Ildikó Nagy

Body and Soul

The Sculptor Béni Ferenczy (1890-1967)

 

Erzsi (Elizabeth), the widow of Béni Ferenczy, died in the year 2000 at the age of 96. She married Ferenczy, already a recognised sculptor, in 1932, and until his death in 1967, she remained his faithful companion, a constant inspiration for his work and a frequent model. She devoted the last thirty-three years of her life to keeping her husband's memory alive, and it is thanks to her that the Ferenczy Museum, containing the artwork of the entire Ferenczy family, opened its doors in Szentendre in 1972. In 1993, she created the Ferenczy Family Foundation. In 2005, the Foundation mounted a small exhibit at the Hungarian National Gallery to honour the memory of the artist and his wife. Curators Mária Földes and Ferenc Zsákovics selected the material from the small collection of works which Erzsi had kept to the end of her life and bequeathed to the Foundation in her will. The interest of these sculptures, drawings and ceramics is mainly personal. Many of the items are portraits of family and friends, secondary copies or original plaster casts of major works, sketches, preliminary studies and late watercolours. Their importance lies mostly in what they tell us about the relationship between Béni and Erzsi Ferenczy. Yet meagre as the exhibit is, the works on display evoke the memory of one of the finest Hungarian sculptors.

Béni Ferenczy (1890-1967) was born into Hungarian art history. His father, Károly Ferenczy (1862-1917), was the leading Hungarian plein-air painter and one of the founders of the artists' colony and school at Nagybánya (Baia Mare) in Transylvania. His mother, née Olga Fialka, Czech by birth and Viennese by culture, was herself a gifted painter who gave up her career for the sake of her family. His older brother Valér was a painter and later an outstanding graphic artist; the name of his twin sister Noémi became synonymous with modern Hungarian tapestry. This environment was both an inspiration and an impediment for the budding artist.
Béni Ferenczy was surrounded by an extraordinary environment at home. His mother spoke eight languages and read poetry and even entire novels to the family. They had a large library filled with works of literature, history and philosophy; they subscribed to journals and magazines from abroad. Their cultural world was based on the classics, but included figures like Baudelaire, though not Dostoevsky or Endre Ady, the revolutionary Hungarian poet of the turn of the century. (The Ferenczy children had to discover Ady for themselves, which they did in due course. Valér even translated Ady into French, as he did Baudelaire into Hungarian.)
Baudelaire into Hungarian.) Due to the doting attention of the parents and their high expectations, young Béni was able to see the world; he studied abroad and established excellent contacts with several outstanding scholars, especially from the Viennese school of art history. In addition, through long hikes, wrestling (an activity on which Valér reported in his letters to his father) and strengthening of the body in general, Károly Ferenczy also saw to it that his sons did not neglect their physical development. Acrobats or displays of physical strength frequently appear in Károly Ferenczy's paintings, subjects well represented in Béni's early sculptures as well. Yet, living with a great man was not without its pressures, and Károly's strict paternal control must have given his son more than a few difficult hours. Béni Ferenczy became an artist under these conflicting influences, between the opposing poles of acceptance and rebellion.
He was born in Szentendre just outside Budapest, but the family soon moved to Munich and from there to Nagybánya, where Béni completed his schooling and received his early training as an artist in the colony. His teachers were the prominent painters Béla Iványi Grünwald and István Réti. He went on to study in Florence (1908-09) and Munich (1909-10), but he was dissatisfied with the instruction in both places. The principal benefit of his stay in Florence was his acquaintance with Márk Vedres, an excellent Hungarian sculptor then living in Italy. Vedres drew the young man's attention to the small bronzes of the Renaissance. In Munich, Béni Ferenczy learned of the theories of the influential German sculptor Adolf Hildebrand, as well as the practice of direct stone-carving, whereby the sculpture was created right into the stone, without using preliminary clay or plaster casts. His teaching did not affect Béni Ferenczy as much as it did some of his contemporaries, but he learned a great deal about the craft, materials and techniques. It was also in Munich that he mastered wood carving. Then, in Nagybánya, he became adept at making clay sculptures and objects. In addition to having the widest cultural background among Hungarian sculptors, Ferenczy also possessed a level of technical expertise unrivalled by any of his colleagues. (He later wrote prolifically about sculptural techniques.) By going to Florence and Munich, he had followed his father's wishes, but the city he really wanted to study in was Paris. This wish came true in 1911, when he became Bourdelle's student. Piero Pavesi ("Monsieur Pierre"), the famous model at the art school, had previously modelled for Rodin (for the statue of St John the Baptist, among others). As Ferenczy later recalled,

I made a rather wild study of Monsieur Pierre that astonished all the students. I exaggerated what I saw. The overly muscular legs almost got into each other's way, the enormous mane of hair was larger than the muscular trunk. Yet all this caricature was moulded after nature; nothing was artificial. It was a heightening of what I saw but not an abstraction from it.

