Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 25. (Budapest, 2007)

Zsolt SOMOGYI: Pál Horti's Late Works in the United States of America

1. Hungarian section of Applied Arts and Handicrafts. Installation in the Manufacturers’ Building of the St. Louis World Exhibition in 1904.

brass mountings contrived from large stylised plant elements as its only embellishments, the hall cupboard from 1900 at the Museum of Applied Arts (and the design for it) proves that Horti was well acquainted with the spirit and output of the British Arts & Crafts movement in the years around 1900.17

The Arts & Crafts movement, which started out in the Great Britain in the 1850s, owed its theoretical base to John Ruskin (1819-1900) and its practical implementation to William Morris (1834-1896). Opposed to the inferior, non-artistic output of industrial mass production and rejecting serial production and the use of machinery, it wished to achieve the creation of a new aesthetics by reviving the old traditions of craftsmanship. The movement - in which social concerns, too, were prominent - wished to create a more liveable environment for all sections of society. It was, however, unable to reach its objectives: producing masterpieces of handicrafts was expensive and time-consuming, with the result that it was precisely the poorer strata, whose surroundings it wished to renew, that were unable to avail themselves of its products. Of interest is the thinking, observable in the British and American literature, that interprets the dates of the Arts & Crafts movement in an increasingly broad way, and by so doing to some extent relegates to the background the (admittedly complicated) cluster of concepts represented by Art Nouveau-Jugendstil-Secession. Earlier on, art historians saw in the Arts & Crafts movement a prototype thanks to which ‘New Art’ developed in Britain and the United States at the turn of the 20th century. In Britain and in the USA, however, the formal and aesthetic changes in the applied arts of the peri108