ART REVIEW : A Too-Grand Tour of Hungary’s ‘Golden Age’ : Eclectic exhibit presents an overview of a historical period. A smaller, stricter selection might have strengthened its impact.

Less an art show than a portrait of a period, “A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914” is filled with promise that is only half fulfilled.

Paintings, prints, sculpture, furniture, architectural renderings, costumes, posters--and on and on--by artists little known in the West don’t mix well in this exhibition opening today (to Jan. 6) at the San Diego Museum of Art. They compete and, too often, the good works are overcome by the bad.

It’s not that there’s not much to love here; to the contrary, maybe half of the 200 works in the show are fascinating examples of how a once-oppressed country briefly came into its own artistically. But a more selective presentation would have made the case for Hungary’s cultural merit at the turn of the century more convincingly. Bad art is bad art, even when it’s there just to represent the big picture.

Hungary’s so-called “Golden Age” was a time of new freedoms and great hope.

In 1896, the country celebrated 1,000 years of history, since the arrival of the Magyars, with a series of monumental Millenial exhibitions. It also was in a period of recovery from the long repression of the Hapsburgs. The middle class was rising and supporting the arts, and a new sense of patriotism and national identity began to stir among the people, leading artists and artisans to look both backward and forward for inspiration.

Shunning the rigid discipline of late 19th-Century academic art, these artists turned back to the rich folk-art heritage that was truly Hungarian, and forward, or rather outward, to the new developments in modern art that were burgeoning throughout Europe.

This show begins with rigid--and not very accomplished--academic work, aptly shown next to fancy corseted women’s costumes.

Installed chronologically, the show moves through a period of Art Nouveau decoration in both functional objects and in the fine arts to finish with some more modern blends of crafts and art in a wonderful group of stained glass windows.

Throughout, though, all of the work here is seeped in romanticism. From the numerous Arcadian images of beautiful nymphs lounging seductively in the woods to the arrestingly intimate view of embracing lovers in “The Golden Age” from 1897-98 by Janos Vaszary, to Karoly Ferenczy’s seemingly spineless “Orpheus” from 1894 to the endless Aubrey Beardsley rip-offs in the later years of the show, there’s more stormy romance here than in any soap opera. And nobody ever really looks happy in Hungarian art.

Even the decorative arts often are steeped in sentiment.

A wonderful art-nouveau wrought-iron gate by an artist identified only as Schiller-Ferreider from the Heidelberg family tomb is an image of a climbing grapevine--but all of the leaves are dead. It’s a peculiar but resonate variation on the upbeat iron vines of the Paris Metro stations built around the same time.

This show displays both the promise of Hungary’s self-discovery and the false starts. Unfortunately, it is dominated by paintings that often look like poor cousins to the inventions being produced concurrently in Paris. Even some of the best works simply make you wish for the luxury of seeing them in the context of their sources to see how they would stand up.

Jozsef Rippl-Ronai’s “Lady with Black Veil (Mme Mazet),” 1896, is a wonderful and mysterious portrait of a woman with a very pale face. Unlabeled, it could easily be mistaken for a Toulouse-Lautrec.

Wispy youths drawn in pencil and watercolor by Lajos Gulacsy reek of Pre-Raphaelite influences, and memories of Renoir, Whistler and Sargent are often in evidence in the smattering of portraits throughout the show.

But such borrowings don’t matter when the art is strong, as with an extraordinary portrait of the artist’s wife by Istvan Zador. Shown seated in a simple wooden lounge chair, she toys with a pendant on her necklace. Dressed in a sensible brown dress, sensible brown shoes, she seems so upright and stern next to the delicate sensuality of the women portrayed in the pair of Japanese prints hanging just behind her.

There is no frill to this wonderful work, no excess in its puritanism.

Some of the finest moments in this show come, too, with the crafts. One whole case is devoted exclusively to red art-nouveau porcelain made in the factory of Vilmos Zsolnay. A wonderful two-stemmed vase shaped like a pair of red tulips shows influences from Asia and Europe.

This show does not make a case for Hungary as a visionary center. Nor does this art appear to have been very influential in the larger picture of world art. None of these artists are well-known or well-documented in the standard art historical texts.

This is a show that will be of great interest to historians, it’s a catch-up kind of show, a filler that gives a more complete picture of the world at a time when everything was changing.

For the rest of us, it’s just a mixed bag.

It does hold some ominous messages about the course of Hungary’s history, however. Unfortunately for Hungary, just as these artists were getting going, the clamps came down and the results of World War I squelched hopes for flourishing signs of individualism.

As Hungary once again comes into its own, the brevity of the exciting period covered here provides hope that a culture can revive, even after a long dormant period. And it makes us recognize the precious nature of even just a few years of creative growth.