Department of Art History, University of Birmingham
Abstract
This article has two principal aims. The first is to outline the approach and development of a group of Hungarian-born art historians who trained in Vienna and who came together in Budapest during the First World War. The radical intellectual climate and the experience of war and revolution exposed these scholars to new concepts of art and culture, challenging many of their aesthetic principles. From this emerged one tradition in the social history of art. The second part of the article traces the dispersal of this group and their subsequent careers, contrasting their work with approaches to art historical scholarship that dominated in Hungarian institutions in the inter-war period. By implication, the article suggests that a distinctive type of art history could have developed in Hungary if the political situation had been more conducive
