L
ooking back on her life and oeuvre on the occasion of her seventieth birthday, Beáta Nikmond gave the following account. Published in the 2007 ‘Seventy Year Olds’ number of the periodical Napút (Sun Path), it was – in keeping with her straightforward sculpture – succinct and to the point.‘My parents kept the ‘Kispipa’ public house in Kispest [a suburb of Budapest], up until 1952. My father died in 1957, my mother in 1997. After eight years of general school, I attended the Bánki Donát Technical Institute, completing two years there. I then finished vocation-al school, where I learned shorthand and typing. For twenty years, I worked for a single firm, as an admin-istrator. I studied art from 1960 until 1977, as a mem-ber of the Dési Hua mem-ber Art Circle. My instructors there were Ferenc Laborcz and Mihály Pál the Younger. Since 1978, I have taken part regularly in exhibitions at the na-tional level. For seven years, I was married; for another eight years, I lived with a partner. Since the age of thir-ty-seven, I have lived alone, in a single-storey building in the Wekerle housing development. This is where I work, out in the yard in summer and in my larger room in win-ter. This is where I feel my best; this is where there is everything necessary for my work. I work the stone by hand. First, I ‘remove the excess’ using a chisel tipped with tungsten carbide. I then rub the stone with carbo-rundum and in the meantime carve it, too, step by step, for approximately a year, after which I leave off and be-gin on the next sculpture, which will be connected with it. Generally speaking, I rise at six in the morning; I work from eight until noon. Afternoons are for housework, rest, and painting. Evenings are for reading. I go to bed at ten.’1
Including small sculptures statuettes, and pictures, this assemblage of artworks by the sculptor
Beá-ta Nikmond speaks of a period of creativity spanning more than five decades, namely a time extending from the 1960s and 1970s up until the present day. During this period, the physical conditions for her work were by no means always optimal. Perhaps the most impor-tant feature of the assemblage (which is representa-tive of her output as a whole), and also the strongest creative impulse behind it, is the wish to tackle time-lessness. Dipping into the past unawares (as it were) by means of parallelisms and sculptural suggestion, gently distancing themselves from the present or else pilfering from it, assimilating the prospective future by dint of their hardness and solidity, and defying im-permanence, Nikmond sculptures stand magnificently alone in present-day art, baffling analysts and inter-preters of contemporary sculpture and prompting as-tonishment in viewers. Behind the broad Hungarian sculpture front definable by the names and oeuvres of Imre Varga, Miklós Melocco, Pál Kő, Tamás Vígh, László Marton, György Jovánovics, and István Har-asztÿ – all of them big names in contemporary Hun-garian art and masters invariably in the spotlight – is a group of sculptors that has attracted, and received, little attention from art historians, and little response from critics and the media. The value-creating work of the sculptors in this second group is known and rec-ognised only by a few persons outside of professional circles, although these sculptors have enriched, and are enriching, modern Hungarian art with immense-ly important and valuable creations just as much as the star sculptors are. To the list of artists given above should be added – as a matter of course and very em-phatically – the names of Sándor Nagy, Gyula Hadik, Magda Gádor, and Beáta Nikmond, although in actual fact these artists have created fewer large, monumen-tal works as commissions and have been exhibited less frequently than colleagues in the public gaze. By
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tue of works and oeuvres created using their unique respective languages and approaches, the last-men-tioned four artists have written, and continue to write, very splendid chapters in the history of modern Hun-garian sculpture. Interestingly, they are without excep-tion artists working in the spirit of classic art ideals, fashioning traditional materials using traditional tools, and siting their sculptures in line with conventions go-ing back many millennia. They are artists who sculpt stone and wood mostly, artists whose works are by no means anachronistic or vehicles for reminiscences but instead contemporary, autonomous compositions that are modern in their approach but pervaded with things obscure and enigmatic.
