Hungarian Cap Embroidery

Illustration: Traditional Hungarian woman's embroidered cap.

Although traditional Hungarian embroidery work was usually known for its strong use of colour which was often reflected in the pattern work, the craft could also appear in much more muted tones. Single coloured threads, although perhaps not as widely used as the more vivid variety, did go to make up at least an element of national and regional costume throughout Hungary.

White work for example, could be used fairly extensively in costume and very effectively so. It was particularly impressive when placed against a strong contrasting background. The five women's caps shown in this article for example, were all produced using white cotton thread on a deep black silk background. The pattern work itself is relatively complex, some of which takes the form of traditional and repeatable motifs, while others are less pattern driven and more composed. However, much of the work does closely reflect the floral aspect of so much of Hungarian embroidery and in that respect these embroidered cap bands do not diverge far from the norm.

Illustration: Traditional Hungarian woman's embroidered cap.

The caps themselves with their specific white embroidery were usually worn by older women as a signifier, not so much of their age, but of their experience and social standing within a community. Bright colours, while not exclusively limited to the young, became more muted the older the individual became. It would be interesting to understand why this should be so and whether the connection between colour tone and age had any symbolic meaning. 

However, it must be understood that many traditional communities, both in Europe and world wide, had a generally positive stance when it came to the passage of time. This was a period where aging was considered a positive development and older members of the community were given a reinforced status, often through the application of an added element to costume. It is interesting to note that as far as embroidered caps in Hungary are concerned, the older the woman became the smaller the stitch and the narrower the band of embroidery on her cap. Rather than trying to hide her age from the community, the passage of years was considered a positive and significant achievement in the development of the individual.

Illustration: Traditional Hungarian woman's embroidered cap.

This status awarded to the passage of time is something perhaps we would be wise to consider in our own contemporary world. As we consistently push our older citizens towards the periphery of society, trivialising and largely ignoring their life experience, we risk losing their accumulated and extensive life skills. All generations are a vital element of communities and all have value and contributions to make towards those communities. By excessively and obsessively promoting youth over experience, we make the fundamental mistake of irrevocably cutting connections with aspects of ourselves and our future. Instead of allowing the natural possibility of experiencing a well rounded, multi-faceted and multi-aged community, we become instead one that is skewed towards only part of the life experience.

Illustration: Traditional Hungarian woman's embroidered cap.

By examining traditional crafts and the cultures that produced them, it is not simply a matter of discussing the craft itself and dismissing the cultures that reflected the skill. Often the social aspects of historical design, decoration and craft are intimately tied up with the product and this can often in turn be reflected onto our own contemporary world. It is not simply a matter of dismissing either the traditional or the contemporary, but understanding what we have both gained and lost in the process of the journey from those traditional communities to that of our own, and indeed beyond. We are both a product of the past and the building blocks of the future.

Illustration: Traditional Hungarian embroidered woman's cap.

Reference links:
Peasant Art in Austria and Hungary
Embroidery: Traditional Designs, Techniques, and Patterns from All over the World
Embroidered Textiles: A World Guide to Traditional Patterns
Hungarian Folk Designs for Embroiderers and Craftsmen (Dover Pictorial Archive Series)
Weldon's 2D #86 c.1892 - Practical Hungarian Embroidery (Weldon's Practical Needlework)
Peasant Embroidery on Linen and Hemp in Hungary (Hungarian folk art)
Hungarian Domestic Embroidery
Hungarian Peasant Embroidery
Hungarian Embroideries
Kezimunka (Hungarian Embroidery)
Ten Years in Transylvania: Traditions of Hungarian Folk Culture

Lace Work by Bela Angyal

Illustration: Bela Angyal. Lace design, c1902.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century Hungarian lace making saw an ever increasing official investment of time, money and energy. The textile craft that had been maintained for centuries very much on an amateur basis with production being likened to that of a cottage industry, was having to not only compete with mass production that had made increasingly serious inroads into the craft, but also that of other traditional European lace making areas that were reorganising their own crafts into much more robust and readily marketable levels.

Illustration: Bela Angyal. Lace design, c1902.

Lace making in Hungary was largely incorporated into the state education system so that in many respects lace making became standardised with girls being taught the craft in a pre-established and regularised form. A number of workshops were founded which maintained a relationship with education, many of the girls either coming through the college system or starting within the workshops themselves. At the same time Hungarian artists and designers were encouraged to work within the newly reorganised craft, supplying contemporary design work.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, a substantial and firm foundation had been laid on which Hungarian lace could be seen to be competing on the wider European stage. Regular applied art exhibitions within Hungary, both publicised and focused the craft, so that on an international scale Hungarian lace proved both popular and desirable when displayed at critically exclaimed exhibitions such as that held in Paris, Turin and Milan.

Illustration: Bela Angyal. Lace design, c1902.

