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1. Art Nouveau and Hungarian Cultural Nationalism in Art, Architecture, and Design
FORTHCOMING BOOK CHAPTER: Megan Brandow-Faller, “Art Nouveau and Hungarian Cultural Nationalism
in Art, Architecture, and Design.” Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies, Louise Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de
Zepetnek, eds. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2012 [Forthcoming].
In 1902 a fierce debate raged in the Hungarian Parliament, with members not contesting politics,
finance, or war, but the proper vernacular of modern architecture in the statehouse along the Danube
(Szabadi, Art Nouveau in Hungary 12). Hungary’s Neo-Gothic Országház had been inaugurated only six
years earlier in celebration of the national millennium and the autonomy gained from the 1867 kiegyezés
(Compromise), which gave Hungary control over internal affairs, excepting diplomacy, war, and finance.
By the turn-of-the-century, however, national extremists were tiring of Dual Rule and cultural
representations thereof. Although historicist buildings like the Parliament were regarded favorably,
modern styles such as art-nouveau, the late 19th
-century artistic movement characterized by organic
motifs and flowing curvilinear forms, proved offensive to more conservative tastes. Self-styled Magyar
patriots argued that the Secessionist style of architecture popular throughout the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy and practiced in Budapest by Ödön Lechner conflicted with Hungary’s national essence. In
place of the curvilinear motifs of Secessionist buildings— symbolizing Western cultural decadence and
Hungary’s national subjugation— conservative deputies demanded buildings ‘that spoke Hungarian.’
Such denunciations of Hungarian Secessionism provoked criticism from a new generation of
Budapest intellectuals, known as the Fiátalok, or Young Ones. Associated with the art-periodicals
Magyar iparművészet (Hungarian Applied Arts) and Művészet (Art) and the literary journals A Hét (The
Week) and Huszadik század (Twentieth Century), the Young Ones believed that Hungarian art nouveau
achieved just what these deputies had demanded: the rebirth of a uniquely Hungarian national style.
Influential art-critic Károly Lyka insisted that art nouveau and the ‘Hungarian national style’ were
overlapping and contingent phenomena. As he argued in Művészet:
At last we can finally state that the situation has never been more favorable for Hungarian
art to begin to create the accents of a national style, and… in this respect our position is
even more favorable than that of other countries. For, to begin with, our historical
traditions of art of are slight significance, making it easier for us to follow new paths…
(“Szecessziós stílus-magyar stílus,” [Secessionist Style-Hungarian Style], 179 [Note: All
translations are my own]).
Similarly, poet Endre Ady defended the Secession’s Hungarian essence in asserting; “My Secession is the
struggle of progress against narrow-mindedness” (“A hétről” [On ‘A Hét’], in Ady Endre összes versei

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125). Yet, referencing notions of Hungarian backwardness, Ady held that “what is Magyar lies in the
reform” (“Az Ige veszedelme” [Dangers of the Word] Összes versei 32). Both Lyka and Ady’s words
betrayed fundamental tensions of Hungarian art-nouveau cultural nationalism. Though searching for the
nation’s primordial essence, the Fiátalok forged new paths to the east in delivering the nation from its
cultural backwardness and mimicry of Western national idioms.
Typifying Ernst Gellner’s notion of nationalism’s “great self-deception,” the idea that
“nationalism does not have any very deep roots in the human psyche,” the Magyarization of Budapest
1900’s cultural landscape was an elite movement that fabricated organic, folkish roots in the glory days of
Hungary’s past (Nations and Nationalism 34). Ödön Lechner’s National Style of Architecture; the
painting of József Rippl-Rónai; and the particularly Magyar style of Vilmos Zsolnay’s ceramics all
demonstrate the nationalizing affinity of an ‘emerging’ but very deliberately constructed nationalistic self-
consciousness. Whether or not Hungarianness was a primordial entity, Hungary’s fin-de-siècle avant-
garde made every effort to give the impression that it was through recourse to ethnography, archeology,
mythology, and folk art.
First this essay sketches the historical background of Habsburg rule culminating in the cultural
Magyarization to be discussed in the case-studies. As if they were adrift in a sea of foreign cultural
wreckage, Hungarians had long harbored ambivalence towards foreign-imposed cultural idioms in art,
architecture, urban planning, and material culture that accompanied Hungary’s political subjugation. The
search for Hungary’s own cultural vernacular peaked around 1900 in the Fiátalok’s vision of cultural
rebirth. Expressions of this national cultural rebirth are illustrated by three case studies: first, Ödön
Lechner’s creation of a ‘National Style’ of Architecture blending Secessionist designs with Magyar folk
motifs; second, the uniquely-Hungarian style of painter József Rippl-Rónai that synthesized Parisian
trends with exotic non-Western elements; and the Magyar accents of the Zsolnay ceramic workshop.
Particularly influenced by their encounters with ‘the other’ through travel and study abroad, these three
prophets of Hungarian art nouveau searched for a new vernacular in art, architecture, and material culture.
Influences of Mughal, Persian, and Turkish art featured prominently in the efforts to reclaim Hungary’s

