The Myth of Folk Art (in Hungarian Perspectives

The study explains the birth of the term ‚folk art‘ in the Hungarian context. In Central Europe, the interest in the culture of the people, i.e. peasants, was connected with the emergence of the idea of nation-states. Towards the end of the 19th century, an evolutionary approach became authoritative in both history and social history. The emerging ethnology also followed this direction. In the simple object forms of peasant culture, it could find documents from old historical periods. At the end of the 19th century, home industry movements emerged. On the one hand, the goal was the production of industrial goods that did not require capital, but meant the use of folk knowledge. Recognizing the possibilities, the state supported the education of house industries and its application in the applied arts for decades. This produced results such as Hungarian Art Nouveau and later Art Deco. At the end of the 19th century, research on ornamentation appreciated the decorations of objects used by peasant. The result was the birth of the term ‚folk art‘, which is a value category without concrete content.