Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 16. (Budapest, 1997)

ÁCS Piroska: Lechner Ödön köztéri szobrának története

could have been realized without any changes. "Beck's work models Lechner 's fate without falling into mannerism and redundancy, or contradicting the calm and concision of plastic art."

10 Beck himself commented about his work as follows: "I knew Papsie Lechner well, I should have made a plaque and a bust of him after his death, for I had received a whole series of very good photographs of him. Disposing of good material, I took part in the competition: I felt concerned anyway. My model represented him explaining a plan at his table in the Café, just as everybody had seen him doing for the last one or two decades. I had assisted to his enlightening lectures myself. His table at the Café had been named "his cathedra" by the press expressing more than once the opinion that Lechner should be assigned a chair."

11 In an article published in Nemzeti Újság, however, Viktor Müller violently condemned Beck's solution: "We are actually facing an epidemic of creeping fantasy: all artists represented an old man sitting by the side of a café table, a kind little old man, at best with a plan in his hand - I still wonder how come nobody featured him stirring his coffee. What's more, the likeness of the portraits is rather poor, as if the memorial was intended to represent a wellknown habitué of the Café, or as if it was dedicated to the Café itself rather than our Captain."

12 The critics were rather partial to the projects of Ede Kallós and young Béla Vörös, who was then living in Paris: "...the work of the latter is highly artistic, even monumental, except for the fictitiously headed, disquietingly soft and immaterial figure itself'.

13 Artúr Elek, the head critic of Újság, described several of the contesting works in an article.

14 He did not agree with the opinion of the jury, for he found Kisfaludy Stróbl's project - a figure sitting on a wall and drawing on a spread-out sheet of paper in a rather affected pose, mounted on an ill-proportionned socle - dull and trivial. His appreciation of the "improvized" work of Ede Kallós was just as negative as that of Petri Pick's project, in which Lechner 's portrait could merely be seen on a relief placed on the side of the plynth, the main figure being a male nude carrying a stone on his shoulder. According to Elek, this was nothing more than a carefully planned study having little to do with the master's individuality. By contrast, he found Károly Cser

's original work remarkable because of the movement given to the modelled pensive figure

15 leaning his head on his left elbow. The critic however described the effect of the whole composition as spoiled by the clumsy representation of a winged genius in the background. Similarly to Ervin Ybl, Artúr Elek attributed the palm to Fülöp Ö. Beck's work, which he thought absolutely appropriate: he found the idea original and the formal realization very good. He especially praised the unity of sculpture and architecture: the artist resolved the unusual, round shape of the table in giving a similar rounded shape to the pedestal. The reasons of cancelling the competition were later given by Károly Lyka in the name of the jury: they conceded that some of the contestants' works would probably have been accepted in a competition less delicate in its topic, but the expectations had been set higher than usual, for the goal was the realization of a "memorial of inspiring force" in the honour of the most significant artists of the time. The root of the problem - so Lyka thus resided probably in the self-evident nature of the task, "...lions, eagles, overburdened or exulting throngs, bigae, trigae, quadrigae, geniuses, upheavals and outbreaks, poses and explosions, athletes and puttos, all these trivial become insignificant when a problem such as ours is to be solved....".

16 The statue representing Lechner had to simultaneously convey the image of the likeably simple man and of the instinctively powerful artist, a task none of the contestants of the first round had been able to fulfill in a satisfactory way. A second competition bearing the same conditions of participation was therefore announced: its closing date was fixed on the 5th April 1930.

17