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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.

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 FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the professional and personal relationship between Czech-Austrian art historian Max Dvořák and his colleague and friend Johannes Wilde. Wilde was the student of the Vienna University department of art history led by the art historian. It cites the financial support of the Wilde estate in Budapest, Hungary to the department led by Dvořák. Also mentioned is the interactions between the Sunday circle, Budapest Museum of Fine Arts and the Vienna School.

The article discusses the conflict between art historians Charles de Tolnay and Erwin Panofsky that is known in the history of the discipline as the Tolnay-Panofsky affair. Topics covered include the two scholars' diverging views on art history, evidence of professional jealousy, and the elementary influences of the Vienna School of Art History and of the Sunday Circle on their way of thinking.

The article discusses the early writings of art historian Arnold Hauser on art history. Also cited are E. H. Gombrich's comments of Hauser's works and views on the social history of art, the art reviews of Hauser in such publications as "Temesvári Hírlap," the personalities in Hungarian art historiography, and Hauser's commitment to the Sunday Circle.

The article reviews the exhibition "Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904-1914," staged at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, Hungary in 2006.

The article examines "Enigma," the Hungarian periodical of the theory and history of art, written by Janos (Johannes) Wilde, a deputy director of the Courtauld Institute in London, England. Topics discussed include professional and personal relationship between Wilde and Austrian art historian Max Dvorak, how Wilde described the circumstances of Dvorak's death, and information on the correspondence of Wilde's first Vienna period in 1915-1917.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]