Pair of curtains

The two wings of the curtains - together with their companion pieces - were ordered by Jenő Radisics, the director of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts, who was commissioned with the organization of the Hungarian Hall at the1905 exhibition in Venice (the measurements were given by the designers of the exhibition). The top, relatively narrow stripes of the curtains are decorated with six pots of peony in a row. However, the design had been prepared long before that, and it can be regarded as the first tapestry design of János Vaszary. The small tapestry was also woven by Sarolta Kovalszky, in 1898 at the Németelemér workshop, and it was introduced in the same year, at the Christmas exhibition of the Hungarian Society for Applied Arts. The new weaving technique and the stylized interpretation of flowers is probably the earliest appearance of Art Nouveau in Hungarian textile art. In the early 1900s it was also woven in various colour variants for the decoration of door and window curtains and for coverlets. The curtains prepared for the Venice exhibition were purple-pink, steel-gray, bluish gray, to match the colours of the two other tapestries exhibited in the Hungarian Hall, the Couple and the Fair. The curtains can be recognized and identified in the picture of the interior, taken at the exhibition and published as an illustration in Magyar Iparművészet Vol. 8, 1905, p.216.