Transylvanian tales: a homewares range inspired by folk art

“What would an American fashion designer, living in Milan, know about Transylvania?” asks JJ Martin, the US-born founder of Italian lifestyle brand La DoubleJ. The answer was “very little”, until a chance encounter with the influential Hungarian-Swiss art dealer Miklós von Bartha, in a bohemian Alpine bed and breakfast, led to a discovery.

After “bonding” over Martin’s dog — and several discussions about fashion — von Bartha invited Martin to view his private collection of traditional Transylvanian folk craft, housed in his Basel gallery. A revelation was in store.

“I walked in to this super-slick white gallery where Miki opened a secret door to a small room. It was like a portal into a Grimm’s fairy tale — a magical, ethereal world,” Martin says. “There were ceramics on the walls; embroidered samplers and painted furniture: centuries of culture conserved in one room. The colours are magnificent — and the designs have such charm.”

Martin, whose ebullient designs draw on archival prints, says the encounter felt like “hitting on treasure: all my creative alarm bells were ringing”. With a team, she designed a collection of fashion and homewares, the swirling motifs and saturated hues “loosely lifted and distilled, like sacred geometry” from Transylvanian folk wares, to be produced under von Bartha’s critical gaze.

Martin finds it amusing that the erudite, multilingual von Bartha agreed to work with a “freewheeling designer”, as she describes herself: “We’re the original odd couple.” Von Bartha, for his part, enjoys the fact that Martin “has made something commercial — and unusual” out of his collection. “Almost all my friends have a piece,” he says.

The collaboration has led to a joint exhibition at Kulturstiftung Basel H Geiger in Basel, with Martin’s wares bringing a contemporary edge to a scholarly edit of von Bartha’s collection. Curated by specialists Enikö Szöcsné Gazda and Edit Katona, Transylvania’s Hidden Treasures includes 186 ceramics and textiles, amassed at auction houses and markets over five decades after he acquired his first piece, an ancestral plate. Von Bartha hopes the weighty catalogue will become a standard text for academic research.

Fringed by the forests of the Carpathian Mountains, Transylvania — myth-steeped land of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel classic Between the Woods and the Water — has a “complicated and misunderstood history”, says von Bartha, whose family came from a village in the east of the area. Transylvania (“the land beyond the woods”) became part of Romania in 1920. Before then, waves of settlers, from Romans to Hungarians (for part of the 19th century, Transylvania belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and Saxons, coexisted over the centuries in a palimpsest of cultures.

Abundant clay reserves gave rise to a ceramics industry that thrived for
centuries, with guilds being founded in the Middle Ages. While men modelled the clay, the decoration was done by women. Each had a distinctive look — from lustrous glazes incised with the sgraffito whirls of Saschiz pottery to the equally expressive blue-and-white painted wares of Draas majolica.

They were all influenced by the Habans, mostly Swiss Anabaptists who in the 1600s settled in the village of Alvinc, where they enjoyed religious freedom. “Thanks to them, pottery — until then produced for utilitarian purposes — became a decorative folk art,” says von Bartha. Among the earlier pieces, a slender 1782 jug from Cluj-Napoca, embellished with flowers and geometric patterns in greens and ochres, owes a debt to the fluent sophistication of Haban design.

The textiles in the show were also made for everyday use as well as decoration and remind von Bartha of his grandmother’s home. Truckle beds heaped with embroidered quilts, pillowcases and curtains brought cheer to the wood-lined interiors of village houses.

Their beauty aside, the mere fact that these works have survived is worth celebrating, says von Bartha. In the 1970s-80s, Romania’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu set out to destroy Transylvania’s villages and industrialise the landscape before his execution, on Christmas Day in 1989, put paid to his grim master plan. (The threat sparked a conservation movement, spearheaded by King Charles III — who has Romanian ancestors. Seven villages, including Saschiz and Biertan, famed for their fortified churches, are now Unesco World Heritage Sites).

In Hungary, Transylvanian craft has long been prized as relics of a lost empire. To research her designs, Martin and von Bartha took a field trip to Budapest, visiting tiny antiques shops, rummaging through collector’s attics and talking to experts. The city’s Museum of Hungarian Applied Folk Art has a comprehensive collection. Before he left for the US, the composer Béla Bartók bedecked his villa (now a museum) with textiles and recorded Transylvanian folk music in an effort to conserve its past.

Martin also drew on myths to design an “ethereal forest chapel, a twist on the Transylvanian mood”, which greets visitors to the show. “I like the idea that we all share the idea of a borderless Transylvania — of vampires and mysterious forests — that exists in our imagination, in the same way that Miki shared his collection with me,” she says.

Von Bartha says he hopes visitors will discover something new. His eye for the overlooked, combined with a scholarly approach to storytelling, has underpinned his success as an art dealer. In 1976, his gallery staged a groundbreaking show of Hungarian avant-garde artists; in the 1980s, he helped to bring the radical Argentine art movements Asociación Arte Concreto Invención and Grupo Madí to global prominence.

But he has a confession to make. “I have to tell you that nowadays I get as much satisfaction from finding a plate or pot as I did from discovering a new artist,” says von Bartha, whose son Stefan now runs the gallery.

“That’s because you’re thinking with your heart — not your inner financial calculator,” chips in Martin.

When I ask about the contemporary craft scene in Romania, von Bartha looks gloomy. “It’s all bad, ugly stuff made for the tourist market,” he mutters. I suggest there is hope this unlikely collaboration might change all that.

‘Transylvania’s Hidden Treasures’ runs until November 6; kbhg.ch/en

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