Museum of Applied Arts highlights small objects of great beauty

Hungary's Iparművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Applied Arts) has recently opened a dazzling new standing exhibition of some 400 items from its permanent collection. The pieces in this "Collectors and Treasures" exhibition are arranged in fourteen distinct sections, to chronicle the expansion of the museum's collection itself, from its inception in 1872 to the present, by particular donors and periods.

So evocative is the spirit of this exhibit, so beautiful and finely detailed each piece, that I soon found myself sporadically freed of the illusion of space-time and plunged willy-nilly into the heart of our ostensibly shared European Ur-culture. The love of my life was waiting for me there:

You and I in a spiral out of time

in the ragged weave of a high-backed chair...

And so it went, into and out of flowing derangement as I cruised the treasured cases. From the early 16th century alone, one finds striking examples of istoriato Majolica ceramics from Urbino in the Mannerist style, as well as detailed scenes in woolen and silk wall carpets from Vienna, and Hungarian countryside stove tiles in the Spanish tradition. From each successive period, extraordinary craftsmanship and detail find ever-new media of expression as civilizations flourish and household patterns evolve, bringing mastery of the various arts to continually-inventive objects, uses, and designs.

We tric-tracked through the centuries'

clasped the metal cups of our haute manquée...

For anyone unfamiliar with this museum, it is housed in a gorgeous art nouveau building tiled in Zsolnay ceramic, built by Ödön Lechner in 1896 to celebrate one millennium since the Hungarian tribes conquered the Carpathian Basin in A.D. 896. This is no ordinary museum of untrammeled realism, nor is it an art museum per se, showing the great masters in expected frames. Rather it is more like an offhand temple, one which implies the aesthetic heights which European civilizations achieved, as expressed in such myriad accumulating details as the alluring curve of mahogany standing clock, the gold inlay on a pillbox lid from Genf, or the floral fancies sewn in silk on a German deerskin shoe. And each superlative detail on these precious objects, handed lovingly down, conjures up a whole epoch in turn.

How many nights did a dawn light soften

squandered in Count Zichy's velvet parlour...

Exalting these astonishing objects from astonishing people collected together, freed from any context of history or moral reflection, lends a certain purity to the whole. The fantasies within these walls are permanently arrested, each pincushioned on its tiny underlit stage, supernally buffed and polished, with nary an interruption from the more variegated reality that periodically swept the ages. My lover and I exchange a last touch, laden with melancholy of worlds as yet unknown, as forces tug us inexorably towards exits on opposite ends of the foyer...

Out there, such bellied teardrop acorn cries!

What a splendid millenium we had.

In the last analysis, I thank God this museum's foyer turns out to be perfectly round after all - for how else would I know, as I redeem my coat-check and simper out to the bleary street, that my lover and I will meet again, and on the best of terms no less, for the best of terms remain within, artfully preserved.

The Museum of Applied Arts's new temporary exhibition, "Collectors and Treasures" will be on display for several years, and is in fact slated to be expanded beyond the single floor it presently occupies.

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