Hungarian Representative Exhibitions and the Rhetoric of Display in the 1920s

Abstract

This article examines the series of art exhibitions organized by the Hungarian government in the 1920s. After examining the bureaucratic framework of the exhibition, the article then discusses the materials displayed at five different exhibitions, organized between 1920 and 1927. While much of the material displayed remained the same, the rhetoric, particularly the catalog essays that accompanied the exhibition provided insight into the organizers’ goals and the governmental ideology underlying that rhetoric.

1. Introduction

On 23 November 1920 at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, in the presence of the recently named Regent of Hungary and “Admiral without a navy,” Miklós Horthy1, as well as numerous other dignitaries2, the Nemzeti Szalon/National Salon, the premier art exhibition space in Budapest, and thus the premier art exhibition space in Hungary, opened the show, Magyar Reprezentativ kiallitas/First Hungarian Representative Exhibition. Consisting of 171 paintings and assorted graphic works and about 50 sculptural works, this show was the first of a series of like-named exhibitions that would run throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.

While there is a long history of art exhibitions as part of foreign policy, such as participation in events such as World’s Fairs and international art exhibitions, the Representative Exhibitions differ from those precedents. The Representative Exhibitions were specifically designed as foreign policy opportunities, not merely exhibitions coincidentally exploited for that purpose after the fact. Previous exhibitions such as the 1894 Künstlerhaus International Exhibition,3 the 1900 Paris World’s Fair,4 and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair had had a foreign policy aspect. They presented Hungarian cultural achievements to the world and in the case of World’s Fairs, economic achievements as well. While the Representative Exhibition did not deliberately ignore Hungarian artistic development, the artists chosen, the objects displayed, and the venues selected were carefully chosen to craft and support a government-favored image of Hungary. More importantly, the rhetoric of the exhibition catalogs reflects a changing vision of Hungary. Over time, the essays of the catalogs moved from historical lessons to vehement revanchism and finally to a more anodyne internationalism.

2. State of the Question

Hungarian exhibitionary culture is not an unexplored topic. Recent years have seen numerous articles and books by Miklós Székely that focus on turn-of-the-century and pre-war Hungarian exhibitionary culture, mostly at World’s Fairs (Székely 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012a, 2012b). The development of Hungarian art in the interwar period has also recently drawn more and more attention, both in areas previously neglected such as female artists, in the works of Anna Kopócsy (2021) and reconsiderations of significant, previously well-studied institutions such as the Rome School,5 but updated with newly available archival material and newer theoretical tools and approaches. This can be seen in works by Gábor Ujváry, whose work also focuses on the cultural theory and political activity of the interwar Minister of Religion and Culture, Count Kuno Klebelsberg (Ujváry 1995, 1996, 2008, 2014, 2019). Little academic attention has been paid to the Representative Exhibitions, an exception is the 1927 Warsaw Representative Exhibition, which receives several pages in Tibor Gerencsér’s dissertation on the cultural relationship between Hungary and Poland in the interwar period (Gerencsér 2018).

Another important aspect of Hungarian exhibitionary politics and culture is the diplomatic aspect. To date, the best and most comprehensive study remains Zsolt Nagy’s magisterial work, Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918–1941 (Nagy 2017).

Primary sources for these exhibitions are also limited. The exhibitions were organized under the auspices of the Ministry of Religion and Education, and voluminous paper records: notes, reports, advisories, minutes of meetings, and file cabinet-filling production of paper, which are the hallmarks of a modern bureaucracy, were no doubt produced.

They are lost.

In 1956, the invading Soviets fired upon the national archive building, mistaking it for something of military importance. While much material was saved from the ensuing conflagration, most of the documents of the Ministry of Religion and Education were destroyed.

Though the finely detailed material and insights those records would have provided are lost forever, other sources, such as catalogs and newspaper articles remain. They allow for a partial reconstruction of the material or at least recreation of the contours of the material, if not the contents.

In the 1920s, Béla Déry, long-time director of the Museum of Fine Arts and one of the instrumental organizers of the Representative Exhibitions, authored two books about the exhibition series, Our Cultural Propaganda Abroad (1921)6 and Artistic Exhibitions Abroad (1927).7 Given that their author was a key organizer of the Representative Exhibitions, the books are encomiums to the shows. That aside, the two collections both present the internal workings of the show’s organization albeit in an overwhelmingly favorable light. The volumes also collect and translate newspaper and magazine critiques of the exhibitions from the countries in which the exhibition was shown, showing the viewpoint and reception of the intended audience.

Images of the exhibitions, both of the artworks displayed and of the show themselves are also scant. These exhibitions were ephemeral in the most profound sense. Not only were they only briefly displayed, but little printed memorabilia, such as postcards or souvenir photographs were produced. Few images of the exhibitions remain, and most of those that do illustrate an event associated with the exhibition, such as the visit of a politician, rather than the contents of the exhibitions themselves. But, like the destroyed archives of the Ministry of Religion and Education, the exhibitions leave behind traces and contours. As the exhibitions were promoted by the Hungarian government through the Ministry and other government entities, there do tend to be accompanying publications. Some of the publications are quite elaborate, containing not only the listing of the works shown but ofttimes a forward and illustrations. Others, though, are no more than a printed list of the images shown.

3. Methodology

The primary source of information for the Representative Exhibition and other Hungarian exhibitions of the immediate pre-war and interwar periods is exhibition catalogs. A total of approximately 70 catalogs, covering Hungarian exhibitions from the 1890s to the 1940s have been found, scanned, and converted into Word format documents. The resulting information was entered into a spreadsheet. While all the data are useful, this article will focus on the catalog essays, particularly those of the exhibits organized or sponsored by the Külföldi Művészeti Kiállítások Végrehajtó Bizottság/Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions in the 1920s. Other aspects of the shows such as the artists selected (or their education, training, and professional affiliations) are all interesting and will be dealt with in future articles, but this article will focus on the rhetoric of the catalog essays and its relationship to Hungarian domestic and foreign policy at the time.

