Review: Motherland and Progress: Hungarian Architecture and Design 1800–1900, edited by József Sisa

Abstract

Jozsef Sisa, ed. Motherland and Progress: Hungarian Architecture and Design 1800–1900 Translated from the Hungarian by Stephen Kane Basel: Birkhauser, 2016, 996 pp., 767 illus. $112.00 (cloth), ISBN 9783035610093 Research on the nineteenth century, including the reevaluation of historicism, has become an area of intense interest throughout Europe over the past few decades. This bulky and richly illustrated volume on Hungarian architecture and decorative arts, published in Hungarian in 2013 and recently translated into English with minor changes, exemplifies this tendency. Presenting a comprehensive history of the nation's art has long been a focus of art historical writing in Hungary. A plan for an eight-part series—of which this book is a part—was initiated in the 1970s, and some of the volumes were published in the early 1980s, including one on the 1890–1919 period.1 Work on the volume focusing on the nineteenth century was begun, but when historicism became a subject of reevaluation during the 1980s, previously overlooked artifacts came to light and a vast new literature emerged. This latter point is well illustrated by the bibliography in Motherland and Progress : most of the works making up its nearly nine hundred entries were written during the past three decades.2 The volumes in the series were conceived as handbooks, each presenting the history of a given era's art and architecture according to the current state of research. At the same time, new research is integrated with that of earlier generations of scholars. A total of sixteen authors participated in writing the latest volume, and two-thirds of its chapters were written by volume editor Jozsef Sisa, the leading scholar of nineteenth-century Hungarian architecture. Originally, the book was meant to discuss all the fine arts together, but faced with the outpouring of available materials, the volume's editors decided to treat the history of architecture separately. This decision …