Alan Crawford
Contacts, Influences, Inspirations

Gyula Ernyey (ed.): Britain and Hungary: Contacts in Architecture and Design during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Essays and Studies. Budapest, Hungarian University of Craft and Design, 1999. 291 pp.

 

There is a political agenda behind this book. It is a collection of essays by British and Hungarian authors on the links between Britain and Hungary in architecture and design during the last two hundred years, and it is written from the point of view of the new Hungary, anxious to play its part in Europe once again. Much of the research for the book was carried out as a collaborative project between Glasgow School of Art, the University of Glasgow, the Hungarian University of Crafts and Design and the Art History Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This is a gentle and indirect example of history as advocacy.
But reading it has made me reflect less on the politics of Europe than on the language that art historians use for describing relationships between countries, and how full of pitfalls that language is. There are words which come easily to hand for describing such relationships, too easily perhaps.
There is a danger which comes from using the language of nations, from writing sentences where nations or countries are actors, as when 'Poland does this' or 'France does that'. This is the language of international politics and diplomacy. Historians of such things are suspended in thought, when they write, above the map of Europe. The countries below come to seem like counters in a game. In reality of course, it is not the countries which are acting but their governments. But there is a system of representation whereby the action of a few politicians and diplomats is taken as the action of the whole nation. News of this world we find on the front pages of the quality papers. On the back pages we find a similar world, that of sport, where countries are represented by their teams, so that it makes sense to say that, the other day, 'England beat Germany 5-1' in a qualifying round of the World Cup.
But in the world of the arts (the middle pages of the quality newspapers) this language is not so appropriate, for nations are not represented culturally as they are in politics or sport. If there are cultural relations between one country and another, they must be relations between individuals, or at the most organizations. And that is where the danger of exaggeration comes in. For when you are suspended in thought above the nations in this way, it is very tempting to say 'British architects did this' or 'Hungarian designers did that', when you should really be referring to 'a small number of noteworthy but rather off-beat British architects', or to 'young Hungarian designers living in Transylvania'. You take the part for the whole. The cultural historian perhaps feels good writing in this way, writing in the language of mainstream political history. But he misrepresents the subject, sets it out upon too large a stage. The title and subtitle of this book shows both the problem and the solution. Britain and Hungary are big words that catch your attention in the bookshop, partly because they make you think this is a book about politics. But the subtitle, Contacts in Architecture and Design during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century: Essays and Studies, tells you what the book is actually about. 'Contacts' is nicely understated.
Then there is the art-historical notion of 'influence'. In some kinds of art history this is an important concept, and the art historian's job seems to be to describe an object, a body of work, or a phase in the history of art in terms of influences, as if that is what these things are made up of. In such texts, influences are active forces, and the artists or objects that are influenced are passive things, the product of influence. What is more, 'influence' describes relationships, so it plays a very important part in art-historical discussions of relations between countries. If artists in one country influence those in others, as, say, the French Impressionists influenced painters in the United States, England, Germany, Hungary and Scandinavia at the end of the nineteenth century, then Impressionism begins to be thought of as a kind of French export, something transferred from one country which makes it to another which wants it.
(I wonder if, as art history takes its language of nations from politics and diplomacy, it also takes its language of international influence from commerce and marketing.)
There are two things wrong with this version of 'influence'. First, it is too crude. If you write about a living artist in this way, explaining aspects of her work in terms of influences, she will be puzzled by the explanation and probably reject it. This is not simply a matter of the artist's amour propre. It is that the explanation does not correspond to her experience, to the way she works. Artists seem to feed where they will, picking up what they need and what their work needs, almost unconsciously. To have their work 'explained' in terms of influences, either from other artists or from other sources, seems intrusive, crude, disabling.
Secondly, the notion of influence is too much associated with that of similarity. If an American artist paints like the French Impressionists, we assume influence from France and describe her as an Impressionist, bracketing her in our minds with her counterparts in France. But as often as not what an artist needs, where she feeds, the influences she absorbs, are not things like her work but things unlike it. An artist in England may be influenced by German art just because she finds in Germany what she does not have in her own work or in her own country, something different that fills it out. In such a case, we have the almost paradoxical situation that influence between the artists of one country and those of another may be a measure, not of similarity, but of difference. If there is a current of influence from one country to another, that may be a marker of the cultural distance between the two countries, not of their closeness.
I am arguing here for scrupulousness in the description of the relations between countries, for not saying 'Hungary' when we mean 'a particular group of Hungarian artists', and not thinking of influence as if it was some kind of international cultural marketing strategy. But I do not mean to reduce relations between, say, Hungary and Britain to a series of individual, inscrutable encounters. There is a place for generalization in history because generalizations exist. For example, though we should not say 'Britain' too readily, we can often say 'the Hungarian perception of Britain', for such generalizations existed historically and had a part to play. Distance and differences cause us to make generalizations about other countries and their peoples, to create stereotypes. We have a rich and fuzzy notion of our own countrymen and can often mistake them for man-kind in general. But when we think about other nations we think in stereotypes, crisply-drawn generalizations that highlight the differences between ourselves and these particular others. (Such stereotypes are, in my experience, actually strengthened by visits to the other country -provided that you do not stay too long. After six months or so the crispness disappears and your hosts begin to take on a fuzzy, generalized-mankind character.)
Journalism, when it operates between countries, is another source of valid generalization. In modern times the cultural relationships between countries will always be mediated to some extent by the standardized information available in newspapers, journals and television. Thus in northern Europe during the 1890s there was a great increase in the number of illustrated monthly journals dealing with art, architecture and design. Commentary on this usually emphasizes the growth in information that this caused, how much more it was possible to know about other countries as a result. But it also standardized perceptions of other countries, for journalism is printed information and opinion. It is first narrowed by the editorial policies of the journal and then it is distributed-broadcast-throughout its readership. The most widely read of these 1890s journals was probably the British Studio. Not all readers of The Studio thought the same, but by reading it they thought about the same things, and perceptions of British art, architecture and design were to that extent standardized throughout Europe and North America.

