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

Events 2006

offer to visitors for several years to come. Displaying approximately 400 artworks, it presents the history of the Museum and its collections. Since in 2006 the Museum entered the 135th year of its existence, to mark this anniversary its management announced an internal competition regarding the approach this exhibition should adopt and who should be its chief curator. The competition and the post were both won by Dr. Hilda Horváth. Under her leadership and with the participation of the entire Museum staff, this large exhibition came into being. At its opening, speeches were given by Dr. Imre Takács, the new director-general of the Museum; Dr András Bozóki, Hungary’s Minister of National Cultural Heritage; Dr. János Veres, Hungary’s Minister of Finance, and Dr. Zsuzsa Lovag, a retired director-general of the Museum. The celebratory mood of the opening was enhanced by the pianist Alex Szilasi, who gave a concert on a Pleyel grand piano from the Museum’s own collection. To coincide with the launch of the exhibition, the Museum published a 200-page richly illustrated album entitled In the Slipstream of Time. This contained a detailed account of the collections written by Hilda Horváth together with detailed descriptions of 198 of the artefacts displayed. It also featured a short study by Piroska Ács on the history of the Museum building and another by Zsuzsanna Lovay on the building’s original furniture and fittings. The volume was edited by Judit Pataki.

As part of the ‘Collectors and Treasures’ exhibition but as a special unit within it, a few tapestries of outstanding importance in the history of the collections were put on show in a room that was darkened, air-conditioned and fully in accordance with rules governing the exhibition of old textiles. Under the title ‘Tapestries from Brussels’,

these works could be seen by the public until 2 July.

The choice of title for the new permanent exhibition (‘Collectors and Treasures’) also makes reference to the Museum’s goal of drawing greater attention to the private collectors who are continually augmenting its collections by donating artefacts. Since the Friends of the Applied Arts Museum includes many experts, art collectors and artists, in the vestibule of the exhibition a glass cabinet whose contents regularly change was made available to collectors. By means of this, the Museum ensures for those private collections and private galleries that reach a suitable standard the opportunity to exhibit in the Museum, and by so doing creates occasions for regular gatherings of the Friends of the Applied Arts Museum. Such a gathering took place following an auction at Christie’s in London where the Ernst Gallery purchased ornamented plates for the dining room of Count Tivadar Andrássy’s palace in Buda that were designed by József Rippl-Rónai and executed by the Zsolnay factory in Pécs. These it then exhibited in the glass cabinet for a month. The Borda antiquarian and secondhand bookshop also brings out bibliophile editions, commissioning one-off artistic bindings for some of them. Among these publications belongs a numbered edition, in ten volumes, of Sebastian Brant’s work The Ship of Fools. Entitled A bolondok hajója - Das Narren Schyjf (a Hungarian translation by László Márton along with the original German text), the work is illustrated by István Orosz. The book was designed by Edit Zigány and the binding by János Juhász.

Consisting of entries awarded prizes in the National Drawing and Visual Culture Competition for Secondary Schools, with support from the Foundation for Visual and Environmental Culture, the Association of

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