Vadas József (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 11. (Budapest, 1991)
STURCZ János: Maróti Géza pályaműve a Rockefeller Centerhez
the most successful architects of the age, who was designing factories, office buildings, private lodgings and apartments for almost all of the big concerns. Maróti designed frescoes and statuettes for some of the buildings planned by Kahn, including the Fisher Building in Detroit, The Kresge Office Building, the Times Building, the Hudson Motor Co. Building and the Foreman Bank in Chicago. After these successful and profitable commissions, from the beginning of 1930 to the summer of 1931 Maróti travelled in Egypt, Greece and the Holy Land, ignoring the fight for positions brought about by the economic crisis; he recorded his impressions in a series of crayon drawings. We know nothing of the competition for the RC mosaic; neither the competition nor Maróti's name is mentioned in monographs about the RC or in handbooks of American art. Consequently, the only document proving his application for the commission are two letters to his daughter. I would like to take the opportunity to thank Márta Vajna for letting me examine these letters. The first one, written on April 24, 1932, proves that the competition, to which Maróti attached great hopes, really existed, and he started working on the „most interesting venture in his life" with lots of ambitions. 17 The second, extremely bitter and disappointed letter of June 6, 1932, was written after Maróti had been unsuccessful in the competition, saying that he was about to come home soon. It also mentions the fact that Kahn had informed him about „Faulkner being in close connection with the whole RC Company". If we compare the achievement of the two artists, we can understand Maróti's suspicions. These were the facts; now for the suppositions. We have no information about the person who asked Maróti to participate in the competition; yet on the basis of their life-long friendship, close teamwork and Kahn's good connections in the upper circles, we might suppose that it was Kahn who encouraged or recommended Maróti to participate. This may explain why he received „a very kind" letter of comfort from Kahn after his „defeat". It is again not clear whether Maróti was given a programme more detailed than the one mentioned above; it was not unusual in other competitions to give a hand-out one or two pages in length. Nevertheless, the motifs of Maróti's design significantly differ from Alexander's program or Faulkner's piece. Now let us examine the picture. DESCRIPTION At first glance, the most significant feature of the picture is its extremely long format (59 X 314 cm), in fact, it is an endless row of motifs. The composition is dominated by decorative schemes. The whole surface of the picture is covered with a geometrical net of huge concentric semicircles and radiating beams, focused at the top end of the axis. The allegorical figures are „hung" on the net as mere applications — they have no connection with each other or with the pattern. So despite being focused in a central point, the picture is divided into an endless row of equally emphasized figures. In the centre, there is a sitting, putto-like child, and a lying figure of a sleeping young woman, who rests her head in the lap of the boy. The identification is helped by the inscriptions beside the figures^ 18 According to these, the almost bodiless female figure, dressed in floating draperies is the Greek ,/ieons", symbolizing the Past, 19 while the child is „Our Age", representing the Present, (picture 11)
