Art-historical consensus holds that Tamás Vigh was a devoted pupil of Béni Ferenczy, yet the great master neither overwhelmed him nor pushed him toward epigonism. Through Ferenczy, Vigh is strongly connected to both Hungarian and universal sculptural traditions. It has often been noted that he made himself at home in Ferenczy’s world: in that universe of classical sculptural construction and modelling – mediated and inspired by early Renaissance interpretations of ancient Greek and Roman art – which had already absorbed the modern sculptural achievements of the twentieth-century avant-garde, now themselves considered classical.
This rich sculptural heritage shielded him from externally imposed schematic temptations, and created a fortunate constellation: once Vigh had fully mastered this tradition, he was able to detach himself from its formal vocabulary and begin his own exceptionally harmonious career. After attending one of the best “schools” imaginable, he created his early sculptures while also feeling the influence of another great sculptor of the time, alongside Ferenczy: István Medgyessy. Medgyessy’s rustic robustness and mass distribution left their mark on him as well. Vigh’s exquisitely sensitive, finely modelled works with a classical aura – “Ferenczy-like to the point of being indistinguishable” – were produced during the reign of Socialist Realism and then, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, amid a Hungarian art world cautiously seeking new paths. And then, at the very end of the fifties, he discovered a new direction that seemed viable. The first work on this path, followed by many others, was the Krúdy Memorial Plaque. It signalled a shift from his earlier artistic mindset. The forms scarcely rise from the plane, yet the spatial and plastic effect is powerful. The model appears as collective memory envisions him: a resigned, slightly ironic, intelligent, weary writer who has poured all his treasures and secrets into his works – instantly recognisable as the Krúdy of the photographs taken on Margaret Island. Even in his Ferenczy-inspired period, Vigh’s bust of Béni Ferenczy already showed that he was a superb portraitist. This sculpture, depicting Ferenczy in Ferenczy’s own manner, expresses not only devotion to the master but also the young sculptor’s ability to condense into form the complex and multifaceted thoughts and feelings he associated with his subject. Yet with Krúdy, something else happened. His career began with a portrait, but this work revealed that it was possible to synthesise the classical–modern heritage and, without denying it, build from it a new, valid, organically developing sculptural practice. A sculptural language that does not turn against the immanent essence of sculpture as it has existed since the Greeks, but nonetheless creates new structures, new forms and thereby new spatial effects.
The departure from his earlier artistic world thus began with a portrait, and Tamás Vigh went on to become a great portraitist. His second Bartók Head evokes the composer’s entire, thin figure; in its undulating surface modelling one can almost experience the whole fate and oeuvre of the musician. Bartók’s slightly raised head signals the elegiac tone that later becomes characteristic of Vigh across other genres as well – a tone that allows him to avoid the trap of sculptural epic narrative. He does not tell a story – as some contemporaries, lacking better ideas, often burdened their sculptures with such tasks – but instead renders the full existential weight of the personality. In this elegiac representation the tragedy of Bartók’s life is condensed, and the work rises to meet the level of Bartók’s music. The key, as with every good portrait, lies in the gaze. The composer’s pupils encompass a wide horizon, just like his life’s work.
Over the decades, countless portraits were created in the studio. Many were made in such a way that their creator could only know the subject from a photograph. These busts – depicting scholars and intellectuals – demonstrate that the sculptor understood the spirit of people who were no longer alive, generally eminent figures in their fields, and was able to transpose that spirit into his own plastic world. He also made likenesses of contemporaries whom he knew well and with whom he entered into an intellectual exchange (László Nagy, Mihály Schéner) as well as some great figures of Hungarian history (János Arany, Sándor Petőfi, Miklós Radnóti, Imre Madách).
The monumental main trajectory of his career began around 1962–1963 with the sheet-metal sculptures. Tamás Vigh discovered the tectonics of copper sheet: he bent the material so that the forms seemed to grow from one another and rhyme with one another. The knowledge of sculptural construction he had mastered so perfectly in Béni Ferenczy’s studio made it possible for the sheet, moving according to the laws of its own material, to articulate the figure’s spiral structure and dynamism. The Kürtösök (Horn players) was no longer elegiac but proud and majestic. It proclaims the sculptural idea in monumental fashion. Within this line of work, he also created the Karancsberény Partisan Memorial (today standing in Salgótarján): the possibilities of sheet bending create a complex, spiral sculptural structure and thereby a powerful effect. Here, the forces do not merely strain against each other symbolically; the internal lines of force of the bent metal sheet shape the sculpture. Both works have a forceful spatial impact: each occupies and activates a large space around itself. The mantle principle also appears in stone: the Magvető (Sower) in Debrecen is the stone-carved lesson of the dynamic surface tensions found in the sheet-metal sculpture.
