. : LAJOS CSÉRI, MASTER OF THE PORTRAIT /Bálint Chikán/

Between 1946 and 1953 Lajos Cséri's teacher at the College of Art in Budapest was one of the definitive personalities of Hungarian medal art, Béni Ferenczy. As a result of this contact, Cséri oriented his art towards the cast medal. He paid tribute to his former teacher in 1990, in a beautiful portrait; shown next to Ferenczy is one of his best known sculptures, that of Sándor Petőfi, the Hungarian poet and martyr who fell on the battlefield.

A CLASSICAL APPROACH

The medallic art of Lajos Cséri (b. 1928) first developed in the 1960s, in the years in which the great artists of Post-Impressionism - Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne - developed an extraordinary pre-eminence. Cséri cast three perfectly tailored medals of these giants, in each case using a selfportrait as his point of departure. The Van Gogh medal found its way to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. About this masterpiece, an elaborate treatise was published in 1967, by Mark Edo Talbaut in Van Goghiana, in which he stated, Lajos Cséri, having reshaped Van Gogh's Starry Night on the reverse of his medal, himself delivered a chef-d'oeuvre of major rank... We can but congratulate his performance, which reveals the outstanding talent of this sculptor.'

At the beginning of the 1970s Cséri went to America to teach medallic art. His exposure to American culture resulted in such fine pieces as the beautiful portrait of Walt Whitman of 1972. Nor should we forget the medal of Elizabeth Seton, the first American saint, portrayed in profile and, in the cool beauty of its classicism, contrasting with the romantic expressionism of the Whitman portrait. Géza Csorba, art historian, deputy director of the Hungarian National Gallery and a close friend of Cséri, especially praised a portrait of Hemingway, stating, 'with its striking sense of character, it represents that particular collective unconscious, the adolescent expression preserved by a longing for adventure, which belongs spiritually and physiologically to Melville, Jack London, Hemingway and perhaps every American'.

The subjects of Lajos Cséri's medals are mostly artists, and also actors, writers, musicians, and the like. Apart from them, we frequently meet the faces of scholars and historical figures such as Hungarian kings. These are special, inasmuch as they include both portraits based on contemporary images and also fictitious ones of persons whose true likeness time has not preserved. To the latter group belongs an image of Moses, who is shown holding two stone tablets. The artist stresses the fourth commandment by a simple yet graphic device: Moses' finger points to number IV, the commandment 'Honour thy father'. By this gesture, the medal sums up the essence of Lajos Cséri's view of life, which is focused on the family. While we are touching upon this important subject, it is appropriate to mention the full figure medal of the artist's mother, whose queenly deportment is determined by this ideal.

Cséri also makes medals of his friends and acquaintances, as if fixing a memory for himself. These portraits also help him to capture the expression of character in his more important pieces. As Viktória L. Kovásznai, an eminent expert on Hungarian medallic art, remarked in the Hungarian numismatic periodical Numizmatikai Közlöny, 'there are an unusually large number of facing portraits in Cséri's oeuvre, something which is made possible by the artist's great draughtsmanship and by his humble approach to his models'.

PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS

As stated above, most of Cséri's portraits are of artists. In 1971 Cséri cast a superb medal of Dürer, an example of which can now be seen in the Dürer Museum in Nuremberg. On his return from the United States, he modelled Tivadar Csontváry-Kosztka, the important maverick Hungarian painter, whose genius is now widely known thanks to a traveling exhibition of his work in Europe. Csontváry's selfportrait with a palette is the basis for Cséri's representation. The sculptor faithfully follows the painter's composition mutatis mutandis, and even a piece of landscape is reproduced next to Csontváry's head. Cséri, however, sees the painter in a slightly more romantic fashion than he envisaged himself. This is also an interesting aspect of the portrait of the Hungarian painter István Nagy. These facts suggest that, while reproducing the feel of his fellow artists' works through his own special means, Cséri also explores hidden dimensions unnoticed by the superficial spectator. Some years later he made a fine portrait of the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy, who was of Hungarian origin. His attention also became more focused on local artists. For instance, he cast a medal of János Kmetty, the father of Hungarian Cubism, who had been a teacher at the College of Art when Cséri studied there. He paid his respects in a similar manner to Menyhért Tóth, who for a long period was shamefully neglected and who was 'discovered' only at the end of his life, due to the intervention of, among others, Lajos Cséri himself. In the medal he stresses the clarity and simplicity of the sitter's character rather than the fact that he was an artist.

THE DANTE SERIES

Every artist has a few pieces which either he or his contemporaries regard as his most important works. In the case of Lajos Cséri, besides his portraits he has a growing number of special works which, according to uniform critical appraisal, constitute his most important artistic endeavour. Their subject is Dante and The Divine Comedy.

He started this series in 1981 with a likeness of Dante and a work entitled On the rock of expectation. To these a full-figure Dante was added, then another portrait, this time based on Raphael's drawing. The medals are to be seen in the Dante Museum in Ravenna.

Following this beginning, he has regularly participated in the Ravenna exhibitions and competitions. By 1985 he had modelled the prologue of Canto I from Hell: 'In the midway of this our mortal life / I found me in a gloomy wood, astray / Gone from the path direct...' The expressiveness of nature was evident already in the Rock of expectation medal. As if liberation from the portrait and its many constraints has resulted in an ecstasy of freedom, Cséri makes the landscapes into which he puts his figures deliberately moving.

In 1987 he chose an abstract scene from The Divine Comedy that scarcely anyone else would have approached symbolically. Canto XIII is entitled 'The Animate Forest'. 'Men once were we that now are rooted here', reads line 37. Cséri depicts the horrible fate of those who killed themselves.

In 1989 he evoked the divine couple, Dante and Beatrice, and in 1994 he added to this composition its negative, in order that the work could be opened and closed like a book. In 1991 under the title Star he produced yet another masterpiece for Ravenna, based on lines 83-84 of Canto XIV of Paradise:

'...and I beheld myself / Sole with my lady, to more lofty bliss / Translated...', the lofty bliss indicated by the planet Mars.

Also in 1994 he modelled a wonderful portrait of Beatrice, which stands not only as a representation of the figure from Dante, but also as a symbol of female beauty, and also of beauty in general. In this portrait, form and line are presented with unvarying perfection and self-confidence. The classicism for which Lajos Cséri has been searching in his oeuvre is now found forever.