The Hungarian National Gallery's (MNG) Art Deco Budapest – Posters, Objects, Spaces (1925-1938) exhibition, which opens on Tuesday, evokes the visual culture of Budapest in the 1920s and 1930s through some 250 posters, furniture, costumes, applied art and other artefacts.
The exhibition focuses on Hungarian Art Deco visual culture, especially poster art and modern metropolitan life, by presenting posters, furniture, costumes, films, and even urban spaces to give a comprehensive picture of the distinctive visual characteristics of the interwar period.
The posters in the exhibition reflect the phenomena of the time, the new ideal of the woman, modern fashion, the cult of sport and health, the innovations – car, radio, talkies –, as well as the new forms of entertainment such as jazz concerts, nightclubs, and revues. Most of the more than 250 artworks on show are rarely exhibited.
MNG's latest exhibition does not focus on a single artist's oeuvre or school of art, but on a lifestyle, a world of taste: the Art Deco style so characteristic of Budapest in the 1920s and 1930s, said Annamária Vígh, Deputy Director General of the National Gallery, at the exhibition's press launch on Monday.
She added that the material on display was based on the rich collection of the MNG. The art deco poster collection from the institution's graphic art collection could have been an exciting exhibition in itself, but many special works of art were also from the National Széchényi Library and the Museum of Applied Arts, Annamária Vígh stressed.
According to curator Anikó Katona, the exhibition was preceded by seven years of research, during which many treasures were discovered that had never been shown before. It's been a long time since the MNG has hosted such an exhibition, with so many objects ranging from lizard-skin bags to ceramic tea sets, from woodcut books to clothes," she said, adding that the exhibition's focus remained on poster art.
The term art deco was actually coined in the 1960s to describe a particular style that drew on the avant-garde and the Bauhaus, but its essence remained decorative, light and elegant.
This multi-sourced taste spread mainly through the metropolitan middle class, but also influenced all social classes, for example through cinema posters," the curator explained.


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