Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 25. (Budapest, 2007)
Éva KISS: Fragmentary look at a carrier. The interior design work of László Juhász (1906-1968)
6. Display windows of Fenyves Department Store, 1940 each other, and the trustworthy cadres among the students censured valuable teachers, rendering the tranquil work of educating impossible. I remember in those years you too were alarmed, frightened. If it was just the two of us, I took on the stronger role ... I have enough experiences from those times, which involved you too, to fill a book, but this is not the place for me to delve into those in detail. The great repositioning has begun, and only time will tell, will judge, will put things in place ... My own life has been completely occupied by the work I undertook - and carried out with faith - for the Applied Arts Council; you were with me there too, and you helped me to not feel alone. For that too I offer special thanks to you.15 Yes, in 1954, ten years after the Council of Industrial Design (1944) was formed in England and two years after the German Rat fur Formgebung (1952), the Hungarian Bulletin published the ministerial resolution 1049/1954 (VI. 26) calling for the establishment of an Applied Arts Council to “ensure the high quality and continued improvement in this respect of mass produced goods”. The resolution was signed by the prime-minister Imre Nagy.16 The recommendation to establish a council certainly came from László Juhász, who along with the other signers of the 1940 flyer, “Toward a New Hungarian Applied Art”, had already called attention to the conditions and organizational backwardness that was interfering with the work of applied artists. Among his demands were, for example, creating a close connection between industry and art, cooperation between commerce and applied art, and raising applied art education to a university level. Only his excellent initiatives were built on unstable grounds. While the institution by European standards was uniquely modern and forward-looking, Hungarian industry and applied arts lagged well behind the possibilities of the time. Following a lost war and the process of nationalization, Hungarian industry was in shatters. Applied artists, relying on the workshop traditions and the legacy of craftsmen from the previous period, tried to continue their work as far as possible from the factory. Commerce also fell under centralized, that is, state control, thus working according to principles different from those of a market economy. The secretary and founder of the Applied Arts Council, László Juhász, waged a heroic struggle to bridge this enormous gap. In February 1956 in the presence of delegates from the ministries of light industry, internal affairs and cultural development (the Applied Arts Council was an interdepartmental institution with professional committees) a meeting was held. The idea of designing “furniture units” was raised at that time, which had to take into consideration 164