4. Historical Background

Art as a diplomatic tool—the display of art, creation of propagandistic works, or the gifting of art—is not a novel concept, but the Representative Exhibition is a relatively new typology. The latter part of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century saw a rise in international Fairs and Exhibitions, such as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. National displays, both economic and cultural, were integral parts of these events. The First World War witnessed the deliberate and conscious subjugation of art to propagandistic purposes amongst the Allies as well as the Central Powers. In the case of Austria–Hungary, the creation of the Kriegspressequartierter/Sajtóhadiszállás (Royal and Imperial War Press Headquarters) whose associated artists documented the Austro-Hungarian war effort on all fronts and in a variety of materials: drawing, painting, and photography, was in many ways to model for this representative exhibition.8

Déry, in his Our Cultural Propaganda Abroad, places the origin of the exhibitions on the activities of Count Miksa Hadik (1868–1921) Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to Sweden who solicited Count Gyula Andrássy Junior (1860–1929) to organize a show of Hungarian decorative arts for exhibition in that neutral country. “The cultured Swedes,” according to Hadik, “would welcome the Hungarian Art.9

Count Andrássy had long been involved in what would now be called “cultural diplomacy”. Before the First World War, he had championed the display of Hungarian art as a means of promoting greater interest in Hungarian culture. In a 1912 essay, he wrote:

And we could gain a lot especially through art. Our language is not understood in Europe. Our science and fiction are largely closed books to strangers. International influence, prestige and cultural weight can be gained most quickly and surely with our art. The language of art is a world language that everyone understands. The Hungarian personality could become known the earliest and most surely through the works of art.

(Déry et al. 1912)

Involving Andrássy was an obvious choice. He had the interest, and he also had the connections. Not only was he the scion of one of the best-known political families in Budapest, his father, Gyula Andrássy senior, had served as Prime Minister of Hungary and then Foreign Minister of Austria–Hungary, Andrássy junior was an avid supporter of the arts, both as a patron; his collection was one the best of its day, but also as a financial and moral supporter, serving as President of the Orszagos Magyar Képzőművészt Társulat/Hungarian National Council of Art10 and the National Salon.11

The noble pair, Hadik and Andrássy, organized the exhibition, arranging for invitations from a variety of venues in Sweden: the Liljevalchs Konsthall, and the Akdademin för de fria knosterna in Stockholm; the Charlottenburg Kunstakademia in Copenhagen, the Christiana (Oslo) Kunstfornening, and in Helsinki, the Stenmans Konstsalong.12 The pair was aided by several expatriate Hungarians residing in the region: in Stockholm, the journalist Béla Leffler (1887–1936)13; in Christiania, Lujza Lamacs Haugsethné;14 and in Copenhagen, the sculptor Jenő Mester (1882–1961)15 helped with the organization. As the plans were being finalized by Count Eugen in Sweden, “the Hungarian political skies fell in” and the Károlyi government took over the organization, directing it to the well-known artist, Károly Kernstok.16

The exhibition benefited though from the sudden change in the organizing committee. Déry recounts that new and more modern artists were added to the exhibition,17 but the planned location was moved from the Nordic countries to Switzerland, particularly Geneva and Zurich. The materials chosen for the exhibition by this new committee remain unknown, but it does not really matter, as the Károlyi government fell to Béla Kun and his communists and the show was canceled. While the Hungarian Soviet clearly recognized the significance of art to its mission, the focus of its cultural activity was internal, not external. It is interesting to note that the brief regime of Béla Kun, from 23 March to 1 August 1919, did see the creation of a different, but no less significant show, A Köztulajdonba vett műkincsek első kiállítása/Art Treasures taken into Public Possession, which was an exhibition of artwork confiscated from private collectors by the “Art Socialization” committee of the communist government.18

With the fall of the proletariat dictatorship and the Horthy regime’s appointment of Gyula Pekár as the new Minister for Religion and Education, the idea of the show was revived. Pekár approached Gyula Andrássy about reviving the committee. A new committee, the Külföldi Művészeti Kiállítások Végrehajtó Bizottság/Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions was formed to organize and coordinate the revived show. Its members included government officials, such as Minister of Religion and Education Gyula Pekár as well as his assistant, State Secretary Árpád Nagy. Other Committee members were leading Hungarian cultural figures, such as Gyula Andrássy, president of the Hungarian Fine Arts Council and the National Salon. Andrássy, along with Minister Pekár were co-presidents of the newly formed Committee. Committee vice presidents were the painter István Csók and the sculptor György Zala, both well-known artists. The lecturer was Béla Déry, a painter and director of the National Salon and the Magyar Studio/Hungarian Studio an exhibition space, auction, and publishing house. Secretary of the Committee was the art historian Ervin Ybl (1890–1965). The other members were well-known artists, collectors, and educators.19 The painters Gyula Bencur, Pál Szinyei-Merse, and Aladar Körösöfői-Kriesch participated in the initial organization of the committee but all three passed away in 1920 and were replaced with newly elected members.20

In 1927, when the mandate for the Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions was coming to an end, Béla Déry recalled the impetus for the Representative Exhibitions. Hungarian art, he wrote, would only make an appearance and be judged if there were a World’s Fair or an international art exhibition. Hungarian art was not often invited to present itself independently because its development and high quality were unknown abroad (Déry 1927, p. 3). The Representative Exhibitions were meant, among other things, to remedy that foreign ignorance.

Déry clearly and closely ties the origins of the Representative Exhibitions to the earlier “War Exhibitions” organized by the Royal and Imperial War Press Headquarters. Describing the initial 1920 Budapest show and the four immediate subsequent shows, two in the Netherlands and two in the Nordic countries, Déry states that they “ended with significant material and moral results” (Déry 1927, p. 5). Nonetheless, he criticizes the Hungarian presentation as lacking the “programmatic character” necessary for such success as the French, Belgians, and Czechs were all achieving at this time, success based on their own “War Exhibits” of the previous years.

5. First Exhibition: Budapest

The first task of the newly revived Committee was the organization of exhibitions in The Hague and in Amsterdam. On the horizon were plans for exhibitions in other countries. As reported in the newspaper Vilag in February 1920:

On the initiative of State Secretary Gyula Pekár, there was a meeting in the Ministry of Religion and Public Education regarding traveling art exhibitions planned abroad, at which the Executive Committee of Foreign Art Exhibitions was finally established. Ministerial adviser Dr. Árpád Nagy, head of the art department, presided. The meeting determined the program of traveling exhibitions. These exhibitions will be held in Zurich, Bern, Basel, Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Gröningen, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Berlin, and the exhibition material will be on its way by the end of March.21

The article continued that while the shows were designed to highlight the dignified appearance of modern Hungarian painting and sculpture, a retrospective devoted to the “deceased great masters”22 would also be included. Though ultimately destined for the Netherlands and beyond, after the jury selection, the show was mounted in Budapest. This exhibition featured a stand-alone catalog but there were no illustrations.

