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

A round trip to the past

closed one that gives no room for further additions without impairing the original design. Only one exception was made when a unique item, a statue of Lenin, was moved here from Csepel in 1997 to be set up on the plinth originally reserved for the Sallai-Fürst memorial. What makes the replacement truly special is that it was the very first Lenin monument ever to be erected in Budapest.

Dealing with works of art we cannot avoid the question whether the items included represent, together with their makers, the genre of public monuments at large as practised in the Rákosi and Kádár eras. There is no denying that if the collection had not been restricted to the capital city but included the whole country, a more comprehensive survey would have resulted. And yet the core material would be no different, elements of the Liberation Monument on Gellért Hill, the Monument of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the Lenin statue from the City Park, the memorial from Köztársaság tér or the Marx-Engels statue are certainly all of national importance and are among the most significant works of public sculpture produced in the period.

The same can be said for the artists. Although the list of names is by no means exhaustive, the creators of the works in the Statue Park were the best-known sculptors of the period. Many were decorated with the Kossuth Award, the highest distinction conferred by the state, such as sculptors Sándor Mikus (1949, 1952), Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl (1950, 1953), Jenő Kerényi (1955), Zoltán Olcsai Kiss (1955), Pál Pátzay (1965), István Kiss (1970), Imre Varga (1973), András Kiss Nagy (1975) and Agamemnon Makrisz (1978). Decorated with the award Prominent

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