Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 25. (Budapest, 2007)
Events 2006
tic and busy colleague Éva Csenkey undertook to organise the mini-exhibition ‘Mementos of 1956. Archive Photographs and Artworks in the Collections of the Museum of Applied Arts’. For this, staff at the archive, under the direction of Dr. Piroska Acs, selected and assembled together photographs that had never been exhibited before. In the second part of the exhibition, damaged furniture, books hit by bullets, broken and cracked goblets, and ornamented glass all revealed the serious damage caused by the fighting. The exhibition, which was on show for a total of ten days, was opened on 19 October by the painter Gábor Karátson, who himself participated in the events of 1956. Lajos Kozma was the most influential figure in Hungarian architecture and applied arts during the 20th century and also enjoyed an international reputation. One of the most exciting chapters in his great career was his architectural and interior design work in the 1930s. As well as the larger and better- known buildings he designed in this period (e.g. the Atrium Building, the Régiposta utca apartment-building and the so-called Glass Building), his family villas, too, are outstanding examples of Hungarian Modernist architecture. For this reason, Eva Horányi, head of the Department of Furniture at the Museum, decided to organise an exhibition presenting this period in the artist’s oeuvre. Called ‘The New House. Modernist Villas by Lajos Kozma’, it featured not just architectural drawings (views in colour of projected buildings, ground plans, blueprints for facades, and plans for furniture and fittings), but also furniture and home textiles designed by Kozma himself. An enthusiastic helper was found in the person of Tibor Somlai, an interior designer and a fan of Kozma. As the designer of the exhibition, he proved an understanding evoker of the age in which the works displayed came into being. The show, which was planned to last two months, was opened on 24 November by Mihály Ráday, president of the Association for the Protection of Budapest. In connection with the exhibition, a hardbound richly illustrated volume of some 250 pages was published, edited by Éva Horányi. Entitled Lajos Kozma's Modernist Buildings, it contained studies on the work of the designer in Hungarian and English written by Ibolya Cs. Plank, Éva Horányi, Éva Marton, Tibor Somlai, Zoltán Fehérvári, Timea Tóth, Éva Kiss, and Endre Prakfalvi. The matchless treasury of the Esterházy princes, which is of outstanding value even in European comparison, is almost the only Hungarian art collection from the Baroque age to have survived the vicissitudes of later centuries. A great part of the collection, which grew in size continuously from the 17th century onwards, has endured, some of it in the castle of Fraknó (today: Forch- tenstein, Austria) and some of it in the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest. Under the professional direction of the art historian András Szilágyi, an exhibition showing this sumptuous collection opened in the Museum of Applied Arts on 13 December. Bearing the title ‘Esterházy Treasures: Artworks of Five Centuries from the Collections of the Esterházy Princes’ and staged in co-operation with the Esterházy Privatstiftung in Kismarton (today: Eisen- stadt, Austria), it is scheduled to run for a year. Through their selection and presentation of the artworks, the organisers of the exhibition endeavoured to convey the important periods in the development and expansion of the collection, and, in the course of showing the different artefacts, to ‘guide’ the visitor through the history of the Treasury from its beginnings to the 20,h 173