The goals of the show were clearly articulated by the organizers in a variety of media. Questioned by the newspaper Magyarorszag as to what he expected from the exhibition, Count Andrássy, one of the prime organizers responded:

One of the strongest weapons of Hungarian culture is fine art, not only because it is at a very high level in our country, but also because its language is international and can be understood by everyone.23

Andrássy further acknowledged that there was an economic aspect to the show, saying that “[t]he economic importance of the exhibition is also very important and we can hope that our artists will get good foreign currency”.24 This aspect of the exhibition was not a novelty. One of the unique characteristics of Hungarian participation in Fairs and Exhibitions is that the works of art shown were often intentionally for sale: this was true at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, as well as the London’s 1908 Hungarian exhibition.25 As the documentation of the sales is lost, it is unclear how many of the works were ever sold, but the fact that works were consistently for sale over years would seem to indicate that they generated significant enough revenue –or had significant enough cultural impact—to make offering them for sale worthwhile.

This Budapest version of the Representative Exhibition was understood as a new chapter in Hungarian art diplomacy, which during the War had been pursued by Austria–Hungary. Janos Bende, in a 21 November 1920 article in the newspaper Orszag Vilag insightfully understood the goals of the show. Beyond simply presenting the art of the day, the show was to have great international diplomatic meaning. As Bende wrote:

Participating in international exhibitions has always been a matter of first priority for individual nations and thus for Hungarians, and it is all the more important for us in the current circumstances. After all, now that all other weapons have been wrested from our hands, [exhibitions are] the only weapon we have in our culture with which we can gain recognition from abroad and prove the viability and historical vocation of Hungarians. And even among the intellectual weapons, fine art is the most important, because our language is not understood anywhere in Europe, our literature is a closed book to foreign countries, while fine art, which speaks the international language of colors, lines and shapes, is equally understandable everywhere and is therefore best suited to prove to the world the vitality and the will to live of the Hungarian nation sentenced to death with an exclamatory speech. This exhibition only partially meets this goal, as it lacks the greatest strengths of our fine arts.26

The Budapest show was visited nine times by Prince Castagnetto Castiglione, Minister Plenipotentiary of Italy. He was so impressed with the material shown that he arranged for the Italian government to request a show of Hungarian art in Rome, as well as organize an invitation to the 12th Venice Biennale, already evidence of the effectiveness of the concept (Déry 1921, p. 10).

Ultimately, approximately 170 paintings and 45 sculptures from a total of 61 painters and 24 sculptors were presented in the Hungarian capital. There seems to be no record of the arrangement of the materials within the National Szalon. A photograph from the Orszag Vilag/Country World shows a view from the exhibition, though, like many such photographs, it is not the exhibition itself but the visitors who are the focus; the artwork is merely an incidental backdrop. Nonetheless, the hanging of the paintings is clearly visible.

In the printed catalog, there is no indication of the physical arrangement of the works, such as room by room, by style, or by date. The works are initially grouped by medium, then alphabetically by artist.

The catalog does not provide dates for the works shown, though it does include the life dates of the artists. The oldest artists, classified by the catalog as “the great masters of Hungarian painting”: Géza Mészöly (1844–1877), Mihály Munkácsy (1844–1900), Béla Pállik (1845–1908), László Paál (1846–1879), and Lajos Bruck (1846–1910) were all born in the 1840s while the youngest artist displayed, Pal Udvary, was born in 1900, a range of some sixty years.27 The single largest decennial cohort was the 1870s, with 21 artists. The decades preceding and following, 1860 and 1880, had 13 and 12 artists, respectively. This would mean that the earliest artists would, by necessity, have trained abroad, as the Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem/the Hungarian Fine Arts University was not founded until 1871. But the vast majority of those born in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, would have been able to train in Hungary, at least initially, though the more successful ones might have studied further in Munich, Berlin, or Paris.

6. Károly Lyka’s Essay

The Budapest version of the catalog featured an essay by Károly Lyka, a member of the Representative Exhibition’s organizing committee. From 1902 to 1918, while Lyka served as editor of the influential art magazine, Művészet/Art, he authored numerous books, articles, and lectures on various aspects of art. From 1914 to 1936, Lyka taught at the School of Fine Art; from 1921 to 1923 he was Director of the school.28 He authored the catalog introductions for Hungarian art display at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair29 and the 1908 Hungarian Exhibition at Earl’s Court, London (Hungarian Exhibition in London: Catalogue of the Hungarian Exhibits of Painting, Sculpture and Weaving: Decorative and Applied Art: Earl’s Court, London, May–November, 1908 1908), and contributed an essay entitled Modern Hungarian Painting to the Hungarian catalog of the 1911 Rome exhibition (Divald et al. 1911, Ungheria 1911, pp. 119–43).

Lyka’s catalog essays from the 1904 St. Louis exhibition and the 1908 London exhibition are almost identical; the Rome essay is significantly different. The 1904 and 1908 essays, face-to-face Hungarian and English, begin almost identically. The 1904 essay reads “[i]f we wished to give the American public a really adequate idea of the development of Hungarian Art, we should have to put the Hungarian Art Museum on board a Transatlantic liner” (Lyka and Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904, p. 7); while the 1908 essay reads “[i]f we wished to give the English public a really adequate idea of the development of Hungarian Art, we should have to send the Hungarian Art Museum to London” (Hungarian Exhibition in London: Catalogue of the Hungarian Exhibits of Painting, Sculpture and Weaving: Decorative and Applied Art: Earl’s Court, London, May–November, 1908 1908). It is as if Lyka had a stock essay into which he merely inserted the name of the country in which the display was taking place and a form of transportation.30

Lyka’s essays then delineate a general history of Hungarian painting. Both have a similar and distinct focus on the threat Ottoman Turkey posed and the necessary and essential Hungarian response. Lyka writes “Hungary had to wage war against the Turks for the defence of Europe” (Hungarian Exhibition in London: Catalogue of the Hungarian Exhibits of Painting, Sculpture and Weaving: Decorative and Applied Art: Earl’s Court, London, May–November, 1908 1908, p. 9; Lyka and Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904) and this war significantly delayed the development of Hungarian national art. The essays continue similarly, though with one or two regional adjustments. In the 1904 St. Louis catalog Lyka, in talking of the Hungarian War of Independence, writes that it is in “some ways analogous to the great strife between North and South which laid so many noble Americans in the dust” (Lyka and Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904, p. 9). Lyka deliberately appeals to the American sense of self. When he emphasizes the newness of Hungarian art, he describes it as springing “into existence suddenly, like an American town beneath whose foundations the roots of the primeval forest have not yet decayed” (Lyka and Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904, p. 7).

