Art Nouveau Furniture - Hungarian Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau Furniture collection. There are more than twenty cabinets in the high-ranked collection of the House of Hungarian Art Nouveau and their number is expanding. The Art Nouveau is uniform as a movement, but the style varies in time and from country to country, so the museum’s collection is very varied. We picked a few pieces to present in more detail.

Arts and Crafts.
The workshops and artists of the Monarchy at the beginning were glancing towards England, where beside the success of the industrialization, to compensate, to counterbalance, even to turn against the Victorian Neo-Styles the Arts and Crafts opened the way for the up to the present day continued modern industry design.

Art Nouveau.
The triumph of the new style was brought by the Paris World Fair in 1900, where more than 1,500 Hungarian artists presented their products. Among them Wigand Ede, who is presented below, won there the silver medal in Art Nouveau furniture.

The Hungarian folk style.
Beside their international relations the artists and craftsmen sought and developed the style called modern in the media of the era: the Hungarian Art Nouveau. This style used the simpler forms, often taken from the life of peasants in harmony with contemporary ethnographic collections (Plain (Alföld), Transylvania, etc) and the national aspirations.

Art and Crafts - Artists and craftsmen together

Plant forms.
It is frequent, in times of changing
styles that with a "return to nature"
slogan, artists draw inspiration from nature, and notice new sides of it.This was the case in Secession, where the many plant forms were literally blooming and making waves.

Thék Endre
was the founder of the Hungarian furniture industry. His cabinet can be seen in the House of Hungarian Art Nouveau (Pine, mahogany paneling). After a study abroad (Vienna, Munich, Paris) in 1872 opened his own workshop, which later became the largest furniture factory.

He constructed Art Nouveau furniture after 1900, working with the painter-designer Joseph Rippl-Rónai.

PHOTO GALLERY

Art Nouveau Furniture - Magyar Szecesszió Háza

Art Nouveau Furniture
The fashion of bold lines, imaginative,
sometimes seductively undulating
new style has been successful throughout
Europe. These artists where brilliant
talented personalities. The furnitures of the Belgian Horta and Hancar, the French Gallé and Majorelle where copied and individualized by many craftsmen.
In 1900, half of the Paris World's Fair pavilions were extravagant Art Nouveau style in their architecture and interior furnishings. The success continued. Many exhibitions in several countries were organized in the new style.

But after 1905 when economic growth is slackening, the motivation shrinked. Only the wealthy middle class was able to buy the furniture. Production remained at the level of manual processing (the renewal processing today is also manual).

PHOTO GALLERY

Wigand Ede.
He studies villages in Transylvania and as a sign of respect adopts the Toroczkai name. Initially he worked at the building of the Parliament, and took part in many exhibitions. He is the internationally best-known Hungarian furniture designer.

Member in Gödöllő Artist Company since 1904, working with Kőrösfői Kriesch Aladár. As a furniture designer he uses less of the folk patterns but rather the folk structures and functions.

The House of Hungarian Art Nouveau presents one table and two chairs from the few furniture pieces left from him. In this picture, you can see the two chairs. Unfortunately, the majority of furniture survived only in drawings and photos.

PHOTO GALLERY

J.J.Kohn
Jacob & Josef Kohn, was a renowned furniture and interior design firm of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, From the 1860s, with a new procedure they drew up many curved wooden furniture. They carried out the decoration of whole coffee houses with modern industrial procedures.

The members of Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop - a grouping of the Austrian Art Nouveau) designed furniture for the Kohn company and won prizes at international exhibitions from the early 1900s.

The Austrian Secession was always more moderate, sober and with cleaner lines. The members of Wiener Werkstätte, Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, Koloman Moser, Adolf Loos emphasized the function of the objects and instead of the French Art Nouveau decoration style they were using a more settled style and precious materials. These simpler and more graceful forms still allowed the possibility of machine processing.

This is how European Art Deco was born from the work of the above architects and furniture designers. These functional and attractive pieces of furniture are available for anyone’s use in the Café of the Magyar Szecesszió Háza.