Hungarian Nationalism, Gottfried Semper, and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art

Author(s): Rebecca Houze
Source: Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring–Summer 2009), pp. 7-38
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bard Graduate Center
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Hungarian Nationalism, Gottfried Semper, REBECCA HOUZE

and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art

The Iparművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Applied Art) is often under-

stood as one of the most striking examples of Hungarian Art Nouveau
(Fig. 1). Built in 1896 by the architects Ödön Lechner (1845-1914) and
Gyula Pártos (1845-1916) as part of the Millennial Celebrations in
Budapest, the museum was a national monument and an evocative
symbol of Hungary’s new emphasis on the applied arts as a means of
promoting a national culture. Textiles and ceramics were at the center of
the Hungarian applied arts movement at the turn of the nineteenth to
the twentieth century and were seen as the key to integrating Hungary’s
native folk culture with its modern industrial identity. Lechner made his
own interpretation of this larger cultural movement in the building’s
vibrant dress—its cladding of glazed ceramic tiles with colorful patterns
derived from the peasant embroideries of traditional Hungarian folk
costume. Equally important to the conception of the museum were the
theories of the German architect and art historian Gottfried Semper
(1803-1879), who argued that textiles and ceramics were the primordial
fields of art-making and were, furthermore, the precursors to building
itself. Semper’s theories were mirrored in the decision of the Iparmű-
vészeti Múzeum director Ferenc Pulzsky to focus on textiles and ceramics
as the core of the new collections. Lechner’s conception of the museum’s
ornament as a reflection of the evolution of a national Hungarian style
is a crucial link between the museum’s program and its design. The
museum’s ornamentation, planning, and conceptual origins all stemmed
from Semper’s theoretical understanding of the relationship between
textiles and architecture. The museum’s ornate organic ornament is thus
more aptly understood as reflecting the complex intellectual debates over
the meaning and form of Hungarian folk art than the broader and more
purely aesthetic notion of Art Nouveau.

The Museum Building’s Stylistic Sources

As the visitor approaches the Iparművészeti Múzeum today, its
bright green and yellow tiled roof stands out against the busy backdrop of

Rebecca Houze is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Northern Illinois
University, DeKalb.

Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009 7

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8 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

Pest, which was rapidly developed in the late nineteenth century with
wide avenues and bourgeois apartment blocks.1 The massive building,
which eventually accommodated both the museum and its affiliated
school, wraps around a trapezoidal city block (Fig. 2). Its asymmetrical
wings, used for storage galleries, archives, and library, embrace the
interior exhibition hall, which is entered from the street by passing
through an extraordinary foyer, decorated in richly colored ceramic tiles
(Figs. 3-4). Most of the building’s surface is covered in buff-colored brick;
its piers and windows are framed in dark gray stone. Yellow ceramic tile
panels, covered with red and green flowers and butterflies, are set spar-
ingly into the façade to emphasize the repeating pattern of the arched
windows (Fig. 5).
Despite its size, the building is not imposing. In its height and the
flatness of its façade the Museum is harmonious with the neighboring
buildings along the Üllői út (avenue), a busy thoroughfare that runs
southeast, away from the Danube and the inner ring of Pest. The
museum, located near the intersection of the Üllői út and the Jozsef körút
(boulevard), lies just outside many of the city’s most notable cultural and
civic buildings of the nineteenth century, including the Opera and
Parliament. The adjacent Kálvin tér (square) was the site of Budapest’s
first horse-drawn streetcars, introduced in 1866. These were replaced
with electric tramlines beginning in 1887, a few years after the grand
Keleti train station to the northeast was completed. With the rise of
modern transportation and heavy factory production in Pest in the late
nineteenth century, the city became a dense and increasingly congested
modern space. Until the late 1890s, Budapest architects tended to favor
romantic Gothic revivals with exotic references, as well as Neo-Renais-
sance designs. By the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century
many had adopted Art Nouveau, which was popularized in modern
applied arts journals and international exhibitions abroad. The more
innovative stylistic elements of the Iparművészeti Múzeum have been
traditionally attributed to Lechner, who was a strong supporter of the
new movement in both his writings and buildings after 1896, when he
and Pártos dissolved their partnership. The design for the new Iparmű-
vészeti Múzeum represents a transitional style that began to break away
from many architectural conventions of the period. It responded in a
sophisticated fashion to the complex urban fabric of Pest, with its
eclectic range of building styles and particular social and cultural needs.
The exterior tiles for the new museum were produced by the Zsolnay
Company, which had gained international celebrity in the second half of
the nineteenth century for its decorative porcelain ware and fireproof

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 9

pyrogranite—architectural ceramics used throughout Hungary for build- FIGURE 1

ing rooftops and exteriors. In his memoir, Lechner wrote that his practice Ödön Lechner and Gyula Pártos,
Iparművészeti Múzeum, Budapest, 1893-
had been particularly influenced by his own family’s brick manufactory,
1896. Photo: Author.
which produced decorative ceramics for many building exteriors, includ-
ing Budapest’s Great Synagogue, executed in 1854-1859 by Frigyes Feszl
and Ludwig Förster. Lechner was particularly attracted to colorful glazed
ceramics. For him, they were a creative medium with deep roots in
traditional Hungarian folk art, which also had the potential of expressing
a true Hungarian modern style.2 Glazed ceramics were not only fireproof
but also easy to keep clean. Less porous than stone or brick, they could
be easily washed, and were especially suitable for the new sooty, urban,
industrial environment of Pest. The Thonet House, 1888-1889, a com-
mercial apartment building in the Váci utca (street) designed by Lechner

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10 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

FIGURE 2
Aerial view of Iparművészeti Múzeum.
Photo: Iparművészeti Múzeum, Budapest.
and Pártos with an innovative cast-iron frame, similarly announced its
modernity through its cladding of vivid blue Zsolnay tiles.3
Jenö Radisics, the museum’s second director, reflected on Lechner’s
distinctive decoration: “The façade speaks to us in a language that
expresses that the modern art of our country is particularly Hungarian; its

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 11

power is inspired by our own artistic past; it proudly proclaims that

Hungarian decorative art engages us in a new vision and provides us the
opportunity to affirm its eminent qualities.”4 Indeed, Radisics, a cham-
pion of Hungarian modernism, speculated that Lechner’s ceramic clad-
ding may actually have had a native Hungarian precedent in the fif-
teenth-century castle of King Matthias Corvinus across the river, in
Buda, where fragments of similar architectural tiles had recently been
discovered.5
Lechner and Pártos won the competition to design the museum in
1890 with their theme, “Go East Hungarian.”6 The exotic decorative
patterns on the museum walls, and the scalloped arches of the interior
loggias, are reminiscent of Persian, Hindu, and Turkish designs. They
echo the Indian art and Oriental ceramics that Lechner encountered on
his visit of 1889-1890 to the new South Kensington Museum in Lon-
don.7 Although the Budapest museum is of course not literally con-
structed of cloth, it incorporates an imaginative fantasy of Oriental
architecture in the tentlike glass canopy suspended over the inner court
and the tapestry-like tiled roof.8 This aspect of the building also alludes
to the tent dwellings of ancient Central Asian nomads, and the remnants
of such architecture in rural Hungarian building styles.9 Lechner was
probably influenced by the designs of Julia and Teréz Zsolnay, daughters
of Vilmos Zsolnay, the company’s founder, who had similarly conflated
Eastern and native Hungarian decorative patterns in their ceramics of
the 1870s and 1880s (Fig. 6). The Zsolnay sisters’ “Persian” patterns were
inspired by the Iznik ceramics of Turkey, brought to Hungary by the
Ottomans during the Turkish occupation of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, patterns evoking the abstracted tulip and pomegranate
forms in traditional Hungarian folk art.
Many have also observed that the stylized floral motifs on the
exterior façade and interior walls (now whitewashed) of the museum are
similar to the ornamentation of certain traditional Hungarian costumes,
such as the suba, or embroidered sheepskin cloak, and the cifraszűr, a
fancy felt “frieze” coat from the Great Plain region (Fig. 7). (In the
nineteenth century, the town of Debrecen was the tailoring center for
cifraszűr production.) Just like the architectural framing of the museum’s
façade, the rectangular cloth panels of the cifraszűr, sewn together to
shape the sleeves, front, and back of the coat, are articulated with
decoration around the seams, forming windows that showcase vivid,
friezelike, embroidered and appliquéd patterns in red and green against a
neutral felt ground. Indeed, Lechner’s new “language of form” was part of
a widespread interest in folk art among Hungarian artists, art historians,

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12 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

FIGURE 3
Detail of ceramic ornament inside foyer of
Iparművészeti Múzeum. Photo: Author.

