Őriné Nagy Cecília (szerk.): A népművészet a 19-20. század fordulójának művészetében és a gödöllői művésztelepen (Gödöllői Múzeumi Füzetek 8. Gödöllői Városi Múzeum, 2006)
Folk Art as Reflected in the Art at the Turn of the 19,h and 20th Centuries and in the Art Colony of Gödöllő. Abstracts in English / Angol nyelvű összefoglalók
218 Abstracts in English 218 made an attempt to achieve in Gödöllő, both in their life and in their art, that state of grace, short as it may have lasted, in which "Folk art is entirely identical with the life surrounding it, satisfying in the most perfect and richest way the needs of that life." Zoltán FEJOS ethnographer, The Museum of Ethnography of Budapest "FOLKART" AT THE TURN OF THE 19™ AND 20™ CENTURIES - NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF RESEARCH AND OF A CONCEPT The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the appearance of the esthetical approach in the ethnography taking shape in the last two decades of the 19 t h century, as well as to describe the phraseology and the conceptual sphere of such an approach. For this purpose, considered will be the scholarly and art treatises with attempts to interpret this universe of objects newly unfolding for the public awareness. It is characteristic of the studied period that there is no scholarly ethnography working with systematically elaborated ready methodology; those who cultivate it are mainly self-taught scholars in this new field coming from other branches of study and fairly often amateurs. The subject of the study took shape, came into existence gradually in which process one of the schools took its birth thanks to general artistic and historical discourses on the questions of ornamentation. The early scholars of ethnography were also concerned in this debate. The other method of analysing the problems related to folk art was founded on the concept of the people's soul. On the other hand, the representatives of the universal ethnography (ethnology) and those of the prehistoric archaeology touched upon esthetical subjects in the light of the problem ofprimitive art and that of the origin of arts. Considering that the ethnographic approach expanding in Hungary in the end of the 19 t h century stood chiefly on the grounds of universal ethnology and anthropology, the world of objects under examination passed for a problem for study primarily from the point of view of general evolutionism. Accordingly, their interest was mainly directed to primitive working tools, utensils; esthetical, artistic questions were secondary. The term offolk art appeared in the beginning or middle of the first decade of the 20 t h century. As far as the content of its concept is concerned, it united more or less the thought elements of the ornamentation, of the people's soul and of the evolution theory, while it claimed as point of departure the comparative analysis of peoples and cultures, in accordance with the most important attitudinal requirement of the discipline. As ethnography matured into a systematic branch of study, it assumed that the question of ethnic and national characteristic features, i. e. the existence of a "national style", to express it in the language of the discussion on ornamentation, could be admitted, raised and answered exclusively on this basis.
