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

Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch: The Springs of Art / fresco. Music Academy. Budapest. 1907 pupils decorated Károly Kós's church in Zebegény under the leadership of their master. The Gödöllő artists also put in writing their desire to create Gesammtkunstwerke or synthesizing art works. Just like Ruskin, they looked upon the medieval gothic cathedrals as the most perfect creations of Man. Sándor Nagy's book, The House of the People, also indicates their interest in communal buildings. Ede Thoroezkai Wigand designed buildings for the collective use of local communties such as the church-and-school at Gálfalva (1909). Murals and stained glass works were often added to earlier historical buildings. As the surviving documentation of plans for new Art Nouveau buildings reveals, they closely collaborated with the architects, for example with Géza Maróti for the Hungarian House in Venice. They had closest contact with Medgyaszay: his Veszprém Theatre designed in 1907 is adorned with Sándor Nagy's sgraffito entitled The Chasing of the Miraculous Stag. The statues in the church at Rárosmulyad (Angels of Death, 1908-10) are Ferenc Sidló's works as is the sculptural ornamentation of the tenement building in Nádor street, Budapest (1914). The most outstanding ecclesiastic works of the Colony hailed by contemporary critics on par with Otto Wagner's stained glass ornaments in the Steinhof church - was the chapel in the Mental Hospital at Lipótmező. The wall decoration by Sándor Nagy (1911) was painted over later but the stained glass windows executed by Miksa Róth (1914) survive in both the sanctuary and the nave. All that survives of the interior decoration of the Temesvár Seminary Chapel are Sándor Nagy's stained glass windows [The Beatitudes, 1914-15). Out of Körösfői-Kriesch's high-quality stained glass works reflecting the influence of the English Arts and Crafts movement, only the Cood Shepherd (1918) window survives as a relic of Körösfői-Kriesch's graphic-monumental style. Árpád Juhász designed decorative wall paintings capturing the customs and folk costumes of various regions. Mariska Undi drew on the same sources for her murals in the White Cross Hospital (1907-08) and the Népszálló [People's Hotel] (1911), depicting the monumentalized figures in folk costumes, doing their everyday chores, in the early decorative planar style of Körösfői-Kriesch and Sándor Nagy. These frescoes, like so many of their monumental works, have perished.