Imre Jakabffy (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 4. (Budapest, 1976)

IVÁNFY-BAL0GH, Sára - JAKABFFY, Imre: Géza R. Maróti

SARA I V A N F Y - B A L O G H - I M R E J A K A B F F Y GÉZA R. MARÓTI 1875-1941 IN COMMEMORATION OF H IS BIRTH CENTENNIAL Károly Lyka, the great old man of the Hungarian historiography of art was writing: „We are having all the reason to assert that Maróti is not known by name for people at large, although anybody may see his works of art on the frontispices of any bank building whose voluminous sculptural adornements had been made by him. As a matter of fact all that could be commented as a hit of art, i. e. the carvings, having become inseparable from the architecture, are so much far from any startling contrast to the architectural surroundings that none has a look at tham, the onlooker having the feeling, those mural decorations to be on their place. Maróti's name can be found in the streets of Budapest. Besides we could follow in Maróti's footsteps not only at his native soil but at several interesting points of the globe."

1 Although at the time of this praise Lyka could not be yet aware of all the works executed by Maróti in America. On the hundreth anniversary of the artist's birth it seems equitable to lift Maróti's far reaching life-work out from the oblivion and call up by reason of the inherited relics his course of life. The „Michigan Society of Architects Weekly Bulletin" (Detroit) number 7 May 1929 had published the list of Frof. Maróti's more important works being herewith accessible to demands of inquirers. That list was supplying an excellent basis to become familiar with the good deal of sketches, crayon drawings and other written matter. The legacy had been donated by the artist's daughter Mrs László Bródy to the Museum of Applied Arts in 1956-, on the other hand some precious plan fragments had got to the Budapest Polytechnical University. The Detroit Bulletin enumerates Maróti's Hungarian and foreign decorations, his honorary memberships of numerous academies of sciences and art college, his work of art the foreign and the home ones, as well as his activity of world-wide reputation. His manysided art did not be evalued up to date just in consequence of its many-sidedness. To take into consideration the large scale of works of art created by him from graphic art to sculpture and from painting to the massive grandeur of architecture and every single one of them in the same manner of eminence. One of his collaborators, accomplisher of several sketches the glass-painter Miksa Roth tells in commemoration about him: „Maróti's talent put in remembrance the many-sided of the great Renaissance masters. The whole work of his art is stamped by his cultured and extremely refined ornamental perception, should it be of sculptural, architectural or applied artistical temper".

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