Exhibition photograph - story telling room for daycare home furnitures designed by Lajos Kozma, Children's Art Exhibition of The Association of Applied Arts 1914

At the 1914 Exhibition of Children’s Art, Lajos Kozma presented the furnishings of a storytelling room in a nursery school. According to photos taken at the time, the furniture included chairs and tables sized for children, while all five of the chairs shown were different in design. There were potted flowers on the windowsill, with the plants supported by small trellises designed by the applied artist. A podium in the window bay bore a chair made for the storyteller, i.e., the kindergarten teacher. The design of the armchair is reminiscent of early 18th-century English (Queen Anne and Early Georgian) furniture. The frame of the backrest, the shape of its central panel, the curved form of the armrest and the legs correspond to that style. However, the original white painting and the colouring—perhaps gilding—of the carvings are characteristic of French Baroque and Rococo. What nonetheless connects the ‘storytelling chair’ to Art Nouveau is the decoration: in the centre of the backrest is a gingerbread heart with a bird and flower in it, and above it a meander reminiscent of the braid of a Hungarian gala dress. The fate of the original piece, presented in 1914, is not known. Budapest History Museum’s Kiscell Museum has a copy of the ‘storytelling chair’ that was made in 1917 (inv. no. B 95.1). The chair and the other objects in the storytelling room were made in the Budapest Workshop, which was established by Kozma. The armchair also bears witness to a change in the style of Kozma, in whose oeuvre late Art Nouveau was followed by a historicizing period.