Katalin Gellér: The art colony of Gödöllő 1901-1920 (Gödöllő, 2001)

Just like anywhere else in Europe, the artists began to realize their new artistic principles with designing their own houses; they conceived of the home as a mirror of the inner world, an inner portrait. "We are furnishing a home in which luxury manifests itself in the variety of ideas...", in which the designing of an object is determined by function and the personality of the user, by "the requirements of his world view", Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch wrote in a letter in 1905. Most artists could not afford to build an atelier house for themselves so they rented flats or houses in and around Erdő street, but the furniture, as the recollections reveal, was highly individualistic everywhere. When Körösfői-Kriesch settled, he fitted out his home with carpets, embroidered cushion-covers and table-cloths from Transylvania as well as furniture of his own designing. In Árpád Juhász's home there were sets of furniture designed by Ede Thoroezkai Wigand, as well as woven Transylvanian and Matyó pieces and pottery jugs. Only Sándor Nagy and Belmonte and their families moved into new houses designed by István Medgyaszay (1904-06), which were some of the most up-to-date buildings of modern architecture. Medgyaszay used ferro-concrete in combination with brick, the ornamentation of the entrances and the pergolas on the roof terraces were apparently inspired by folk art. The layout of the houses was also new: instead of the customary row of rooms, Medgyaszay adopted the English, centralized plan. The central room - the heart of the house - was the ground-floor living room, the venue of the family's "collective work, collective art, collective social life, collective meals" (Sándor Nagy), from which the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen opened. Upstairs there were the atelier and two small rooms. In Sándor Nagy's house, a stained glass painting of floral ornaments in the small window of the downstairs room and his desk designed by Ede Thoroezkai Wigand survive. In the photo taken by Medgyaszay of the interior of Belmonte's villa we see painted wooden furniture adorned with subtly meandering vegetal ornaments, just like on the walls of Sándor Nagy's house ín Veszprém. In the world fair of 1906 in Milan, Sándor Nagy and Medgyaszay presented an interior with the title The Artist's Home where carved and painted wooden posts, timbered ceilings, cushions, covers, carpets and Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch's gobelin entitled Family were displayed all made in the spirit of collective work in the Gödöllő workshops. The functional approach of the English designers was decisive in their furniture. The influence of folk art appeared in the structure - e.g. the use of the chest - or in ornamentation and accessories adorned with stylized folk genres. Ede Thoroczkai Wigand was the most outstanding furniture designer. English critics also hailed his furniture designs as deriving from the Arts and Crafts Movement. His designs also include richly carved "story-telling" furniture pieces with roots in biedermeier style. For his own use, Ödön Moiret designed mostly rustic furniture pieces combining Viennese and Scottish interior decoration with his own imagination (1907-08). Mariska Undi was also a prominent furniture designer. Her nursery was functional, with thorough attention to all needs of a child's life. Her forms are simple borrowed from folk art, including the chest. Her "A Woman's Study" is also influenced by folk art, but the structure of the pieces also reveals the characteristics of Viennese geometrism. The Gödöllő artists made their debut together in the Circle of the Friends of Art in 1904. Körösfői-Kriesch used Kalotaszeg motifs, painted wood beams, carved motifs from wooden grave posts for "A Han's Study". The carpets shown here were still woven in the Torontál and Pozsony weaving school. Sándor Nagy's leather pieces and Leó Belmonte's oil paintings were also added to the exhibition. The majority of one-time interiors are only preserved in photos, a few fragments of wall decoration surviving. In Sándor Nagy's house some stencils of animal shapes used for the painting of the wall, a few designs of Art Nouveau metal bowls, jugs and mirros can be found. THE GARDEN The architect-designers and painters, first of all Ede Thoroczkai Wigand, regarded the garden as an organic extension of the house. He researched old styles in Hungarian gardening and also used Kalotaszeg garden patterns to design the fictitious garden of Dame Réka. Several representations of gardens are known by KörösfőiKriesch, Sándor Nagy and Mariska Undi (Aladár KörösfőiKriesch: Courtyard. 1906; Detail of a Gödöllő Garden, 1910). Sándor Nagy's painting Early Spring (c.1910) has an intimate atmosphere despite its meticulous naturalism, while KörösfőiKriesch's Lillies (1906) conceals a symbolic meaning despite its traditional rendering. A new tone was struck by Rezső Mihály, whose Pierrot series are scenes set in theatrical rococo backgrounds. In his dual portraits, Sándor Nagy showed himself and his wife in the garden. In his Our Garden (1902) which he painted in Veszprém, the owl, the deer and the lilies were inhabitants of their garden both literally and symbolically. In the etching entitled The Hearth, the couple is shown in the interior, Laura Kriesch tending to a huge rose tree in the middle of the room. The rose, or strongly stylized other flowers such as those in the perished glass paintings in the National Salon, symbolized the cultivation of art. In the Dual Portrait made after 1907 they are shown in front of a garden wall, united in introverted self-improvement.