“The Whole Country of Mexico is a Great Cemetery of Fabulous Cultures”. The Hungarian Artist Pál Horti and his Mexican Collection

Abstract

The 1904 World Fair in St. Louis wrought a fundamental change in Pál Horti’s life. A trailblazer of Art Nouveau in Hungary, he was commissioned to design and build the Hungarian pavilion and to organize Hungary’s official exhibit at Saint Louis, where he first encountered pre-Columbian art and concluded that the ancestors of the Hungarians had to be related to the American indigenous peoples. His opinion was based on ideas popular in the second half of the 19th century. According to these ideas, the origins of the Hungarians were to be sought on other continents. That’s why Horti resolved after the World Fair to travel to Mexico and then on to Asia in order to explore the origins of Hungarians and their ancestors. In 1906, he crossed Mexico from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean and on his three-month trip acquired various archaeological pieces and ethnographic objects. According to letters he wrote home, what he experienced mostly in Western Mexico convinced him that there existed some kinship between the indigenous peoples of Mexico and the Hungarians.