Bela Angyal an Hungarian artist and teacher had been interested in renewing the image and direction of traditional Hungarian crafts since the early 1880s. In 1882 he had founded the National Bobbin-lace School of Kormocbanya. He was a regular contributor to magazines dedicated to the arts and crafts and paid special attention to renewing some of the traditional Hungarian lace designs, particularly those that incorporated a large element of floral work which was seen at the time as being especially closely related to traditional Hungarian decorative work.

Illustration: Bela Angyal. Lace design, c1902.

Angyal, also produced his own lace design work, five examples of which are shown along with this article. Although many saw the relationship of Hungarian lace making with that of the contemporary world as one that should be encouraged, Angyal seemed less certain. While many Hungarian designers concentrated on producing lace work that closely followed the contemporary and hugely fashionable Art Nouveau style, as well as closely following the work produced by the various lace schools of neighbouring Austria, Angyal was more inclined, as can be seen in these examples, to focus attention much more on the key elements of the traditions of Hungarian lace. Therefore, Angyal's lace design work is much more conservatively structured with little to hint at any concession to the styling of Art Nouveau.

Illustration: Bela Angyal. Lace design, c1902.

It is a fine balance when trying to protect the craft traditions of a country, while at the same time allowing those traditions to survive by putting them on a much firmer, but more contemporary and sometimes commercial footing. The balance is difficult to get right and the twentieth century has shown the two extremes. Work can either appear so traditional as to be seen as either a pastiche of the past, or so contemporary as to lose any sense of continuity within the craft. It is a balance that perhaps is impossible to achieve and so traditional and contemporary craft may always have to journey down different pathways.

Further reading links: 
The Art of Lace-Making in Hungary
Hungarian Folk Designs for Embroiderers and Craftsmen (Dover Pictorial Archive Series)
Hungarian Folk Art
Britain and Hungary: Contacts in architecture and design during the nineteenth and twentieth century : essays and studies
The Folk arts of Hungary: Papers presented at a symposium, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 1980
Folk Art & Folk Artists in Hungary
Herdsmen's art in Hungary (Hungarian folk art)
Nomadic Generation Youth and Folk Art in Hungary 1970-1980
Hungarian Decorative Folk Art
Hungarian folk customs (Hungarian folk art)
Hungarian folk jewelry (Hungarian folk art)
Hungarian peasant art,
Traditional Hungarian Folk Art

Lace Design Work of Arpad Dekani

Illustration: Arpad Dekani. Lace design, c1908.

Much of the early twentieth century revival of practical lace making, but more particularly that of designing lace within Hungary, can be attributed fairly squarely to Arpad Dekani. Professor Dekani, who started his career relatively humbly as a teacher at a provincial school in Hungary, eventually became a professor at the Arts and Crafts School in Budapest. It was in this position that he had the influence to restructure some of the aims and ambitions of lace production throughout Hungary.

Dekani used old traditional Hungarian patterns as an origin point in which to engender the production of a completely new system of styles for twentieth century lace production. He was also able to engineer the training of students on two levels. Firstly, there were those who would hopefully produce lace as a going concern. These students were trained in all forms of lace making as well as that of bookkeeping and the general maintenance and organization of a business. On another level, Dekani organized the training of students, which in turn who become teachers themselves. These newly trained teachers who were well versed in the new production and design parameters that Dekani had set out for the modernisation of Hungarian lace making, would filter out into the traditional areas of lace making in Hungary, particularly in the north of the country. These Dekani disciples if you will, were given the task of restructuring and repositioning local customs and traditional frameworks of lace production, not to industrialise the craft as such, but to give it a decent competitive edge within Europe.

Illustration: Arpad Dekani. Lace design, c1908.

A number of areas of traditional lace production in Europe particularly that of Italy and Austria, had already gone through a restructuring process, giving exports a much more contemporary look and feel to their lace design work. Although still based very much as a traditional craft, European lace did see a considerably robust marketing campaign in the late nineteenth century, but particularly that of the early years of the twentieth century, when so many other crafts and traditions were also having to reshape and redesign themselves for the new century.

Hungary as a partner within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, tended to follow the structure already set out by the Austrian craft schools and college system, whereby traditional craft design and decoration was upgraded, restyled, repackaged even. However, Austria was not the only example of this repositioning of design and craft for the new century. Schools and colleges from Glasgow to Moscow were having to re-evaluate the textile craft system, its present position and its potential future in a rapidly expanding market that was becoming increasingly dominated by mass production and consumerism. Hand production of printed and woven textiles, as well as that of embroidery and lace was particularly vulnerable to market forces. The situation was not helped by the increasing reluctance of customers to subsidise these traditional crafts by paying much more for hand crafted work than they would for industrially based work.

Illustration: Arpad Dekani. Lace design, c1908.

In some respects, the blame for the decline of the craft system of hand production can be placed with the general buying public as much as with industry. Many who could afford to subsidise these old traditions did so on a progressively smaller scale. As fashion began to incorporate the marketing ploy of inbuilt obsolescence, there was even less room for the craft system to manoeuvre, particularly with a product that was often produced with the intention that it be seen as outside the role of obsolescence and therefore fashion. Even though some craft work might have attempted to compete with fashion, by its very nature and its high price tag, craft products were meant to be bought as long term investments rather than for short term profit.