What kind of narrative then, emerges from the varied and often learned essays that Gyula Ernyey has edited, and how does it appear in the light of my historiographical musings?
Perhaps the most important event in this story comes near the beginning: the Hungarian Revolution against Habsburg rule, led by Lajos Kossuth in the year of European revolutions, 1848, and cruelly defeated in 1849. Though the revolution failed, the Habsburgs, under pressure from elsewhere, had to negotiate the Compromise of 1867 which gave Hungary its own monarch and a degree of independence within the Austro-Hungarian empire. This was the cradle for Hungary's rapid growth as an industrial and commercial nation during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and for the growth of Budapest as a major European capital. Through all this process of modernization, British society appeared to liberal Hungarians as a political, economic and cultural model: a parliamentary democracy, the home of liberal political thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, the industrial capital of the world. When the 1848-9 revolution failed, Kossuth went into exile in Turkey; in 1851 he travelled to England where he was greeted with the same enthusiasm that greeted Garibaldi ten years later. The roots of Hungarian Anglophilia go back into the eighteenth century, but the enduring image of Britain-a stereotype, of course, of the sort I have mentioned-was that 1848 image of a middle-class radical, a manufacturer and man of business, above all, an enemy of ancient Habsburg rule.
Several essays in this collection show how Hungarian architecture and design in this period was coloured by Anglophilia. (Language lets us down again here. Hungarian relations were with Scotland as well as England, as various essays make abundantly clear, but the word 'Britophilia' does not exist.) József Sisa writes about the fashion for English landscape gardening (which was not, of course, peculiar to Hungary among European nations), and Paul Stirton gives an account of the building of the Széchenyi bridge linking Buda and Pest, by an Englishman, William Tierney Clark, and a Scotsman, Adam Clark, in 1839-49. A topic that might have been touched on-and perhaps will be, since a second volume of essays is said to be in prospect-is the development of the Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, which was established in 1872 with a specifically educational role. Nowadays we think of such collections as offering enjoyment to the general public, but this collection was primarily intended for the instruction of Hungary's decorative artists and artisans, with a view to raising the standard of taste in national production. In this respect, the Museum was modelled (like so many other decorative arts museums in Europe and North America) on the South Kensington Museum in London (now the Victoria and Albert). The Museum was housed at first in part of the National Museum, and then in the old Hall of Exhibitions in Andrássy Avenue. In 1893 Ödön Lechner was asked to design a building specifically to house the collections, and his museum, now seen as one of his masterworks and one of the sights of Budapest, was opened in 1896.
1896 was also the date at which Hungary celebrated its Millennium, and it introduces a new and more crowded phase of this story, when the influence of British architecture and design was perhaps at its strongest in Hungary. The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, which turned away from the industrial world, seeking a sense of simple, personal values in old ways of making, was at the centre of Hungarian interest in British work. A chronological list will illustrate the variety of important contacts:

• 1895 Work by the English artist and designer Walter Crane was shown in the Exhibition Hall (Muýcsarnok) in Budapest. This exhibition of Crane's had been on the road in Germany and Austria since 1893.