Both essays then jump into the present, proclaiming that after a thousand years of strife “we have now for 30 years breathed freely” (Lyka and Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904, p. 13). That respite, Lyka continues, was a time of “vigorous creative work,” (Lyka and Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904, p. 13) with an almost feverish activity and productivity. This creative period, however, had not resulted in the formation of any definite “Hungarian School,” but a series of talented but idiosyncratic artists: Géza Mészöly, Pál Szinyei-Merse, Mihály Munkácsy, László Paál, and Bertalan Székely. Lyka emphasizes that none of these distinguished artists initiated a school such as is found in France or England. “A Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or a Barbizon community” continues Lyka, “could not be imagined in our country” (Lyka and Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904, p. 13). He blames not only the social conditions of the country but the “Hungarian temperament” (Lyka and Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904, p. 13). His, he writes, is a race with “a strong tendency toward well-marked individuality” (Lyka and Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904, p. 13). Having established the foundations of Hungarian art, Lyka then explores the works of several painters, continually emphasizing their independence and individuality. Shorter sections of the essay are devoted to architecture and sculpture. In the 1908 London catalog, in addition to the general essay on Hungarian art, Lyka wrote a separate, smaller, essay devoted to Hungarian Industrial Art, examples of which were on display and for sale.

The Rome exhibition catalog differs significantly in design and tenor.31 Not only is the introduction much longer than either that of the St. Louis or the London show but its organization and content differ. Rather than a single catholic essay devoted to the history of fine arts in Hungary, there are several smaller, specialized essays, each covering a topic or aspect of Hungarian art more profoundly than a single general essay. There is an essay devoted to the development of Hungarian art in the first half of the 19th century by Simon Meller (1845–1949), a curator of sculpture at Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts; an essay on historical and genre painting, by art historian and art topographer Divald Cornel (1872–1931), who also authored a short essay on sculpture. Additionally, there are several short biographical essays on Mihály Munkacsy, László Paál, and Pál Szinyei-Merse, authored by the art historian Béla Lázár (1869–1950). These are followed by Lyka’s own essay, Modern Painting, and concludes with a short essay on Hungarian architecture by Ödön Gerő.

The tenor of the Rome catalog essays is quite different from its predecessors, St. Louis or London, even when taking into account the distinctly differing natures of the earlier exhibitions. While Meller’s essay does touch on the history of Hungary and the role that the Ottoman Turkish invasion and occupation played, in the development of Hungarian art, it is not as detailed as Lyka’s previous essays.

In the Rome catalog, Lyka’s own essay focuses on recent Hungarian art movements, especially the artist colonies of Nagy Banya, Szolnok, and Gödöllő. Interestingly, it almost contradicts his earlier essays, which claim that nothing like the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood or schools organized by a single artist existed in Hungary, which he had ascribed to the independent nature of the Hungarians.

The difference between the Rome catalog essay and those of St. Louis and London would seem to indicate a maturation of thought. The focus on the debilitating Turkish invasion and its stultifying effect on the development of Hungarian art is here glossed over in only a sentence or two.

Lyka’s essay for the Budapest Representative Exhibition, however, is a throwback to that earlier form, that of the 1904 and 1908 exhibitions, but this essay is flavored by the irredentism that was a foundational pillar of the Horthy era political ideology. The Horthy regime’s domestic policy was to keep the wounds of Trianon open, salted, and repeatedly put on display, like the stigmata they were understood to be. From the phrase “Nem, Nem, Soha/No, No, Never”, which appeared on posters, postcards, and even children’s school notebooks, to the rise of a new artistic genre, the Irredentist sculpture and monument, the wounds of Trianon, and the suffering of Hungary were a constant (Ludmann 2020). Artistic representation of this ideology, though, is difficult. To a Hungarian audience, well-versed in recent history, the idea needed little visual imagery to be convincingly evoked. But for a foreign audience, this evocation remained elusive. Rather than a visual portrayal of the loss and the social upheaval the Trianon Treaty engendered, it is presented verbally, in the introductory essay by Károly Lyka.

As in his essays for St. Louis and London, Lyka gives an overview of Hungarian art history, but with a particularly caustic bent. Hungarian art, he opens:

has always been and still is an integral part of European art. Beyond the borders of Hungary built by nature, towards the East there is no European art, that is, there is no art that shared ideals with the art of Western European peoples. Beyond the Hungarian borders, the process of development stopped in the Middle Ages, and the art of Hungarians represents the last great belt in the south-east of Europe, on which Hungarian art has been continuously forming, organically changing and developing for many centuries. This organic, unceasing and lively development is the main characteristic of European art in the strict sense, and with it Hungarian, as opposed to the East. Those who wish to study the mysticism of medieval domes, the solemn harmony of the Renaissance, the passionate splendor of the Baroque can find many excellent examples of it in Hungarian art—but beyond Hungary’s southern and eastern borders they would look in vain for such things. The southeastern border of European art coincides with Hungary’s ancient southeastern borders.

In this way, Hungarians have been the guardians of universal European art for a millennium.32

He continues on this path for several paragraphs. Lyka underscores Hungary’s embrace of the Western European style, which is the gothic, while concurrently resisting the tempting glitter of the Byzantine style.33 Proudly, he credits Hungary with being the first country outside of Italy to welcome the Renaissance.34 The triumph of the West over the East is simply explained by Lyka and, according to him, is clear to anyone who studies the thousand-year history of Hungary. Hungary, at great physical and cultural cost to itself, has served as a defensive bulwark for Western European and European civilization. As Lyka succinctly put it, “[Hungary] has been the sword and shield of Europe against the invasions of the East for centuries”.35

This Hungarophilic rhetoric, while not overtly irredentist, nonetheless furthers the politics of the Horthy regime, which presented itself to the West as the modern bastion of defense, the new sword and shield against the renewed threat from the East. This time, Hungary was defending not against the Ottoman Turks, but the Communists who, having taken control of Russia were now seeking to export their revolutionary ideals westward.