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national roots, as referencing such exotic cultures stressed Hungarians’ Eastern origins over their semi-
autonomous status under the Ausgleich.
Due to centuries of foreign rule and cultural influence, the issue of a modern national style in
Hungary remained highly controversial given the ethno-linguistic basis of Magyar nationalism.
Conservative Hungarians dismissed modern art as decedent and un-Hungarian, as the opening vignette of
the 1902 parliamentary debates illustrated. The issue of whose nationalism was really at stake in Budapest
1900 only reinforces the constructed nature of fin-de-siècle cultural nationalism. In ‘awakening’ the
nation from its cultural slumber, the generation of 1900 did not settle but rather complicate the problem of
Hungarian national culture. As these terms have thus far been used interchangeably, the definitions of the
categories of ‘Hungarian’ and ‘Magyar’ should be clarified. ‘Magyar’ references a certain ethnic group:
the Finno-ugric nomads arriving in Pannonia around 896 under the leadership of Prince Árpád, whose
kinsman István accepted Christianity in 1000 and was crowned King of the Magyars. Theoretically, the
Magyar identity was limited to the bloodlines of this warrior class. In contrast, all ethnic groups present in
the historic lands of the Crown of St. Stephen, i.e. Germans, Jews, Slovaks, Rumanians, Croatians, Roma,
etc., fell under the civic rubric of ‘Hungarian.’ That only one word, ‘Magyar,’ exists in Hungarian for
both categories obscures this distinction in practical linguistic usage.
Magyar resentment towards Austria circa 1900 found its roots in late-17th
and early-18th
century
history: specifically, in Austria’s curtailment of the historic privileges of the Hungarian Diet. Not only
was the diet forced to recognize the Habsburgs as hereditary Kings of Hungary, Austria ruled
Transylvania separately and organized southern Hungary into a military-border (határőrvidék) against the
Ottomans (Haselsteiner, “Cooperation and Confrontation” 146-8). These constitutional changes officially
commencing with the Peace of Karlowitz in 1686 were the diet’s payment for Austria’s repulsion of the
Ottomans from Hungary. Despite these constitutional setbacks, Habsburg rule initiated the modernization
of Buda and Pest. Gaining the rights of a free royal town in 1711, a Habsburg building spree inaugurated
the re-founding of Buda and Pest after nearly two centuries of Ottoman occupation (Gyáni, Parlor and
Kitchen xiii). Although Buda previously formed the city’s core, the booming commercial-center of Pest

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began to eclipse Buda, a trend climaxing in nineteenth-century urbanization, industrialization, and
population patterns. Buda, in contrast, lost its administrative role when the diet was moved to Pozsony in
1734.
Accompanying the economic advances propelling Habsburg rule was Austro-German culture.
After convincing the diet to support her struggle against Prussia, Habsburg matriarch Maria Theresia
thanked Hungary with gifts of Counter-Reformation culture, including the construction of Baroque
churches. The Hungarian high-nobility, including the Esterházy, Batthyány, Pálffy, Nádasdy, and Zrinyi
families, followed suit in building residences in the Baroque and Rococo (Zopfstil) styles (Haselsteiner,
157). Yet some Hungarians found these imported European styles discordant with Hungary’s architectural
traditions. The memory of Ferenc Rákóczi II, the Prince of Transylvania who led an early-18th
-century
anti-Habsburg uprising, lingered fresh for many Magyar magnates, as the Austrian Baroque served to
remind Magyars, in bricks and mortar, of their defeat in earlier insurrections.
Habsburg innovations in architecture and language fostered Hungarian national awareness. That
the Habsburgs’ efforts to modernize and rationalize Hungarian administration reminded Magyars that
much of their culture was, in fact, foreign remained an indirect consequence of these reforms. For
instance, while introduced more in the spirit of rationalism—in that the majority of his subjects spoke
German—than out of nationalistic intent, Josef‘s 1784 decree making German the language of official
public transactions attracted attention to the state of the Magyar language (Barany, “Royal Absolutism”
174-5). Language reformers such as György Bessenyei and Ferenc Kazinczy introduced a Nyelvújítás
(language renewal) to make the Magyar tongue—then a peasant language filled with layers of foreign
words—suitable for scientific and scholarly use (Czigány, Hungarian Literature 105-6). Other forms of
Austro-German high-culture, such as German-language theater and opera, architecture, and urban-
planning customs, lent Pest a German character. The suburbs developing around Pest bore Magyarized-
versions of Habsburg rulers’ names (Terézvaros, Erzsétbetváros, Jozsefváros, Ferencváros), as were
bridges, squares, and monuments dedicated to the House of Austria.

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Stamped in the mould of Austrian urban-planning, by 1900 Budapest was Transleithania’s largest
city, having grown rapidly since the 1873 incorporation of Óbuda, Pest, and Buda as Budapest. Like other
Habsburg urban centers, Budapest had its own ring-boulevard. Modeled after Vienna’s Ringstrasse, the
Nagykörút (Grand Ring-Boulevard) connected important civic and cultural institutions, such as theaters,
concert halls, and museums. However, in contrast to Vienna, where the Ring separated the court from
middle class suburbs, Pest’s grand boulevard, in the words of Peter Hának, “had a combining and leveling
nature, binding together the inner area and the rapidly integrating outer areas” (Hanák, Garden and
Workshop 14). Andrássy út—the other main thorughfare leading from the Chain Bridge, the modern
suspension bridge built by István Széchenyi to foster commerce, to the Hősök tére (Heroes‘ Sqaure)—
included important buildings like the Opera-House, Academy of Music, and national-musuems. An
eclectic blend of architectural styles, the monumental buildings on these avenues were constructed in
historical-revival styles reflecting their cultural functions.
Despite Budapest’s outwardly “Habsburg-true” character, issues of cultural and linguistic
nationalism began to escalate within the Habsburg Gesamtstaat. The Badeni Language Ordinances,
movements for the Magyarization of place names, conflicts over Austro-Hungary’s joint military
expenditure, demands of other historic nations for concessions similar to the Hungarian Settlement, and,
the disintegrative effects of the 1868 Nationalities Law on Habsburg centralism—which, in effect, made
Magyar the state-language of the Hungarian lands and promoted the assimilation of Hungary’s ethnic
minorities—shattered the illusion that the Ausgleich would be a lasting solution (Janos, The Politics of
Backwardness 125-6). Nor did the death of Crown Prince Rudolf, whom many Hungarians believed as
sympathetic to Hungary as his mother had been, and the prospect of Franz Ferdinand’s secession do much
to inspire black-and-yellow patriotism.
Against the backdrop of escalating national tensions, the construction of Budapest’s new
Országhaz (Parliament) beginning in 1885 assumed tremendous political and cultural significance.
Referencing Hungary’s golden age under King Mátyás Corvinus, architect Imre Steindl employed the
language of historicist architecture for the Parliament. Steindl choose Gothic Revival to “implant national

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and individual spirit into the majestic style of the Middle Ages” (Quoted in Moravánszky, Competing
Visions 68). Prior to the construction of the Hungarian Parliament, reform-era national-institutions
established through the patronage of Ferenc Széchenyi and György Andrássy, such as the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences, the National Museum, and National Theater, had also been constructed in
historicist styles. Nonetheless, despite this progress towards a Hungarian national culture, the fact
remained that many of these architectural trends were borrowed, en masse, from the western architectural
canon (Alofsin, When Buildings Speak 127-132).
Even the housing patterns of late-19th
-century Budapest, whose rapid growth outstripped Vienna
and Prague, spoke to the sense of cultural uprootedness. While the street facades of Pest worker-
tenements appeared grand in showy revival styles, the courtyards revealed squalor and the cheap
construction. Around half of Pest’s residents lived in overcrowded rental barracks, in so-called “room and
kitchen flats,” without bathrooms or running water (Gyáni, Parlor and Kitchen 143). Likewise did the
architecture of upper-middle-class districts betray a sort of cosmetic superficiality, as grand apartment-
blocks were, as cultural historian Gabor Gyáni has phrased it, ‘palaces on the outside and middle class
homes within.’ Like the Monarchy’s dual capital of Vienna, entire residential blocks were built in similar
historicist styles; the repetition creating a “monumental feel” despite the modest size of individual
tenements (Gyáni, Parlor and Kitchen 39). The interiors of such apartment buildings underscored this
superficiality. Like elsewhere in Europe, middle-class parlors were stuffed full of curio-cabinets,
sideboards decked with porcelain, family portraits with gilded Louis XV frames, oriental carpets, ferns,
and taxidermy. Collecting such objects representing a variety of aesthetic styles, few of which had their
genesis in Hungary, conveyed a household’s prestige, worldliness, and material wealth; to use French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, a family’s ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, Distinction). Yet in contrast
to Western Europeans, Hungarians were farther removed from the decorative styles characterizing this
eclecticism, as most of these styles were imported from ‘the West’ without modification.
The jumbled, Victorian manner of interior arrangement and all that it stood for—Hungary’s
cultural mimesis of other nations—was precisely what the generation of 1900 was rallying against. While

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elements of cultural discontent remained latent throughout the Habsburg era, Hungarians began taking
active efforts to rescue and reconstruct their homeland’s castaway culture around 1900. In contrast to the
superficial nature of the Hungarian bourgeois lifestyle—showy facades masking shoddy interiors and
parlors arranged like theatrical sets—the Young Ones conceptualized architecture, art, and life as an
organic whole that should speak to Hungary’s national essence. Members of the group loosely known as
‘the Young Ones’ included poets Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, and József Kiss; painters József Rippl-
Rónai, Károly Lótz, János Vaszary; the architects Ödön Lechner, Béla Lajta, and Károly Kós; ceramic
producer Vilmos Zsolnay. Also associated with this avant-garde were members of the plein-air colony at
Nagybánya (present-day Baia-Mare, Romania), founded by Károly Ferenczy in 1896, and the painters and
applied-artists of the Gödöllő Artist-Colony founded in 1901 by Aladár Körösfõi-Kriesch and Sándor
Nagy on the ideals of Gnosticism and the teachings of John Ruskin and William Morris, and, above all, a
reverence for preserving techniques of traditional Hungarian folk art from isolated, presumably less
“westernized” regions of Eastern-Transylvania (Jacobs, Artist Colonies 133; Körösfõi-Kriesch,
“Hungarian Peasant Art” 31-46). While no formal group united all of these artists, these individuals felt a
mutual affinity in awakening Hungarians from centuries of cultural slumber.
Hungary’s fin-de-siècle avant-garde railed against academism and mimicry of Western cultural
idioms. Like other Secessionist movements, Budapest’s Young Ones believed art nouveau could lead to a
greater degree of national and individualistic expression. Taking particular inspiration from the English
Arts and Crafts Movement—individuals like John Ruskin, William Morris Charles Rennie Mackintosh
who sought to spiritualize art and work— and the Secessionist Gesamtkunstwerk (total-work-of-art) ideal,
the generation of 1900 strove to translate art-nouveau ideals into Hungarian (Gellér, A Magyar Szecesszió
7-18). The Young Ones championed a leveling of the high arts of painting, sculpture, and drawing with
the applied arts of architecture, ceramics, jewelry, and interior design. Striving to define Hungary as non-
Western, Hungarians took up “an eastern oriented quest that went beyond their relatively recent
Christianized traditions” (Howard, Art Nouveau 104).

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The Generation of 1900 emphasized the nation’s modern traditions while searching for its
eastern, primordial essence. Endre Ady, the spokesman of the Young Ones in Huszadik Század, held that
the essence of Magyarness lie in reform and progress. Hailing from an impoverished noble family, Ady
defined Magyarness as much by what it was by what it was not. As he countered Magyar backwardness:
Oppressed, backwards, and beggarly, that’s what we are. But this is not the worst
of our troubles… The people of Góg and Mágog were imprisoned behind iron
gates, but…at least they could pound on the gates. Our folk cannot do that. Their
arms have been chopped off and they cannot pound even the gates of hell, only
tumble into its grave as cripples, with bodies putrefied (Ady, AEÖPM 4:132-3).
Nonetheless, Ady and colleagues like Lechner, Rippl-Rónai and Zsolnay promised salvation to their
‘armless’ national kindred. Their vision of reshaping the primordial Magyar essence, backwards and
beggarly as it was, into something supple and modern played is illustrated by the three artists examined as
case-studies. Thus, the famous words of István Széchenyi, regarded as the greatest of Magyars, that
"Magyarország nem volt, hanem lesz" (Hungary has not been, but will be) would find a resounding echo
in Ödön Lechner’s desire to create a Hungarian language of form, in József Rippl Rónai’s bright
canvases, and Vilmos Zsolnay’s eosin-glazed ceramics (Lechner, “Magyar formanyelv nem volt, hanem
lesz” [There Has Not Yet Been a Hungarian Language of Form, but Will Be], 1-18).
Like other members of the generation of 1900, Ödon Lechner traveled abroad in searching for his
national roots. Lechner, the son of a Buda bricklayer, trained in Berlin and apprenticed in Italy and France
before returning to his homeland. In striving to create a national style, Lechner’s shift from eclectic
historicism to a bold art-nouveau style resembled careers of other modern architects in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, such as Otto Wagner, the influential Viennese architect, theorist, and teacher.
However, in contrast to the supranational architecture language of Wagner and his students, Lechner’s
works spoke a uniquely Magyar architectural vernacular. Lechner not only prophesized but necessitated
out of the utmost political and cultural reasons the coming of a Hungarian language of ornament in his
famous 1906-essay called “There Has Not Been a Hungarian Language of Form But There Will Be,” as a
reference to Széchenyi’s patriotic adage (Lechner, “Magyar formanyelv” 1).

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After opening an architectural firm in Pest in the 1870s, Lechner obtained important commissions
for revival-style buildings, such as the Thonet Brothers’ furniture company and the Hungarian State
Railways Pension office. After his involvement in Hungary’s 1896 Millenarian Celebrations, an
international exposition featuring Hungarian folk costumes, crafts, music and contemporary achievements
in industry and craft, Lechner turned to Asiatic culture and Magyar folklore for inspiration. The architect
increasingly favored an explicitly Hungarian architectural language, and abandoned the Habsburg-true
style employed in the 1896 Millenarian exposition. As art historian Jeremy Howard has argued; “the
program of the Millennial celebrations was inevitability compromised by simultaneously proselytizing the
distinctiveness of Hungarian identity and professing the beneficial effects of the Habsburg association”
(Art Nouveau 108).
While taking influence from art-nouveau architects such as Henry Van de Velde and Wagner,
Lechner championed the construction of a new Magyar style stressing Hungary’s relation to the East
(Gellér, A Magyar Szecesszió 27-35). Lechner and his followers showed enthusiasm for art-nouveau not
because of any one aesthetic style, for Lechner’s buildings were highly eclectic, but for the revolutionary
spirit it implied (Hanak, Garden and Workshop 78). An admirer of Lechner in Á Hét thus described the
architect as a “heroic freedom fighter who helps tear down barriers and overthrow tyrants” (“Lechner
Ödon,” 498-99). Lechner’s mature style relied upon the work of József Huszka: the ethnographer who
studied and recorded folk-decoration in Transylvania, Northern Hungary, and the Great Hungarian Plain.
Huszka argued that medieval and early-Renaissance Magyar folk art including embroidery, ceramics, and
furniture had origins in Persian and Mughal design, and was thus more purely Magyar than later folk art
(Magyar ornamentika). Lechner was also influenced by the ethnographic studies of Aladár Körösfői-
Kriesch, the leader of the artists’ colony at Gödöllő, a village on the outskirts of Budapest. Kriesch, a
fresco painter by training, promoted a free-thinking, Ruskinian art-and-crafts lifestyle at the Gödöllő
encampment; life there featured participation in non-combative athletics such as swimming and skiing,
nudism, and vegetarianism (Keserü, “Workshops of Gödöllő 13-14). The Gödöllőists were particularly
enamored with the Kalotaszeg region of Eastern Transylvania and the Székelys, a Magyarised Turkic

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ethnic group originally settling the region to guard the Ottoman Empire’s borders (Körösfői-Kriesch
“Hungarian Peasant Art” 41-46). Not coincidentally because these regions were strongly Protestant,
members of the Gödöllő-circle regarded the Kalotaszeg area as the source of true Hungarianness. Kriesch
and his followers created stylized depictions of Székely folk mythology, such as the White Stag Legend.
Figure 1.1: Ödön Lechner, Musuem of Applied Arts (Iparművészeti Múzeum), Budapest, 1891-6
The first building marking Lechner’s
arrival at a distinctly-Magyar style was his
1891-6 Museum of the Applied Arts, or
Iparművészeti Múzeum (Figure 1.1). Its
arabesques, rosettes, and majolica mosaics
simultaneously alluded to Mughal art and the
stylized foliate designs of
Hungarian embroidery
depicted in Huszka’s work.
Speaking to the manner in
which the Young Ones were
reinventing their national
roots, the Museum of Applied
Arts resulted in a building
that was highly eclectic and
imaginative in style. The building utilized elements from Gothic, Mughal, and British-colonial styles.
Fusing the ancient and the modern, Lechner’s Museum for the Applied Arts was true to modern
architecture’s motto of form following function in exposing the modern glass and iron materials yet
evoked the tents of the Magyars’ ancestors (Alofsin, When Buildings Speak 136-8). For instance, its
central exhibition hall (Figure 1.1) resembled the British Crystal Palace in celebrating modern materials

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like iron and glass skylights. Nonetheless, the hall evoked an altogether eastern character with Mughal
arches and intricate white carvings. The majolica tile decorating the entrance hall and the building’s front
façade referenced the colorful mosaics of Indian art. Lechner had commissioned Vilmos Zsolnay to
produce the tiles after their 1899-trip to study the Islamic Collections of London’s South Kensington
Museum (Gellér, Magyar Szecesszió 33).
Figure 1.2: Ödön Lechner, Postal Savings Bank (Postatakarékpénztár), 1898-1901.
Lechner’s later buildings illustrate his
progression towards a bolder Hungarian style. His
Postal Savings Bank (Postatakarékpénztár, 1898-
1901) utilized a flat plane façade, only broken by
the whimsical parapets at the roof (Figure 1.2).
Blending local folk traditions with art-nouveau
motifs, Lechner translated the language of
artnouveau into Magyar by stressing Hungary’s
connections to Central Asia. Lechner adapted the stylized floral motifs and garlands on the parapets from
folk sources including painted furniture, utensils, embroidery, and szűr (traditional herdsmen’s sheepskin
coats): decorative elements to which Körösfõi-Kriesch had hoped to introduce to English-speaking
audiences with his Studio article “Hungarian Peasant Art” (42). The building’s vaults and arches
suggested the tents of the Magyars’ ancestors while a bull’s head above the doorway alluded to Attila the
Hun: a national symbol suggesting the origins of the Huns and Magyars.
In addition to executing important public commissions, Lechner taught a new generation of
Hungarian modern architects, including students such as Károly Kós and Bela Latja. Ironically, Lechner’s
efforts to create a Hungarian language of form were better received abroad than at home, as the Magyar
Secession remained an argot not yet understood by Hungary’s masses (Melani, “Some Notes” 289).
Hungarian governmental support of Lechner halted in 1902, when his Postal-Savings-Bank was dismissed

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as “too Hungarian and too Secessionist” (Alofsin 149). Although the public demanded that buildings
‘speak’ Hungarian, the syntax and grammar of Hungary’s language of form remained to be resolved.
The career of József Rippl-Rónai resembled that of Lechner and other contemporaries. Like
Lechner, Rippl-Rónai’s travels and studies abroad brought him closer to his Magyar roots. After leaving
his hometown of Kaposvár to study at the Munich Academy in the late 1880s, Rippl-Rónai migrated to
Paris on a Hungarian state scholarship. He looked to Paris as a “holy city of beauty, love, and inspiration”
in contrast to the cultural alienation he felt in his national homeland (Howard, Art Nouveau 104). In Paris,
he worked in the studio of Mihály Munkácsy: a compatriot working in an academic style (Szabadi, Art-
Nouveau in Hungary 55-56). As Rippl-Rónai described meeting Munkácsy, who was working on
important commissions including the ceiling fresco for Vienna’s Art History Museum;
As a young man I, too, ended up in Paris, like so many other young artists. I
walked the streets of this magnificent city unknown, without a penny to my
name. […] I watched the glitter of this city of lights, the hustle and bustle of this
metropolis of a thousand faces. I felt very much a stranger, and very poor. I knew
that an outstanding compatriot, Mihály Munkácsy was living in this city, in
prosperity and celebrity. I decided time and again that I would look him up…
(“Memoirs—Excerpts,” [n.p.]).
Young Rippl-Rónai collaborated with Munkácsy for several years in addition to exhibiting with Siegfried
(Samuel) Bing, an important dealer of Japonist and art-nouveau objects (Sármány-Parsons, “Hungarian
Art” 36). By 1890, however, Rippl-Rónai turned away from Munkácsy’s stuffy academic style to join
forces with Scottish painter James Pitcairn Knowles in Neuilly (Howard and Keserü, Neuillyben).
Leaving Munkácsy’s studio, Rippl-Rónai began working in a dark and mysterious palette: a phase
of his career marking a turning point in devising a Hungarian style of painting. During the 1890s Rippl-
Rónai progressed into a black-phase: a period dominated by somber tones and heaviness. His painting My
Grandmother, a penetrating study of the worry-worn face of his grandmother, attracted the attention of
the young French artists, such as Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, known as ‘les
artists intelligents’ or Nabis. Rippl-Rónai began working with the Nabis shortly thereafter, and
experimented with theories of color reduction. This technique used black rather than white as the canvas
base-color. Interestingly enough—although the paintings produced during this black phase arguably

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spoke more to the dark Magyar character described in Ady and Mihály’s verse than his earlier Whistler-
esque paintings— these black-phase paintings were not well-received back at home. Hungarians
perceived Rippl-Rónai’s dark Parisian phase as decadent
(Sármány-Parsons, “Painting the Nude,” 76). Miklós Rózsa,
later one of Rippl-Rónai’s staunchest supporters when he
resettled in Kaposvár, commented in 1900; “Let us hope he
will stay away from things Hungarian. The heartbeat of our
virginal and pure land cannot be understood by Rippl-
Rónai’s West-European, decadent, enervated, nearly
perverse soul” (“Rippl-Rónai,” Quoted in Szabadi, 53). By
contrast, however, Rózsa looked quite favorably on Rippl-
Rónai’s brighter late-works done in Hungary. In addition to
his new color theory, the eastern influences of Japanese
color woodcuts and Tahitian art, by way of Matisse,
Gaughin and Van Gogh, influenced Rippl-Rónai’s progression towards a more authentically Hungarian
style of painting (Sármány-Parsons, “Hungarian Art” 36). Describing the love of Eastern art he shared
with Gaughin and Van Gogh, Rippl-Rónai hinted at the national cultures dividing them:
Probably all three of us equally admired the Chinese, the Persians, the Egyptians
and the Greeks… along with the Japanese. Even unwillingly, we felt their
influence. Yet I am convinced that we are each different. Our starting points are
different, the intermediate stages are different, and so are the final results.
Gauguin's Noa-Noa is entirely different from Van Gogh's Sunflowers, or my own
My Father with Uncle Piacsek Drinking Red Wine (“Memoirs” [n.p.]).
While art-historical scholarship has stressed the commonalities linking this trio, national differences
contributed to their works’ divergence.
Figure 2.1: József Rippl-Rónai, Girl With A Cage (1892)

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The Girl with a Cage (1892, Figure 2.1), presents a good example of Rippl-Rónai’s color-
reductionist phase, and relates to the dark backwardness of the Magyar character described in Ady and
Babit’s verse. In contrast to earlier paintings like Woman in a Polka Dot Dress (1889) that evoke a
painterly quality in depicting an elegant young Parisienne, The Girl with a Cage conjures up a sense of
eastern mystery similar to Lechner’s fanciful parapets and turrets. Whereas Rippl-Rónai had applied the
paint in thin layers in Woman with a Polka Dot Dress to achieve a glowing effect emphasizing the dress’s
decorated surface, The Girl with a Cage speaks to something more primordial in treating the forms as
dense color blocks. The painting’s “deep, glowing green tones” symbolize a sense of exotic, and even
erotic, mystery (Szabadi 60). Rippl-Rónai’s forceful evocation of the forms celebrated a sort of Hungarian
primitivism rather than mimicking other national idioms.
The artist’s own words describing his so-called ‘black phase’ demonstrate how Rippl-Rónai was
searching for a uniquely-Hungarian cultural vernacular.
I painted my "black" paintings series in Neuilly…not because I saw things black,
but because I wanted to paint things with black as my starting point. […] [This
is] not due to poor draughtsmanship, as some would like to think, but are the
natural consequence of my painting methods (“Memoirs” [n.p.]).
His words suggest that Rippl-Rónai was abandoning himself to his natural Magyarness after searching to
repress such ‘dark’ qualities in earlier works. What is most interesting about this so-called black phase
that these paintings were poorly received back home in Hungary. Although Parisian critics admired the
dark and mysterious ‘eastern-European’ quality of such paintings, Hungarian observers deemed the black-
phase paintings as decadent and ‘un-Hungarian,’ similar to Hungarian skepticism towards Lechner’s
architectural fancies. The fact that each party harbored a reverse definition of the national other only
reinforces the constructed and contingent nature of group identity.
In contrast to his black-phase work, Hungarians preferred Rippl-Rónai’s colorful, pointillist
works of the Hungarian countryside (Figure 2.2, Manor-House at Körtvélyes 1907) when Rippl-Rónai
moved back to Hungary and established a studio in his hometown. Here, he perfected his characteristic
"corn kernels" style, a technique utilizing bright colors and small, pointillistic brush-strokes that left his

