attempts of younger Szőnyi followers as well. The landscapes constructed on dramatic light-shadow effects played a key role in Paizs Goebel's painting art - thanks to his sojourn in Barbizon among other factors - and his distracted brushwork and the contrasts of the cloudy sky testifies to the influence of the early paintings of Aba-Novák's circle.
There is of course a natural mixing of the above landscape types, and changes over time can also be observed within the oeuvre of individual artists, for instance in the case of Vilmos Aba-Novák. The artist's painting entitled Fetching Wood was put on display in the 30th group exhibition of the Ernst Museum in 1924, marking an important milestone in his career: it was the first time he showed his paintings to the wider audience. Of all his artworks discussed so far only four were put on show in this exhibition. These are: the Golgotha, the Eta Washing Herself and Eta Combing Her Hair and perhaps the Bath. The pictures painted prior to 1924 could be seen - only a few of them - for the first time in the memorial exhibition of 1942, and after that they were still rarely seen in shows. A comprehensive presentation of his oil paintings made in the early twenties was delayed up to 1962 when the exhibition of his life's work was held in the Hungarian National Gallery. Now that these artworks can be known, it is difficult to believe that Aba-Novák had been known solely as a graphic artist up to 1924, and even in 1935 Genthon still wrote about him that: "he started painting regularly oil pictures relatively late, from the time he reached thirty years of age." At that time it had appeared as if he had started to deal with painting only at the time of his first painter-show, but - as we have seen - the artist was continually painting a great number representative oil pictures from as early as 1919. As Aba-Novák in his autobiography dated 1928 recalled these times: "Amidst the black-and-white possibilities of graphic art I became interested in colours as well. I painted. And in 1924 I presented myself as a painter in the Ernst Museum." The reason for his late self-manifestation is not clear, but it was probably at this date that the artist - who had gone without official and regular education - felt adequately prepared for showing his hands' works to the public. Aba-Novák's pictures painted around 1924 still maintain the cubistic fragmentation of the forms - similarly to Róbert Berény's landscape of 1911 - but the foliage tatters of the trees stuck to the branches in the Fetching Wood loom against the sky in more roughly torn shapes. Aba-Novák's style changed gradually, the previously smooth surface renderings are slowly replaced by coarser, broken or even hatched brushwork; and the dark shades nearly turning into monochrome patterns give way to lighter and warmer colours.
The Fetching Wood was probably painted in the surroundings of Tarján, but the turning point in Vilmos Aba-Novák's art was brought about by his stay in Felsőbánya the next year. The new environment had an inspirational effect on the artists and although they painted self-portraits and large nude compositions, too, most of the pictures were made to represent the 'veduta' of the small mining town with its typical church towers, and this townscape served as the background of several paintings made years later. In these landscapes of heroic tone, everyday, working people took gradually the place of the ageless nudes. In his townscape picture entitled Felsőbánya - complemented with the spectacle of people working in their yards - is still dominated by Aba-Novák's earlier colour scheme, and the brownish earth-colours rendered in greasy patches are continuations of the silky, warm shades of figured scenes placed in interiors as in the previous year. But the cubic forms of the buildings are squeezed between the arched outlines of haystacks and mountains.
But Aba-Novák had painted the same mining town hidden in the valley in a hectic version of unusual picture-cut. The compositional solution and the expressive perception appear also in an earlier India ink drawing made in another location, Bodajk. The vertical composition is divided in two parts by the line of the horizon positioned somewhat above the centreline, and the town sat on the side of the mountains can be seen in the distant background in both artworks. The pattern followed in this composition is much like that of the Bathing Women, but the nudes have disappeared from the scene forever, and the former 'background scenery', the landscape and the plants have now become the main characters. The shift in style - as described in the case of Szőnyi's Viaduct - can be first detected in the landscapes in Aba-Novák's art also, and the example for this is the picture titled Fetching Wood. The style first applied here would reach full completion in the large Felsőbánya painting, and this is where Aba-Novák can succeed in what he often tried in vain in his early multi-figured oil pieces: the transposition of dynamic and sketchy drawings into an oil painting. He is now able to translate to the media of oil the scratchy, scattered forms and the a-moving patches so familiar from India ink drawings and etchings. All this is accompanied by the exciting brushwork of vibrating colour reflections: and this path would take him on to the painting-art problems of the following years.