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 13

FIGURE 4
Interior of exhibition hall of Iparművészeti
Múzeum. Photo: Author.

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14 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

FIGURE 5
Detail of façade of Iparművészeti Múzeum.
Photo: Author.

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 15

and ethnographers, who believed that they could discover evidence of an

authentic Magyar spirit with roots in Hindu, Persian, and ancient Sas-
sanian decorative motifs. These designs presumably had been brought to
Europe in the ninth century by nomadic Central Asian tribes, from
which the Hungarians descended. The ethnographer József Huszka was at
the forefront of this search for Magyar ethnic roots in the visual art of
India and Persia, and his ideas were published in many leading Hungar-
ian art journals in the late nineteenth century (Fig. 8).10 In addition to
his interest in the embroidered motifs of shepherd’s cloaks from Hunga-
ry’s Great Plain, Huszka was particularly drawn to the decorative em-
broidery and painted motifs of the folk costume and architecture of
Kalotaszeg in his native Transylvania. As a result of Huszka’s enthusiasm
for the region, publicized in his many sketches, books, and essays, a
generation of modern artists, architects, and designers continued to
search for their own stylistic identities in the ancient vocabulary of
Transylvanian folk art.11

Hungarian Nationalism
Investigations into Magyar ethnicity were politically motivated, as
they were part of a cultural effort to define Hungarian national identity
during the period of the Dual Monarchy. This rule began with the
Compromise of 1867, in which Austria granted semisovereign status to
the Magyar portion of the empire, and it ended in 1918 after World War
I. Although technically still under the “protection” of the Habsburg
emperor Franz Josef via the imperial military and bank, Hungary estab-
lished its own independent administrative infrastructure, with separate
Parliament and ministries, and strove to build an industrial economy that
could compete with Austria’s. As early as the reform period of the 1840s,
Hungarian nationalists, including István Széchenyi, had held up native
ceramics manufactories at Herend, Munkács, and Batiz as evidence that
a commercially viable and aesthetically unique form of Hungarian ap-
plied art could exist.12 The cifraszűr itself was a subversive political
symbol. Habsburg sumptuary laws had outlawed the garment in the
eighteenth century, but later, in defiance, many anti-Habsburg revolu-
tionaries, including the political reformer Lajos Kossuth, began to wear
the szűr, which quickly became associated with Hungarian nationalism.
Lechner’s famous promise “A Hungarian language of form does not yet
exist, but it will!” was an ideological battle cry based on Széchenyi’s
message, “Many think Hungary has been; I like to believe she will be!”13

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16 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

FIGURE 6 Before Huszka and Lechner began their ethnographic explorations,

Engraving of ceramic dish designed by Júlia
Zsolnay and produced c. 1870- c. 1880 by
Zsolnay Manufactory, Pécs, Hungary. From
Die Österreichisch-Ungarische Monarchie in
Wort und Bild, vol. 5 (Vienna, 1888), 503.
Photo: University of Chicago Libraries.
FIGURE 7
Suba and szűr, felt shepherd’s cloaks. From
Jǒzsef Huszka, “A Debreczeni Czifra Szűr”
(The fancy shepherd’s cloaks of Debrecen),
Művészi Ipar 1 (1885-1886): 85-91. Photo:
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Vienna.
the Hungarian art historians Imre Henszlmann (1813-1888) and Arnold
Ipolyi (1823-1886) had awakened an interest in national art through
their research into and preservation of cultural treasures— especially
from the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods. Henszlmann, al-
though academically trained in medicine, was tutored in Vienna along-
side Rudolph Eitelberger, who would later become the first director of the
Austrian Museum for Art and Industry. In the 1840s, Henszlmann
became increasingly interested in the study and preservation of historic
monuments in Hungary, especially the restoration of the Gothic cathe-
dral in Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia), the city in which he was born. He
provided a plan for the building’s new glazed tile roof, completed in 1860:
it is a design that underlines the connections between the geometric
rooftop patterns of the Iparművészeti Múzeum and those of other Gothic
and Gothic Revival churches throughout Austria and Hungary.14 Ipolyi,
a Catholic bishop with an academic background in theology, was particu-
larly interested in Hungary’s folk tradition and its spiritual sources. He
strongly supported the Neo-Gothic direction in Hungarian architecture in

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 17

the late nineteenth century, which reached its culmination in the designs for
Imre Steindl’s (1839-1902) new Parliament building in Budapest. The
building’s ornamental scheme was based on historical studies of medieval
Hungarian decorative arts. Members of the Hungarian clergy, whose per-
sonal collections of ecclesiastical vestments and decorative church objects
supported the idea of a rich and uniquely Magyar aesthetic tradition and
sensibility, were also staunch proponents of the national revival in the arts.15
Historicism was the dominant mode of architecture and industrial
art in both Vienna and Budapest in the late nineteenth century, but it
was inflected differently in each capital. The eclectic buildings along
FIGURE 8
Vienna’s Ringstraße drew on Classical and Gothic traditions, but it was
Detail of traditional suba embroidery. From
ultimately the style of the Italian Renaissance, flavored with elements of
Huszka, “A Debreczeni Czifra Szűr,” color
Habsburg Baroque, that characterized the aesthetic, cultural, and intel- pl., n.p. Photo: Österreichische
lectual aspirations of the city. Rudolf Eitelberger favored the clear and Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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18 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

rational forms of Renaissance architecture and the interior decoration of

August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll’s Staatsoper,
1861-1869. The popular style was the guiding principle behind Heinrich
Ferstel’s design of the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry, 1868-1871,
as well as for Gottfried Semper and Karl Hasenauer’s twin Art History
and Natural History Museums, 1872-1881, and their Burgtheater, 1874-
1888. Stereotypes at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century
described Vienna and the Viennese character as light and gay. This
identification of the city with “waltzes and pastries” was inextricable from
its architecture. Forming the unmistakable urban landscape of this cap-
ital of art and music were the showy buildings of the Ringstraße and the
cafés in the inner city, as well as the delicate, gilded, pale yellow Rococo
palaces and churches of the eighteenth century, from the era of Maria
Theresa, and the simple white Biedermeier buildings of the early nine-
teenth century.
Budapest, by contrast, is bigger, grander, but also darker and more
looming. Enormous bridges span the Danube and link the medieval city
of Buda, with its castle perched on the hill, to the sprawling industrial
expanse of nineteenth-century Pest. Gothic and early Renaissance styles,
associated with Hungary before it came under Habsburg rule in the
fifteenth century, had a much greater role in Budapest than in Vienna.
In the Hungarian capital, these architectural traditions were intimately
and romantically linked to the legendary events of the nation’s long
history.
Lechner and Pártos were heirs to the work of Frigyes Feszl, whose
Romantic 1859 design of the Vigadó (Concert Hall) in Pest featured
oversized renderings in stone of the ornamental cord (vitézkötés) used to
embellish traditional Hungarian court dress (Fig. 9), and whose designs
with Ludwig Förster for the Great Synagogue also drew on exotic themes
with Gothic and Moorish associations.16 Late medieval and Renaissance
styles were particularly beloved in Budapest, as they signified the “golden
age” of Hungarian history, represented by the enlightened King Matthias
Corvinus, known for establishing one of the largest libraries in Europe,
his extensive patronage of the arts, and his early Renaissance renovations
to the royal castle on the Buda Hill. Miklós Ybl’s Opera House, 1884, and
Imre Steindl’s new Parliament building, 1884-1902, which quickly be-
came a symbol of Hungary’s national heritage, exemplified the Hungar-
ian Renaissance and Gothic Revival styles. Lechner and Pártos experi-
mented with Neo-Renaissance architecture as well, seen, for example, in
their 1883 design of apartment buildings for the Hungarian Railroad

