The 1914 Art for Children Exhibition of the Hungarian Applied Arts Association

The Art for Children Exhibition opened in the Museum of Applied Arts in the middle of May 1914. It featured five interiors, and the exhibition committee also accepted art photographs, artistic artefacts, paintings and sculpture relating to children’s lives, clothing and surroundings. Four of the interiors were furnished rooms: a schoolroom, a storytelling room intended for after-school and other childcare institutions, a children’s room, and a girl’s room. Also displayed in the rooms were school murals, illustrated books, toys, children’s clothes and other everyday items. There was also a display of work entered for the Association’s school competition. The second group was made up of various things for children: drawings, handicrafts, etc. Overall, the exhibition presented the whole range of artistic factors affecting body and soul in the environment inhabited by children. Miklós Menyhért designed a practical, almost spartan, elementary school and Lajos Kozma an after-school centre, while Antal Meyer’s (Megyer) white girl’s room and Béla Vass’s children’s room were fine models of tasteful surroundings for children of modestly situated middle-class families. Among the artistic trifles and toys for children, work by Gitta Gyenes, Mariska Undi (Springholz), Vera Balázs and Nagy Sándorné particularly stood out, as did Árpád Juhász’s characteristically Hungarian small toys and Maulcs and Zadubránszky’s “character dolls”. (Esti Újság, 1914. V.20.)

s.au. 'Kiállítások' in: Magyar Iparművészet 1914/5 szám, 216, 225.

Esti Újság, 1914. V.20.

by Jessica Fehérvári