Collections
Furniture Collection
The Furniture Collection has about 4500 items, and in addition to furniture it embraces musical instruments and wooden pieces such as small sculptures, gingerbread moulds and toys.
Ceramics and Glass Collection
The Ceramics and Glass Collection consists of 23,000 items. The faience collection features outstanding Italian, Haban and Hungarian (Holics, Tata, Buda) pieces.
Library / Book Art Collection
The Museum of Applied Arts’ 4500-volume book art collection is unique in the country for collecting books according to the historical significance of their binding, illustrations and typography, and for regarding its holdings as art works.
Library / Design Sheet Collection
Design sheets – plans and drawings produced by various printmaking techniques – are significant documents of the history of applied arts in Hungary at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Library – Rarities
The Rarities in our specialist library comprise remarkable documents that may not be catalogued as artworks, but are still precious items of the Museum’s collection on account of their historical or aesthetic value, or the importance of their creator or former owner.
Contemporary Design Collection
The most recently established curatorial unit of the Museum focuses on collecting objects of modern and contemporary design. Our goal is to create a collection representing different branches of 20th- and 21st-century design, focusing on the territory of East-Central Europe.
Metalwork Collection
The Metalwork Collection contains 11,000 pieces, mainly consisting of artworks of foreign and partially of Hungarian masters. As well as items of precious metals, there are fine pieces made from copper, bronze, tin and cast and wrought iron.
Textile and Costume Collection
The seventeen thousand items in the Textile and Costume Collection are mainly from Europe, but several other continents are well represented. They embrace many periods of textile art and textile production techniques. Historical technical devices also feature in the collection.
Archive / Collection of Designs and Drawings
In the collection of designs and drawings the Archive owns approximately 7000 pieces of original designs for different decorative art objects. Besides numerous artists' bequests the collection includes the museum's original plans drawn by Ödön Lechner and his colleagues.
Archive / Ex Libris Collection
The Ex Libris collection consisting of approximately 70,000 pieces is one of the most comprehensive of such collections in the world, and offers numerous examples of bookplates owned by memorable book collectors or designed by famous graphic artists.
Archive / Collection of Photographs
The collection includes more than 25,000 archive photographs which are unique sources of the works of art and interiors destroyed during the twentieth century, of the private collections in former times as well as of the universal expositions and of the earlier exhibitions in the museum.
Archive / Collection of Printed Design Sheets
The collection of design sheets numbers approximately 7000 entries and primarily consists of printed design sheets and art supplements of periodicals from the nineteenth and twentieth century.