• 1896-1898 Sarolta Göcze published her Hungarian translation of John Ruskin's seminal book The Stones of Venice.

• 1897 The journal Magyar Iparmuývészet (Hungarian Applied Art) began publication providing a Hungarian equivalent to The Studio magazine and publishing regular accounts of British work.

• 1898 An exhibition of decorative designs by British art students was held at the Museum of Applied Arts.

• 1900 Walter Crane, by now arguably the best-known decorative artist in Britain since the death of William Morris in l896, held a one-man exhibition of his work at the Museum of Applied Arts, and was taken on a tour of Transylvania, where he made drawings of peasant ornament. Academics, museum directors, journalists and the Minister of Culture, Gyula Wlassics, danced attendance on him.

• 1901 The work of the Pre-Raphaelite painters Edward Burne-Jones, J. E. Millais and William Holman Hunt was exhibited in Budapest.
  The artist Aladár Körösfoýi-Kriesch bought a house in Gödölloý near Budapest. Soon a colony of artists, architects and craftspeople gathered round him, devoting themselves to simple living in the spirit of Ruskin and Tolstoy, and to painting and weaving in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement.

• 1902 A large exhibition of 'British Decorative Art', with a strong element of Scottish work in it, was held at the Museum of Applied Arts.

• 1903 Sarolta Göcze published her essay, "Ruskin's life and message".

• 1905 Körösfoýi-Kriesch published his essay "Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites". The English Arts and Crafts designer C. R. Ashbee came to Budapest to design a town house for the Hungarian MP Zsombor Szász.

• 1907 The work of the artist and book illustrator Aubrey Beardsley was exhibited in Budapest, exerting a strong influence on the work of Lajos Kozma, Gyula Tichy and Attila Sassy.
  Formation of a group of young architects, known as 'The Young', who turned both to the plain domestic work of British Arts and Crafts architects and to the vernacular architecture of Transylvania, in their attempt to create a typically Hungarian architecture.

• 1909 Károly Kós, the leader of 'The Young', began work on a large housing development for Budapest, the Wekerle Colony, modelled on English garden suburbs.

• 1910-1913 Aladár Árkay designed a more exclusive development of houses, modelled on English detached houses for the middle class but decorated with Hungarian motifs, for judges and lawyers in the Buda hills.