The sculptor’s consistent artistic approach bore fruit, and the result was that throughout his entire career he pursued simplification – not of spatial structure, but of form. After thoroughly considering and internalizing the plate sculptures, he became increasingly interested in the shapes of the internal cavities of the sculptural formations. He cast these dynamically created configurations, sliced them horizontally, and from the dynamic forms thus obtained he began constructing a new type of sculpture. These forms served as the basis for his nonfigurative works: Ősök idézése (Invocation of Ancestors”, Burjánzás (Proliferation), Részlet a Tejútból (Detail from the Milky Way).
By the end of the 1960s, we could have been enriched with two magnificent monuments. But we were not. The planned Vásárhelyi Memorial in Tiszadob never materialized; A Tisza-szabályozás emlékműve (The Tisza Regulation Memorial) was erected only in 2007. We had to settle for the fact that Vásárhelyi Pál (Pál Vásárhelyi) and Az Alföld népe (The People of the Great Plain) existed only as small sculptures. Vigh Tamás was invited to create the Vásárhelyi Memorial in Tiszadob. The memorial consists of navvies standing on a diagonally cut mound, and the main figure positioned in the cleft of the mound. The engineer who regulated the Tisza moved and cut through enormous amounts of earth and hills. Standing within this barrow is the main figure, constructed by exploiting all possibilities of sheet-metal bending, including spiral movement – the refined form of Vásárhelyi. And on the mound stand the massive navvy figures, built from abstracted, flexible shapes derived from plate sculpture. Vigh Tamás envisioned a worthy monument to Vásárhelyi’s heroic struggle and to the immense labor required to tame the dangerously unpredictable river.
The Az Életfa (The Tree of Life), which was Székesfehérvár’s jubilee monument design, likewise remained in small scale until 2009. The artist won the Székesfehérvár Millennium competition in 1971, but instead a clichéd, shallow work was realised. The Tree of Life is a valid symbol that could have proudly proclaimed a nation’s past, present and future as early as 1971 by filling the tree-of-life myth with natural and organic meaning. Today it stands seven metres tall on the Danube bank in Visegrád, a work built from Tamás Vigh’s dynamic “basic forms” with great structural boldness.
A great branch of Tamás Vigh’s sculpture is medal art. Over the past decades he created a vast number of medals. He also learned medal-making from Béni Ferenczy, and his fine, sensitive and highly characteristic medals attest to his expertise. The strong three-dimensional stance of the figure holding the plumb line on the important Academy medal, the robustness of the figure contrasted with the extremely thin string of the plumb line – all show that Tamás Vigh the medallist drew upon the achievements of Tamás Vigh the sculptor. In the seventies he made another major turn in this field: six medals were created to accompany the lines of Iván Rozgonyi’s poems. One resulted from intersecting two medals; another from cutting up three imagined medals and interlocking them anew; and a third from joining two imagined medals almost as if they were pieces of a spherical shell. While Vigh handles the forms with complete freedom, he adheres closely to the poetic lines. These works step out of the traditional plane of the medal and come alive with movement. He could also create medals of large scale and grandeur: the Ady-óriásérmek (Ady Giant Medals) in Győr were built upon the lessons of the medals inspired by Iván Rozgonyi’s verses.
The commemorative plaque, the relief, is another genre in which Tamás Vigh created major works. We have only to recall those of – after Krúdy – Gutenberg, Pál Vasvári, Zoltán Kodály, Pilinszky, or the mathematicians.
In the 1970s a series of superb small sculptures were created. Among them were several works so powerful that they would have been suitable as public monuments. Aki felszabadult (He Who Became Free) is certainly one of them: it expresses that a person can liberate himself only from within the thick stratified layers of the earth. The spiralling figure in motion forces apart the blocks of earth or stone closing around him, while the layers beneath him indicate the segmented nature of the movement and the exertion of force itself.
The sculptor’s fertility and the richness of his mature plastic language are shown by Sinbad, whose peculiarity lies in the fact that its main viewpoint was conceived from above – although of course it was never realised in large scale – as well as by Kis emlékművem Adyról (My Little Monument to Ady) and many other thought-rich sculptures.
Vigh Tamás closed the 1970s with a triumphantly monumental work: Városalapító (The City Founder), which stands on the Castle Hill of Esztergom. The figure standing on a four-wheeled cart, holding a shield in his left hand, thrusts a long spear into the ground with his right, marking the place. The four-metre, block-like figure not only holds its own against the nearly hundred-metre height and vast mass of the Basilica, but even seems to float as one approaches it. In the structure of the figure, sheet-metal bending and block-based construction interact. The two attributes – paradoxically even the inherently more static spear – further reinforce the dynamism of the expressive human figure. The almost hemispherical shield further expands the already ample spatial volume. This masterpiece also had a conflict with “small-town arbitrariness”. Fifteen years after its erection, when a fragment of the cart broke off due to a natural disaster, a local dignitary wanted it dismantled rather than repaired. It still stands there today, with the broken cart.
