Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 24. (Budapest, 2006)
Magdolna LICHNER: The reception of electroplates in Hungary I. - Electroplates in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts 1873-1884
doing so we can draw consequences concerning the contemporary range of meaning of the term 'industrial arts' or 'applied arts'. Purchases at the Vienna (1873) and Paris world exhibitions (1878) The earliest electroplates of the Museum of Applied Arts were purchased from the Elkington Company (Birmingham) 15 by the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Trade in 1873. The purchase was financed from 50,000 forints; the motion concerning the amount was adopted by the Parliament on the basis of an application of the Society for Industry. The objective was to establish a collection of an industrial museum."' The establishment of the new museum was jointly proposed by the Society for Industry and the Association for Fine Arts. It was supported by the Government and the council of the capital; nevertheless, it became a state institution no sooner than in 1878, with the support of Ágoston Trefort, the Minister of Education. Definitely, the objective of the Vienna purchase was that Hungarian craftsmen could use up-to-date artefacts as models. The question arises: what did the museum model? Did it introduce the industry-related potentials of recent science and technology? Or did it aim at propagating artistic taste? On the level of theory, the two objectives seem to have combined in one motivation, that is (as contemporary rhetoric put it), the „elevation and betterment" of industry. 17 Mór Gelléri, the clerk of the Society for Industry ( 1872) and the secretary of the association (1880), when talking about the establishment of the museum and qualifying the purchase in Vienna, gave voice to his disappointment: 'It was not the society for industry that played the crucial role. The sum was used for obtaining not industrial artefacts, but works of applied arts:' 18 In Vienna, the artefacts were selected on the basis of Károly Pulszky's principles. Pulszky was appointed the honorary assistant secretary of the would-be museum by the Count József Zichy; it was this title that appeared in the preface of the exhibition catalogue published in 1874. 14 The preface did make reference to the controversial opinions. Even the name (a museum of industrial arts instead of industrial museum) is a result of a deliberate choice. 2 " The imperative demand for industrial expansion and the idea of an educated nation intertwined; the emphasis, however, shifted to the development of taste, that is, to the role of art as a means to elevate industry. Flóris Römer, a curator of the National Museum, sent reports from the 1867 Paris world exhibition; in his articles he used rhetoric to substantiate these arguments. On the basis of what he has seen in Paris, he publicly raised the issue of the necessity of the establishment of a new museum; his essays explicitly associate the issue with that of artistic education. 21 Nevertheless, it would be oversimplification to interpret the emerging situation as the result of the activity of an 'industrial lobby' and an 'artistic lobby'. The pro-technology opinion was by no means unified even within the Society for Industry. In 1872, the committee that established the museum asked Soma Mudrony to make a European study tour in order to get acquainted with similar institutions. He gave an account of his observations in the Society for Industry; next year, his report was published ('The artistic tendency of industry and Industrial Museums'). 22 The principal idea of his account was that „fine arts should be applied in industry", which he thought to be a prevalent notion of the age. To convince those doubting, he justified his opinion with the following train of thoughts. If this idea is not adopted, he said, the blessing that lies in the direction of development and in the evolution of industrial society might turn into a curse, since craftsmen became defenceless factory workers and but a few of them became factory owners. This results in a decline of culture. 2 ' Several of his contemporaries shared his anxiety; just let us take into consideration a well-known formulation of the problem in Imre Madách 's The Tragedy of Man. In the phalanstery scene of the play, the distress caused by the inhumanity of factory work is reflected by the figure of Michelangelo, who is manufacturing chair-legs. This is a most understandable reaction for the termination of trade guilds (1859), the first experiences of free enterprise and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy's economic liberalization. For handicrafts and craftsmen, this put an end to faith in the