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 19

Pension Fund (today the Drechsler Palace), which directly face and
converse with Ybl’s Opera House across the fashionable Andrassy út.
Hungary’s mythic past was memorialized in monumental form at the
1896 Millennial Celebrations with a pastiche re-creation in Budapest’s
Városliget (Central Park) of the country’s most famous historic buildings.
At the center of the complex was a replica of the fifteenth-century
Transylvanian Vajdahunyad Castle (Fig. 10), residence of János Hu-
nyadi, one of Hungary’s most beloved leaders and father of King Mat-
thias.17 The castle, with its tall square spires, evoked the rural church
architecture of Transylvania’s Székely people, who held a special place in
the Hungarian imagination. Many believed that these mountain inhab-
itants, isolated for centuries and relatively untouched by foreign domi-
nation, still possessed spiritual traces of the original Central Asian
tribesmen from whom they descended. The replica of the castle was so
popular that it was recreated for the Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle as
the Hungarian national pavilion, where it received critical acclaim for its
sensational representation of Hungary’s “bloody past” in Romantic mu-
rals and its lavish display of weaponry (Fig. 11). The Millennial Monu-
ment on Heroes’ Square (Fig. 12), adjacent to the castle complex in the
Városliget, firmly fixed the memory of the nation in a narrative of a
feudal and militaristic past, in which the Eastern barbarian warriors were
slowly civilized, Westernized, and Christianized, all the while maintain-
ing their true character as strong and passionate fighting horsemen. At
the center of the movement, Prince Árpád on horseback leads his fellow
Magyar warriors, representing the seven conquering tribes who settled in
the Carpathian basin in 896. Encircling the central group of horsemen,
enormous sculptures depict over a dozen leaders in sumptuous regalia,
from St. Stephen, János Hunyadi, and Matthias Corvinus to the revo-
lutionary Lajos Kossuth, whose dress also reflects elements of the original
tribesmen’s costume.
By contrast, the exhibitions of modern Hungarian decorative arts at
the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle were received with more ambiv-
alence by the general public, as they presented a much less comprehen-
sible picture of Hungarian identity. Zoltán Bálint and Lajos Jámbor’s
peculiar framework for the Hungarian installation of decorative arts in
Paris, loosely modeled on the idiom of the Iparművészeti Múzeum,
introduced this specifically “Hungarian” style of modern design to the
international community. The Iparművészeti Múzeum is less fluid in its
form and ornamental style than some of Lechner’s later buildings in
Budapest, such as the Geological Institute, 1898-1899, the Postal Savings
Bank, 1900-1901, and the Sipeki-Balász villa in Hermina utca, 1905-

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20 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

1906. The more pronounced emphasis on smooth volumes and abstract,

organic line in these buildings relates them to the international Art
Nouveau movement that blossomed at the turn of the century. The new
museum was experimental. It represented Lechner’s sense that a truly
Hungarian native modern style would emerge, but had not yet been fully
articulated.
Lechner and Pártos’s combination of stylistic elements can be un-
derstood as a form of bricolage—a strategy that enabled them to make a
building that bridged the old and the new, as well as to unify very
different manifestations of Hungarian styles. The rooftop design, while
clearly a version of the tiled rooftops of many of Central Europe’s
architectural landmarks, also referred to traditional Hungarian textiles.
Unlike the regionally specific (and politically loaded) patterns of the
cifraszűr, however, or the folk costumes of Kalotaszeg evoked by the
ornamentation of the building’s façade, the geometric patterns of the
rooftop resembled more generalized forms of weaving or cross-stitch
embroidery found throughout Hungarian and Romanian lands (Fig. 13).
It is quite possible that Lechner and Pártos were making a direct refer-
ence to these ubiquitous fabrics, collected before Huszka’s revival of
interest in Kalotaszeg, as they were at the center of Hungary’s exhibits at
the 1873 Wiener Weltausstellung. The Hungarian Parliament had pro-

FIGURE 9
Hungarian man’s gala costume, c. 1860-
1870, detail of vitézkötés on tunic,
traditionally worn beneath a heavy coat.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 21

vided a large grant to purchase the four thousand samples of Hungarian FIGURE 10
Ignác Alpár, replica in Budapest of
and Romanian folk embroideries and weaving collected by Florian Franz
Vajdahunyad Castle, Transylvania, 1896.
[Flóris] Rómer, which had been highly praised at the 1873 World’s Fair.
Photo: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum,
As the goal of the new museum was to illuminate the relationship Budapest.
between traditional crafts and modern Hungarian applied arts, the tex-
tiles provided its material and conceptual foundation.18
Lechner’s references to traditional textiles in the building’s decora-
tive scheme were complex and multivalent. He combined patterns de-
rived from diverse regional forms of needlework and costume with
allusions to the Central Asian origins of the Magyar people, and trans-
lated his narrative of Hungarian history into the medium of ceramic
ornament—a medium that linked Hungary’s ancient roots to its modern,
industrialized present.19 The museum building functions linguistically,
mapping a story of the Hungarian spirit through space and time with
visual symbols. It was quite common at the turn of the nineteenth to the

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22 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009
FIGURE 11
Hussar (Hungarian horseman). From Das
Österreichische-Ungarische Monarchie in Wort
und Bild, vol. 5: 221. Photo: University of
Chicago Libraries.
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twentieth century for critics to describe architecture in terms of “lan-
guage”—as a verbal text that could be read and interpreted by the viewer.
In the case of the Iparművészeti Múzeum, this language was specifically
a language of “dress.”20 After his visit to the 1873 Wiener Weltausstel-
lung, Rómer described the fanciful traditional costumes from throughout
Austria-Hungary as a medium for communication, especially as seen on
Viennese trains, where it was possible to “read” a fellow passenger’s
ethnicity and place of geographical origin. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, even the smallest regions of Austria-Hungary
were signified by the traditional folk costume worn by its inhabitants.
“National costume” began to function as a visual map for those living in
the capitals of the Dual Monarchy during a period of increasing mod-
ernization and industrialization, in which ethnic and national identities
and allegiances were particularly complex and often confusing.21
The Habsburg court was renowned for its fashionability, which
reached a peak during the reign of Emperor Franz Josef and his wife,
Empress Elizabeth. Because of the great diversity of costume styles
throughout Central Europe, it had long been the custom in Vienna to
appear at court in the gala dress of one’s own native region. The
Hungarian “hussar” costume was the most handsome, exotic, and luxu-
rious form of dress at court. Evolved from the military dress of a nomadic
group of Hungarian horsemen who helped defend King Matthias against
Turkish invaders in the fifteenth century, the hussar’s dress had a kinship
to that of Prince Árpád and his fellow warriors. Because of the success of
the Hussars against the Turks, the hussar costume remained a fashionable
form of court dress into the sixteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth
century, nationalist reformers and politicians, including Lajos Kossuth
and the first Prime Minister of Hungary, Count Gyula Andrássy, also
wore this native dress.
Lechner envisioned costume—specifically the fancy aristocratic cos-
tumes worn at court—as a model for architectural innovation.
Take, for example, Hungarian gala dress. It had its origins in the
primitive language of form of our people and in the course of time
it has become such an exquisite form of dress that it satisfies a
certain demand not only in Hungary but in the clothing of all
cultured nations of the world. Even the Japanese hussars, when
searching for a special uniform, borrowed Hungarian decorative
motifs. Hungarian festive dress is a mature, developed, generally
accepted concept although it originates from simple forms which
other disciplines (architecture, painting and arts and crafts) could
well develop.22
 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 23

The museum’s director Radisics, who supported Lechner’s mission, also

felt it was puzzling that Hungarians should wear such extravagant gala
dress and yet live in “whitewashed rooms,” that is, among furnishings
that lacked a clear stylistic identity or a clearly developed aesthetic with
origins in traditional forms of folk art.23
Apropos of the decorative scheme of the building, Lechner’s ceramic
decoration calls to mind the traditional embroidered patterns of the
cifraszűr and other peasant clothing worn in Transylvania, or Hungary’s
Great Plain. Yet, for the architect, it was the Hungarian gala dress, a
Western aristocratic fashion derived from Eastern tribal costume, that
provided the best model for his new architecture. The building itself may
be read as an example of Western architecture, appropriate for appear-
ance at court, so to speak, based on the traditional vocabulary of
FIGURE 12
civilized, Christian Europe. The tripartite articulation of the façade, with György Zala, Millennium Monument on
more heavily rusticated treatment at the lower level, recalls the tradi- Heroes’ Square, Budapest, 1896. Photo:
tional form of the Italian High Renaissance palazzo. The pointed stone Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, Budapest.