This underlying idea, the revalorization of Hungary as the defensive outpost of Western Europe against the new Turkic struggle that was the communist threat was readily understood and promoted by the popular press. The exhibition was reviewed in a variety of Hungarian language newspapers, and they uniformly acknowledged and commented on the underlying organization’s ideology and contents.

Even Nepszava/Voice of the People, a communist-leaning daily, commented that “the exhibition will be dedicated to showing the significance of our artistic culture in the West, and the superiority of our art to neighboring successor states”36 while the Nemzeti Ujsag/National News wrote that the show “will go on a European tour to fight for the cause of Hungarianness with the ideal weapons of culture”.37

While the reception of the show is well-documented, as are the names of the participating artists and their works, identifying the object shown remains elusive. The catalog does give the name of the work, but it is often difficult to attach an image to that name. Given that many of the images shown in the Representative Exhibitions throughout the 1920s were for sale, although sales records are lost, and the turbulent history of Hungary, many of the works have gone missing, either destroyed or disappeared into collections. Several of the catalogs provide images, but these black and white images tend to not be of the highest quality. Some, such as the catalog of this show, the Budapest Representative Exhibition, provide no images.

Two different genres of criticism about the show exist: process and contents, and the ultimate goal of the show. Several of the critics highlighted the unevenness of artist selection. The works of better-known Hungarian artists, those of the previous century were often already in government collections and thus readily accessible while the work of younger artists was often difficult to acquire. And while older artists reflected well on Hungarian cultural achievement, they were not the most modern, the proof of the vivaciousness of contemporary Hungarian culture.

A second criticism of the show was the selection process. As one newspaper put it, “[t]he jury was generally well-chosen, and thus we could see a high-quality, artistically very precious collection, although we would have liked to have done without the hand of some members of the judging committee who were too inclined towards themselves”.38

Six of the exhibited artists were also members of the selection jury. Among them, they account for 41 of the roughly 170 images, about 25%. This is not to say that the artists were not worthy: József Rippl-Rónai, a member of the selection committee, had 20 images on display, a significant percentage. But one critique was that his many works were from his “colorless period”39 and thus neither truly a reflection of his skill nor his critical role in the development of modern Hungarian painting.

Overall, though, the show was well-received and understood as a well-designed representative of Hungary. One newspaper wrote, “[t]he exhibition opens tomorrow and will be on display until the end of this year, when it will go on its surely triumphant journey abroad. The foreword to the catalog is written by Károly Lyka a concise and complete summary of the history of Hungarian fine arts”.40

7. Representative Exhibition 1921: The Hague and Amsterdam

In April 1921, several months after the December close of the Representative Exhibition in Budapest, a revised version of the exhibition opened in The Hague. Containing the works of 107 artists, the revised exhibition consisted of a total of 260 works: 133 oil paintings, about 60 graphic works (watercolors, pastels, or drawings), and about 50 sculptures, so it was slightly larger than the Budapest version, which had contained 217 works. Open for only three weeks, the show was visited by 17,000 viewers.41 In July of 1921, the show then moved to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where it was viewed by more the 50,000 viewers.

Though the show was organized by the Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions, several expatriate artists living in the Netherlands, Oszkár Mendlik (1871–1913), Móric Góth (1873–1944), and Ede Telcs (1872–1948), facilitated the show. While the contents of the two Dutch shows, in The Hague and in Amsterdam, were similar to that of the Budapest iteration, there are several significant differences. Although there were separately published catalogs for each venue, their contents were identical; only the location, the local organizers, and the dates of the exhibition were altered to fit the venue. And unlike the Budapest model, there is no catalog essay whatsoever.

One of the highlights of the Amsterdam stage of the Representative Exhibition was the 4 May morning visit of the Dutch Queen Vilma to the exhibition. As reported by Déry in the Pesti Hirlap, the Queen, who remembered Déry from when he had organized the Hungarian section of the War Press Headquarters show three years earlier, had first walked around the room, taking in the whole and then focused in on one or two works. She was particularly taken with Oszkár Glatz’s work, Mother and Child.

While the recognition of the Royal Family he so proudly reported was certainly desirable, the elite were not the target audience of the show. In his long essay in Kulturpropaganda, Déry underscores the significance of the Representative Exhibition’s first foreign venue being in the Netherlands. The Netherlands had been the site of one of the last shows organized by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1917, from October 14 to November 15, the Stedelijk hosted the 1917 Exhibition of Austrian and Hungarian Painters and Sculptors.42 This was one of the last exhibitions organized by the War Press Headquarters; one of the organizers had been Béla Déry.

The purposes of the current show were manifold. There was a political goal, an artistic goal, and an economic goal. In judging the exhibition, Déry proclaims it a great political success because for weeks, a foreign country, “ill-informed about us and our internal conditions” had focused on Hungarian culture and the revived and renewed art scene. The shows also provided, as he puts it, “an artistic cadre” for future shows. Finally, the show was also an economic success. Paradoxically, though prices are listed in the catalogs, Déry maintains that:

Political reasons of great importance advised that the organization of Hungarian exhibitions in the Netherlands should be devoid of any measures that could have an economic dimension, and thus the work of all factors was limited to achieving moral success. But despite this direction of organization, purchases were made from the material of the exhibition, and enthusiastic art lovers bought 16 works of art worth more than three hundred thousand crowns.43

Even though Déry proclaimed the exhibitions a political propaganda success, that assertion would seem questionable. The catalogs lack any propagandistic text. While the shows promote an image of Hungary, it is an image promoted by the existence of the exhibition itself, not the works displayed. The works themselves are not in any way uniquely Hungarian; their subject matter is not limited to Hungary, and when the subject matter is Hungarian, it is never anything evocative of the loss Hungary suffered after the First World War. It is neither images of the crucified Hungary, which were so common at the time, nor even hazy reminiscences of the territories now located on the other side of the border.

