If the history of art as we understand it is Eurocentric, that is hardly the fault of the French, who have long acted as though the entire continent is just an appendage to Paris. Like every notion, this one has the virtues of its flaws and the career of Jozsef Rippl-Ronai (1861-1930) is an example of both. Born in Kaposvar, a small city southwest of Budapest, Rippl-Ronai came to Paris at age twenty-five to study art with a fellow Hungarian, Mihaly Muncaksy. Once there, he was befriended by Aristide Maillol, also effectively an outsider who came from rural southern France and Toulouse-Lautrec, with whom Rippl-Ronai liked to attend the bicycle races.
A stay in Pont-Aven in 1889 and the discovery of Gauguin's work led the Hungarian to break with his fellow countryman and join the Nabis (prophets or seers), who adopted Rippl Ronai as le nabi etranger (the foreign Nabi). Although the group was short-lived, the Nabis' 'new synthesis' of nature with personal symbolism pointed the way to non-representational art.
It was the japoniste dealer Siegfried Bing who commissioned the lithograph Woman Reading By Lamplight for the August, 1894 issue of La Revue blanche. And a japoniste image this is. With its lack of western-style perspective the everyday scene is rendered fresh, even mysterious. The light from the lamp casts no shadow, as it surely would not in a ukiyo-e print. The eye moves from the yellow lamp to the yellow cup and saucer, and from there to the woman - her face cupped in her hand - and the third element of this ingenious trinagular composition.
In 1900 Rippl-Ronai returned to Budapest in 1900, where he had a radicalizing influence on other Hungarian artists. He had the misfortune to be visiting Paris when war broke out in the summer of 1914. Taken into police custody as a possible enemy alien, Rippl-Ronai was released due to the efforts of his devoted friend Maillol. Had it not been for the dozen years he lived in Paris, most of us might never have been exposed to the art of Jozsef Rippl-Ronai.
Jozsef Rippl-Ronai - Woman Reading By Lamplight, 1894, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, original at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.