Gyergyádesz László, ifj.: Félbeszakadt prófécia Lantos Ferenc zománcművészeti alkotásai 1967-1976 (Kecskemét, 2006)

THE INTERRUPTED PROPHECY

are visual base units that he handles as building units for his sculptures. We can see a method, therefore, that is similar to the one used in most of his enamels or in ail the works of the '70s where sequences of elements derived from the relation between the square and the circle, the most general base unit for Lantos. Of the enamel works the strongest relation is perhaps in the "Tettye space elements" that were displayed in the half-human, halfnatural city park; the enamel sculptures could also be interpreted as space variations of the space elements, as a sort of sign-tower.

In 1976 Lantos has participated the 2nd Kecskemét Enamel Art Workshop but after that he has basically given up enamel making (colorplate 29). When I asked him some twenty years later why he did that he said the reason was essentially that the level of technology was not yet appropriate for construction purposes. Lantos has been involved in enamel making hardly for a decade, yet his contribution cannot be left out from the contemporary history of enamel. He has developed an independent and well separable domain within enamel art that equally opposes both the "national-mythological" type of the Kecskemét school, although as we have seen at the beginning Kátai was still referring to Lantos, as well as the traditional industrial art approach mixed with the melange of historical and modernised as represented by the fine smith group of József Engelsz and his disciples. Particularly in the light of the works of the later group should one understand Lantos's significance in art history. Although the process got interrupted, nevertheless, it was his work that carried most the hope of eventually transforming Hungarian enamel art into an independent genre that could turn away on a value-based stand from the more cumbersome than encouraging heritage of industrial art. For Lantos sensed the most how enamel art could also become an appropriate tool for progressive fine art.

Relics of Lantos's enamel art are very rarely shown to the public and the profession. In the last years, after a good two decades of oversight, there were only two enamel history exhibitions, curated by the this author, where his relevant works were shown. It became very clear both at the 1998 Kecskemét exhibition ["Contemporary Hungarian Enamel Art", page 23)17 and at the 2001 Budapest show ["Contemporary Hungarian Enamel Art 1960-1995"] that Lantos's enamel oeuvre is still modern and that even after three decades of silence he would still have a great deal to say.

17. Cf.: Gyergyádesz, L.: Kortárs magyar zománcművészet. Kecskeméti Képtár (Cifrapalota), 1998. március 21.- április 26. In Hungarian. In: Magyar Iparművészet 1998/2. pp. 2-19.

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