A Golden Age [antikvár]

Preface The years 1896 to 1914 were exciting, formative years for Hungary. They began with the monumental celebrations of the Millennium, the 1000th anniversary of the formation of the state, and ended with the prospect of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy and the advent of the Republic of Councils as the government steadily moved towards the left. The plans envisaged by the great nineteenth-century Hungarian reformer, Count István Széchenyi, were being realized, and in the wake of modernization, optimism swept the nation. Like its sister city, Vienna, Budapest was experiencing an unprecedented, rapid growth burdening so many cities at the time. In turn, this led to a major transformation of the social structure. In the midst of these growing pains, Hungary was desperately searching for a new, confident identity, the assertion of its nationhood. All this did not leave Hungarian art unaffected. Though the major European centres of Art Nouveau were Glasgow, Brussels, Paris, Nancy, Barcelona, Munich, Weimar and Helsinki, a special version of the Modern Style was born in Vienna and Budapest that with the opening of Joseph Maria Olbrich's Secession building in Vienna in 1897-1898 became known as the Secession. The art of these two cities had much in common —a kind of lucid clarity coupled with the delight in rich ornamentation, a reflective maturity complemented by the Apollonian attitude of harmony and classicism. Greater value was accorded to the applied arts, and thus to architecture itself, than previously, bringing about a new synthesis of architectural and interior design that came into its own in the national pavilions of the Paris Exposition of 1900. It was also at this world's fair, which with its olTering of so many new technological achievements, including the cinema, launched the twentieth century, that the Hungarian pavilion enjoyed unhoped-for popular appeal. The reason for its success was that it revived the traditions of the past. In an attempt to find their own national identity within the Dual Monarchy, many Hungarian artists of the time sought to elaborate a typically magyar style, which they accomplished by recourse to a glorified and party reinvented past, and partly by the lavish use of Hungarian folk ornamentation. The results were indeed spectacular, from the Music Academy of Kálmán Giergl and Flóris Korb (1903-1907) through Ödön Lechner's Museum of Applied Arts (1891-1896) to the paintings of István Csók. Artists' colonies, too, were set up, the most famous of which, located in the small country town of Gödöllő, produced art and artifacts of lasting value. Like the Viennese Joseph Hoffmann, the artists and artisans of the Gödöllő colony looked back at English models and expressly claimed William Morris as their master, but while they agreed with Morris that art is the expression of pleasure felt in the course of work—and the lavishness of their objects stood as monuments to this conviction—what came out from under their hands, whether the breathtakingly beautiful "Fountain of Art" fresco for the Academy of Music (1907) by Aladár Körösfői Kriesch or Sándor Nagy's "Home of the Artist" exhibit at the Milan Exposition of 1906, they were always unmistakably Hungarian. All this, of course, was back in the years before the Golden Age was swept away, here as elsewhere in Europe, by the cataclysm of the First World War. Having been not just an artistic event but a reform movement with economic and political interests which inspired as well as handicapped it. Art Nouveau fell a natural victim to the changing times. The one European capital where it is still most prominently in evidence as part of the cityscape is Budapest, where to the delight of visitors and residents alike, a huge reconstruction programme is revealing more and more of the spirit of innovation, of the love of beauty and the search for identity that characterized Hungarian art and society between the years 1896 to 1914.