Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 32. (Budapest, 2018)

Edit DARABOS: Blomstermarmor, klistermarmor. Modern Danish endpapers in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts

ments in the history of the art form. The marbled sheets published in the first issue of Dekorative Kunst for the year 1898 became sources for those artists who were inspired by Kyster and Eckmann to use the technique. Kyster’s sheets present numerous patterns and motif types that later became iconic. The hatip ebru-sty\e marbled papers became more widespread in the early 1900s, with Paul Kersten, Walter Leistikow and Leopold Stolba also making similar papers. Their names, however, have now been nearly forgotten; today the wider public invariably links marbled sheets containing Art Nouveau, figurai elements to Koloman Moser.53

Anker Kyster’s marbled sheets

As mentioned above, an examination of the Budapest sheets involved not only comparing them to contemporary publications but studying analogies, primarily among the original Kyster endpapers (which were much smaller in size than the Budapest papers) preserved in the Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen. These include Kyster’s early marbled sheets, made around 1892, which are relevant to this research.54

The Budapest marbled endpapers can be placed in three categories: those made with the technique Kyster dubbed blomstermar- mor, double marbled papers and fantasy marbled papers.

The first type is found in the largest numbers in the collection. Simple flower, leaf, whirl and star motifs appear against a pale coloured background. Kyster’s favourite motif was the simple flower head. The structure of lines surrounding the flower are varied, ranging from dense to light and airy compositions. (Figs. 8-9)

Three of the Kyster sheets in Budapest

were made with the double marbling technique. Direct European prototypes were unknown; therefore, this method can also be considered a Kyster innovation. The paper is marbled, then—naturally after the sheet has dried—another layer of marbling is applied. In the Budapest sheets, the second marbled layer creates leafy flower stems, and the artist added patches of paint only to this area containing the motif; thus the underlying pattern is still clearly visible. In the sheet published in the Magyar Könyvszemle, which was made in two versions, leafy poppy stems can be seen. (Fig. 10) Many of Kyster’s fantasy marbles found in the museum’s collection differ from the blomstermarmor papers because of their stronger colours and more freely winding systems of lines. (Fig. 11) Among the sheets are examples of the classic marbling technique; Kyster also made modern versions of combed and curled marbling.

Of the papers in the Museum of Applied Arts, the water lily sheet published in Dekorative Kunst indeed deserves special attention. Here the marbling technique is just a tool for conjuring the shimmering surface of the water and the leaves and flowers floating on it. (Fig. 12) The similarity between the Budapest sheet published in Dekorative Kunst and the smaller version preserved in Copenhagen suggests that Kyster would make several copies of one sheet; perhaps he worked on several trays at the same time. The Budapest museum’s water lily sheet was made on eastern, presumably Japanese, hand-made paper. This Kyster sheet is also unique in its recollection of Japanese prints. A couple of years later, the black-yellow, stylized fish-shaped motifs in the Kyster page would appear more concretely and more artistically in the marbled papers of Koloman Moser and Leopold

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