Budapest’s Art Nouveau

Budapest abounds in exquisite Art Nouveau structures and interiors, the radical design style that swept across turn-of-century Europe within architecture, applied arts, and fine art. Hungary developed its own cutting-edge take on the movement, known as Hungarian Secessionism, exemplified in its founding father, Ödön Lechner, featuring the use of porcelain along with Asian motifs and elements. This 3-hour Art Nouveau walking tour of Budapest scratches the surface of a city filled with beautiful examples of this cutting-edge aesthetic, highlighted by an expert art/architecture historian as your guide.

At the turn of the 20th century, roughly between 1880 and 1914, Art Nouveau was the fashionable and cutting-­edge aesthetic for architecture, applied arts, and fine art all over Europe. Hungary developed its own spin on the movement called “Hungarian Secession” (in Habsburg Austria, Art Nouveau was called Secession). This Budapest Art Nouveau tour will take you through the finest examples of this distinctive and elegant style, including buildings designed by the founding father of Hungarian Secession, Ödön Lechner, regarded as the Gaudi of Hungary.

Art Nouveau became so popular in Budapest (and in many provincial towns in Hungary) that it is impossible to see all Art Nouveau buildings in one day. This introductory tour takes you along some of the Art Nouveau highlights in Downtown Pest. It includes stops at the two most undeniably important buildings of the movement: the Royal Postal Savings Bank, designed by Lechner (a very frivolous and Gaudi-­like design), and the Gresham Palace, built by the founder of the London Stock Exchange, Lord Gresham, as office space and a series of luxury apartments for Hungarian nobility (and today, the number one luxury hotel in Budapest). Fortunately, both buildings allow visitors into the entrance hall, allowing us to admire the wonderful details on the outside, as well as the stunning interior elements.

Other stops on this walk include a flower shop, which still has its original interior, a department store, several bank offices, and The House of Art Nouveau, which is a small but exquisite museum and coffee house – a wonderful private initiative. As we pause outside of Thonet House (designed by Lechner in 1890), you’ll also examine a series of ceramics from the renowned Zsolnay factory in Pécs, a town in the south of Hungary. The extensive use of such ceramics on the exterior of the buildings (the roof and the façade) as well as in the interior, is one of the most typical features of Hungarian Art Nouveau. These decorations were only made possible by Zsolnay, who made groundbreaking inventions renowned all over the Habsburg Empire: the roof of the St. Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna is also made of Zsolnay tiles.

Another common Hungarian Art Nouveau feature is the use of Asian motifs and elements in decoration: a reference to the supposed eastern origins of the Hungarian nation. We will also discuss how Orientalism influenced Art Nouveau across Europe. Some elements of the tour are dependent on the day of the week, for example: on weekends we cannot enter the Hungarian National Bank, which has some very fine examples of Zsolnay porcelain; and the Kazinczy Street orthodox synagogue, with its exquisite Art Nouveau interior, is closed on Saturdays. On these days, we will adapt your tour to explore the best sites available.