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

Éva KISS: Fragmentary look at a carrier. The interior design work of László Juhász (1906-1968)

So who was this man?

László Juhász was born in 1906 “among the wood chips” as he used to say, meaning into a joiner’s family. During his years in secondary school he worked as a joiner’s apprentice alongside his father. Those were difficult years “because the workshop work was my responsibility too. I had to do everything required during the apprenticeship years along with being a secondary school student.” When he finished his apprenticeship, he attended Lajos Csabai Ékes’s course in painting, “to refine my drawing and artistic approach ... it was a stroke of good luck, because ... his habit of thinking out loud introduced me to the possibilities and the new language of the new world being born.”1

After this he attended the Academy of Applied Arts, in Gyula Kaesz’s class. Interestingly, not only he, but the majority of his classmates came from families of joiners and brought with them a knowledge and love of the workshop from their childhood, from their home.2

The years spent in Gyula Kaesz’s class, from 1923 to 1926, would have a lifelong impact on the young student. “I am filled with such fond memories as I think back. What you created, the young teacher, was for me a sense of community...” he wrote. “It was good being with you Professor Kaesz. You were the centre of our school work. You brought the great world to us ... every student in our large classrooms would follow you around to every drawing board. There was absolute silence as we listened to your words. You were for us the world’s first ‘radar’, you conjured up for us the events of the outside world, you rendered visible the battle of the arts ... all that existed in the world at that time.”3

When the workshop of László Juhász’s father went to ruin, and there wasn’t even enough for tuition, he was expelled from

school. He continued to receive instruction from Kaesz in order to keep pace with the others. But who were the others, László Juhász’s schoolmates? There was Ferenc Haár, a recognized photographer known from Paris to Japan; Zoltán Kemény, who became a world-famous sculptor in Switzerland; Sándor Bodon, who became a famous architect in Holland; the painter Tamás Lossonczy; Zsuzsa, the daughter of Lajos Kozma; and Imre Tóth, who became world famous under the name Amerigo Tót.4 From the list of names it is clear that Gyula Kaesz was capable of instructing students in several artistic arenas.

With the recommendation of Gyula Kaesz, László Juhász has got his first job as a designer in the workshop ofjenő Bodonyi, “master of upholstery and decoration”. “There I had the opportunity to learn what a healthy relationship between client and designer is”, he writes in his “recollections”.

We find him, as a young artist, in the professional circle of Lajos Kassák. Here he indeed came into contact with the most current trends in international artistic life, since the journals edited by Kassák were also transmitting the ideas of De Stijl and the Bauhaus. These ideas had given rise to new architectural movements emerging at the end of the 1920s - ones that espoused international, social goals. This path led László Juhász to join the Hungarian section of CIR- PAC (Comité International pour la Réalisation des Problèmes d’Architecture Contemporaine), which had been established by Farkas Molnár of the Bauhaus. The goal (of CIRPAC) was to create a new architecture that would address social issues, primarily the housing problem for low income people.5 Juhász himself wrote the following in a letter to a friend, Iván Ambrózy, who was residing in Holland at the time, about these years: “I am involved in lots of things,

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