Vadas József (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 11. (Budapest, 1991)

STURCZ János: Maróti Géza pályaműve a Rockefeller Centerhez

viding only one sentence — „The Media is the Message" — and thus leaving the spiritual focus unoccupied. This pseudo-centralized composition is like a Last Judgement scene without the Pantocrator or like a „pin-rolled apse mosaic"

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' which mingles the methods of cycloramas and narrative frescos. For the distortion of the character and the symbols of the picture we must blame the topic and ideology of the given programme. The latter was so alien to art, that Maróti, with his classical artistic education, failed to illustrate it in a way acceptable to the organizers of the competition.

64 IDEOLOGY Maróti had to express the ideology of the New Deal. This explains the optimiste tone and subject, the universal and militant features (e.g. the marching classes). The whole concept is overpowered by this all-embracing, totalitarian feature. With his symbols, Maróti tries to grasp everything that existed or exists in time and space. He recalls the periods of world history: Walhala represents pre-history, while Orpheus the classical period of history; Beethoven stands for the modern age. With a strong bias towards the Anglo-Saxon civilization, he presents the Old and New World, using as emblems of London and Washington.

65 He parades all social classes and layers. (An irresistible urge for totality makes him place a harvesting figure, the representative of the peasants, among the students who listen to the lecture.) The picture embraces all the spiritual spheres: natural (geography, biology) and social sciences (philosophy, politics), religions and mitologics (Hellenistic, German, Christian), and almost all branches of the arts (music, poetry, architecture, even film, marked with Garbo 's name). Likewise, every means of transport or information conveyance are shown. Maróti's work unifies all dominant trends of his age: Art Deco (the formation of the figures, theirstretched, slim, asexual features, geometrical patterns, symmetry, the unity of archaic and modern, the use of colours

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, elegance), ncoclassicism (mythological topics, free implication of formal models) and, especially with the marching groups, socialist realism.

67 Maróti's picture can therefore reasonably be grouped together with the art of the American sphere, best represented by the Rockefeller Center. American empirical art was a specific equivalent of the Soviet, German or Italian governmental-empirical representation. Contrary to European totalitarian ideas of praising the power of a race, a nation or communism, the American ideology preached the power of money and reason — with a rather limited meaning — over the world. In his design, Maróti praises the mass media as one of the main weapons of this superpower.

68 NOTLS 1. Museum of Applied Arts, Documentation Department. Krtf: 749,p.,c, 59 x 314 cm, marked at bottom right: „G.Maróti,1932." 2. See a pioneering study of Maróti's, as yet unresearched, oeuvre: Ivánfy-Balogh, Sa'ra Jakabffy, Imre: Géza R. Maróti. Ars Decorativa 4, Budapest, 1976, 144. 3. Literature - as for example the excellent catalogue „Chicago in Birth", Paris, 1987 - does not mention such a type of building in Chicago. 4. This might be explained by the fact that some sketches, cut later and provided with the „Chicago"