Although his colleagues appreciated Ferenczy's work, Bourdelle did not, and he gave his student a long lecture on the need to study nature and on the difficult road travelled by all the great sculptors of the past.

Was he right? Who knows. All I know is that I had had enough of the difficult road and wanted to reach the stars sooner. I was copying Gothic sculptures at the Musée de Cluny. Of course, my father found out about my dilemma and ordered me back to Budapest right after the New Year.

He spent the summer in Nagybánya, diligently drawing from nature. He still exaggerated the forms of his models, yet his father somehow became accustomed to this perception of nature and in the winter of 1912-13 he allowed Béni to return to Paris. After attending several of the Russian private academies then in vogue, he entered the school of Alexander Arkhipenko. He met many great luminaries of the period; he visited Matisse; he saw Gertrude Stein's famous collection. However, the only modern artists who really interested him were Cézanne and Renoir. In Arkhip enko's studio he made a small relief in stone with two figures. The sculptor didn't think it was modern enough, though he found Ferenczy himself talented. In the end, both this contact and school turned out to be disappointing. Ferenczy had been brought up to respect the values of the past; how could he have accepted the radicalism of the avant-garde? With a slight sense of irony he later wrote:

I couldn't get along with Bourdelle, because he found me too modern; I couldn't get along with Arkhipenko, because he didn't find me modern enough. how can I satisfy everyone?

In the end, the greatest revelation of the Paris period was Chartres Cathedral and Gothic art in general. There is only one surviving Ferenczy work from this period, a drawing now in a private collection in Romania, showing a group of muscular women in dynamic detail and in a beautifully balanced composition that may well have represented Ferenczy's idea of Cubism at the time.
Upon his return to Nagybánya in February 1914, Ferenczy organised a studio exhibit where he showed work he had created since the autumn of 1913, following his Paris sojourn. The sculptures are not known, but a laconic report in the local press tells us of a life-size female nude with a painful expression on her face whose spine and shoulder muscles were arched in a "morbid" way. Alongside a male figure with a strong neck and short legs, the exhibit contained some "carved groups" as well. The anonymous reviewer appreciated the way the sculptures "rendered the character of a man full of energy" and stated: "Béni Ferenczy's naturalism feeds on that of his father, yet the light of originality is already shining in his work."

