There are undoubtedly very few people in Hungary’s intellectual life – especially among practitioners of our narrower profession, art historians and art writers – who are able to recognise in time what their training and talent, their fields of interest and personal preferences, and the combination of all these, truly predestine them for. And even fewer who, once they have recognised this, go on to unfold their exceptional and versatile abilities with such impressive consistency. The body of work and ever-expanding oeuvre of Hedvig Dvorszky testify that she is among these few.
By the time she completed her studies in history and art history at Eötvös Loránd University in 1965, the very subject and title of her thesis already signalled her focus – Kortárs építészet és képzőművészet kapcsolata (lit. The Relationship between Contemporary Architecture and the Visual Arts) – revealing that she was primarily interested in the art of the present day, in the tendencies unfolding and taking shape in the contemporary moment, and in the achievements of living artists. The presentation and analytical evaluation of these would later form the most significant strand of her considerable life’s work.
At her first workplace, as an art historian at the Lectorate of Fine and Applied Arts, numerous memorable and highly successful exhibitions were initiated and organised under her name. Alongside her official duties – she also lectured as a guest at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts – she played an active role in the professional training of future artists. In the second half of the 1960s, she introduced the wider public to significant contemporary artworks through the programme series titled Galéria (Gallery), which presented exhibitions and was produced within the Fine Arts Editorial Department of Hungarian Television.
From the first half of the 1970s onwards, she took an active part in the work of the artists’ colony called the Siklós Kerámia Symposion (Siklós Ceramics Symposium), founded by the ceramic artist Imre Schrammel. This initiative proved to be of defining importance both in the Hungarian art scene and in the career of Hedvig Dvorszky. In the decades that followed, the symposium and artists’ colony movement spread throughout Hungary. These outstanding professional workshops – including the renowned International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét – could not have done without Hedvig Dvorszky’s organisational work and her regular lectures.
After nearly a decade, she left her first workplace, the Lectorate – the institution in which the well-known expectations of Aczél’s cultural policy had been increasingly enforced at the time. Wishing to avoid forced and unscrupulous compromises, and accepting the highly unfavourable financial consequences, she changed her career path. At her new workplace, as an editor at Corvina Publisher House, she produced some of her most outstanding and enduring achievements. Alongside editing various impressive volumes on Hungarian and European art of earlier periods, she launched the Műterem (Studio) series presenting contemporary Hungarian fine and applied artists, whose splendid volumes she herself edited and oversaw – such as one of the series’ most outstanding and still fundamental works, the volume on the art of Imre Schrammel. Also a gap-filling work – now frequently consulted and read by successive generations of professionals and future professionals – is Design – a forma művészete (lit. Design – the art of form), published in 1979 by the Publishing House of the Fine Arts Fund, selected and with an afterword by Hedvig Dvorszky.
Since the early 1970s, the analytical writings and reviews reporting on major exhibitions have attracted particular attention – at times with the force of revelation – both within the profession and among the wider public. Which exhibitions she selected from the artistic offerings of the time and deemed worthy of publication was, of course, influenced primarily by her personal taste and preferences. Yet her choices were ultimately determined by artistic accomplishment and the inherent aesthetic value of the works on display. Thus she did not limit herself to discussing and analysing the work of artists who stood close to her – in either a literal or a figurative sense – but also addressed the work of others, including those whose very mention was, at the time, almost risky. Regarding the exhibition that caused considerable stir in its day – the 1986 September show in the Dorottya Street gallery presenting the works and designs of Tibor Szalai, Gábor Bachman, Attila Kovács and László Rajk – few formulated and recorded statements as convincing and perceptive as those written by Hedvig Dvorszky in issue no. 6 of that year’s Ipari Forma magazine.
From her publications and numerous statements it is clear that, from the very beginning, she followed and acknowledged the emergence of Hungarian organic architecture with perceptive attention, focusing above all on the work of Imre Makovecz and György Csete. Among her analytical writings, particularly enduring in value is the substantial study included in the following exhibition catalogue, which she edited: Architettura Organica Ungherese – (Magyar Organikus Építészet), La Biennale di Venezia, 1991.
Given the earlier stages of her career, it is hardly surprising that Hedvig Dvorszky was among those members of the intellectuals in the humanities for whom the political transition of 1990 – beyond the shared sense of euphoria – primarily meant new challenges and new tasks. Unlike many others, she did not shy away from these. On the contrary, she actively sought them out and embraced them with enthusiasm. The new responsibilities appeared, on the one hand, in the form of ‘official work’: between 1992 and 1995, Hedvig Dvorszky served as Senior Adviser for Applied Arts at the Ministry of Culture and Public Education. On the other hand, a long-desired but now realistic opportunity presented itself – the revival and relaunch of a distinguished, long-established professional journal that had been sorely missed from the domestic periodical landscape since 1945. This was Magyar Iparművészet, a journal published continuously between 1897 and 1944 by the National Hungarian Society for Applied Arts. Dvorszky developed and submitted the concept for the revived journal in the autumn of 1992 to her then administrative ‘superior’, Deputy Secretary of State György Fekete, and the first issue appeared the following year. Her contribution to this achievement is as undeniable as her role in what followed: under her editorship, which lasted nearly a decade, the journal earned the well-deserved recognition of both the professional community and the interested public. Her own writings – studies, reviews and critical essays – contributed significantly to this success.
The Hungarian public with an interest in culture could become familiar with Hedvig Dvorszky’s work not only through her writings and editorial activity, but also through her voice – carried over the airwaves. Since 2003, several hundred engaging and remarkably substantial conversations have been broadcast on Magyar Katolikus Rádió (Hungarian Catholic Radio), in which practising artists and prominent ecclesiastical and secular figures of intellectual life responded to the questions of the programme’s editor and interviewer, Hedvig Dvorszky.
[the author is an art historian, Museum of Applied Arts]