Ultimately, the same is true of the Budapest version of the Representative Exhibition; the subject matter itself was not irredentist, it was the accompanying text that presented in word, not image, the discontents of post-Trianon Hungary. This combination is paradoxical; the text is directed to a Hungarian-speaking audience, one no doubt already knowledgeable about and sympathetic to the Hungarian cause. As Déry himself proclaims, the Dutch know nothing of Hungary or its unjust suffering and the shows, in neither form nor content, do anything to bring that knowledge to them.

8. Representative Exhibition 1922: Stockholm and Finland

The Representative Show toured Europe throughout the 1920s. After the Netherlands, the next venue was the Nordic countries, the originally intended locations. The show opened in Stockholm, Sweden, in May 1922 and then moved to Helsinki, Finland where it opened in September of 1922. It then traveled to two or three smaller cities in Finland. While the content of the shows changed over time, even between shows as close in time and space as the Swedish and Finnish, generally the same artists were featured (see Supplementary Materials). The major difference among the first three years of shows, the Budapest, the Dutch, and the Nordic versions, is the content of the catalog. As previously stated, the Dutch catalogs had no accompanying text whatsoever. The catalogs of the Swedish and Finnish versions did have text. The essays differed; though their tone and tenor were similar, there were significant variations. The Swedish essay, by Karoly Lyka, is 8 pages long, in catalog which totals 32 pages of text (and another 35 pages of illustrations). The catalog overall is a much more professional production than that of the previous year’s show in The Hague and Amsterdam. The essay’s beginning is similar to that of the Budapest Representative show:

Hungarian art has always been significant as European art, and still is today. Beyond Hungary’s natural border to the east, there is no European art, i.e., no such art, which has common ideals with the art of the peoples of Western Europe. Beyond this border, development came to a halt in the Middle Ages, so that in South-Eastern Europe, Hungarian art represents the last great zone in which, for centuries, European art was organically changing and constantly evolving.44

While not an almost word-for-word reiteration, like the 1904 St. Louis and 1908 London essays, the opening of the Swedish essay repeats the essential ideas of the opening of the Budapest Representative Exhibition essay: Hungary is the last country of Europe and its eastern border marks the end of European civilization and European art. More significant, Lyka continues, is that while Hungary was serving as Europe’s shield, it suffered great artistic losses. Galleries (presumably meaning the collections within as well) were destroyed and artists were forced to emigrate. Lyka cites Ajtósi Adalbert (ca. 1427–1502) –Albrecht Dürer’s father– as the first Hungarian artist forced to flee westward, setting the stage for a series of Dürer-related events in 1928.45

The essay continues like most of Lyka’s essays. He lionizes the previous century’s greats: Géza Mészöly, Pál Szinyei-Merse, Mihály Munkacsy, and László Paál. Lyka introduces a number of newer painters, to whom he had, previously, given short shrifts, such as Bertalan Székely, Károly Lotz, and László Mednyánszky. The essay concludes by briefly summarizing the architecture and sculpture of Hungary. It ends with the rather pessimistic line, “this exhibition can be no more than a handful of flowers picked here and there on Hungarian soil and sent to foreign lands to understanding cultural people from a nation condemned to death” (Ungerska Konstitutställningen i Konstakademien maj 1922, p. 20).

In the few short months between the closing of the Swedish show and the opening of the Finnish show, the rhetoric changes dramatically. The bilingual Finnish/Estonian catalog has a significantly shorter introductory essay than that of the Swedish catalog. The author of the essay is now “The Hungarian Organizing Committee” not Károly Lyka personally, although Lyka is a listed member of the Committee. Among the listed organizers, but neither credited as the sole or main organizer, is the Hungarian Committee for Foreign Exhibitions.

The rhetoric of this catalog essay is bizarrely inflammatory. Rather than the previous idyllic introductions, about shipping the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts to America or asserting that Hungary has also been the easternmost and defensive part of Europe, the essay is deliberately incendiary. It builds on all the ideas previously presented: Hungary as a sword and shield, Hungary as the last European country, and Hungary’s artistic trajectory stifled by its preoccupation with selflessly protecting its European brethren. But it presents these ideas in a brutally aggressive and almost paranoid way:

With the peace treaty of Trianon, our country was cruelly dismembered and separated from not only the areas inhabited by foreign races, but also parts where about three to four million pure Hungarians live. Our enemies have achieved their purpose: the peoples of the West have believed the lies that they have been spreading for decades, that our people have only used brute force to control the alien races living in the territories of Hungary. But the history of the development of our culture and art clearly prove that our nation has not only known how to use the sword, but also the pen, brush and sculpture, and not only with its bravery but with civilizing work is defeated the peoples who have now usurped most of our land.

(Unkarilainen Edustava Taiteen Näyttely Suomessa 1922, p. 12)

The reasons for this change in tone are unclear but it found resonance with the Finnish hosts. The Hungarian journal Turán, published by the Turanian Society,46 which would naturally be sympathetic to these claims, reported that at the opening banquet following the vernissage, the speech of the head of the Finnish organizing committee, Alfréd Jotuni, concluded with the lines that from the Carpathians to the Adriatic:

Hungarian culture left its indelible mark on this area. The coronation of the Romanian king in Cluj cannot destroy the Hungarian culture in Transylvania, nor the Slovaks at the Carpathian mountains, nor the Serbs along the Lower Danube. This Hungarian spirit flourishes in spite of foreign powers and claims its rightful place in the life of cultured nations.

9. Representative Exhibition 1924: Vienna

Several iterations of the Representative Exhibition after Stockholm and Helsinki were presented with a numbering that seems rather idiosyncratic. Every different venue, even if the contents remain identical, was counted as a new show, and therefore received a new number. In 1924, two years after the Swedish and Finnish shows, Vienna’s Künstlerhaus hosted the “Ninth Hungarian Representative Exhibition”. The show, which ran from May to June, consisted of 282 works by 98 artists in a variety of media such as oil, pencil, and etching, and was thus about the size of the Helsinki show and significantly smaller than the Stockholm show. Most of the artists shown in Vienna were being exhibited for the first time in a Representative Exhibition (see Supplementary Materials). As with the other shows, many of the works were for sale, but again, sales data, either buyer or price realized, remain elusive.

