István Beöthy

István Beöthy , also: Etienne Beothy (born September 2, 1897 in Heves ( Heves county, Hungary ), † November 27, 1961 in Paris ) was a Hungarian sculptor and architect who lived and worked mainly in France .

biography

After the First World War , in which he was a soldier , Beöthy began to study architecture in Budapest . He was in contact with the artist group “MA” (today) around Lajos Kassák , who were largely based on the maxims of constructivism and suprematism, and in 1919 attended József Rippl-Rónai's free art school .

His earliest works, created around 1919, show an architectural structure of precisely calculable proportions and reveal constructive tendencies. Beöthy persisted in a strictness and was occasionally committed to a somewhat over-pointed formal stability. In the same year he was inspired by his relationships with the group of painters “ Section d'Or ” to create his font “La Série d'Or”, in which he declared the principle of the golden section to be the determining design idea. This text, which only appeared in Paris in 1939, already contains the central idea of ​​his later artistic work.

From 1920 to 1924 Beöthy studied sculpture with Béla Radnai in Budapest . A scholarship led Beöthy to Vienna , from where he first made several trips to Western Europe until he settled in Paris in 1925 . Here Beöthy came into contact with design models and movements that were created against a completely different intellectual background: the Romanesque. Immediately afterwards he developed a remarkable creative activity. Instead of the just imagined compositions, he discovered the figure. And instead of the edgy coolness of his first years, he began to prefer binding intermediate zones. The result was figurative lively sculptures whose harmonious rhythm is determined by the principles of the “Série d'Or”. In the treatise of the same name, he tried to prove that every work of art has a mathematical starting point. His sculptures took on anthropomorphic features. It was not by chance that he discovered the beauty of wood at the same time, which he subsequently began to prefer as a material. The handling of this grown material determined volume, rhythm and aesthetic character so strongly that one suspects even with many bronzes that they could be made of wood. The sculptures that have been created since that time are very slim. They rise up like symbols of an earthly thing that wants to strive towards heaven, whereby the spiral becomes the basic form from which Beothy developed most of his individual concepts. Michel Seuphor spoke of “lyrical states of enthusiasm” that “shoot up like frozen flames”.

Beöthy made contact with the Parisian art scene and took part in exhibitions at the “Salon d'Indépendants”. Beöthy married Anna Steiner in 1927 . In 1928 he had his first solo exhibition in the gallery “ Au Sacre du Printemps ” and in 1931, alongside Auguste Herbin and Georges Vantongerloo, he co-founded the group “ Abstraction-Création ”, of which he was temporarily vice-president.

Beöthy had an exclusive contract from 1931 to 1939 with Léonce Rosenberg's “L'Effort Moderne” gallery . In 1938 he organized an exhibition in Budapest that showed non-figurative art in Hungary for the first time .

Like Herbin later, he finds parallels to the sister arts, especially to music. And through his material he tries to make it tangible, tangible and tangible. The sculptures develop from then on in the sense of sound bodies, which are confirmed by appropriate musical titles. "Stretched between the poles of abstract calculation and representational sensuality, these handcrafted wooden sculptures are artistic aesthetics of almost unsurpassed perfection" (Eduard Trier).

During the Second World War he was active in the French Resistance , for which he produced leaflets. In 1946 he was a founding member of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and in 1951 the group "Espace". In 1948 the “Maeght” gallery in Paris showed a retrospective of his work. In 1951 he founded the magazine "Formes et Vie" with Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier . For a short time from 1952 to 1953 Beöthy headed the architecture class at the École des Beaux-Arts and gave lectures on color and proportion . In the following years he worked with architects and was involved, among other things, in the plans for the reconstruction of Le Havre .

At the end of the 1950s, Beöthy moved away from the figural conception a little. His endeavor was towards a synthesis of painting, sculpture and architecture. Nevertheless, the poetry has remained in his work, the delicacy, the discretion that never led to an ostensible result in the materialization of a fantasy.

Exhibitions

• 1928: Sacre du Printemps Gallery, Paris
• 1929: Galerie Zak, Paris
• 1930: Galerie Bonaparte, Paris
• 1931: SALON Kovács Á., Budapest
• 1934: Abstraction-Création exhibition rooms, Paris
• 1942: Center d'Etudes Hongroises, Paris
• 1946: Denise René Gallery, Paris
• 1948: Galerie Maeght, Paris
• 1952: La Librairie des Archers, Lyon
• 1953: Galerie Ex-Libris, Brussels, Antwerp
• 1958: Berri-Lardy, Paris
• 1974: Galerie Gmurzynska-Bagera, Cologne
• 1979: Sculpture Museum, Marl
• 1983: Janus Pannonius Múzeum, Pécs
• 1985: Beothy et l'avant-garde hongroise, Galerie Franka Berndt, Paris
• 1990: Permanent exhibition space Musée de Grenoble
• 1991: Galerie Franka Berndt, Paris

Fonts

• Etienne Beothy: a classic of sculpture; Retrospective; Sculpture Museum Glaskasten, April 28 - June 7, 1979, contains texts by Etienne Beothy. Translated from: Helga Müller-Hofstede, Marl 1979, ISBN 3-924790-00-0

literature

• Alfred Meurer, The Sculptor Etienne Beothy: Work and Aesthetics , Weimar: VDG 2003, Zugl .: Marburg, Univ., Diss., 2002 ISBN 3-89739-325-5

Web links

• Literature by and about István Beöthy in the catalog of the German National Library
• István Beöthy in the art portal (Spanish)
• István Beöthy (Eszter Sarkadi, overview, Hungarian)