In Search of the Budapest Secession: The Artist Proletariat and Modernism's Rise

This important work by American historian Jeffrey Taylor, who spent the last two decades in Hungary and earned his PhD at Central European University in Budapest, serves to detail the nineteenth-century origin of the art market in a Central European nation as its economy was shifting from total dependence on agriculture to a mixed industrial/agricultural model during the Industrial Revolution. The creation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1867 provided Hungary with a measure of equality with Austria, initiating a period when the social and cultural development of Hungary and its newly emerging professional and merchant classes provided a new marketplace, which while bourgeois in nature nevertheless brought “art” to a greater portion of the population. Taylor provides us with a fascinating history, beginning in eighteen hundred, of the art market of Hungary, of the rise of modernism and its conflict with traditional elements.