Spending an afternoon in the cool, marble interior of the National Gallery is a fine way to soak up art and escape the heat of the Budapest summer.
A clue to the importance of Art Deco and Art Nouveau for Hungarians and visitors alike lies in the Hungarian National Gallery exhibition titles. These movements shaped not just how Budapest looks, but also how city life felt and feels. Although the Hungarian National Gallery celebrated Art Deco first, as a movement it came after Art Nouveau.
Arising around the end of the 19th century, Art Nouveau was a response to the industrial revolution and mass production, applying modern methods of production to time-honored artistry and craftsmanship. Inspired by the promise of the present and optimism about the future, it aimed to transcend the supposed distinctions between decorative and fine art.
As the Hungarian National Gallery says, the goal was to “reshape the whole of visual culture in the spirit of modernity from buildings to leaflets. Since Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, was regarded as the ideal of Art Nouveau, it was truly ‘the art of life’ with its aestheticism imbuing everyday life.”
Rather than being inspired by the styles of the past to mimic, let’s say, classical Greek murals, Art Nouveau employed natural imagery that inspired smooth curves, flowing lines, and twists and turns that paid homage to organic forms. Line and form are more important than color, which is often neutral, subtle or pastel-like.
Transmuted into Secessionism in Hungary, the modern fusing with this country’s hunger for true independence after the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise, Art Nouveau left a flamboyant mark on Budapest. The Sonnenberg House in District VI, located at 23 Munkácsy Mihály utca, is a particularly impressive example of Secessionist architecture that also evokes Gaudí’s Barcelona.
Somewhat of an inevitable reaction to Art Nouveau, Art Deco emerged out of the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. In a sleek, streamlined nutshell, it’s modernism as fashion. For instance, Cubist art influenced Art Deco’s use of zigzagging patterns, vertical lines and rectilinear forms.
Using materials that had emerged or been refined by technology such as plastic, stainless steel, aluminum, glass and concrete, Art Deco introduced a post-WWI decorative modern elegance symbolizing affluence, sophistication and glamor that was applied to everything from everyday objects to architecture.
The exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery is the first comprehensive exhibition of Hungarian Art Nouveau poster art. It is accompanied by a Hungarian and an English catalogue and curated by art historian Anikó Katona.
Posters were a response to late 19th-century metropolitan life and the rise of advertising to promote consumption. They were also, from the beginning, regarded as high art with their own aesthetic and specialist collectors. Alongside Toulouse-Lautrec, artists such as Alphonse Mucha and Gustav Klimt worked in this form.
Although inspired by nature and its forms, Art Nouveau took full advantage of the development of print techniques such as Cheret’s “three stone lithographic process,” which, as the term suggests, used only three lithographic stones to produce a complete rainbow of colors. In the hands of a master artist and a careful printer, Cheret’s breakthrough made it possible for poster artists to create work that stood out under the then-newly introduced electric streetlights, first installed in Paris in 1878.
The Hungarian city of Temesvár, now Timișoara in Romania, became the first European city to introduce electric street lighting with a direct current (DC) distribution system in 1884.
In Hungary, the introduction of the poster as a new genre, along with a new style readymade for it, meant that Art Nouveau caught the popular imagination and was promoted by exhibitions, journals, and institutions.
The 120 posters on display, created by famous Hungarian painters such as József Rippl-Rónai, János Vaszary, and Károly Ferenczy, as well as specialist poster artists Géza Faragó, Mihály Biró, Ferenc Helbing, and Márton Tuszkay, demonstrate how the poster became a dominant promotional form.
Manifesting the Art Nouveau ideal of beauty expressed through flowing lines and the subtle use of color, the posters on display advertise all aspects of modern life from commercial products to newspapers and entertainment in the form of theaters, cabarets and nightclubs. They evoke middle-class Budapest, especially the life of suburban women, the atmosphere of coffeehouses and popular leisure activities such as visiting spas.
After you’ve whiled away the afternoon in the cool of the National Gallery, you might like to spend a night outside under the stars rather than head for a bar or restaurant.
Starting in late July, the city is offering two programs that give movie buffs and anyone who wants an excuse to sit outside on a balmy summer night the opportunity to watch movies al fresco.
The CineSpa initiative at Széchenyi Baths will be showing the 2017 musical “The Greatest Showman,” about the life of P.T. Barnum, on July 25, and the 2022 independent neo-noir thriller “Bluff” on July 29. The latter is a bit of a strange choice, but there you go. In any case, the movie will probably come second to swimming in this evocative setting. The movies start at 9 p.m.
From the end of July, there’s also the “Road Movie” initiative with Hungarian movies being shown in outdoor locations. In August, you can see films including the comedy “Sose Halunk Meg” (“We Never Die”) at Pünkösdfürdői Strand on Aug. 21, and adult animation “Macskafogó” (“Cat City) at Dunafok on Aug. 29. The program starts at 8 p.m. I’m not sure if the movies are subtitled, but it’s a great excuse to travel to parts of the city you might never otherwise have a reason to visit.
Find out more about the Széchenyi CineSpa program at szechenyifurdo.hu and the Garden Cinema/Road Movie series at facebook.com/budapestkertmozi.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of July 25, 2025.
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