Öriné Nagy Cecília (szerk.): A gödöllői szőnyeg 100 éve - Tanulmányok a 20. századi magyar textilművészet történetéhez (Gödöllő, 2009)

Summaries

130 The study considers how work in the manufactory, showing parallelism with the production "practice" of the carpetweaving workshop of Gödöllő, was organised with regard to the large-scale exhibition and commercial activity. Lesznay drew the designs herself, and then painted them with tempera or watercolour. She forwarded the accomplished designs she prepared the samples of, to the embroidering staff, which consisted of peasant women she employed, but she entrusted the task of the contact person and the guidance of the local work to more educated women. One of Lesznai's basic principles was to have her applied art designs executed in regions where traditional folk art did not exist, and this is the reason why she found her executing staff in the northern villages having - in her judgement - poorer folk art traditions. The executed articles were sold, most of them to order. According to the sources, she provided work for some sixty women throughout several winters. After the start of her life in emigration in Vienna, her activity related to textile art and design gradually decreased giving way to graphics. Comparing the applied art designing activity of Lesznai with that of the artists in Gödöllő, her oeuvre is less complex. The majority of the accomplished designs, then of the executed products is cover, cushion, runner, wall-hangings and other small size items related to interior decoration. In addition, we can find, in her legacy, dress designs, collars, wall-paper, jewellery, jug, candlestick designs and pieces of her typographic art activity, but there are no designs for furniture, interior furnishing or others of larger-scale related to global interior decoration. The whole activity and life work of Anna Lesznai was dedicated to the creation of home and community, to the creation of an intimate atmosphere, but despite her extraordinarily sociable personality, she did not give up, regarding the outward appearances and life style, her upper middle-class way of life and she did not adopt instead a new type of communal form of living put into practice, which existed in Gödöllő. The study describes Lesznai's theoretical explanations to be found in her diary, in which she paid particular attention to the symbolism of the carpet, embroidery and stitch. Lesznai regarded it to be the criterion of the artistically perfect, well-resolved art composition that the parts building up the whole of it, should be autonomous elements interpretable in themselves and should be closed and finished, and this way should be the symbols of the complete work. By the introduction and application of the notion of episodicalness in her novel entitled Kezdetben volt a kert ('In the beginning there was the garden'), she has realized also in the epic the principle of the artwork composed by the juxtaposition of "stitches" (events closed and finished in themselves). During the decades in the United States, in addition to teaching and education, Lesznai returned to the cultivation of embroidery, but the source of inspiration this time was no longer Hungarian embroidery, but that of the Peruvian and Mexican Indians. The conventional (learnable and repeatable) stitch technique has been followed by a free technique combining many existing and invented stitches in which only the individual artist could have a part, because this type of embroidery was not reproducible. Gergely Barki The "Gauguin of the needle" The embroideries of Róbert Berény Róbert Berény is known first of all as a painter mainly remembered as member of the painters' group Nyolcak ('The Eight'), but he holds a distinguished place in the history of Hungarian art also as a poster artist. His activity in applied arts has remained a mystery despite that his main source for a living for years was the embroidery he designed. It is not evident when exactly he began to paint samplers, but most probably his more serious activity in this field, for the purposes of exhibitions, started when he became enthusiastic upon seeing the success of Anna Lesznai who exhibited as guest artist in the exhibition of the Nyolcak in 1911. The painters' works barely found new owners there, but the embroideries of Lesznai sold fairly well. Berény could have got carried away then, because the following year he also organised an embroidery exhibition in Berlin. The literature mentions a joint exhibition with Lesznay, but several newspaper articles of the time seem contradict to this, reporting that only Berény exhibited in the Keller und Reiner Salon, and the cushions of Lesznay were presented elsewhere. Similarly to Lesznai's financial expectations, those of Berény came off well also, for he managed to sell a lot of applied art articles in Berlin (bags, wall-hangings, cushions, folders, etc). The catalogue of his exhibition organised in the Keller und Reiner Salon is not known to us, and the whereabouts of the artworks sold in Berlin is unknown at present as well. Also, there is no trace of the samplers painted by Berény for his embroidery. Although we know nothing of the works he exhibited, it reveals from the press reaction that Berény's embroidery material was absolutely different from the handicraft work of Lesznai and was quite unlike any other Hungarian or European embroidery types known from the period. According to the testimony of descriptions, when Berény designed his modern handicraft pieces based on silk, the original source for him was mainly Japanese art, but the critics often mention the influence of Gauguin, too. The works had been executed by Berény's wife, whose work was aided by a smaller manufactory, for all alone, she could not keep pace with the ever growing number of orders.