Boros Géza: Statue Park - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
The endless promenade of the liberation monuments
portions, that makes my work monumental.... The simplicity of its clothes and the naturalness of its stance will suggest a sense of human intimacy." The style of the execution smoothly fitted into the mainstream of Lenin portraits made in Hungary at the time. Here is how this style was characterised by art historian Sándor Kontra in the Moscow magazine likuótvo in 1970: "The aspiration and the task of our artists is not to raise idols but to render as faithfully as possible the man who was capable of almost superhuman deeds.” In the context of art history, Pátzay’s Lenin is a transitional work with modest aesthetic qualities, standing, with its conservative style, half-way between the Socialist-Realist traditions of propaganda art and the more daring, ’deheroising’ tendencies of the late 1960s. Having lost its original lustre, the red marble covering had to be replaced with something more durable, which is why a new coating of Swedish red granite was put on the obelisk in 1970. By the late 1980s another restoration job had fallen due, for which a new, expensive consignment of red granite was ordered by the Municipality from Sweden. Lenin’s figure (for the purposes of restoration, it was emphasised) was removed from the plinth a few days before the 1989 reinterment of Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs of 1956. The feeble idea of re-erecting the statue elsewhere was raised at one point, but by that time the fate of the statue and the regime it stood for was already sealed. (The consignment of red granite was not wasted, however, as it was used for the covering of the monument of Vilmos Apor, when the statue of the bishop killed by Russian soldiers was erected in 1997 to plans of László Marton.) Leaving behind the statues in the main fagade wall and passing through the gate we step on the pathway amidst sections of the reception building 'cut in two’, after which the panorama of the park opens up before our eyes. A path straight as an arrow leads from the entrance to the interior of the park. Three symmetrical thematic walks fork out of this pathway to rejoin it later. The gently arching pathways form three 'reclining eights' suggesting the mathematical symbol for infinity (00). We can freely roam the park along these pathways, but after our rambling we will always be obliged to return to the 'true path’ which is 'one and indivisible’. The endless promenade of the liberation monuments 1945 represents a sharp division in the history of Hungary’s art of monument building. Together with the new political system, a new system of symbols in public spaces was born on the ruins of the war. As in other central European 16
