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

Funeral Art in the Second Half of the 20th Century

■ Miklói Bona: the funeral monument of Lajoi Guldciy

over the erection of funeral monuments in the decades of the country's dictatorial government. As a result, there were relatively few funeral works set up in the cemetery in the period between the closure of 1952 and the partial reopening in 1994 (even though that was also the time when the remaining tombstones of the Víziváros and Tabán cemeteries were brought here).

An emblematic work of the era was the Labour Pantheon, a monument of little artistic merit but considerable documentary value (K 13). The structure, which was unveiled in 1959, was built to plans by József Körner. The designer might even deserve some praise - if the ideological background were discounted — as Körner's work manages, with the help of some architectural and visual tricks, to make the assigned region more monumental than it actually is. However, the extreme crudity of the sculptural decoration designed by Zoltán Olcsai-Kiss distracts all attention from the building and thus mars whatever agreeable effect the overall composition might make. Another sig58