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24 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

FIGURE 13
Belt ornament from Naszód, woven cotton,
Romanian work, purchased from 1873
Wiener Weltausstellung by Iparművészeti
Múzeum, Budapest. Color pl. by textile
designer Friedrich Fischbach, in Carl
[Károly] von Pulszky, Ornamente der
Hausindustrie Ungarn’s (Budapest, 1878),
pl. 14 B. Photo: University of Chicago
Libraries.
arches around the windows and the rooftop decoration reflect the late
nineteenth-century Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts movements.
While the interior treatment of the walls may refer to Persian or Hindu
building styles, the encircling structure of the building overall is akin to
that of an ancient Assyrian palace. The most distinctive feature of the
building’s silhouette is the shape of the tall central dome, surmounted by
a smaller ornamental cupola. Scholars have noted that the larger dome
is similar to the shape of the ancient Sassanian or traditional medieval
hussar’s helmet, as worn by Prince Árpád, while the cupola may resemble
St. Stephen’s crown—a national treasure and a symbol of the nation’s
conversion to Christianity.24 In this sense, Lechner and Pártos transform
Hungary’s Eastern past into its Western present. The dome of the
Iparművészeti Múzeum reflects as well the Neo-Renaissance dome of the
city’s most visible architectural landmark, St. Stephen’s Basilica, a mon-
ument to Hungary’s first Christian king.

Semper’s Influence
Just as Radisics described the façade of Lechner’s new building as
“speaking in an expressive language,” Gottfried Semper had understood

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 25

architecture as a linguistic system, whose visual elements combine and

evolve over time and communicate in a multitude of cultural, historical,
and even spiritual ways.25 Semper’s theory of architecture’s origins in the
decorative arts played a key role in the institutionalization of the applied
arts in Austria-Hungary. Having designed a number of installations at
the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, Semper wrote his influential
treatise, Science, Industry and Art, 1852, in response to the aesthetic
dilemma of England’s rapid industrialization. At the exhibition, he
observed endless permutations of traditional crafts, imitated with new
materials and technology, including ornate furniture and decorative
objects made of cast iron, papier-mâché, and gutta-percha. In these new
objects, artistic style had been perverted, he believed. Technology had
erased the memory of primitive crafts, such as weaving and pottery, and
their symbolic forms. This was especially evident because the hand-
crafted imports from the British colonies abroad, such as woven and
embroidered textiles from India, appeared to possess a great deal more
artistic integrity than England’s modern applied arts.26
Semper envisioned a reform in design education that would involve
learning crafts while following good-quality historical models, which he
outlined in his 1852 manuscript “Ideales Museum für Metallotechnik.”
The ideal design museum, Semper indicated in that manuscript, should
be organized thematically around the four primary elements of architec-
ture: weaving, pottery, carpentry, and masonry. The act of building,
according to Semper’s theory, was founded on these basic media, because
they emerged from the earliest place of social gathering—the hearth. The
ceramic hearth itself had to rest on a stone mound. A joined roof and
wickerwork walls covered and enclosed the surrounding space.27 Sem-
per’s organizational scheme served as the framework for all three of
Europe’s first museums of applied art, the South Kensington Museum in
London, 1857, the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry in Vienna,
1864, and the Hungarian Museum of Applied Art in Budapest, 1874, the
last of which was established nearly two decades before it found its
ultimate home in Lechner’s new building. Each of these museums divided
its collections by media, with departments of textiles, lacquer, enamel,
mosaic, leather, glass, ceramics, wood, iron, bronze, gold, precious stones,
and so forth, in order to illuminate Semper’s theory of the transformation
of artistic style based on media and technique.28 Ferenc Pulszky and
others affiliated with the Society for Applied Arts believed like Semper
that one of the new museum’s most important goals was to improve and
foster a competitive applied arts industry in Hungary. Because Pulszky
and Semper were both exiled revolutionaries in London in 1848, some

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26 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

have even suggested that it is possible, if not likely, that the two may
have met during that period.29
While each of these four elements was ostensibly an equivalent pillar
of architecture, for Semper textiles had the greatest cosmic significance.
His fullest, and yet still incomplete, articulation of this architectural
theory was finally published in the two-volume compendium Style in the
Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, 1860-1863. The three
hundred-page section on textiles constitutes Semper’s most extensive
analysis of a single material, and is the part of the book that he chose to
write first. It is here that he formulated his influential Bekleidungsprinzip
(Principle of Dress), which states that a building’s communicative ca-
pacity lies in its decorative cladding. This volume is a dizzying effort to
understand the nearly infinite ways in which textiles are fabricated and
used, as well as the way in which their outward expression evolved from
the architectural styles of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and
Rome, through Byzantium and the early Christian era, to the early
modern period of the Renaissance.
Semper begins his analysis of the textile’s functional properties by
distinguishing among the “band,” the “cover,” and the “seam.” “The
cover’s purpose,” he writes, “is the opposite to that of binding. Everything
closed, protected, enclosed, enveloped, and covered presents itself as
unified, as a collective; whereas everything bound reveals itself as artic-
ulated, as a plurality.”30 Each of these treatments of the textile—whether
using the expanse of its flat surface or joining two surfaces together— had
a symbolic meaning. Seam embroidery, Semper believed, “forms the
actual material basis for all surface ornamentation.”31 Lechner’s building,
with its emphasis on the seam as the source of surface ornament, is a
visual expression of Semper’s idea. The floral motifs, so similar to the
embroidered patterns of cifraszűr, are actually secondary to the ornamen-
tation of the building piers. The building stands out visually not so much
because of the floral decorations, which can only be seen on closer
inspection, but as a result of the marked contrast between the stripes of
dark gray stone piers and the lighter, neutral brick surface between them.
The seam, for Semper, had primeval, mystical significance, especially in
the form of the knot: “The sacred knot is chaos itself; a complex,
elaborate, self-devouring tangle of serpents from which arise all ‘struc-
turally active’ ornamental forms, and into which they irrevocably return
after the cycle of civilization has been completed.”32 This recalls Feszl’s
knotlike ornamentation of the Vigadó, which mimics the tangled inter-
lace form of the braided vitézkötés.

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 27

Among the earliest built structures, Semper wrote, were spaces

divided by hanging mats of woven grasses, as well as temporary festival
tents with cloth canopies, decorated with ribbons and garlands of flowers
and branches. The primary function of the wall was significatory—
orienting the viewer in space. As architecture necessitated sturdier,
load-bearing walls, they were often covered with woven carpets or
tapestries. The spatial delineations—the vertical and horizontal desig-
nations of borders, bands, and hems—were translated into walls, floors,
and ceilings in such a way as to guide the viewer through the built space.
Semper strongly objected to the inappropriate use of directional orna-
ment, such vertical bands on flags (which are meant to flutter horizon-
tally in the wind), or the Victorian fashion of draping Indian scarves over
the shoulders, rather than gathering them in folds, which distorted the
original ornamental motifs, or of decorating tile floors with naturalistic
images, which gave occupants the uncanny sensation of not knowing
where to step in crossing a room. All decorative wall treatments—stucco,
mosaic, paint, or the wicker-like patterns of brick— evoked the symbolic
form of these original textile “dressings.”
Semper saw the clearest historical evidence of the transformation of
textile motifs in ancient Assyrian tile work. In fragments of glazed
architectural ceramics from Babylon and Khorsabad, Semper recognized
the remnants of colorful tapestries, with their vivid black borders and
stylized figural, animal, and vegetal motifs, tapestries that, according to
historical accounts, were hung on palace walls for victory celebrations
and imperial ceremonial processions. The stone, ceramic tile, and later
painted representations of these ceramic wall treatments recreated the
festival adornments in monumental form.33 The use of textile treatments
for festival purposes was at the center of Semper’s theory of the devel-
opment of artistic style over time. From his point of view, the urge to
construct a space was less based on a rudimentary need for shelter than
on a primal human impulse to play with decoration. People had always
ornamented themselves—with wreaths and jewelry—the symbolic pur-
pose of which was to anchor the human body comprehensibly within the
universe.34 In his theory, architectural dress mediates between building
and spectator just as clothing mediates between the individual body and
the wearer’s environment.
Toward the end of his volume on textiles, Semper digresses dramat-
ically, in order to make a connection between the most apparent appli-
cation of textiles, for clothing the human body, and his theory that, “the
principle of dressing has greatly influenced style in architecture and in
the other arts at all times and among all peoples.” Here he asserts that the