This by no means implies that Dekani and many others like him across Europe failed in their attempt to redesign and in many cases relaunch craft traditions. There is a long line of repeated craft initiatives that stretch across the twentieth century. Many of these might well have been short term or failed for various marketing, pricing and fashion reasons. However, the craft system is still with us today and as it yet again restructures itself in the form of contemporary craft, we should be thankful for the many individuals, such as Arpad Dekani who kept the ideal of production that was largely outside the increasingly fragile and some might even say destructive cycle of fashion and redundancy.

Illustration: Arpad Dekani. Lace design, c1908.

Further reading links:
By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art
Contemporary Crafts
Form Magazine - Australia
Crafts: Contemporary Design and Technique
Arts and Crafts Furniture: From Classic to Contemporary
Contemporary African Arts and Crafts: On-Site Working with Art Forms and Processes [460 Photographs; 23 Color Plates]
Common Ground: Contemporary Craft, Architecture and the Decorative Arts (Mercury Series)
Craft and Contemporary Theory
Craft and contemporary culture,
In Praise of Hands: Contemporary Crafts of the World
Exploring Contemporary Craft: History, Theory and Critical Writing
Jim Partridge (Contemporary Craft Series) (Contemporary Craft Series)

Hungarian Flower Embroidery

In traditional Hungarian embroidery, the flower and leaf tend to be seen as the most dominant style and motif used. This is by no means universal to Hungarian embroidery, though it does seem to identify the national style, particularly to outsiders, of the embroidery technique and decorative style that has come to identify that of Hungary.

In many respects, the Hungarian plain was both a meeting place and battleground for various cultures within the last millennium of Europe's history. This was one of the points in Central to Eastern Europe, where Germanic, Slavic and Turkish cultures, as well as that of the native Hungarian, came together, often mixing and overlaying previous cultures, all adding to the decorative arts of the region.

It is in this respect that the decorative work that goes to make up Hungarian embroidery was formed. The style contains elements of European Renaissance and Baroque decorative eras, as well as that of Turkish and Persian influences. This, in tandem with the long held decorative styles of native peasant motifs that have always been a mainstay of peasant culture throughout Central and Eastern Europe, has made Hungarian embroidery what it is today.

One of the defining elements, at least in some aspects of Hungarian embroidery, is its free-form strategy. Decorative designs can be fluid and although reflecting the consecutive generations, there is always enough leeway to interpret and reinterpret the motifs of both flowers and foliage that make up this clear and distinctive style of embroidery.

The sheer depth, scale and colour combination of floral embroidery in Hungary, which includes any number of interpretations of flowers that are both native to Hungary, but includes those that are found much further afield including the traditionally used tulip motif that is so much a part of traditional Turkish decoration, attracted a great deal of attention within Arts & Crafts circles at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, particularly in Britain. There was a regular amount of cultural activity between the two countries, and Hungarian crafts, with particular emphasis on embroidery, was featured regularly in a number of British magazines sympathetic towards the general feeling of the Arts & Crafts movement during this period.

Embroidery in Hungary was used for both costume and domestic use and was used equally by both men and women. The style seems purposely bold, colourful, and visible. Some believe that Hungarians can trace their embroidery pattern work to that of the original Hungarian homeland, which is thought to be somewhere in western Siberia. Although this may be partially true and there are certain similarities between some aspects of Siberian embroidery and that of Hungarian, so many levels of influence and generations of innovation have passed, that it would be hard to be certain if there was any tangibility in this belief.

However, whatever the true origins of Hungarian embroidery, it is a fine, distinctive and liveable cultural heritage that will always be considered part of the Hungarian cultural framework which inevitably significantly adds to the history and present day decorative crafts of Europe.

There are a number of online sites that deal with many aspects of Hungarian crafts and embroidery in particular. A good place to start is the Hungarian Folk Arts site, which also has a store. Another site is that of Kalocsa Embroidery which deals with a specific style of Hungarian embroidery. It could be said that the illustrations I have given in this article fall into the range set by Kalocsa, but I have purposely left this introduction to Hungarian embroidery, very open. These sites and general books on Hungarian embroidery that can be found on Amazon.com, are listed, with links in the Further reading links section below.

Further reading links:
Hungarian Folk Arts website
Kalocsa Embroidery website

Weldon's 2D #86 c.1892 - Practical Hungarian Embroidery (Weldon's Practical Needlework) 

Hungarian Domestic Embroidery 

Hungarian peasant embroidery 

Kezimunka (Hungarian Embroidery) 

Peasant Embroidery on Linen and Hemp in Hungary (Hungarian folk art) 

Hungarian Folk Designs for Embroiderers and Craftsmen (Dover Pictorial Archive Series) 

Embroidery: Traditional Designs, Techniques, and Patterns from All over the World
Embroidered Textiles: A World Guide to Traditional Patterns
Hungarian Folk Art
Mestersegek Kezi Szoves / Handwoven Crafts
Palóc hímzések - Palóc Embroidery