Report from Europe; Hungarian culture in London.

To mark the entry of Hungary into the European Union this year a number of cultural events are being held in Britain, of which two are exhibitions.

The first exhibition, entitled A Celebration of Hungarian Gold and Silver, is on view at the Gilbert Collection in Somerset House in London until February 1. The intention is to show the diversity of Hungarian metalwork through examples from various eras and regions. Because of their location near the crossroads of Europe and the Islamic world, Hungarian craftsmen took inspiration from many different cultures.

The earliest work in the show is a Scythian running stag (illustrated below) made of gold and dating from the sixth century B.C. Other gold artifacts, mainly medieval, include a number of ecclesiastical objects such as a thirteenth-century gold cross encrusted with pearls and precious stones.

Until silver was discovered in the New World, Hungary was Europe's most important source, and its supply was only exhausted at the end of the eighteenth century. Included in the exhibition are many silver and enamel and silver-gilt objects such as a late fifteenth-century archbishop's crozier, a sixteenth-century coconut flagon mounted in silver-gilt, and a late eighteenth-century silver-gilt and enamel table fountain.

A different aspect of Hungarian creativity is on view at Christie's in London from January 6 to 22. Entitled A Brush with Grandeur--Philip Alexius de Laszlo, it is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of this Hungarian-born painter since his death in 1937. Born in Budapest in 1869, he studied there and in Paris and Munich before marrying into the Guinness family in 1900 and moving to England in 1907.

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He achieved great success as a society portrait painter. His royal sitters included Elizabeth II as a girl as well as her parents, and the kings and queens of Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Romania. Laszlo also painted aristocratic and beautiful women as well as the most important men in the military and business worlds. In the United States this pattern continued: his sitters included four presidents and Andrew W. Mellon.