Seite - 385 - in Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg - Netzwerker der Kunstwelt

Across the Leitha 385 were the only artefacts worth collecting.65 He built on this idea while in post-revolu- tionary exile in London in 1851, where he delivered a lecture in London On the progress and decay of art ; and on the arrangement of a national museum that sketched out his ideal vision of an institution that would, very much like the British Museum, be universal in its scope.66 In a later article of 1875, On Museums, he revisited the lecture, singling out for critical treatment institutions that were instrumentalized purely to serve “national vanity”.67 In 1872 Henszlmann expressed virtually exactly the same sentiment in the pages of the Pester Lloyd in which he argued that the National Museum should not re- strict itself to merely “provincial” concerns but should aim to represent the history of art “in general”.68 Eitelberger and the Blindness of Liberalism In his note to Henszlmann, Eitelberger expressly sought co-operation with leading de- signers and art world representatives from Hungary. His hopes were not fulfilled, how- ever. While he paid constant attention to the development of art and design in Hungary, the events of the following years, in particular, the Ausgleich and its consequences, meant that Hungarian designers and artists made increasingly little reference to Vienna. In- deed, once the Museum of Applied Arts was founded in Budapest in 1872, they had their own institutional framework, and so while museum correspondence testifies to the loan of objects between museums in Budapest, Vienna and Košice, such constant contact did not materialize in the way Eitelberger envisaged it. When the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (k. k. Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie) was founded in 1864, the Habsburg state was still, for- mally, the Austrian Empire. The transformation of Austria into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867 was not followed by a matching change of name for Ei- telberger’s museum. We might regard this as a matter of mere nomenclature, except that increasingly, the Museum became just what its title came to imply : a museum for the Austrian half of the Empire. Hungary did still occasionally feature in the pages of 65 F. Pulszky, A műgyűjtemények’ hasznáról, in : Athenaeum : Tudományok és szépművészetek’ tára, II, 1838, pp.  185–189. 66 F. Pulszky, On the Progress and Decay of Art. And an Arrangement of a National Museum, in : The Museum of Classical Antiquities, 5, 1852, pp.  ii f. 67 F. Pulszky, A múzeumokról, in : Budapesti Szemle [Budapest Review] 8 : 16, 1875, pp.  241–257, reprinted in : Marosi (ed.), A Magyar művészettörténet-írás programjai (cit. n.  61), pp.  53–64. 68 I. Henszlmann, Der Landeskunstrath und die Provinzial-Museen, in : Pester Lloyd, 18  January 1872, p.  5 and 20  January 1872, p.  5.