A semmi ágán (On the Branch of Nothing) is the transposition into space of Attila József’s total loneliness, the material realisation of being torn out from everywhere. The idea –Attila József’s solitude in the moment of his death, his final detachment from life, the fragile figure falling out of its plane – already appeared in the work conceived in 1982, which was then realised in Pécs in 1990. A significant work of Vigh’s is the four Ady tondi visible in Győr. The sculptural idea grew out of the revolutionary reinterpretation of medals developed in the 1970s, and from the fact that he examined the site where the leaders of Győr intended to erect a monument. Vigh Tamás saw that a traditional monument could not be placed there, as it would lose its meaning and spatial function. By contrast, the four large bronze tondi placed on the ground organise the surrounding space. The male profiles emerging from the circular form recall Ady’s faces expressing different emotions and passions.
In 2006 a new chapter began in Tamás Vigh’s career. The Philosophy and History Department of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences wished to commemorate Zoltán I. Tóth on the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution, placing a memorial to him in front of the Academy’s headquarters. Zoltán I. Tóth, the eminent historian, university professor and academician, was treacherously shot dead in October 1956 while demonstrating at the head of university students. Vigh Tamás created a work in black granite that expresses the darkness of mourning. The pedestal – a prism widening slightly at the top and bottom with smaller geometric blocks – gives the illusion that the plinth itself is shifting around its own axis. This very tall pedestal displays the recalled, murdered historian almost like a monstrance, becoming an organic part of the sculpture and its expression. The bust tilts slightly to the side and forward on the pedestal, alluding to the moment of the shooting. The wise scholar’s gaze carries the knowledge of a man who lived through our particular history and became its victim.
A Tisza-szabályozás emlékműve (The Monument to the Regulation of the Tisza River) was completed in Tiszalök forty years after the large-scale spatial and monumental design conceived by Tamás Vigh. From 1967 onward, there was no chance for the generous and richly meaningful composition to be erected until exactly forty years later. Since 2007, the figure of Vásárhelyi has stood in the cut that slices through the burial mound, echoing the river’s capricious meandering, while atop the kurgan stand four majestic, block-like figures of the earthworkers. The labourers – “the cloaked men”, as Vigh Tamás called them – stand in the vast, open space, and the solitary figure of Vásárhelyi stands in the trench of the mound. A thoroughly Hungarian drama unfolds in the beautiful arboretum of Tiszalök: the tragedy of the lonely Vásárhelyi – a pioneering Hungarian hydraulic engineer who gave even his life to his work – and the drama of his “naturally” unfinished great project, the regulation of the Tisza. And equally, the fate of the many Hungarian earthworkers, peasants who exchanged their rural way of life for extremely hard physical labour.
The small bronze Tree of Life left no doubt that in large scale, in stone and in a vast spatial setting, the expressive power of the work would also succeed – that it could monumentally proclaim the meanings, beliefs and myths behind the ancient symbol, the richness and proliferation of plant life, our embeddedness in nature, and the moral respect humans are obliged to show toward the natural world. In its basic form, one also recognises a characteristic of Hungarian folk art: the szűrrátét (decorative trim) motif. The story of the Életfa, from winning the Székesfehérvár competition in 1971 to its erection in Visegrád in 2009, is long and arduous. But now it stands there triumphantly, more than seven metres tall, on the Danube bank in Visegrád.
The figure and spirit of Gábor Sztehlo, the Lutheran pastor who rescued children, were important to Tamás Vigh, which is why he was one of the initiators of erecting a statue of Sztehlo in a distinguished location in Budapest. This was realised in 2010 on Deák Square. The body of the statue is carved from crystal-like “black storm stone”. Amid sharply cut, densely folded planes and protrusions, the pastor in his Luther coat holds the child on his knee with a firm yet gentle hand, sheltering and protecting him within the folds of his coat; he turns sideways, gazing sharply around himself. In contrast to the dazzlingly sharp planes and protrusions of the pastor’s figure, the child is carved with almost Early Renaissance softness, with finely modelled surfaces. The pedestal is a hard-edged, irregular prism, surrounded by strong, low geometric forms carved from the same heavy stone.
The black granite Múlt és Jövő (Past and Future) has stood in Gyula since 2011. What links it to the Sztehlo statue is that here too low stone prisms surround the sculpture. They define and simultaneously expand the sculpture’s space, directing the viewer’s gaze toward the work while also separating it from the urban environment and elevating it above it. The nearly decade-long story of the Gyula sculpture began when the city sought to commemorate the year 2000. The sculptor depicts Time with two figures leaning back-to-back. One figure steps upward with head raised, the other walks downward and looks down. The young and the old inhabit one and the same granite body, yet move in opposite directions. The two figures form a single, gently undulating mantle with beautifully polished surfaces. Ovid calls Janus biformis, meaning “two-formed”: two figures who cannot be separated, because continuously flowing Time binds them inseparably together. Tamás Vigh placed Time itself into space.
The monumentality of Tamás Vigh’s works derives not from their size, but from the idea, the sculptural shaping – the meaningful, mutually responding forms and their spatial presence.
[2014]