The Hungarian town of Szentendre is known for its small museums dedicated to individual artists, but the Margit Kovács Museum stood out in popularity after it first opened in 1973. Looking at the ceramicist’s Bundt-Cake Madonna, it is not hard to understand why. As the title indicates, the conical shape of the Madonna’s body is designed to recall a cake; the white glazing on the surface, then, makes us think of the cake’s icing. The baby Jesus wears the same, cake-shaped garment, but a tiny one, and his mother holds him lovingly, gently bending her neck to touch her face to the baby’s crown. It is a sweet composition, and it is also a very well-formed one, which unites simple, pure form with intricate surface decoration, so that the ceramic sculpture as a whole appears robust and solid, rather than finicky. It represents a cake that is not only sweet, but also filling; a dessert of considerable substance.
Tag: art and religion
New book: Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design
Artwork of the Month, May 2021: The Church of St. Anthony of Padua by Gyula Rimanóczy (1931–34)
In the western suburbs of the 2nd district of Budapest, on Pasaréti Square, is one of the more striking examples of interwar modernist architecture in Hungary: the Franciscan Church of St. Anthony of Padua. The innovative nature of the design is apparent if we compare it with other churches built in Hungary shortly before, such as the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Győr of 1929, or the Church of St. Emeric in Balatonalmádi (1930). We can also gain a sense of the striking addition it made to the cityscape when we view it in its environs, a low-density neighbourhood of villas. It is commonly regarded as one of the most important churches built in interwar Hungary, and as evidence of the embrace by the Hungarian Catholic church of modernity. Consecrated in October 1934, it might have been the first example of functionalist church architecture in Hungary, had it not been for the tumultuous process of its approval that delayed its completion. As a result, the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Bertalan (1901–1971) and Aladár Árkay (1868–1932) is generally held to have that distinction.
Modernity and Religion Keynote Lecture: Elizabeth Otto on Bauhaus Occult
The second keynote lecture of our workshop Modernity and Religion in Central European Art and Architecture will take place at
18.00 CET on 13 May 2021
on Zoom.
Elizabeth Otto (State University of New York at Buffalo)
will present:
Bauhaus Occult: Experimental Spirituality in the Home of Rational Modernism
Modernity and Religion Session 5: Church Architecture in Interwar Hungary
Session 5 of our workshop Modernity and Religion in Central European Art and Architecture will take place at
18.00 CET on 15 April 2021
on Zoom, featuring papers by
Erzsébet Urbán (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest)
and
Eszter Baku (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest).