Boros Géza: Statue Park - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

The main façace wall

upon the facts of reality. These features radiate with the strength, dynamism and longevity of our theory and movement."

According to a contemporary description given by art historian Lajos Németh, "within the structural confines of a single prism-shaped block the statue holds its two figures in elemental poise. They make sharp, clear, basic statements where all superfluous detail is discarded in a geometric order of things: these are the ancient features of modern sculpture.” According to the original conception, the work was to be sculpted in chromium steel. The competition-winning design featured a metal sculpture composed of rough-and-smooth planes, which, however, had to be modified at the request of those commissioning it. According to the assessment given by art historian Tibor Wehner, a welded, rather than carved or cast, public monument erected in such a highly exposed location and representing such an exceedingly significant theme would have been regarded as far too radical in the early 1970s. "Segesdi's work is the result of a typical compromise. The cubistic shapes doing no more than indicate their models' physiognomy, build, clothing and other decipherable features were acceptable on condition that these 'abstractions’ were materialised in the traditionally 'noble’ substance of grey Mauthausen granite. But this alteration cancelled out the original conception in which the material solidity of the bodies would have been transformed into an airily spatial structure of welded metal sheets resting on supports. The result can only be regarded as a work artistically impaired under duress.”

In 1991 the general assembly of the Budapest Municipality held a debate about the removal of the statue. The decision passed stipulated that if any of the capital’s districts volunteered to accept the statue, the Municipality would raise no objections to its reinstallment elsewhere. "The hypocritical decree refrained from stating that the monument might have some aesthetic value, and laid the responsibility of removing it to the door of the districts. The final outcome was easy to foresee - no district claimed the statue for itself, which is why Marx and Engels, too, were transferred to the Statue Park. The career of the sculpture ended in the same way it had begun. Its removal as well as its erection was decided according to political considerations only and the decision was taken, in both cases, by politicians" (historian János Pótó). A fountain now plays where the statue once stood.

2. Statue of Lenin (Pál Pátzay, 1965)

The metal figure of the one who perfected the theory of Marxism and led the revolution of the proletariat to victory before he emerged as the first man of

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