Ferenczy's surviving early work bears out these observations. His student years had come to an end in 1913; his "adventures" in modern art were over. During the winter of 1913-14, with a certain relief, Károly Ferenczy was able to tell his son Valér that "at any rate, Béni will become more substantial along these lines which I, to a certain extent, forced him to follow." His sculptures from 1913-17 show him still grounded in naturalism, which he was trying to transcend by various sorts of stylisations. The sculptures emphasise the physical strength of the human body - short, muscular legs, exaggerated upper bodies, a certain rigidity in posture, a certain impersonality (St George, 1913; Hercules, 1915; Dancer, 1916). For all their beauty and interest, these works evince a certain strain in an attempt to show something of the human essence beyond the merely visual. At the time, Ferenczy found this essence in physical strength. In something he wrote in the 50s, he was critical of this way of portraying the "hero" and referred to Donatello's St George as his favourite sculptural representation of heroism. "Strength is expressed here solely by the tense arching of the eyebrows." (He may have attempted to emulate this in his tenderly shaped Petőfi statue of 1948 where the strength of the poet, who had a very slender physique, was indicated by his raised eyebrows.)
Károly Ferenczy died in 1917. Following this, Béni's artistic development seems gradually to have changed. He continued on the path prescribed by his father in, it seems, a less frantic and less strained manner.
The change is marked by a series of portraits of people close to him, including his sister Noémi (1916, 1917); the sculptor and writer Christina Winsloe, wife of Lajos Hatvany, the writer and patron of writers (1917); and his friend, the Michelangelo scholar János (Johannes) Wilde (1918). The portraits are strongly profiled, with sharp contours, yet they are intensely personal in their head positions and in their faces, which seem withdrawn or lost in thought. Here, instead of concentrating on the expression of physical strength, Ferenczy grasped the very soul of his models. The change can be felt not only in the portraits, but in the full-figure statues. The image became a mirror of the soul, which in turn resulted in a new vocabulary of forms. At first, the artist (understandably) returned to a classical, Grecian idiom (Walking Woman, 1917); then, after a short period of transition (Dévi, 1918), he found a way to transcend the visual and to express the soul. In other words, he managed to grasp the real subject: the tension between body and soul. Ferenczy's Young Man (1919) is a landmark work in early twentieth-century Hungarian sculpture. The posture of the standing nude - spiritualised, somewhat lacking in energy - and his head, tilted to the side in an expression of pain, contrast with the dynamically articulated, analytical structure of the body. The muscles are well developed and separated from one another; the wrists and ankles are extremely thin and fragile. This fragility - one might say vulnerability - appears in the head, as if the figure suggests only the body to be present, the soul somewhere else. A man of leftist leanings, Béni Ferenczy joined the Directorate of the Arts during the three months of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in the spring of 1919. He was also a member of its purchasing committee, which was charged with acquiring artwork for museums, thereby helping many an artist in dire straits. He was appointed to the faculty of the Academy of Arts and Crafts, though the collapse of the regime prevented him from taking up his post. In 1920, he went to Nagybánya and from there he went into exile in Vienna. He married an Austrian woman with whom he had a daughter and a son. During 1922-23 he lived in Berlin, where he wished to settle, but lacked the money to do so. In July 1923, he returned to Vienna, where he rejoined the Hungarian émigré colony including among its members his old friend János Wilde. Through Wilde, he came into contact with many of Vienna's cultural luminaries, mostly painters and art historians. He made a medal of Julius von Schlosser and formed a lifelong friendship with Hans Sedlmayr. His reading expanded to include literature and art history, and he was introduced to the work of Sigmund Freud. This intellectual environment produced a second wave of major influences on Ferenczy and, in turn, another artistic renewal.
Before Vienna, he had exhibited at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin. The director of the gallery, Herwarth Walden, was one of the most important figures in the art world of the day. He discovered and linked up many modern artists who flocked to Berlin from different countries during the 1920s. Among Hungarians, the painters Aurél Bernáth, Béla Kádár, János Mattis Teutsch, Hugó Scheiber, László Moholy-Nagy and the sculptor László Péri all exhibited at Walden's gallery.
The director's openness, energy and stamina were astounding. In the summer of 1924, Ferenczy showed his work at the Sturm in a joint show with Bernáth. The exhibition included thirteen of his sculptures, possibly all in wood, from the period between 1921 and 1924. An exact list of the exhibit items is impossible to determine: many of the works are lost, others are known from photographs only. A few have been preserved and eventually passed from the artist's estate to the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre. It is as though the Paris memories of a decade earlier had suddenly resurfaced - body shapes made into planes intersecting in sharp angles, no soft curves whatsoever. The faces are left vague, the upper bodies still disproportionately large, the legs short, the women's hips wide. Many of the figures are nudes; yet, they do not concern the human body, but rather the search for a tradition of representation. In his attempt to find a more authentic way of representing the human form, Ferenczy reacted against the European tradition based on Greco-Roman art and clung to some undefinable "primitive" idea of a pristine primeval artistic tradition. In the process, he approached certain African patterns as well as certain expressionist sculptures - connections further facilitated by wood, their common medium. He also approached Cubism, though without its radical break with form. The sculptures are rough-hewn and grotesque; the arms and legs either too thin or else kept close to the body. There is something forlorn and lonely about the figures, even when in groups.
Strangely enough, the most harmonious of all the pieces happens to be a female torso, fortunately preserved in the original. The proportions of this torso are not exaggerated, and the soft curvatures of the trunk take their full effect. The head, barely articulated, does not draw attention away from the body, but rather serves to counterbalance the mass of the hips and to give the composition a softly arched, well-balanced structure. In 1925, some pieces from the Sturm exhibit were shown in Budapest, though Ferenczy continued to live in Vienna. He received commissions for portraits and made a number of reliefs for buildings in Berlin. He also made a monument for Egon and Edith Schiele in the Vienna cemetery (1928).
From 1925 on, he returned to a more traditional style. A beautiful early example of this is a young female nude (1927), whose salient features are once again the expression of the soul, the image of solitude and melancholy. Many sculptures of the 1920s remained abroad, making it difficult to form a realistic view of this important transitional period. Like many left-wing intellectuals all over Europe, Ferenczy expected a great deal of the new society emerging in the Soviet Union. This was probably the reason why he moved from Vienna to Moscow, where he lived from 1932 to 1935. He hoped above all that the great constructions then underway would provide sculptors with interesting new challenges and opportunities. He was soon disappointed, however. In one of his first letters to Noémi, he complained that "the situation here is not conducive to art." There are no known major works from these years, only a few sketches. Yet, the Moscow period marks the beginning of his series of medals commemorating great artists. He had been making medals more or less regularly since the beginning of his career. (His Ady medal dates from the year of the poet's death, 1919.) These were conceived on a flat base, in high relief. Ferenczy's characteristic "pictorial" style was first developed in medals devoted to these artists, on which he showed layers of space by making the background move. On the front of each medal is the portrait of the artist, and on the back a work, or an excerpt from a work, by the artist (Daumier, 1933; Goya, 1934; Van Gogh, 1936; Titian, 1937).

