Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 25. (Budapest, 2007)

Zsolt SOMOGYI: Pál Horti's Late Works in the United States of America

distributed across the whole of the United States. As well as these, I have made forty designs for pianos, thirty-five for opalescent windows, one for a gold crown for a church in Mexico, and numerous advertisement drawings and title-pages for catalogues!’10

May 1906 found Horti still in New York. According to a letter he wrote on the 24th of that month, ‘A package has been posted requesting financial support and containing a great number of drawings and sketchbooks.’ In other words, he had sent his American designs to Hungary. On 22 June of that year he was planning his departure for Mexico. His subsequent letters and postcards contain information relating to his study tour, helping us to reconstruct the stops he made and the pieces he acquired for his Mexican collection. They do not, however, contain data concerning his design work.

Horti’s letters convey a picture of an enthusiastic artist, but one who was always struggling with financial difficulties. Admittedly, the National Széchényi Library holds only one of these letters,11 but he was in continual contact with Kálmán Györgyi, who sent him specialist publications and, as far as he was able, supported him financially through the Applied Arts Association. Horti considered his designs for the ministerial reception room exhibited at the Milan World Exposition to be important work,12 and very much expected an order from Japan.13 However, a great amount of his time and thinking were taken up by seeking and proving the origin and ancient links of the Hungarian people.

In 1907, Magyar Iparművészet published two sheets from his American designs, publishing another the following year.14 (These three sheets contained eight furniture designs in all.) With regard to the later fate of the documentation mentioned in the periodical as a ‘sketchbook’, we know that

after the death of Horti his widow presented this to the Applied Arts Association, and that some of its designs were distributed among the industrial training schools.15 In 1923, a few drawings reached the Archive of the Museum of Applied Arts from Kálmán Györgyi, the president of the Association. Among these is the design for an armchair by Horti from 1904 that accords with the style of the sketchbook. However, the fate of his other creations is unknown.16 The documentation held by the Applied Arts Association was probably destroyed during the Second World War.

The furniture shown in the drawings published in the periodical Magyar Iparművészet bears witness to a significant change in Horti’s art. In the works he made in Hungary, the influence of almost every European current in Art Nouveau can be discerned. Among his ceramics pieces we find artefacts exhibiting a French lightness and featuring embellishment inspired by nature. With their undulating repeated geometric motifs, some of his porcelain creations bear witness to the influence of Jugendstil, primarily to that of Peter Behrens, but Hungarian Secession decorative elements utilising the motifs of traditional folk art also appear on pieces designed by Horti. In his furniture the influence of the graceful forms and motifs of the Paris school, of elements of English furniture art, of creations by Belgium’s Henry van de Velde (1863-1957), and of works by Ödön Lechner can all be sensed. However, on the designs he made in the United States we can see furniture that is built on clear, straight lines, is chunky, is in the traditions of the Arts and Crafts movement, and seems slightly ponderous. Even earlier, however, this world of forms had not been alien to Horti. With its block-like shape (the stiffness of which is broken by the shelves) and

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