The Vienna exhibition marks a change from those that preceded it. This is most evident in the catalog essay, which was strikingly different than those of previous shows. Although once again written by Károly Lyka, the essay lacks the rancor and bitterness or the yearning for vengeance, which had permeated the earlier essays. There is none of the long history of Hungary and its role as the protector of Western Europe and the European cultural legacy. Instead, the essay dreamily evokes the period before the First World War when the two polities, Austria and Hungary, were politically and culturally interconnected. Interestingly, the period Lyka evokes when he considers the halcyon period when the two states were “interconnected to such an extent that the art history of both would be imperfect if it left these interactions unilluminated,” are the Baroque and the Biedermeier, not the more recent post-Compromise era, which marked Hungary’s ascension to nominally equal partner with Austria (IX. Ungarische reprasentative Kunst-Ausstellung: Katalog, Mai bis Ende Juni 1924 1924, p. 5).

The emphasis on this period is an interesting choice; in the Baroque and Biedemeier eras, there was little independent or self-standing Hungarian artistic culture. Hungarian art and artists were greatly under the influence of Viennese traditions and schools, just as Hungary subordinated politically to Austria. Despite Lyka lionizing that era, no works of that period are shown, even as historical artifacts. In concluding the essay and bringing it to the present day, Lyka does mention the Künstlerhaus and the Hagenbund as welcoming institutions for Hungarian painters but does not single out any Hungarian artist active in either organization.47

The overall purpose of the Vienna show seems quite different than that of the previous shows in Budapest, The Hague, Amsterdam, Stockholm, or Helsinki and it seems to be emblematic of the rest of the Representative Exhibitions in the 1920s. Those earlier exhibitions sought to illustrate and valorize Hungary’s suffering and to find sympathy from the outside world for that suffering. But here in Vienna the goal, as Lyka put it, is “[t]o refresh this old atmosphere,” (IX. Ungarische reprasentative Kunst-Ausstellung: Katalog, Mai bis Ende Juni 1924 1924, p. 6) between Budapest and Vienna. This goal, he wrote, would be furthered by an exhibition in the near future, an Austrian art exhibition to be held in Budapest.48

The Vienna Representative Exhibition marks a change in the tenor and seemingly in the purpose of the Representative Exhibitions. Prior to the Vienna show, the irredentist policy of the Horthy regime strongly influenced the content of the essays. The essays decried the unfair treatment Hungary had received at the hands of the victors of the First World War and the betrayal of the Hungarian nation, which had long sacrificed so much to protect Western Europe. After Vienna, the exhibitions’ focus seems more and more on the cultural and political relationship between Hungary and the host state. The Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions freed from politics moved from foreign policy to exhibitonary policy. Thus, the Vienna exhibition only mentions the First World War as a rupture in the relationship between Vienna and Budapest, nothing more.

10. Representative Exhibition 1925: Berlin and Fiume

After the 1924 Exhibition, the Committee moved away from organizing self-standing shows as it had previously and began instead to coordinate and organize Hungarian participation in international shows organized by others. While this change meant fewer costs and simpler organization, it also robbed the Committee of the free-standing catalog, and more important, the propagandistic platform the catalog essay provided. No longer could the Hungarian understanding of the Trianon treaty be presented directly to a foreign audience.

The Berlin Exhibition, the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung of 1925, presented only German and Hungarian works. In the accompanying catalog, the Hungarian section was almost a postscript, following the listing of more than 1000 German works. Overall, the catalog is a simple listing of the works shown. A floorplan is provided, but there is no real text, neither a general introduction nor a specialized essay. In the foreword to either section, the German and the Hungarian is a list of the organizers. For Hungary, they are the Ungarischer Landes Senat für Schöne Künste49 and the Comité der Ausländischen Ausstellungen,50 as well as the Executiv-Kommission der Ungarischen Kunstausstellung in Berlin. Presumably, the works are now intended to speak for themselves.

Similarly, the Hungarian participation at the First Fiume International Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1925, was simply a single room with 20 works displayed. There is neither a catalog essay nor even a crediting of the organizers.51

11. Representative Exhibition 1927: Warsaw, Poznań, Krakow, Vienna, and Fiume

The year 1927 was both a highwater mark for the Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions and a finale; it marked the end of the initial five-year legislative life of the Committee. The trend of moving away from the highly politicized rhetoric of the earlier years to a more diplomatic and historically focused rhetoric did continue into the 1930s, but also 1927 marks the end of the Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions’ independent work. While the Committee existed until the Second World War, it became less of a prime organizer and more of a supporting patron. The exhibitions associated with it became smaller. Politics still remained a vitally important element of the exhibitions, but it was a politics of persuasion rather than of grievance.

The five major exhibitions the organized that year were memorialized in a second book by Béla Déry about the exhibition program: Művészeti kiállítások külföldön Az 1927. évben: Warszawa, Poznań, Kraków, Wien, Fiume (Déry 1927). Again, documenting the history of the exhibitions in general the book sometimes slightly contradicts Déry’s descriptions of 6 years earlier. The book discusses the organization of the shows in its various venues and, like the earlier volume, presents excerpts of local press coverage of the show. Interestingly, the word “propaganda” has been removed from the title. That does not mean that the shows were no longer propagandistic, they were, but their ultimate reason for being was no longer solely propagandistic.

By 1924, three years earlier, the Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions had begun to produce exhibitions that were more cultural than didactic; more artistic than political. The heated, irredentist rhetoric of the early catalogs was not simply toned down; it was eliminated. The 1924 Representative Exhibition in Vienna at the Künstlerhaus was one of the last shows organized by the Committee solely devoted to Hungarian art. The shows which followed, beginning with the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1925, were parts of group shows: international affairs with a Hungarian component. This trend continued in 1927. Although the three Polish shows, Warsaw, Krakow, and Poznań, were devoted solely to Hungarian art, the two other shows of that season, the Great Art Exhibition in Vienna and Fiume’s Second International Exhibition of Fine Arts, were contributions to larger, more international shows.

