Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Document Type
Language
- Multiple languages (2) (remove)
Keywords
- Alajos Alois Unger (1814-1848) (1)
- Alajos Unger (1814-1848) (1)
- Hungarian Art (1)
- Materialflusssimulation (1)
- Mátyás Unger der Jüngere (1824-1878) (1)
- Mátyás Unger der Ältere (1789-1862) (1)
- Mátyás Unger the Elder (1789-1862) (1)
- Mátyás Unger the Younger (1824-1878) (1)
- Nazarene Art (1)
- Playing cards (1)
Institute
- Fakultät für angewandte Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften (2) (remove)
Alajos (Alois) Unger, who was descended from the well-known Unger playing- card making family from Győr, is a recently rediscovered Hungarian late Nazarene and late Romanticist artist. The son and brother of the playing-card makers Mátyás (Mathias) Unger the Elder (1789-1862) and Younger (1824-78), he was originally apprenticed in this craft as well and, as could be proved for the first time, designed the family’s playing-cards. First trained at the National Drawing School of his hometown under János Hofbauer (creator of The Castle of Dévény, Hungarian National Gallery), which apprentices and journeymen of the local crafts attended, Alajos Unger enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts first in 1833 to train there as a draughtsman and then became a pupil of Leopold Kupelwieser (1796-1862) from 1836 until 1842. Among his classmates were the famous artists Eduard von Engerth (1818-97), Franz Josef Dobiaschofsky (1818-67), Ferenc Szoldatits (1820-1916) and August von Pettenkofen (1822-1889). In an art exhibition in Győr in 1903 the quality of Unger’s genre paintings displayed there was likened to those of the latter.
It has now been possible to demonstrate how strongly his art was rooted in the late Nazarene and late Romanticist tradition of the circle around his teacher. Overall, his style not only reflects the ’’literary-musical-artistic” orientation of Kupelwieser, but also the ”fairytale-like-poetical” variety represented by Joseph von Führich and particularly Moritz von Schwind.
Alajos Unger had until recently only been known by name, but with the present article, a fuller picture of the artist’s life and work has been presented. Thus, apart from the two oil paintings, which came into the possession of the Hungarian National Gallery in the 1970s, The Recapture ofRaab (1840) and a portrait of the artist and his family (1843), a series of hitherto unknown oilworks has been discovered: a portrait of an unknown lady (1836), now part of the art collection of the University of Pennsylvania, a copy of Cesare da Sesto’s La vierge au bas-relief (date unknown), the Baptism of Vajk (1842) and a Biedermeier picture clock depicting a patriotic scene from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor set against the backdrop of a veduta of Venice (1847). The portrait of Ferenc Hergeszell, a local politician from Unger’s hometown and later member of the Hungarian Diet, from 1841, now in the collection of the Flóris Römer Museum in Győr, also bears Unger’s painterly handwriting.
Altogether, the torso of the extraordinary work of a representative of a younger generation of Nazarenes, who promoted Hungarian national art, has been unveiled in the bicentenary of his birth. In addition to this, the role of Nazarene artists and that of their networks in the development of Hungarian art generally was investigated.
The Unger Family from Győr: The Social Semiotics, Political Iconography and Manufacture of their 19th Century Playing Cards Mátyás (Mathias) Unger the Elder (1789–1862) and his eponymous son Mátyás (Mathias) the Younger (1824–1878) from Győr are prominent in the history of the Hungarian playing cards. Due to more recent research, new details about the family and their playing cards have surfaced. This includes the fact that another son of Mátyás Unger the Elder was Alajos (Alois) Unger (1814–1848), an academic painter trained at the Vienna Academy of Arts, particularly under Leopold Kupelwieser and Johann Ender, in late Nazarene, late Romantic style.
New findings on the Unger playing cards are presented drawing on social semiotics and its relationship to political iconography, whereby cards are considered as text and the two categories of denotation and connotation pivotal. Change in connotation and meaning is analysed to provide further explanation for how the four season cards, i.e. Tell cards (magyar kártya), today‘s standard pattern, came about with lost Unger playing cards serving as a missing link. These Unger cards reflected the art policy of the Austrian Empire of the time as image propaganda for the Casa d’Austria linked with the pietas austriaca/hungarica, in line with Alajos Unger’s oil paintings. Over time, the connotation of the Tell cards changed into a clear anti-Habsburg stance. Further reasons for why this pattern became standard in Hungary and how the four seasoned Däuser cards, popularized by the Ungers, must have become part of it are also given. Against this background, a novel bottom-up material flow simulation approach is proposed to investigate the artisanal playing card production process, output and profitability of the small workshop of the Ungers together with a research agenda for adapting it to the building and conditions of the last known production site, all on the basis of a reconstruction.