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28 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

oldest principle of architecture is the “masking of reality in the arts.”35

The goal of architectural dressing is simultaneously to express a building’s
ritual meaning and to conceal its inner structure. The once-colorful
painted surfaces of ancient Greek sculpture and buildings represented, for
Semper, the most dematerialized of architectural dressings. Again, he
turned to classical antiquity for his model of theatrical disguise—the
mask. It is not surprising that Semper’s most influential buildings include
the Dresden Opera House, first built 1838, rebuilt 1871—the site of
many performance debuts for his friend Richard Wagner—as well as the
imperial Burgtheater in Vienna, 1874-1888, and the twin museums of art
and natural history, 1872-1881, designed in collaboration with Karl
Hasenauer as part of a festive imperial forum that was never completed.
Semper died on May 15, 1879, just two weeks after the imperial
celebration of Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Elizabeth’s silver wed-
ding anniversary in Vienna. At the extravagant jubilee festival parade,
organized by the painter Hans Makart, thousands of attendants dressed in
historical costume, including Hasenauer, participated in a series of pro-
cessions and represented historic guilds from the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries.36 Makart was beloved for his enormous mythological
and history paintings, as well as his portraits of women dressed in
costume from the late Renaissance and Baroque periods. These sumptu-
ous painterly canvases in the style of Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt
inspired lavish and amusing lebendige Bilder, re-enactments of the scenes
in Makart’s studio with his wealthy patron friends dressed as characters
from the paintings. Makart’s studio itself was famously filled with all sorts
of theater props; it became a symbol of Vienna’s atmosphere of masked
performance in the late nineteenth century. The Makartzeit was domi-
nated by a cultural love of historicism in architecture, fashion, fine and
decorative arts, and its greatest expression could be found in the Vien-
nese passion for masquerade balls during Fasching (Vienna’s long carnival
season). Otto Wagner, Lechner’s contemporary, began his career by
designing temporary pavilions for Makart’s 1879 Festzug, but he later
criticized Vienna’s historicizing architecture, likening the ostentatious
Ringstraße buildings to costumes rented for a masquerade ball.37
Is it possible that Semper’s fascination with the ancient Orient,
which stemmed from his abhorrence of contemporary Western industrial
arts, had a parallel in the Hungarian intellectuals’ search for an exotic,
non-Western identity, in the face of oppressive western Austrian impe-
rialism? The belief that artistic creativity must have a primitive source
pervaded modernist explorations well into the twentieth century. The
famous decoration of Makart’s studio in Vienna with its eclectic and

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 29

exotic array of objects might be seen as a parallel to Lechner’s assimila-

tion of diverse references in the Iparművészeti Múzeum, as well as to
Semper’s encyclopedic synthesis of global and transhistorical styles and
his comprehensive assessment of craft media and techniques.
On closer inspection, it is easy to see that the Iparművészeti Múzeum
reflects various theatrical aspects of Semper’s earlier buildings in Vienna
and Dresden. It announces its presence as a celebratory monument with
a parade of sculptural figures around the roofline much like the Millen-
nial Monument on Heroes’ Square. The 1896 celebrations, like the 1879
Festzug in Vienna, featured elaborate costumed parades, and were fa-
mously attended by Hungarian nobility in gala dress.38 Despite its many
references to the East and to the primitive at home, the Iparművészeti
Múzeum is in effect a Western, historicist building—a palace of the
industrial arts—which bears a remarkable similarity in its general silhou-
ette to Karl Hasenauer’s first sketches for the Kunsthistorisches Museum
in Vienna. Semper’s understanding of architectural dressing was two-
fold. On the one hand, he saw the building’s decorative sheath, or
cladding, as analogous to a flexible cloth wrapper around the structure,
whose symbolic form evoked the historical evolution of architectural
fabrication. On the other, the building’s “dress” was akin to a theatrical
costume which enabled the actor, or building, to embody the social,
ritual function of constructed space.

The Idea for a New Museum

Long before Lechner’s building was erected, artists and intellectuals
had envisioned a national Museum of Applied Arts in Hungary. On
witnessing Austria’s success in the industrial arts at the 1867 Paris
Exposition Universelle, Ferenc Pulszky, then director of the Hungarian
National Museum, the painter Gusztáv Keleti, and the art historian
Flóris Rómer, argued that they too ought to have a public institution for
art and industry in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy.39 This new
institution, they believed, would serve as a repository for the nation’s
treasures: its court costumes, ecclesiastical vestments, fine porcelain, and
the traditional crafts that were their source, such as peasant embroideries,
native ceramics, and the ornamental uniforms and riding gear of medi-
eval soldiers. With a program of public exhibitions, the new museum
would foster an appreciation of Hungarian history and cultural identity,
and through its affiliated school, it would train a new generation of
industrial artists whose designs could energize national industry. By the
time that Lechner’s building was completed, the museum had already

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30 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

gathered a large collection, comprising objects from the ethnographic

department of the National Museum, private donations, and, most sig-
nificantly, the extensive purchase of peasant embroideries from the 1873
Wiener Weltausstellung.
Although politically a part of the Austrian Empire since the 1867
Compromise, Hungary was always represented as a sovereign nation at
the international exhibitions of the late nineteenth century—a strategy
that drew attention to Hungary’s unique cultural traditions, but one that
usually left her compared to and overshadowed by the industrially and
economically more powerful Austria.40 Hungary had a strong presence at
the 1873 fair, with many exhibitions about the nation’s agriculture,
especially grain, wine, and wool production. The most popular Hungar-
ian exhibits, however, were those that showcased the colorful, pictur-
esque costumes and architecture of rural mountainous regions that ap-
peared to be frozen in time, “unchanged since the Middle Ages.”41
In her prize-winning essay on women’s work at the fair, the Austrian
writer Aglaia von Enderes, Secretary of the Wiener Frauenerwerbe-
verein, praised the Hungarian and Romanian embroidery on display as
part of the exhibition of “National Hausindustrie,” work that had been
collected by Rómer and János Xántus, head of the Ethnography Depart-
ment at the Hungarian National Museum, and that was afterward pur-
chased for the new museum of applied arts. This array of textiles was a
rich treasure, she wrote, compared to more commercially influenced
dilettante work in the women’s building. Of the Hungarian embroideries,
she remarked, “Whole chests full of this work, wonderfully beautiful
things were there to see, a repository of inventiveness in design and in
the execution of stylish motifs.” A number of these examples with their
“fresh beauty,” she believed, could well serve to introduce a new direc-
tion in women’s handicrafts (Fig. 14).42 Hungarian and Romanian hand-
icrafts seemed more pure and intrinsically beautiful than those of other
nations, in part because it was believed that Hungary was not yet as
spoiled by industry as the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy.43 In fact,
the degenerated state that was associated with the Austrian women’s
work, especially that of dilettantes and students on display in the wom-
en’s pavilion, may have served as a warning call of sorts for Hungarian art
historians like Rómer, whose stated goal was to increase public awareness
of these national treasures, and to bring to light their particular impor-
tance as models for reforming the industrial arts.44
When the Museum of Applied Art first opened to the public, only
a few objects were displayed, in the stairwell of the Hungarian National
Museum. Clearly, this was not the right space for an extensive collection

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 31

of decorative arts with elaborate social and economic goals, and in 1877 FIGURE 14

the works were relocated to the exhibition gallery of a newer building Border of a towel or sheet, silk and gold-
and silver-wrapped silk-thread embroidery
owned by the Society of Applied Arts in Budapest’s recently developed
on linen, Hungarian work. Textile
Andrassy út. This building still did not provide adequate space for the purchased from 1873 Wiener
important collection, however, and it eventually found a fitting home in Weltausstellung by the Iparművészeti
the building designed by Lechner and Pártos, with its inauguration timed Múzeum, Budapest. Color pl. by Fischbach,
to coincide with the grand finale of the 1896 celebrations.45 Semper’s in von Pulszky, Ornamente, pl. 9C. Photo:
scheme underpinned the concept of the museum in Budapest, just as it University of Chicago Libraries.

had in London and Vienna. The displays and storage systems of all three
institutions manifested Semper’s theory of the relationship of crafts to
one another, with hundreds of thousands of sample objects nestled into
glass cases and tucked into labyrinthine corridors.
Textiles and ceramics, “the pot made of fired clay and the
garment decorated with needlework,” were at the center of the new
museum’s collections. Jenö Radisics wrote that these media equally
deserved first place among the museum’s finest objects. Like Semper,
Radisics believed that textiles and ceramics were “the first creations of
primitive man.” “Magyar taste,” he believed, could be perceived in
ancient Hungarian pottery, whose decorative motifs were preserved in
traditional folk ceramics of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nine-
teenth centuries. Embroideries for royal dress and chasubles from the
Middle Ages shared many of the same decorative motifs as the

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32 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

FIGURE 15
Embroidered chasuble, silk and gold- and
silver-wrapped silk-thread embroidery on
silk, Hungarian work, in Iparművészeti
Múzeum, Budapest. From Magyar
Műkincsek. Chefs-d’oeuvre d’art de la
Hongrie, ed. Eugène (Jenö) de Radisics
(Budapest, 1897), pl. 12. Photo: University
of Chicago Libraries.

traditional folk ceramics, such as simple, stylized floral patterns (Fig.

