Imre Jakabffy (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 1. (Budapest, 1973)
KOÓS, Judith: Walter Crane and Hungary
JUDITH KOOS WALTER CRANE AND HUNGARY Special significance is to be attributed to the English connections and influences in the Hungarian applied arts of the turn of the century. These relations included several important events, which took place mainly between 1898 and the 1910s. Everything that happened in the field of the Anglo-Hungarian artistic connections centered around the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts. It was here that series of exhibitions of the decorative arts with English bearings were organized mostly by director Jenő Radisics, who was not only an excellent scholar, a supporter of new artistic endeavours, but a great personality as well and was in close contact with each of his collaborators. It is he who deserves credit, first of all, for the advance of Hungarian arts and crafts during the years around 1900, and for the establishment and nursing of those foreign relations among which also that with England can be kept on record. The artistic principles and views of John Ruskin and William Morris enriched with new ideas the decorative arts throughout Europe in the second half and on the turn of the 19th century. It was their activity that underlay the movement in which the reformation of applied arts was set as target by both of them. 1 The principles of these two great artist individualities bore significant influence, both directly and indirectly, on the decorative arts and the course taken by the artistic life in Hungary in this period. At the same time not only their works became known in our country, but other trends as well in the British art-craft being connected to the Arts and Crafts Movement and some of its further leading personalities, like Ch. F. A. Voysey or C. R. Ashbey, and the representatives of the Glasgow School, Margaret and Ch. R. Mackintosh. Among these masters — regarding both his significance and effect — Walter Crane stood pre-eminent, whose large-scale retrospective exhibition was organized, for the first time in the Continent, in the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts, in 1900. Before examining, however, Walter Crane's connections with Hungary, and the Hungarian aspects of his art more thoroughly, it seems necessary to offer a brief survey of the AngloHungarian relations in the field of decorative arts round about the turn of the century. The conscious artistic orientation, its direction, aim and content, that connected the Hungarian applied arts first of all to the leading British arts and crafts of the age and their representatives, will so be more clearly outlines for us. 153
