Art Nouveau – A Hungarian Perspective

The reopening of the György Ráth Villa fills a longstanding gap for the Museum of Applied Arts. Its original owner, György Ráth, was the Museum’s first director and one of the foremost art collectors of his time. He left the villa, together with his entire art collection, to the Museum, and between 1906 and World War II, it operated as the museum of the Ráth bequest. From then until its closure in 2014, it was a venue for exhibitions on oriental themes.

Now, in 2018, the villa is opening again with a permanent exhibition called Art Nouveau – a Hungarian Perspective. As is clearly expressed in the title, the exhibition puts over our own Hungarian situation and point of view, but it is also very much ‘our own’ in conveying the present state of affairs of the Museum of Applied Arts. The exhibition is opening just as the Museum’s historic main building has been closed for what will be a long and comprehensive reconstruction. For the duration of our exile from the building in Üllői út, we are fortunate in having this fine villa as a place to display many of the museum’s world-famous holdings and thus maintain our presence in the museum world. It is also a symbolic move, because as we prepare for the museum of the twenty-first century, we are occupying the very place — the home of the Museum’s first director — where radically new approaches and viewpoints were first applied to planning and museum curation. That work heralded the new paradigm and the new attitudes we are exploring today. The exhibition displays art works of deserved world fame from the most significant collection held by the Museum of Applied Arts, and it takes the novel approach of presenting the Art Nouveau style from the point of view of people living today, the cultural consumers of the present.

Zoltán Cselovszki acting director