Art: To the General’s Taste

Soviet Marshal Klimenti (the “Liberator of Budapest”) Voroshilov is something of a connoisseur of art, as generals go. In the summer of 1946, when Hungary was looking for somebody to commemorate its “liberation” with a giant monument, Voroshilov found the man on the spot. On a stroll through a Budapest park, he had seen and admired a sculpture by Sigismund de Strobl. Voroshilov dropped in at De Strobl’s studio on newly named Voroshilov Avenue, found the sculptor quite willing to do the job. But De Strobl would have nothing to do with the proposed designs, which called for a Greek temple. “Design what you like,” said Voroshilov grandly. “You’re the artist.”

One day Voroshilov picked up De Strobl in his limousine, took him to the top of rocky Gellert Hill, which overlooks the city, the Danube, and the broad Hungarian plain. Said he: “This is where we will put our monument.” With the help of 300 workers, they did.

The result, which cast its shadow over Budapest last week, was probably far superior to the pink marble monuments the Reds have been building in Berlin, and certainly surpassed the obelisks, as characterless as paperweights, with which they have dotted Eastern Europe in the past two years. Instead of a tank, or a bust of Stalin, it featured a high-breasted, neoclassic lady holding a king-size palm leaf 42 feet above her bare bronze toes.

Upstairs & Downstairs. Members of the U.S. colony in Budapest have dubbed the statue “the Tobacco Auctioneer.” Hungarians say she holds the victory palm aloft because the grim, 18-ft. figure of a Russian soldier that stands below her on the pedestal might steal it. But these cracks fail to bother De Strobl. “The figure upstairs,” he explains, “is international. The figure downstairs is Russian. Many Russians lost their lives here, after all.”

At 64, De Strobl has designed some 30 monuments, modeled innumerable portrait busts, and won a commanding postion in the middle-European art world. A diplomatic fellow, who gets along with the Russians without antagonizing too much those who don’t, he returned last year from a month’s visit to England and immediately accepted an invitation to tour Russia. George Bernard Shaw, whom De Strobl once “busted,” neatly ticketed the sculptor’s somewhat bland art when he described the portrait of himself as being “what I should like to look like. Perhaps I shall some day, if I contemplate it with sufficient intensity.”

Model No. 50. De Strobl used no model for the woman in the Budapest monument (“She came directly from my stomach, as we say in Hungary”), but the Russian below her was modeled from a Red Army trooper—the 50th model that Voroshilov had sent around for approval.

Says De Strobl, “I like my monument. I have done many things in my life and many of them I dislike after a few months, but this one I keep coming back to see.” And as war memorials go, De Strobl’s monument was indeed complex, harmonious, and impressive. Even so, Hungarians who look forward to a “second liberation” can hardly wait to topple it into the Danube.