Dénes Györgyi won the closed competition for the design of the Hungarian pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Exposition. The main attractions at the Expo were the monumental German and Soviet pavilions. Despite this, the Hungarian exhibition building, which was relatively small in scale and did not have a very high budget, reaped great success with the critics and with the public. Contemporary reports appreciated its modern and elegant architectural composition and the quality of the examples of fine and applied arts displayed in it. The works of Pál Molnár C., Vilmos Aba-Novák, Pál Pátzay, and Margit Kovács, amongst others, were included in the exhibition. The central element of the pavilion’s hall of ecclesiastical art was the large stained-glass window by Lili Árkayné Sztehlo, which gained the Grand Prix of the Expo. The artist’s husband, Bertalan Árkay, in addition to being an excellent Modernist architect, also took scores of photographs. In these, he documented the buildings he himself had designed as well as the works of his wife and their travels. He also took numerous exterior and interior photographs of the Hungarian pavilion at the Exposition, and here we have highlighted one of these.
Mercedes Köntzey
