Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 20. (Budapest, 2001)

Katalin GELLÉR: Walter Crane and the Art Nouveau as a Hungarian Style

KATALIN GELLER WALTER CRANE AND ART NOUVEAU AS A "HUNGARIAN STYLE" Out of all the British artists of the period, in Hungary Walter Crane had greatest publicity. His exhibition in Budapest in October 1900, in the organization of the flourishing Museum of Applies Arts and the Society of Designers, and then his travels in the country were like a triumphal procession.

1 The enormous success was probably owing to the good "PR work", the careful preparations as his previous exhibition of a far smaller selection in the Budapest Kunsthalle five years earlier passed almost unnoticed. The July issue of Magyar Iparművészet came out with Walter Crane's allegory of art on the cover including the Hungarian national blazon and his own emblem. It was followed by two writings sent from London, an essay by the artist about Hungarian applied art and an article by V.H. Kálmán Rozsnyay, who had prepared the exhibition, with several reproductions of the exhibits.

2 After the opening, the periodical of Hungarian decorative arts summarized the weight of the exhibition in these words: "This exhibition has special importance for us Hungarians because there are many among us who tend to draw a fast line between fine arts and so-called applied arts, whereas both are of the same value."

3 In the issue, there were photos of Walter Crane's home at Holland Street. The aim was not only to make the artist more familiar but also to acquaint the public with one of his major fields of creation: notably, the artist's home and studio decoration was one of the first products of the emergence and unfolding of the new style. Crane represented the transition in this regard. The furnishing of his home combined several styles, but a novel feature was the search for the singular, the individual, the manifestation of the artist's taste replacing the earlier representative functions predominating the period styles. (Plans of atelier houses and rural cottages by his son Lionel Crane were also reproduced.) There were highly appreciated wallpapers of his design in the interior and some exhibited in Budapest which drew on medieval and renaissance motifs. One of them, with motifs already connected to the Art Nouveau, still adorns the walls of the Museum of Applied Arts. The art theories of John Ruskin and William Morris determined the art of several generations in England including Walter Crane's. The Arts and Crafts movements and the various trends of European Art Nouveau that sprouted from it reached Hungary almost simultaneously. The first to be known was the theory, followed by the great success of Walter Crane's works. The romantic historicism of the PreRaphaelites was more readily embraced by a group of Hungarian artists clinging to traditions and shrinking back from the rapid influx of the most recent artistic currents often without any precedents in Hungary. Crane's works fed by traditional, ancient, medieval and renaissance elements were widely popular in Hungary. In his esthetic views, he rejected the materialism and individualism of the age and advocated the adherence to nature, so as to unfold a beautiful and harmonious art.

4 In Walter Crane's decorative works of firm outlines adjusting to the laws of two-dimensional creation the illusion of space is retained.