15). It is not possible to say of ceramics and textiles, Radisics wrote,
that one medium influenced the other; only that they were formed by
“the same aesthetic spirit.”46 The Iparművészeti Múzeum— both its
new building and the institution itself—was a creative, synthetic
response to the intellectual search for Hungarian national identity
within the new disciplines of art history and ethnography, and within
the bureaucratic infrastructure of applied arts education.

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 33

Ethnographic and historic preservation projects were extremely im-

portant throughout the Austrian empire during this period. As the
Habsburgs had no colonies abroad, they were at a distinct disadvantage
in the face of economic competition from England, Germany, and
France. To compensate, Austria looked to its own natural resources,
including its indigenous peasantry, as a source of wealth. Factory pro-
duction of lace and fancy goods, especially with the expansion of the
railroad in the nineteenth century, had crept further and further into the
more distant reaches of the Empire. Manufacturers tapped the inexpen-
sive but skilled labor force available in the peasantry, often providing
native needleworkers with standardized patterns for lace and embroidery
based on popular Western fashions. As these objects were increasingly
displayed at international exhibitions, however, it became clear that
industry had overlooked the real potential of this resource. Traditional
folk arts had a fresh beauty all their own, and cottage industries were
established in both Austria and Hungary that began to generate a certain
amount of income for their rural producers. More significantly, these
objects were at the center of a much farther-reaching intellectual and
economically based reform of the applied arts industry, in which modern
designers, manufacturers, and consumers were trained to appreciate the
formal beauty of traditional folk art, while its producers were educated to
make good-quality and “tasteful” objects.47 The massive reform project
was carried out not only through the collections and exhibitions at the
new museums of applied arts in Vienna and Budapest but through an
extensive network of regional museums and vocational schools of applied
arts throughout the empire as well.
As a political entity fraught with linguistic, religious, and racial
differences, Austria-Hungary relied on costume and clothing, both liter-
ally and metaphorically, to map its geographical territory and to help
come to terms with its own identity in an era of intense political and
economic competition. In 1884 Emperor Franz Josef’s progressive oldest
son, Crown Prince Rudolf, began an ambitious collaborative project to
map and describe in encyclopedic detail the diverse peoples of the Dual
Monarchy, The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image, 1886-
1902. His optimistic goal was to foster unity between the nations, and
experts from both Austria and Hungary were invited to work on the
twenty-four-volume illustrated text.48 Rudolf differed in ideological ori-
entation and temperament from his father, Emperor Franz Josef. Many
believe that in this respect he took after his mother, Empress Elizabeth,
beloved as “Sisi” in both halves of the Dual Monarchy. Rather than
suppress the ethnic and cultural minorities within the Austro-Hungarian

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34 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

lands beneath the hegemony of the Habsburg court, as had been the case
under Franz Josef’s long and absolute, although relatively peaceful, pros-
perous, and ostensibly benevolent rule, Rudolph wanted to explore the
multicultural diversity of his lands, and to accept and embrace the
diversity of its many inhabitants. Elizabeth had likewise developed an
intense love for Hungary, a close friendship with Prime Minister Count
Gyula Andrassy, and a sympathy toward the Hungarian nationalist cause.
She even learned to speak Hungarian fluently, and preferred to spend her
time there, rather than at court in Vienna. Rudolph never saw the comple-
tion of his project, as he tragically and inexplicably committed suicide in
1889, nine years before his mother was assassinated by an Italian anarchist
in Geneva, foreshadowing the eventual disintegration of the Dual Monarchy
and of the Austrian Empire.

The Aesthetics of the Mask

Lechner and Semper both attempted to synthesize a vast array of
stylistic forms, which spanned space and time. For both, the daunting
project was an effort to make sense of the visual confusion that sur-
rounded them. For Lechner, it took on greater political urgency at the
end of the nineteenth century than it had for Semper, a multinational
architect with ties to Germany, France, England, Austria, and Switzer-
land. Semper’s proposal for a reform in design education, and his call for
change in current methods of industrial manufacturing, had global im-
plications, and they were inspired by a thirst for understanding human-
ity’s place in the cosmos. Lechner and Pártos brought Semper’s proposal
to fruition. The Iparművészeti Múzeum was a material manifestation of
what Semper could only have imagined. The architects engaged Sem-
per’s notion of “dressing” in several ways. First, the ceramic tiles were
employed as a façade covering, the significance of which was as much
symbolic as structural; second, Lechner’s use of ceramics themselves as
well as his allusion to embroidered textiles in the decorative motifs
supported Semper’s conviction that primitive media and techniques were
the true foundation of architecture. The material substance of the build-
ing and its symbolic meaning, however, were also inextricable from
Semper’s concept of the ideal institution—the museum and school of
applied arts—in which architecture’s origin and evolution through ele-
mentary crafts, such as textiles and ceramics, could be explicated in a
historical and scientific manner.
Above all, Semper’s theory of dress had to do with transformation—
the transformation of “style” that happens as culture evolves over time.

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 Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art 35

The trajectory of his text leads from the primitive Eastern past to the
civilized Western present, and for him it was the act of transformation
itself—the dematerialization of the dress—that was civilizing, elevating,
and spiritually necessary. Lechner perceived this urgent stylistic trans-
formation in the form of the Hungarian gala dress, which remembers its
Eastern barbarian origins. Traces of the animal past can be found in the
fur-trimmed cloak, feather-topped cap, and leather boots. The leopard
pelt, slung over the shoulder, signifies the virility of the “hot-blooded”
warrior, as does the long mustache—an unmistakable feature of Hungar-
ian men’s fashion. When Lechner evokes shepherd cloaks in his orna-
mentation of the museum, it again recalls hair and skin—the felt and
sheepskin cloaks of the plains shepherds, who live among animals like
their ancient nomadic ancestors. The material of felt itself represents the
uncivilized Other, as it is composed of what are originally unwashed, tangled,
matted knots of animal hair.49 For Semper, however, the knot was the primal
source of stylistic transformation, and Lechner elevates the knotted felt
fabric to the most dematerialized dressing. The façade of the Iparművészeti
Múzeum is no longer primitive folk art made of embellished animal hair,
skin, or earthy clay. Rather, it is civilized, urban, modern architecture.
Semper’s theoretical ideas about “dress” were intimately connected
to a preexisting and pervasive fascination with costume and its deep
cultural significance in Austria and Hungary in the late nineteenth
century. Ákos Moravánsky has written that Semper’s “aesthetics of the
mask” had particular resonance in Central Europe where the concept was
used by architects to express the “fascination of the old, feudal world,
which had by no means disappeared in [that] part of Europe.”50 Lechner’s
Iparművészeti Múzeum expressed Hungary’s feudal past and industrial
present in monumental form. It performed that history in a theatrical,
commemorative, spiritualized manner, in much the same way as the Mil-
lennial Celebrations had throughout Budapest, with festive costumed pa-
rades and the construction of civic landmarks. For Semper, architecture’s
most meaningful quality was its ability to deny reality through the carni-
valesque mechanism of “masking.” As Semper’s biographer, the architectural
historian Harry Francis Mallgrave, writes, “It is through this primordial
masking, as Semper saw it, that one comes to grips with the existential
human condition of alienation.”51
Two of Semper’s followers in Vienna, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos,
were especially attracted to the concept of dress, both for its application
to the practice of architecture, and for its broader cultural significance.
Many of Wagner’s buildings, such as his Budapest Synagogue, 1870-1873,
and Vienna Majolikahaus, 1898, are particularly evocative of Semper’s

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36 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009

notion of the textile dressing. Although Wagner disagreed with Semper’s

architectural theories in some respects, he nevertheless conceived of
architecture in terms of clothing, costume, and fashion. Modern man, he
wrote, does not look right wearing Rococo costume while waiting for a
train in a modern train station.52 Wagner believed that a building’s
“clothing” should suit its time and purpose. Loos expanded on Semper’s
language of “Bekleidung” in his writings and buildings, which he con-
flated, it might be argued, with his own personal identity and mode of
dress.53 “Modern man uses his clothes like a mask,” he wrote.54 Modern
dress was what allowed modern man to live his modern life within the
comfortable space of urban anonymity. For Loos, modern architecture
was specifically masculine, but Loos’s suave and urbane modern man,
dressed in well-tailored, understated classics, was quite different from
Lechner’s hero of the Magyar spirit, a shepherd-warrior transformed by
his sensuous gala costume. The psychological dimension of modern
architecture may have had its roots in Semper’s notion of the original
wall as differentiating between the “inner life,” or home, and the “outer life,”
or public space. Modernity brought a constant negotiation between public
and private life, which was mediated by both architecture and dress.
There were differences between this “aesthetics of the mask,” how-
ever, as it was manifested in Vienna and Budapest, twin capitals of the
Dual Monarchy. Whereas Wagner and Loos both employed a rhetoric of
“fashion” to voice their criticisms of culture and of traditional architec-
tural practices and to call for a new style of building appropriate for the
modern age, Lechner relied on the concept of tradition, metaphorically
represented by traditional costume and decorative peasant textiles, in
order to craft his own style for the modern age. It might seem easy, at first
glance, to view as opposites the multiple efforts at the invention of a
modern visual language of form by architects as diverse as Wagner, Loos, and
Lechner. It is more challenging, however, and more fruitful to understand
them as rooted in a shared experience of the multiethnic, multinational
state, searching anxiously for its own identity in a complex time.