Having divorced his first wife, Ferenczy remarried in Moscow. Erzsi, his second wife, was Hungarian; she had also spent her childhood in Nagybánya. From Moscow they moved to Vienna in 1936 and on to Budapest in 1938. Erzsi, beautiful, strong, full-bodied, and full of life, became the model for many of his sculptures, drawings and watercolours - the main subject of his art. The idea of strength, which in the early works had been embodied in the ostentatiously displayed physical strength of the male hero, now became the property of the female principle. This was no longer sheer physical strength but the elemental force of nature itself - existence, biological and eternal at the same time. In Ferenczy's nudes (Danae, 1936; Atalanta, 1937; Woman Taking a Step, 1939; Susanna, 1940, etc.), this female type was perpetuated over a span of several decades. Only from the 1950s on does a whiff of sadness appear in this category of works (Torso of a Sitting Female Nude, 1956). "This beauty is nothing less than the innocence of life in Paradise, the unconscious pride of the act of becoming human - it is, in a word, primeval beauty", wrote Ferenczy about Renoir's Venus, whose ideal of beauty he was himself pursuing at the time. This ideal revives Greek tradition, though not in the canonic sense of representing beauty but rather in "the complete absence of psychological mimicry," in "the unselfconscious harmony of physical existence". The same applies to the female figures. The sculptures' concern is the beauty of the body; they include several torsos. The legs are cut off at mid-thigh, the arms just underneath the breasts. The heads are usually missing, leaving to the body all that has to be said. One of the torsos also exists in a full-figure version (Woman Taking a Step, 1939); a comparison of the two works shows with what concentration the torso expresses the dynamics of the body and its "unselfconscious harmony". The other side of life, which we might call the spiritual, meditative principle, is represented by children's figures - tall, lean, sad-faced pre-adolescent boys. They bear the burden of knowledge about human life and destiny. They stand in the world, awkward and defenseless, lonely even while at play (Boy Playing with Marbles, 1936; Miklós, 1937). The unified image of a human being, which Classical artists had been able to bring together in a single work, was split in Béni Ferenczy's oeuvre - the expression of the body was separated from that of the soul. One of his most stunning works is Pillar-Boy (1958), the most beautiful among his few male torsos, cast when he was already gravely ill. The tall, thin figure peers down with his head inclined. His sadness does not suggest prescient knowledge of the future, but rather the certitude of known suffering. Yet, this was not the artist's last word about the relationship between body and soul.

The Ferenczys spent the war years in Budapest; his studio was hit during the siege of 1945, and several of his works were destroyed. After the war, he was appointed Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts; yet in 1949, the year of the Communist takover, his former friend and fellow émigré in Vienna, Minister of Culture József Révai, abruptly dismissed him from his post. Ferenczy lost even his studio. Afterwards, he made mostly small sculptures while supporting himself by illustrating books. He was not allowed to take his Petőfi statue (1948-49) to its intended site, the Ambrosiana in Milan. It wasn't until 1960 that this statue was erected in the Hungarian city of Gyula. Soon after the suppression of the 1956 Revolution Béni Ferenczy suffered a debilitating stroke which left him speechless and which paralysed his right side, but with help from his wife, he learned to draw and make casts with his left hand; the final decade of his life was an amazing monument to willpower and spiritual strength. He had been making drawings all his life, yet the graphic arts acquired special significance during his last years. With a trembling hand he drew and painted his touching still-lifes with flowers, bearing witness to the indestructible nature of the creative spirit. His sculpture Golden Age (1959) is an artistic testament. While many of his early works, such as Hercules, glorify the physical strength of the hero, this lean, wide-eared, merry little elf confidently proclaims the triumph of soul over body.

 

Ildikó Nagy
is an art critic specialising in twentieth-century Hungarian art.