Majorossy Judit (szerk.): A Ferenczy Múzeum Évkönyve 2014 - Studia Comitatensia 33., Új Folyam 1. (Szentendre, 2014)
Szentendre. Adalékok a Pajor család, a Pajor-kúria és a Ferenczy-család történetéhez - Martos Gábor: Két talált kép „megtisztítása”. Ferenczy Valér ismeretlen nagybányai művei egy magyarországi magángyűjteményből
Studia Comitatensia 2014 - Yearbook of the Ferenczy Museum - New Series 1 - English Summaries Dorottya Gulyás A Night with Béni Ferenczy. The Sculptures of His Left-Handed Artistic Period The topic of this study is the last era in the life of the sculptor Béni Ferenczy (1890-1967) that encompasses the years between 1956 and 1967. The artist suffered a stroke in November 1956 which left his right side paralysed and also claimed his ability to speak. Although he was struggling with the aftermath of this tragic event through the rest of his life, by no means was it an end to his artistic career. He learnt how to draw, paint and sculpt using only his left hand. There are several hundred graphic works and quite a few sculptures that depict the regeneration of his artistry. The initial ungraceful attempts were followed by drawings, watercolours, sculptures that are on a par with his earlier work, and form a natural part of his whole oeuvre. Ferenczy s battle with and eventual victory over his illness served as an inspiration for his literary contemporaries. Writers and poets who suffered through the revolution of 1956 and the retaliation following in its wake saw Ferenczy, who continued to produce art even after his stroke, as an exemplary artist. His personal tragedy occurred almost at the same time as the tragedy of the Hungarian nation, thus it is not surprising that his contemporaries saw his fate as extrapolated from the nation’s, and admired his strength and effort for overcoming paralysis and returning to art. Ferenczy’s case was highly interesting to the neuropathologist István Környei who devoted his inaugural lecture in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to the pathography of the aphasia-struck sculptor. Környei later published an article on the subject that made Ferenczy a well-known case study of the international medical literature covering painters and sculptors who suffered a stroke and consequently had a change in their artistic output. Even though Ferenczy’s ‘left-handed period’is quite well-known, its detailed overview was regretfully set aside by art history. The topic lacks proper investigation apart from a few sentence-long mentions. This is why the author chose to write this paper, to redeem this long-overdue debt and to integrate Ferenczy’s last artistic era into the whole of his oeuvre. She attempts to reconstruct his last period between 1956 and 1967 based on the surviving sources, and analyses the sculptures of this period with respect to his earlier works. 263