NOTES

1. Buda (on the west of the Danube) was admin-
istratively joined with the cities of Óbuda and
Pest (on the east bank of the river) to become
Budapest in 1873.
2. Ödön Lechner, “A Biographical Sketch,” orig-
inally published in A Ház (The House), 1911,
trans. Catherine Pusztai and András Székeley, in
Ödön Lechner 1845-1914, ed. Làszló Pusztai and
András Hadik, exh. cat. (Budapest: Hungarian
Museum of Architecture, 1988), 12-16.
3. In both its structure and ornamentation the
Thonet House resembles contemporaneous Chi-
cago School architecture by Daniel Burnham,
Louis Sullivan, and others. András Hadik, “Ödön

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Lechner’s Oeuvre,” in Ödön Lechner 1845-1914,
ed. Pusztai and Hadik, 5-11.
4. “La façade nous dit dans un langage expressif
que l’art moderne de notre pays tend à être hon-
grois, qu’il puise ses inspirations dans notre propre
passé artistique; elle proclame hautement que l’art
décoratif magyar se sent de force à s’engager dans
une nouvelle voie pour peu qu’on lui offre
l’occasion d’affirmer les éminentes qualities qu’il
possède”; Eugène de [Jenö] Radisics, “Le Musée
Hongrois des Arts Décoratifs,” in Magyar Műkinc-
sek. Chefs-d’oeuvre d’art de la Hongrie, ed. Jenö
Radisics and Jànos Szendrei (Budapest, 1897), 73-
94.
5. Ibid., 81.
6. Piroska Ács, “The Museum of Applied Arts
(Iparművészeti Múzeum),” in Hungarian Ceramics
from the Zsolnay Manufactory, 1853-2001, exh. cat.,
ed. Éva Csenkey and Ágota Steinert (New York:
The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Dec-
orative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2002), 201-4.
7. Katalin Keserü, “Magyar-Indiai Épı́tészeti Kapc-
solatok (Indian-Hungarian Architectural Connec-
tions),” Néprajzi Értesı́őö 77 (1995): 167-82.
8. Ákos Moravánsky, Competing Visions: Aesthetic
Invention and Social Imagination in Central European
Architecture, 1867-1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998),
225.
9. Aladár Kriesch-Körösfői, “Hungarian Peasant
Art,” in Peasant Art in Austria and Hungary, ed.
Charles Holme (London, 1911), 31-46; Gusztáv
Keleti, “Die Kunst,” in Skizze der Landeskunde Un-
garns, ed. Karl Keleti (Budapest, 1873), 142-46.
10. József Huszka, Maygar Ornamentika (Budapest,
1898). See also idem, “A Debreczeni Cifra Szür”
(The Debreczen Embroidered Cloak), Művészi Ipar
1 (1885-1886): 85-91.
11. Támas Hofer and Éva Szacsvay, “The Discov-
ery of Kalotaszeg and the Beginnings of Hungarian
Ethnography,” trans. Elayne Antalffy (Budapest,
Museum of Ethnography, 1998) [virtual exhibi-
tion: http://www.neprajz.hu/kalotaszeg/angol.htm].
12. Ákos Kiss, “Die Entwicklung der Kunstge-
werblichen Bewegung und das Enstehen der Kunst-
gewerbemuseen,” Ars Decorativa 1 (1973): 7-29.
13. Moravánsky, Competing Visions, 223.
14. Among the most visible of such rooftops in
Budapest are those of the Gothic Mátyás Church,
restored by Frigyes Schulek, 1873-1896, and the
Calvinist Church by Samu Pecz, 1893-1896. In
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Semper and the Budapest Museum of Applied Art
Vienna, Heinrich Ferstel’s Votive Church, 1856-
1879, reflects the style of the city’s most important
Gothic landmark, St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
15. Ernő Marosi, ed., Die Ungarische Kunstge-
schichte und die Wiener Schule 1846-1930, exh. cat.
(Vienna: Collegium Hungarium, 1983), 9-22.
16. Moravánsky, Competing Visions, 218.
17. János Hunyadi, a legendary figure in Hungar-
ian history, symbolized Hungary’s resistance to
both the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. A profes-
sional soldier from Transylvania, Hunyadi
achieved international fame in his successful mil-
itary defenses again the Turks, and, as a result, was
granted riches and noble titles, serving as governor
of his region until 1456. During his last years,
Hunyadi acted as guardian to the young King
Ladislaus V, grandson of the Holy Roman Emperor
Sigismund of Austria, and when he died, Ladi-
slaus’s uncle, Ulrich of Cilli, wary of Hungary’s
devotion to Hunyadi, assassinated the general’s
oldest son, László, and imprisoned his youngest
son, Mátyás, in Prague. Following a bloody battle
for control of the Hungarian crown, Mátyás
emerged victorious in 1458, ushering in centuries
of epic accounts of the heroic feats of the Hunyadi
family. See Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians: A Thou-
sand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton, 2003),
75-59.
18. Kiss, “Die Entwicklung der Kunstgewerbli-
chen,” 22; Hilda Horváth, “Ferenc Pulszky and the
Movements in Applied Arts in Hungary,” in Ferenc
Pulszky (1814-1897) Memorial Exhibition, ed.
Ibolya Laczkó, Júlia Szabó, and Lı́via Tóthné
Mészáros (Budapest, 1998), 165-69; Carl [Károly]
von Pulszky, Ornamente der Hausindustrie Ungarn’s
(Budapest, 1878). The majority of medals awarded
to exhibits of “National Hausindustrie” at the 1873
Wiener Weltausstellung went to Hungary and
Croatia (one of the lands of the Hungarian crown
at the time). See also Florian Franz [Flóris] Rómer,
Die Nationale Hausindustrie auf der Wiener
Weltausstellung 1873 (Budapest, 1875), 32.
19. Although textiles were the most readily col-
lected, exhibited, and debated form of folk art at
the fair, ceramics played a much more significant
role in Hungary’s development of an advanced
applied arts industry. The fine porcelain manufac-
tory Herend, founded in 1826, was already inter-
nationally recognized by the time of the 1873
Weltausstellung, and would soon be matched by
the Zsolnay ceramics manufactory, founded in
1853, which by the turn of the nineteenth to the
twentieth century produced some of the most de-
sired Art Nouveau wares in Europe. See Gabriella
37
Balla, Herend Porcelain: The History of a Hungarian
Institution (Budapest, 2003); Éva Csenkey and
Ágota Steinert, eds., Hungarian Ceramics from the
Zsolnay Manufactory, 1853-2001, exh. cat. (New
York: The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the
Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2002).
20. Anthony Alofsin has recently interpreted the
architecture of Central Europe as a multitude of
“languages” of history, organicism, rationalism,
myth, and hybridity. The Iparművészeti Múzeum,
according to this framework, represents the “lan-
guage of myth.” See Alofsin, When Buildings Speak:
Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and
Its Aftermath, 1867-1933 (Chicago, 2006).
21. Rómer, Die Nationale Hausindustrie, 21.
22. Ödön Lechner, “So Far There has not been a
Hungarian Language of Form but There will be,”
originally published in Művészet (Art), 1906, trans.
Catherine Pusztai and András Székeley, in Ödön
Lechner 1845-1914, ed. Pusztai and Hadik, 17-23.
23. Radisics, “Le Musée Hongrois,” 74.
24. Alofsin, When Buildings Speak, 135.
25. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Ar-
chitect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and
London, 1996), 284; Debra Schafter, The Order of
Ornament, the Structure of Style: Theoretical Foun-
dations of Modern Art and Architecture (Cambridge,
U.K., 2003), 32-44.
26. Gottfried Semper, Wissenschaft, Industrie und
Kunst: Vorschläge zur Anregung nationalen Kunstge-
fühles, bei dem Schlusse der Londoner Industrie-Aus-
stellung (1852), trans. as “Science, Industry, and
Art: Proposals for the Development of a National
Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Indus-
trial Exhibition,” in Gottfried Semper, The Four
Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans.
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann
(Cambridge, U.K., 1989), 130-67.
27. Gottfried Semper, “Practical Art in Metals
and Hard Materials: Its Technology, History and
Styles,” 1852 (unpublished manuscript in the Na-
tional Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Mu-
seum, London). Semper gave a copy of this manu-
script, with a new title, “Ideales Museum für
Metallotechnik, ausgearbeitet zu London im Jahre
1852,” to Rudolph Eitelberger in 1867 for the
library of the k.k. Österreichisches Museum für
Kunst und Industrie (today the MAK—Öester-
reichsiches Museum für angewandte Kunst). The
story behind the gift is told by Rainald Franz, “Das
System Gottfried Sempers: Reform des Kunstge-
werbes und Grundlagen für Kunst und Industrie in
38 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Spring-Summer 2009
ihren Auswirkungen auf das Österreichische Mu-
seum,” in Kunst und Industrie: Die Anfänge des
Museums für angewandte Kunst in Wien, exh. cat.,
ed. Peter Noever (Vienna: MAK—Österreichi-
sches Museum für angewandte Kunst, 2000), 41-
51. The MAK also recently published a transcrip-
tion of their version of the manuscript. See
Gottfried Semper, The Ideal Museum: Practical Art
in Metals and Hard Materials, ed. Peter Noever
(Vienna, 2007). Semper’s theories were more fa-
mously outlined in his essay Die Vier Elemente der
Baukunst: Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Baukunde
(1851), trans. as “The Four Elements of Architec-
ture: A Contribution to the Comparative Study of
Architecture,” in Semper, The Four Elements of
Architecture, 74-129.
28. Jacob von Falke, vice-director of the Öster-
reichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie in
Vienna, modeled the institution’s departmental
classification system after that of the new South
Kensington Museum in London. Significantly,
Falke reversed the order of the British departments,
placing textiles first, which was more in keeping
with Semper’s hierarchy of elementary materials.
See Franz, “Das System Gottfried Sempers,” 49.
Rudolph Eitelberger von Edelberg, Oesterreichische
Kunst-Institute und Kunstgewerbliche Zeitfragen, vol.
2 (Vienna, 1879), 108.
29. Hilda Horváth illuminates the explicit rela-
tionship between Ferenc Pulszky’s and Semper’s
goals as they were outlined in Pulszky’s frequent
articles published in the Hungarian journals Vasár-
napi Ujság (Sunday News), Budapesti Szemle
(Budapest Review), and Archaeologiai Értesı́tő (Ar-
chaeological Bulletin) in 1874 and 1875. See Hor-
váth, “Ferenc Pulszky and the Movements in Ap-
plied Arts in Hungary,” 165-69, and József Sisa,
“The Beginnings of Art History and Museology in
Hungary. Some Semper Connections,” Centropa 2,
no. 2 (May 2002): 128-35.
30. Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and
Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics (1860-1863),
trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Rob-
inson (Los Angeles, 2004), 123.
31. Ibid., 155.
32. Ibid., 156.
33. Ibid., 317.
34. Gottfried Semper, Ueber die formelle Gesetz-
mässigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung als
Kunstsymbol (1856), repr. in Gottfried Semper:
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Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans Semper and Manfred
Semper (Berlin, 1884), 304-43.
35. Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic
Arts, 242, 247.
36. Renata Kassal-Mikula, “Der Festzug,” in
Traum und Wirklichkeit—Wien 1870-1930, exh.
cat., ed. Robert Waissenberger (Vienna: Histo-
risches Museum der Stadt Wien, 1985), 40-49.
37. Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture (1896),
trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Santa Monica,
Calif., 1988), 78.
38. See, e.g., the photograph of Baron George
Sztojanovits in the garb of a Transylvanian mag-
nate, parading on horseback at the 1896 Millennial
Celebration, published in Costumes à la cour de
Vienne, 1815-1918, exh. cat. (Paris: Palais Galliera
and Musée de la Mode et du Costume, 1996), 44,
82.
39. Radisics, “Le Musée Hongrois des Arts Déco-
ratifs”; Horváth, “Ferenc Pulszky and the Move-
ments in Applied Arts in Hungary”; Sisa, “The
Beginnings of Art History and Museology in Hun-
gary”; and Kiss, “Die Entwicklung der Kunstgewer-
blichen Bewegung.”
40. “La Hongrie a l’Exposition de Vienne,”
L’Exposition Universelle de Vienne Illustrée, ed. Jules
Franck (Paris, 1873), 106-7.
41. Henri E. Gintl, “Les Huculy (Habitants des
Carpathes): Leurs Costumes, Leurs Moeurs,”
L’Exposition Universelle de Vienne Illustrée, ed. Jules
Franck (Paris, 1873), 56-58.
42. Aglaia von Enderes, “Die Frauenarbeit,” in
Kunst und Kunstgewerbe auf der Wiener Weltausstel-
lung 1873, ed. Carl von Lützow (Leipzig, 1875),
181-261. On the popularity of the Hungarian and
Romanian Hausindustrie exhibits, see also Julius
Lessing, Das Kunstgewerbe auf der Wiener
Weltausstellung 1873 (Berlin, 1874), 33.
43. Romania exhibited separately from Austria
and Hungary at the 1873 Wiener Weltausstellung.
In 1862 the Romanian-speaking principalities of
Wallachia and Moldavia were united as Romania,
yet they did not become independent of the Otto-
man Empire until 1881. Translvania, the third
Romanian-speaking principality, also inhabited by
Hungarian-speaking Magyars as well as Germans
(Saxons), had been ruled by the Habsburgs, despite
various attempts at independence, since 1687. In
1775, the Habsburgs also annexed the Bukowina,
of Moldavia’s northern territories. Both Austria
and Hungary were thus quite interested in Roma-
nian handicrafts, as many ethnic Romanians re-
sided in the Austro-Hungarian lands.
44. Rómer, Die Nationale Hausindustrie, 1.
45. Given the problematic lack of space for the
collections, the Hungarian administrator and later
Minister of Public Education, Count Albin Csáky,
proposed to Parliament that a new building be
constructed— one that could be used for both a
public museum and a school of applied arts.
46. Radisics, “Le Musée Hongrois,” 83.
47. Alois Riegl, Volkskunst, Hausfleiss, und Haus-
industrie (1894; repr., Mittenwald, Germany,
1978).
48. Kronprinz Erzherzog Rudolf, ed., Die österreich-
isch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild, 24 vols.
(Vienna, 1886-1902); Regina Bendix, “Ethnology,
Cultural Reification, and the Dynamics of Differ-
ence in the Kronprinzenwerk,” in Creating the Oth-
er: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Cen-
tral Europe, ed. Nancy Wingfield (New York and
Oxford, 2003), 149-66.
49. Kenneth Hayes, “Felt’s Alterity,” in Felt, exh.
cat., ed. Kathryn Walter (Toronto: Museum for
Textiles, 2000), 5-16.
50. Ákos Moravánszky, “The Aesthetics of the
Mask: The Critical Reception of Wagner’s Mod-
erne Architektur and Architectural Theory in Cen-
tral Europe,” in Otto Wagner: Reflections on the
Raiment of Modernity, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave
(Santa Monica, Calif., 1993), 199-239.
51. Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the
Nineteenth Century, 300.
52. Wagner, Modern Architecture, 77.
53. Adolf Loos, Ins Leere Gesprochen: Gesammelte
Schriften 1897-1900 (1921; Vienna, 1981); idem,
Trotzdem: Gesammelte Schriften 1900-1930 (1931;
Vienna, 1982); Janet Stewart, Fashioning Vienna:
Adolf Loos’s Cultural Criticism (London and New
York, 2000); see also Damjan Prelovšek, “Semper
and Viennese Architecture ca. 1900,” Centropa 2,
no. 2 (May 2002): 89-99.
54. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” (1908),
trans. Michael Mitchell, in Adolf Loos, Ornament
and Crime: Selected Essays, ed. Adolf Opel (River-
side, Calif., 1998), 167-76.