Exhibit From Hungary’s Golden Age : Art: Paintings, sculpture, objets d’art show flowering of Magyar culture at turn of the century.

“A peacock takes its perch upon the county hall --

A sign that freedom comes to many folk in thrall.

Let the proud, frail peacock, whose feathers daze the sun,

Proclaim that tomorrow here all will be undone.

Tomorrow all will change, be changed at last. New eyes

In new battles will turn with laughter to the skies.

New winds will make laments in the old Magyar trees,

While we await, await new Magyar mysteries . . . .

--Hungarian poet Endre Ady, (1877-1919)

In October of last year, Hungary began to shed its communist skin and transform itself on the model of Western democracy. The events of the past 12 months have put the country to a test, as its citizens, and especially its artists, confront the luxuries and pressures of expanded freedoms.

The test is not a new one, however, for the Eastern European nation has had a long history of bitter occupations and brutal invasions.

Today’s times could be compared, for example, to the period after the signing of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867, when Hungary was granted internal autonomy for the first time in nearly 200 years. With the yoke of the Austrian-ruled Hapsburg monarchy loosened, Hungary entered a new era, with a new energy.

Finally, Hungarians had the chance to rekindle the long-suppressed flame of their native culture. “New forges and new fires, new faiths, new holy men,” the poet Ady wrote, addressing the Magyar people, who had occupied the Carpathian basin for a thousand years. “Either you’ll come to life, or be nothing again.”

Hungarian culture did come back to life, at least until the World War I sank the country into yet another abyss. Voluminous evidence of this renaissance can be seen in the exhibition “A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914,” opening Saturday at the San Diego Museum of Art.

More than 200 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, ceramic objects and architectural designs are included in the show, a somewhat smaller version of the exhibition originally staged in Budapest several years ago. The Barbican Art Gallery in London organized the current show’s tour to England and the U.S. with the Hungarian Ministry of Culture, the Hungarian National Gallery and the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami. San Diego is the final stop on the show’s four-city tour.

The confluence of forces that came together in late 19th-Century Hungary is what makes the period fascinating, according to Robert Frankel, former director of Miami’s Center for the Fine Arts, and now director of the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, where the exhibition was last seen.

“It was a time when Hungarians were looking for and discovering a national tradition and identity. At the same time, they were becoming more aware of things happening everywhere else.” The art, architecture and design from those years, Frankel explained by telephone from Norfolk, “reflect that searching, that exploration.”

In their search for a distinct national identity, Hungarians peeled back layers of foreign influence to revive their own traditional folk art and design. During the long Hapsburg rule, native Hungarian culture was supplanted by art and architectural styles derived from Austria. As pressure from Austria waned after the Compromise, Hungarians began to rehabilitate what they saw as the pure, unspoiled art of their forebears, and to integrate it into newer, more modern forms of expression. Motifs from embroidered felt coats worn by Hungarian shepherds, for instance, reappeared as decorative patterns in Art Nouveau architecture.

Paintings in the “Golden Age” show reach beyond Hungary’s native folk art to touch on familiar aspects of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Realism and Romanticism. There is little stylistic unity, but, according to Frankel and the show’s informative catalogue, a consistently strong drive toward independence underlies every artist’s work.

Hungary, like most European nations, spent the late 19th and early 20th centuries pursuing artistic options outside the rigors and rewards of the official academy, an institution which had long trained artists in traditional styles and held a monopoly on launching their careers. Modernism and its rebellion against authority seduced Hungarian artists, but the pull of patriotism was just as strong. This friction between rejection of the past and respect for native tradition drew sparks, many and varied.

On one hand there were the urbane psychological portraits of Jozsef Rippl-Ronai, on the other the pastoral idylls of Karoly Ferenczy. The nostalgic fantasies of Janos Vaszary represented one way to pay tribute to the past, the rustic, folk-art-inspired crafts of the Godollo colony reflected another.

Emerging from the shadow of Vienna, whose fin de siecle culture was among the world’s richest and most sophisticated, posed a perennial challenge to Hungarian artists. Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were among the many turn-of-the-century Viennese to carve secure niches in the art historical canon. In Hungary, however, even the period’s biggest names “don’t slip off the tongue,” admits the Barbican Gallery’s John Hoole, chief organizer of the “Golden Age” show.

When Hoole saw the original exhibition in Budapest, the work was new and unfamiliar to him, as it remains to most audiences outside of Hungary. But, he discovered, the situation was not that different within Hungary itself.

“The subject was even new to the Hungarians,” he said by telephone from London. “It was as though they were rediscovering their past. The exhibition came about with the thaw that subsequently spread throughout the rest of Eastern Europe.”

Nearly one hundred years after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, the country is once again undergoing a rebirth of freedoms. Among the positive effects is a new enthusiasm for sharing Hungary’s cultural wealth with the rest of the world.

“We were welcomed” San Diego Museum of Art director Steven Brezzo said of the Hungarian response to organizers of the British and American touring exhibition.

“The motives were different than they had been in the past. Before, the emphasis was monetary, the interest was in getting hard currency. Now, they’ve become more interested in the significance of the cultural material.”