15. 15
canvases filled with distinct, kernel-like patches of paint. Despite the dark qualities of the Hungarian
national character described in the Young Ones’ poetry, Hungarians preferred that their national culture
project an image of vitality. Bright and lyrical evocations of Hungarian femininity, such as the tapestry
Young Woman With Rose, which was commissioned for the dining room of Count Tivadar Andrássy’s
Budapest villa (Figure 2.2), were well received in Hungary. Although it used a similar stylized form of a
slender female as in the cage painting, the tactile quality of the tapestry and color mellowed the affected
sophistication of her pose (Szabadi 61). With her connections to nature and the colorful countryside,
Young Woman With Rose was not deemed decadent like Rippl-Rónai’s
earlier women. Generally, threatening female types remained absent
from turn-of-the-century Hungarian painting, as Hungarian critics
preferred the gentle femme-fragile over aggressive femme-fatales
(Sármány
Parsons, “The
Image of
Women,”
228).
Figure 2.2
Right: József
Rippl-Rónai,
Manor-
House at
Körtvélyes,
1907; Left: Young Woman With A Rose, 1898
In keeping with his Secessionist ideals, Rippl-Rónai promoted the applied arts in Hungary. In
fact, in 1896 Count Tivadar Andrássy had commissioned the artist to not only design the tapestry (Young
Woman With Rose) mentioned above, but to design the entire dining room of his fashionable Budapest
villa: from furniture, to upholstery, to decorations, and ceramics. His tapestry designs for Young Woman
With Rose, executed by his wife Lazarinne, won a silver medal at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1897.
True to the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal, Rippl-Rónai supervised every aspect of the production process: from

16. 16
the fabrication of the ceramics at the Zsolnay factory in Pécs, to the stitching of the tapestry at his wife’s
Neiully studio, to the construction the art-nouveau furniture by the Andreas Thék cabinetry-firm. Rippl-
Rónai’s and his contemporaries’ work in the applied arts attempted to revitalize the Hungarian home-
craft-industry (Kerserü, “Workshops of Gödöllő 3-4). The sideboards for the Andrássy residences, for
instance, utilized a stylized floral motif as did the Zsolnay plates perched upon it (Figure 3.1). While
Rippl-Rónai relied upon traditional Hungarian folk myth and design, his paintings simultaneously created
something new altogether. The fact that the Hungarian public understood the language of his bright ‘corn-
kernel’ period better than that of his black canvases speaks to the optimistic national culture they wished
to project.
Figure 3.1: Porcelain-Faience Plate, Design: Jozséf Rippl-Rónai, Execution: Zsolnay Workshops,
1898
Creating equally luminous works of earthenware, the
Zsolnay Ceramics Manufactory gained a reputation as
Central Europe’s most innovative earthenware-producer.
The Pécs-based firm was not only revered for technological
advances, such as freeze-resistant tiles for roof/façade
decoration and durable stoneware cobbles for roading, but
unique designs expressing Hungary’s eastern cultural roots.
Like the other figures examined as case studies, Vilmos
Zsolnay traveled abroad in search of his eastern roots.
Together with Lechner, he investigated the South Kensington Museum’s Collection of Oriental and
Islamic Ceramics (Gellér, “English Sources,” 17). Vilmos took over the family business in 1869 after
studying other European collections of oriental art and implemented rigorous training-programs for
craftsmen, as well as assuming vertical control of the manufacturing process. Zsolnay’s first international
showing at Vienna’s 1873 World Exhibition earned him national honors. While the Imperial government

17. 17
was eager to claim Zsolnay as Austrian and awarded him the Order of Franz Josef, Vilmos used the
success to market his products worldwide (Hárs, “Zsolnay and World Markets” 56-7).
Zsolnay’s adoption of the eosin luster-glaze, a complex iridescent glaze created by metallic
oxides fired in reduction, around the time of the Millenarian Celebrations stood for the same sense of
Eastern mystery fueling the Legend of the Honfoglalás (Hungarian Conquest). Like the Magyar tribes’
westward migration from Central-Asia, the eosin glaze originated in 9th
-century Persia. Eosin produced a
metallic luster that brought new life to familiar earthenware forms (Kovács, “Historicism” 42). That the
lusterous eosin glaze was Zsolnay’s forte became a source of national pride, for the technical demands of
producing the glaze eluded many modern European manufacturers. Aside from Persian and Ottoman
sources, Zsolnay’s treatment of form and surface-decoration as an organic whole was influenced by his
exposure to Louis Comfort Tiffany art glass and the iridescent Bohemian glass of Johann Lötz (Mundt,
“European Ceramics” 32).
Zsolnay arrived at a distinctively Hungarian art-nouveau style of ceramics exploiting his mastery
of eosin. Evoking the ornamental styles of the east, his products were celebrated as capturing the essence
of the Hungarian national character. His daughter Júlia’s fieldwork researching folk-ornament in
repositories such as the Viennese Museum for Art and Industry’s Islamic and Ottoman collections, as
well as her study of European Japonisme, had a decisive impact on the firm’s designs (Gellér, Magyar
Szecesszió. 48). While borrowing from this data and her brother Miklós’s collection of Turkish designs,
Júlia and other Zsolnay designers transformed ancient and eastern motifs into something uniquely modern
and Hungarian. Like poet Mihály Babits’ idea of dressing an old idea in a thousand bright colors, the
Zsolnays “sought to upgrade and refine” ancient designs rather than slavishly copying them (Sinkó,
“National Style” 52) World exhibitions winning Zsolnay honors for these designs included: Exposition
Universelle de Paris 1878, International Exhibition Sydney 1879-1880, International Exhibition
Melbourne 1880-1881, Columbian Exposition Chicago 1893, Exposition Universelle d'Anvers
(Antwerpe) 1894, Exhibition de Nice 1894-1895, Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles 1897, Exposition
Universelle de Paris 1900, and the Exposizione Internazionale d'Arte Decorativa Moderna, Torino, 1902.