In the case of the 1927 Vienna exhibition, there was no catalog essay at all. There was a brief introduction of the show, in which the Hungarian participation of three years prior is nostalgically evoked, and a brief summary of the current participants. The essay concludes: “We welcome with particular satisfaction that the work of recently emerging and most worthy artists from the other side of the Leitha work can be presented to the Viennese audience”.52

The Fiume show catalog did have an essay, but it was merely a brief recounting of Hungarian art history and a laudatum of contemporary art. The essay was authored by Béla Déry, Royal Commissioner of the organizing committee, although his exhibit was not the sole Hungarian participation. The diminishing importance and power of the Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions is evident from the dual organizers. Alongside the Hungarian national committee’s exhibit were 35 works selected from the Museum of the City of Budapest; no curator or organizer was named. Déry underscores that the City of Budapest, which had had an art collection since the 1880s, was now also organizing participation (Glavočić 2019, pp. 32–33).

The 1927 Polish shows, in Warsaw, Poznań, and Krakow, each of which produced its own catalog, although the only difference among them is the list of organizers, much like the Netherlandish shows of 6 years earlier, show a mature and politically aware version of the Representative Exhibition. Counting among the largest of the 16 Representative Exhibitions to that date, they contained over 500 works of painting, graphics, and sculpture. The Polish version saw the return of the catalog essay, though not authored by Károly Lyke, but rather by Ervin Ybl who had long been involved in the Representative Exhibitions, though only as a committee member, not an organizer.

His essay “The Arts in Hungary” appears in Polish and French, as back-to-back, not face-to-face translation. It is similar in many ways to previous essays. It briefly recounts the history of Hungary and the development of Hungarian art while consistently emphasizing the political and cultural connections between Poland and Hungary. Ybl does mention the Turkish defeat at Mohács and subsequent occupation, evoking the interruption it created in the development of Hungarian art, but also uses it as a moment to mention the Polish reinforcements sent by King Sigismond. The rhetoric that characterized Lyka’s essays, the evocation of Hungary as “the sword and shield of Europe against the invasions of the East for centuries” is absent. Unlike Lyka, Ybl focuses on the relationship between Hungary and the host country.

Ybl also brings his essay closer to the modern day than Lyka did, who usually stopped with the turn of the century schools of Nagybanya, Gödöllő, and Szolnok. Ybl goes so far as to even discuss the brief period of the Hungarian Soviet. He credits the period with having both popularized and stigmatized modernism. As part of the Bolshevist cultural policy, he writes, the streets and urban hoardings were decorated with innumerable posters that were ultra-modern in style. According to Ybl, it took a long time for the Hungarian public to make the distinction between modern art and the policies the Bolsheviks had promoted with that modern art (Wystawa Sztuki Węgierskiej 1927, vol. 22, p. 24). Despite the claim that modern art was experiencing a revival in Hungary, the artists displayed in the Polish versions of the Representative Exhibition are still essentially those of earlier iterations (see Supplementary Materials). Radical modernist artists, either those in Hungary, such as Lajos Kassák, Sándor Bortnyik, or Robert Berény, or those outside of Hungary, such as László Moholy-Nagy or Andor Weininger, were not represented.

Ybl concludes by saying that:

The purpose of our Exhibition is, on the one hand, to make Hungarian fine arts known to the distinguished Polish public and, on the other hand, to respond to the Exhibition of Polish Graphic Arts which took place in our National Salon at the beginning of last year and aroused the keenest interest and the highest appreciation on the part of the Hungarian public.

(Wystawa Sztuki Węgierskiej 1927, vol. 22, p. 27)

12. Aftermath

Though the Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions’ mandate expired in 1927, the Committee continued its work, but rather than as a free-standing entity, it seems to have been reduced to a desk within the Ministry of Religion and Education. Until the outbreak of the Second World War, the Committee continued to produce exhibitions promoting Hungarian art, though never again producing shows as large as the Representative Exhibitions of the 1920s. Despite the smaller scale, or perhaps because of it, the Committee’s reach expanded across the Atlantic. Beginning in 1930, the Committee was involved in sponsoring and organizing numerous shows in the United States. These included such shows as the 1930 “Exhibition of Paintings. Sculpture and Works of Applied Arts by Contemporary Hungarian Artists” (National Collection of Fine Arts 1930), which was essentially a reiteration of the 1929 Hungarian Exhibition at the Barcelona World’s Fair with the addition of several works by Hungarian artists residing in the United States, who would have been more familiar to the American audience. There were also several shows organized in conjunction with the College Art Association: the 1931 Exhibition of Modern Hungarian Paintings (College Art Association of America and E. & A. Silberman Galleries 1931); the 1933 College Art International (International [Exhibition] 1933, Rockefeller Center, February 5 to 28 1933); or the 1937 exhibition, Modern Hungarian Art (College Art Association of America and E. & A. Silberman Galleries 1937). The two painting exhibitions, 1931 and 1937, were both held in the E. & A. Silberman Galleries, owned by a pair of Hungarian-born brothers, Elkan and Abris Silberman.

The materials shown at the various exhibitions organized in part or whole by the Executive Committee for Foreign Art Exhibitions changed only slightly over the course of the 16 exhibitions organized from 1920 to 1927; in the decade that followed the shows became smaller, and even as the mission of the Committee, to present Hungarian artistic achievement to the greater outside world, recognized a larger remit, not just Europe, but the New World as well. While many of the artists displayed remained the same, what did clearly change was the slant with which the images were presented, that is, the text of the accompanying essay if there was one. The rhetoric changed. No longer were vitriolic essays from a vengeful, suffering Hungary the tone, but a sense of Hungarian accomplishment and artistic development. The greater frequency of shows, made possible by both the reduction in size and cooperation with foreign sponsors, meant more exposure to the outside world.

The change in size, format, and organization of Hungarian art exhibitions is paralleled by a wide-reaching cultural diplomacy campaign of the Hungarian government which, in the last years of the 1920s and through the 1930s, created and exploited other means of cultural diplomacy, such as the Nationality Room in the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, which became a standing exhibition of Hungarian culture, as opposed to the ephemeral exhibitions,53 or the creation of the short-lived Hungarian Reference Library.54 Art exhibitions remained a significant means of cultural diplomacy, continuing even through the war years, though with greatly reduced numbers.

The transformation of the Representative Exhibitions reflects a change in Hungarian foreign policy and the Hungarian approach to foreign policy. While representing the artistic production of Hungary and its modernity remained significant goals of Hungarian art exhibitions, the shows were bifurcated: to Hungarian allies, such as Italy, they were used to reinforce the cultural ties between the two countries, while to others, they were manifestations of the modernity of Hungary, of its uneasy acceptance of the political state of affairs it had long vehemently protested.