Tóth Vilmos: Funeral Art - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2006)

Funeral Art in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Jesus and his major Old Testament prefiguration in the person of Jonah. The cross and the tree of life were designed by Gábor Mezei to match the pews looking like ancient Hungarian tombstones carved in the shape of a boat’s prow.

As suggested by the foregoing, the recent past is very rich in works of funereal art, which is why no single work should be singled out as the one most important achievement of the period. And yet, if one particular work of central significance and general renown were to be chosen, then it would have to be György Jovánovics's "thanatoplastic" monument for the martyrs of 1956 in section 300 of Rákoskeresztúr Cemetery. The competition for designs announced in 1989 called forth a panoramic overview of the era's fine arts comparable in its importance to the situation that had arisen in connection with the Kossuth Mausoleum. Unveiled in 1912, Jovánovics's intellectual and avant-garde work of seminal significance in the history of Hungary's funereal art stands in a complementary as well as contrapuntal relationship with the 301 individual headstones set up in the neighbouring section by the Inconnu Group of artists with the collaboration of András Koczogh in 1988-89.

Reviewed in a rich body of literature, Jovánovics's monument has been commented on at length by the artist himself, too. An important aspect of the work is the complexity of its maker’s approach, which was unprecedented in this country’s funereal art: it is not only the sight of the work but the interplay of auditory and visual effects and the surrounding landscape that had been taken into careful consideration. The martyrs’ monument is made up of three components, each of which is rich in symbolism on its own: an open grave, a shrine and the "rustic stone" known from the testament of István Angyal and inspiring the basic idea of the whole monument. This then is the only work to be found in the cemeteries of Budapest of which this can be claimed with complete certainty: it has become part of the communal consciousness of the country and has taken its place among the emblematic works of twentieth-century Hungarian fine arts.

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