18. 18
Through these exhibitions the Zsolnays kept abreast of trends in the industry and used the forums to
expand their export markets. European consumers were greeted with Zsolnay ceramics after the family
entered a contract with Viennese merchant Ernst Wahliss, who marketed Zsolnay’s wares across the
continent (Hárs, “World Markets,” 56-58).
Like Lechner and Rippl-Rónai, the Zsolnay family remained true to the art-nouveau ideal,
producing not only objet d’art but ceramics useful in many aspects of everyday life. Architectural-
ceramic production—very much at the center of the Hungarian ornamental style that Ödön Lechner
pioneered—reached a peak around 1900, just as Miklós Zsolnay II assumed control of company upon his
father’s death (Mendöl, “Service of Architecture,” 174). Decorative tile-panels, fountains, mosaics, and
surface-cladding represented common uses of the ceramics. Demonstrating the collaboration between the
three artists examined here as case-studies, Lechner relied upon Zsolnay architectural-tiles for all of his
major commissions. Likewise Rippl-Rónai produced a series of porcelain-faience plates, featuring
variations on traditional Hungarian floral-designs, for Count Tivadar Andrássy’s dining to be executed by
Zsolnay craftsmen (see Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.2: Tulip Motif Vase, Earthenware with Eosin-Glaze, Zsolnay Workshops, 1898
The very forms of Zsolnay pottery emphasized
Hungarian cultural distinctiveness. Whereas 19th
-century
pottery had emphasized the decorative scene on the object’s
surface, Zsolnay’s art-nouveau designs shifted the emphasis
to the object’s form itself: a concern analogous to the
heightened interest in the origins of the Magyars around the
time of the Millenarian Celebrations. Zsolnay pieces
featured stylized versions of the folk designs collected by
family-members and elements (such as deer, tents, smoke) directly referencing the conquest itself. The
metallic luster-glaze Tulip-Form Vase depicted in Figure 3.2 recalled the importance of the tulip in

19. 19
Hungarian folk-art decoration. In addition to floral-form vases, Zsolnay produced vessels depicting
animals, such as deer, stag, and the turul (a mythological bird associated with Prince Árpád’s father
Álmos) important to Hungarian folk mythology. Nonetheless, though Zsolnay took inspiration from
Hungarian folk culture, exposure to a variety of international sources from America, to Persia, to Turkey,
distanced his ceramics from the Magyar essence. Zsolnay had indeed, to borrow Lechner’s phrase,
created a new language of form; whether or not it spoke Hungarian remained a matter of dispute
(“Magyar formanyelv”).
This essay has examined three Hungarian artists circa 1900 who constructed a new cultural idiom
in the search for Hungary’s national roots. This process of cultural Magyarization revealed fundamental
tensions between elite and popular forms of nationalisms, as well as the ways in which an urban elite co-
opted elements of traditional folk culture. Ödön Lechner’s National Style of Architecture; the painting of
József Rippl-Rónai; and Vilmos Zsolnay’s art-nouveau ceramics demonstrated how Hungarians looked to
the east, rather than the west, in purifying their homeland’s cultural wreckage and backwardness. To an
unprecedented degree, Hungarian culture embraced its eastern roots rather than succumbing to the
Westernizing effects of the Church or Habsburg rulers.
Tensions remained in the Young Ones’ program of cultural nationalism. The paintings, buildings,
and ceramics analyzed here received a mixed review in Hungary while being applauded abroad. Although
the artists and intellectuals discussed in this essay fashioned themselves as thoroughly Hungarian, the
generation of 1900 was arguably as foreign to Hungary’s masses as the cultural ‘others’ these artists
encountered abroad. Yet at least a few Hungarians believed in the power of artists and intellectuals to
recreate Hungarian culture as a ‘coat of many colors.’ To close with Rippl-Rónai’s own words on
returning to his national homeland to commence a sunny new phase of his career.
I have full confidence in the power and beauty of painting all at once….This
trumpeting of colors probably comes from my present mood. This is what my
surroundings [the Hungarian countryside] are now, and that’s the effect they have
on me. Colors like this surround us in my new house and garden in Kaposvár. I
have come to love not only the scarlet-covered sage and the red single geranium,
and also the pure white flowers, but even ore the chrome-yellow zinnias
(“Memoirs” [n.p.]).

20. 20
Although the culture he came to love was as much ‘forged’ as it was natural, the generation of 1900
searched for a national culture that spoke Hungarian—and a nation that could understand it.
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