Lajos Barta

Lajos Barta (1966)

Lajos Barta [ ˈlɒjoʃ ˈbɒrtɒ ] (born March 9, 1899 in Budapest , † May 13, 1986 in Cologne ) was a Hungarian sculptor .

Life

Even as a child, Barta stood out for his special talent for drawing. At the age of fifteen he attended the arts and crafts school in Budapest and from around 1915 received private lessons from the sculptor Eduardo Telcs . From around 1916 onwards, he spent his apprenticeship and traveling years in what is now Romania and Slovakia. After the war, Lajos went on long study trips and stays in Vienna, Milan and Paris with his brother István (a painter). From 1927 to 1938 Lajos Barta worked again in Budapest, where he met the painter Endre Rozsda in 1932, with whom he had a lifelong, close private and artistic partnership. The first Jewish laws in Hungary and the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938 prompted the friends to leave the country and rent a studio in Paris in the XIV district. In the same year Barta exhibited in the Salon d'Automne . In the following years, both artists followed the current art movements and were influenced by Surrealism . Barta was also interested in the ideas of the Abstraction-Création group , which had already disbanded before his arrival in Paris. When the Wehrmacht marched into Paris, life for Jews had become increasingly insecure. The artist friends therefore gave up the studio, went underground and returned to Budapest with forged papers in February 1943 via Berlin and Vienna.

In 1943 in Budapest, Barta took the step into abstraction . The first non-representational drawings and plasters dealt with the subject of balance and playing with balance. Shortly after German troops marched into Budapest in March 1944, Barta had to wear the yellow Star of David and only narrowly escaped being transported to the destruction.

After the end of the war, Barta became a founding member of the Európai Iskola, the European School, which attempted to resume the thread of progressive art in Hungary that was broken in 1919. The aim was to restore the term “Europe”, which in 1945 was also mentally in ruins. The group held a total of 38 exhibitions, including four in which Barta participated. The V. and XV. Exhibition in 1946 and 1948 was exclusively dedicated to the artists Rozsda and Barta. By 1948 at the latest, Barta was one of the leading abstract sculptors in Hungary. The European School disbanded in 1948 under pressure from communist forces.

1949 became an epoch year for Barta. The intensive exploration of the design possibilities opened up by abstraction resulted in a mature personal style. But with the founding of the People's Republic of Hungary in the same year, abstract art was devalued as formalistic and was undesirable. Barta got into trouble, had to fear for his existence and interrupted his work as a sculptor. To make a living, he created a model for a competition for a Stalin monument and submitted it without having been invited to the competition. In doing so, he publicly signaled his willingness as an artist to serve the party and society and thus also work in the style of Socialist Realism . His competition design was accepted. Nevertheless, Barta stuck to his conviction of being a free artist, chose the path to inner emigration as a draftsman and continued his abstract work undeterred.

Immediately after the Hungarian uprising at the end of 1956, Barta resumed his work as an abstract sculptor and was able to develop a broad, non-representational oeuvre in a short time . By 1958, a considerable part of his plastic life's work had been formed. From around 1959 he applied in state competitions to be able to enlarge his works. Four of his models were accepted and could be realized by 1961/62: in Budapest, Siófok and Pécs. Nevertheless, Barta found that abstract art was not recognized in Hungary. The purchase of one of his major works by the Hungarian National Gallery in 1963 did nothing to change this. In 1964, however, great difficulties in realizing the playground sculpture “Three Horses” became an unmistakable indication. Later in the same year, an unrestrained demolition of his exhibition in Kecskemét gave the serious cause to make the decision to leave home forever.

From autumn 1965 onwards, Barta worked as a guest at "arts and music GmbH" at Rolandseck train station near Bonn . From March 28 to April 30, 1966, he already had an exhibition in the great hall on the upper floor with his sculptures and drawings from the years 1956 to 1966. In 1967 he moved to Cologne , where - interrupted by frequent stays in Paris (1970–) 1974) - lived until his death. In Cologne he joined the Masonic lodge Zum Ewigen Dom . The museum exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 1970 brought him great recognition . In the following year, it led to the inauguration of the sculpture "Schwingende" in Bonn's Hofgarten . In the following fifteen years Barta repeatedly took part in competitions in the Rhineland and received a number of first prizes. In this way, important works from the 1950s and 1960s could be enlarged and realized for public space. These large, free plastic formats form Barta's artistic legacy in the Rhineland that is accessible to the public today.

In September 1982 Lajos Barta met the well-known Hungarian photographer André Kertész, who spent a week in Cologne for the photokina and his solo exhibition at the Wilde Gallery in Cologne. During the visit to Atelier Barta and other meetings, both were able to converse in their mother tongue.

gallery

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  Die Schwingende (1957), since 1971 in Bonn, Am alten Zoll, Hofgarten

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  Couple (1957), in Bonn since 1970 and in Wuppertal since 1981

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  Spring (1958), at the University of Siegen since 1982

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  Ancient form (1966), since 1985 in Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Park , Cologne

literature

• Lajos Barta - Emigration. Edited by the Martin Lantzsch Nötzel Foundation. With a foreword by Norbert Lammert. Texts by Péter Kovács , Gábor Pataki, Ulrich Winkler. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2015, ISBN 978-3-7757-3994-8 .

Web links

Commons : Lajos Barta  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Lajos Barta in the catalog of the German National Library
• Lajos Barta - Vita, which documents in particular his work in public spaces in Hungary and Germany (Martin Lantzsch Nötzel Foundation)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Barta, Lajos ( Memento of the original from December 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - Enciklopédia Kiadó, Budapest (in Spanish)