Imre Varga
Great Hungarian sculptor best known in Britain for his striking bronze of the composer Bartok
IMRE VARGA, the sculptor, who has died aged 96, enjoyed a long career as one of Hungary’s most eminent artists. Varga somehow managed to sit on both sides of the political fence, sculpting Bela Kun (the revolutionary leader of the ill-fated Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919) and Lenin as dexterously as he did St Stephen, Bela Bartok, Franz Liszt and even Imre Nagy, the hero of the 1956 uprising. But his work always remained fresh and was never derivative.
Most Hungarian cities had statues by Varga, though abroad he became best known for the monument to the 600,000 Hungarian Jews who died in the Holocaust, unveiled in 1990 at the gates of Budapest’s former Jewish ghetto.
A huge black granite and steel memorial, it depicts a weeping willow in the shape of an inverted menorah, the seven-branched Jewish candelabrum, its 30,000 tiny metal leaves engraved with names of victims.
In Britain, he was responsible for the life-size bronze statue of the composer Bartok, unveiled in 2004, on a pavement opposite South Kensington Underground station and commissioned by the Peter Warlock Society, fans of the English composer who, in 1922, introduced Bartok to London.
Imre Varga was born at Siofok, on the southern bank of Lake Balaton, on November 1 1923 and showed early promise as an artist, participating in a Paris exhibition aged 14. He studied aeronautics at the Military Academy in Budapest and served in the Hungarian air force during the Second World War. He was captured and taken as a POW to the US, returning to Hungary in 1945.
Postwar Varga studied at Budapest’s University of Fine Arts, and soon began contributing to exhibitions. His first solo show was at the Institute for Cultural Relations in 1967. In 1973 he won the Kossuth Prize and in 1984 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
Varga ranged from small sculptures and medals to public sculptures and monuments, including funerary monuments, for which he became best known.
Other notable works include a bronze and granite monument to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis before disappearing into Soviet captivity. The statue, commissioned by Nicolas Salgo, a Hungarian immigrant to the US who was American ambassador to Hungary in the 1980s, was dedicated in 1987 on the western, wooded slopes of Budapest.
One of Varga’s most striking works, Umbrellas, a shiny sculpture of women sheltering from the rain, can be seen outside a museum dedicated to the artist in Obuda, Budapest.
Varga broke away from the conventional monumentalism characteristic of public works under communism. Although his modernist 1986 memorial to Bela Kun, depicting him exhorting Hungarian soldiers to the attack, was relegated like other communist-era statues to Budapest’s Memento Park, it stands out from the wooden depictions of other revolutionary heroes as the only artefact that could legitimately appear in a gallery.
Other works by Varga can be found in the Hungarian chapel of St Peter’s in Rome, in France, Poland, Germany and Israel.