Commissioned Memory

Metamorphoses
Two sculptures were included in the 1965 exhibition, by István Martsa and József Somogyi, both shown here in photographs. Martsa was commissioned to execute a composition, created for the invitation-only competition of the memorial in Mauthausen, which the artist had intended to turn into a memorial statue of Miklós Radnóti a year earlier. The figure stepping on the pyre suggests a voluntary martyrdom, his arms are intersected in the form of a cross.

A bronze cast of József Somogyi’s 1963 plaster model was commissioned for the Auschwitz exhibition, later a second copy was also made for the Budapest Municipal Gallery, entitled Mourner. From Auschwitz, the sculpture was transferred to the Labor Movement Museum in 1979, and long after the latter’s dissolution, it was transferred to the Hungarian National Gallery, losing all its data and context, as a work entitled Ballad, dated around 1960. The title can actually be considered apt in view of the figure, resembling a peasant woman.

However, similarly to its afterlife, the work’s prehistory was not without unexpected twists and turns either: originally, Somogyi’s work had nothing to do with either the Holocaust or Auschwitz. The first version of the work, which differed only in a few details, was created in 1955 for a competition for the memorial to the martyrs of the labor movement.