ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Hungary's participation at four international exhibitions of decorative art in Paris, Turin, St. Louis, and Milan. These events promoted new design concepts to critics, artists, and consumers, paving the way for innovative collaborations between designers and manufacturers across national borders. The exhibition of Native American dwellings, costumes, cultural traditions, and arts and crafts in the United States paralleled the display of traditional village architecture, woodcarving, textiles, and other folk art in Central Europe throughout the 1890s. In Hungary, national identity was closely tied both to cultural memory and to the tensions brought to the fore by industrialization, which introduced new concepts of race and gender, and which changed traditional relationships between craft and industry, and between center and periphery. The 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris provided an opportunity to reinterpret old stereotypes of Hungary and Hungarian culture that had circulated at national and international exhibitions for several decades.