This list makes it sound as if British taste was being exported to Hungary on a massive scale at the turn of the century, but to understand it so is to fall into the trap of regarding influence as an active force, an export. We need to look at aspects of the Hungarian situation more closely to make proper sense of it.
In the first place, this Brito-Hungarian narrative needs to be placed in context. The story it tells is part of a whole phenomenon of innovation in the arts which was at work in Europe in the years round 1900. The commonest name for this is Art Nouveau, and this name is now generally used by Hungarian art historians when they are writing in English, to refer to what happened in Hungary round 1900, though there is a native term available that was used at the time, szecesszió. Hungary was very much a part of the rest of Europe in this way, open to many influences. Simplifying a little, one could say that there were two principal currents of influence running through the phenomenon of Art Nouveau. One was that of France and Belgium which played a leading part in the movement of innovation: Art Nouveau started earlier there and the characteristic swirls of French and Belgian work spread more widely throughout Europe than any other motif. The other was the domestic architecture and decorative arts of the British Arts and Crafts movement, led by William Morris; the Germans called this das englische Vorbild, the English example. This was reticent, concerned with ideas about making, materials and function, and not very visible stylistically. Both these currents of influence were present in Hungary, and to keep our sense of British influence in proportion, we need to remember the French and Belgians. In 1900 Jenoý Radisics, Director of the Museum of Applied Arts, went to the International Exhibition in Paris, and bought 128 objects for the instruction of students at the School of Applied Arts. Sixty of them were French.
The appetite of some progressive Hungarian architects and designers for things British seems to have been markedly intellectual, a matter of political ideals and radicalism. This sort of thing goes back to 1848. Thus the inspiring and confusing writings of John Ruskin counted for much, especially among the artists at Gödölloý. 'We are all his disciples,' Körösfoýi-Kriesch wrote, 'whether we read a single line by him or not. He is the source of this entire modern artistic movement... William Morris, who stood at the head of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain because of his social status as a poet, his interest in craftsmanship, and his success in designing and selling decorative art, was actually better known in Hungary as a Socialist and as the author of News from Nowhere. Walter Crane was not a thinker of the order of Ruskin and Morris-intellectually, his writings are bland. But he had the right credentials: he had learned his radicalism as a young man from his master in wood engraving, W. J. Linton, who was an active supporter of Kossuth. And when he visited Transylvania, his words and drawings gave confirmation to the Hungarian fascination with folk art. C. R. Ashbee was known for the social ideals of his workshop, the Guild of Handicraft, founded in 1888 in East London to provide creative work among the urban poor, and his Hungarian friends had similar ideals: his client, Zsombor Szász was a Nationalist MP who read The Studio; another client was Gyula Mandello, an economist and Ruskinite, who represented the Hungarian Economic Association in the progressive Sociological Society; a pupil, Mihály Biró, was later a distinguished revolutionary poster artist; and for a time Ashbee looked after the anarchist Ervin Batthyány in London. It was the intellectual and political ferment which interested Ashbee when he came to Budapest not the architecture, which he thought was rotten. He was thinking, presumably, of the repetitive, neo-Renaissance street façades of modern Pest, the street-fronts of Habsburg-dominated prosperity. For Szász he designed a house to go in Stefánia út which, if it had been built, would immediately have been nicknamed 'the English house', it stood out so, in its plainness and simplicity, among the elaborate stucco-fronted villas of that fashionable street.
Károly Kós and the architects gathered round him, on the other hand, were also interested in the look and feel of British Arts and Crafts work. And that is puzzling at first because their aim was to create a national style of building, and they had found an exemplar for that, a romantic Hungarian homeland in the deep, wooded valleys of Transylvania with their tall church spires and steep and sweeping roofs, their long traditions of embroidery and decorative woodcarving. Why look abroad when you have found so much at home? Why go, indeed, to another country to express your own? The answer is perhaps that this is a good example of the fact that artists sometimes look in other countries for what is unlike their own art, something that fills it out, supplies what it has not got. In this case, the work of British architects like M. H. Baillie Scott and C. F. A. Voysey, which would have seemed both countrified and disciplined, romantic and reticent to Hungarian eyes, may have supplied a kind of straightforwardness, a discipline of functional expression and sensitivity towards materials, that helped Kós and his colleagues to manage the transition from the romance of Transylvania to the disciplines of modern building in a city.
The twentieth century, or that long and painful part of it that stretches from the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 almost to the present day, has not provided so much for Ernyey and his colleagues to write about, for the first half was interrupted by wars and the second by Communism. In a sense the accounts of Hungarian emigrés seem most typical of the period: Marcel Breuer who, though he was only in Britain for two years before he left for the United States, created some important furniture in col-laboration with Jack Pritchard; Ernoy Goldfinger, whom Gavin Stamp describes as 'a formidable figure' in the 1960s and 1970s, though 'somehow detached from the younger generation of modernists'; and the less well-known figure of György Fejér, an industrial designer who helped to introduce fitted kitchens to Britain after the Second World War. Ernyey has written a chapter on design trends in Hungary 1900-1950, but the second half of the century is blank of course, and in no areas of architecture or design were relationships with Britain as close or as fruitful as they had been before the First World War.
But this particular twentieth century has now had a line drawn under it. Central European countries can think of themselves as part of Europe again. The research project which gave rise to this book was created in that spirit, and in his pre-face Ernyey writes:

At the end of a century full of vicissitudes, including two world wars, Europe is being reborn. We hope this book will convey to those who will help shape this Europe in areas of design, applied arts and architecture that Hungary, even during a dark and protracted period of isolation, was European in its culture and had close and multifaceted contacts with Britain.