Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 24. (Budapest, 2006)
In Memoriam Ferenc Batári (1934-2005) (András Szilágyi)
School, entered the Castle Museum in Tétény. The museum opened that very month. Later, when he had graduated from university and become a research worker of the Museum of Applied Arts in 1958, his visits became more frequent and, so to say, more purposeful. By that time, renovation works were taking place there, which, once finished, yielded to the opening of two impressive exhibitions: "Hungarian art of furniture in the 18 th century" (1963) and "European furniture in the 15 th —17 ,h centuries" (1966). Ferenc Batári, cooperating with Mrs. Zlinszky Stemegg Mária and Hedvig Szabolcsi, played a major role in planning, preparing and arranging the exhibitions. We can say the culmination of his activity in Nagytétény was the thoroughly reformed, exquisitely arranged exhibition and its catalogue ("Art of Furniture from Gothic art to the Biedermeier", with Erzsébet Vadászi); the exhibition opened in 2000 and has been accessible to the public ever since. Given that one's workplace (in this case, the museum) is one's second home, then for Ferenc Batári Tétény must have been somewhere halfway between his two "homes" - even if geographically speaking, this is not the case. Having entered the building or the castle garden, he had a good reason to feel that in a certain sense he had returned home. As for his workplace proper and advance at the workplace, his straight-line career can be considered as a manifestation of an unbroken continuity. From 1970 on he was the head of the furniture department of the Museum of Applied Arts, except for a five-year interval, when he headed the textile department. At the same time, as far as "attractions and choices" are concerned, his activity is characterized by a peculiar duality: a duality in terms of genre and - related to it - geography. At the beginning of his career he chose craft of furniture as a professional line. That is, he researched the changes of various kinds of objects and the activity of renowned, illustrious masters; also, he investigated and surveyed artistic-level fashioning of interiors. It was this starting point, along with the consideration of material remains of one-time Hungarian interior decoration, that made him turn his attention to a special kind of textile art, namely, to old Oriental carpets. His interest, augmented by superior professional skills, deepened to become an extraordinary attraction. His publications attracted wider and wider international attention. Heads of renowned foreign institutes (museums, university departments and scientific institutes from Istanbul to London, from Rome to New York and Los Angeles) invited him frequently and with pleasure to share his far-reaching knowledge in the course of lectures and seminars. He neither spared time nor energy. He accepted these complimentary invitations if he could, mostly in order to have the opportunity to introduce artefacts of Hungarian museums and collections to his fellow-scholars. It is interesting to observe how the peculiar subjectivity of a researching expert asserts itself or, in other words, where it can be "caught red-handed". Obviously, not in the process of identifying artefacts and determining the conditions of their production, because that, first and foremost, demands and presupposes objectivity. Nevertheless, it is certainly no accident that from the attractive, multicoloured world of Oriental textiles he selected Ottoman Turk knotted carpets (the catalogue he compiled on them in 1994 was the first scholarly-level subject-catalogue of the Museum of Applied Arts' collections). Also, it is most probably not by chance that the title of his most successful and probably most memorable exhibition, which he arranged in October 1988 in the Museum of Applied Arts, in co-operation with colleagues who are still active, was entitled "British Applied Arts". Turkey and England, more specifically, Istanbul and London. As Ferenc himself said, when not staying in native regions, in the "Hungarian globe", he was the happiest to stay in Turkey and England, more specifically, in Istanbul and London. He had the reputation of a "great traveller", and, indeed, a passionate traveller he was. In the years and decades past, we, his immediate colleagues - just like collectors and enthusiastic non-professionals - "bothered"