In drawing out the secrets of Beáta Nikmond’s par-ticular sculptural world, it is helpful to refer to a long study entitled Magyar művészet (Hungarian Art) pub-lished almost a century ago now by the philosopher of art Lajos Fülep. Fülep called to mind an epoch-mak-ing action by Greek sculpture that determined Euro-pean sculpture for millennia, stating that the basis for sculptural composition was the correlation between restriction and liberty: ‘This correlation was estab-lished by the Greeks first of all; with them a new peri-od begins. Their matchless achievement – the great-est revolutionary achievement in the history of world art – was that they set figures with all their weight on one leg instead of on both legs equally […]; the second leg, freed from weight, they placed lightly in the air, and they drew the consequences stemming from the distribution of the weight for the trunk as a whole through contrary positioning of the hips and shoul-ders, through the drawing in of one side of the trunk and the pushing out of the other, through contrary functions for the arms and legs, and through the posi-tioning of the head. […] In actual fact, with this begins
the story of sculptural composition, which is then al-ready the story of equilibrium, the story of the corre-lation between restriction and liberty, between being and becoming.’2
Looking at Beáta Nikmond’s sculptures and weighing the differences between them, it is easy to assert in the light of Lajos Fülep’s thesis that the artist turned back to the approach characteristic of the period be-fore the Greeks, re-establishing perfect equilibrium consciously or instinctively, eliminating antagonisms, abolishing limitless freedom to fashion, and making restriction prevail. Gripped in seated and standing postures, her human figures are compositions that are stiff, immobile, gesture-free, almost perfectly sym-metrical, heavy, barely proportioned, mostly closed, and unpierced. They are portraits of figures looking sternly ahead, fixing their eyes on a point in the dis-tance. If in its metaphorical heights sculpture is able to make formulations about everyday things, then such formulations stand before us in the style of Nikmond sculptures: they speak indicatively in an exact way, raising matters to the sphere of the poetic, talking to us with delicate allusions in an understandable way about human splendour and dignity. This can be traced back to the creative method outlined by the artist – ‘I […]
rub the stone with carborundum and in the meantime carve it, too, step by step, for approximately a year, after which I leave off and begin on the next sculpture, which will be connected with it.’3 – and the conclusion may be drawn that in her oeuvre there are no big chang-es, no separate periods or groups of works different from one another or built on one another. Nikmond’s is a highly uniform oeuvre in which figures, groups of figures, and portraits naturalistic in depiction and lat-er detlat-ermined by a fashioning method using difflat-erent degrees of stylisation alternate and follow one another all the way from the 1970s to the present.
The materials and techniques used by Beáta Nikmond call to mind ideals and practices of the times be-fore the classical epochs. Almost exclusively, Beáta Nikmond’s materials are wood and very hard stone:
granite, basalt, and labradorite. Often, wood is used simply to make models for compositions to be carved from stone later on. Bronze castings appear only ex-ceptionally, usually in a group of portraits. Her stone sculptures take shape at a glacial rate, by way of de-manding, lengthy, meticulous work performed entirely by hand: the sculptor uses no machinery even today, in the early 21st century. Her only tools are mallets and chisels, plus the various implements with which she smoothens compositions that are stripped of detail and emphatic of essential elements, fashioning sensi-tively made convex and concave surfaces that arch in and out, thus connecting with each other. In the pres-ent age of artistic mass production, it is refreshing and a relief that one-off works are still being created by means of daily labour over many months, often more than a year, works that feature the marks of the artist’s hands while radiating the magical aura of uniqueness.
In his book Kőfaragók műhelytitkai (Secrets from the Ateliers of Sculptors in Stone), the eminent stone carver and conservator Ernő Szakál calls granite – Beáta Nikmond’s most important sculptural material – the stone of stones. This is because ‘With its claim to permanence, it is godlike, inhuman, and cruel.
[…] Those who carve from granite are demi-gods at the very least. Moreover, black granite is the real gran-ite, since the lighter in colour the grangran-ite, the less val-uable it is.’4 On the other hand, this is offset by what Ernő Szakál sees as the more human character of white granite, since according to measurements re-corded in air whose temperature is 26˚C, black gran-ite in sunlight heats up to a temperature of 65˚C while
white granite warms up to just over half that, to 33˚C.
Incidentally, this warming serves to explain the com-ing to life of a marble sculpture in the legends of Pyg-malion and Daedalus respectively. If we weigh mere-ly these strange phenomena and the characteristics of the stone types, then we can consider the special, near-transcendental effulgence of Beáta Nikmond’s sculptures carved in these incredibly hard materials to be immediately explained. In the characterisation of granite as formulated by Ernő Szakál, there is another important thesis, namely that this material ‘destroys those who shape, carve, and polish it using the strength of their hands merely’.5 Well, this particular contention is refuted by the sculptural output of Beáta Nikmond:
this is an artist who – by dint of manual labour over many months performed with stout persistency and with the feeling each day of work well done – fashions her sculptures from stone of immense hardness. Then, when she is finally ready with one sculpture, she be-gins work on another. For five decades now, she has carved and polished without the use of machinery:
freely, empowered, with the happy knowledge that she is creating sculpture. Looking at her works, our gain may indeed be sculpture that is pure and ideal.
There is, perhaps, no need to explain: Beáta Nikmond is a creator of figurative sculpture, but in her own way.
This is an artist who with her creations calls to mind sculptural mediums going back many millennia, hu-man figures, and various animals. In her choice of subject, then – from its beginnings in the very distant past until times that today count as long ago, hu-man beings and animals were the only subjects for sculpture – there is nothing unusual, except that she links, or rather fuses, real and imaginary animals, birds, and fishes with human figures, thus linking her sculpted figures to the sphere of legends. The men,
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the women, the young and old people, the birds, and the fishes are – when they give shape to the sculptur-al other of the initiated – themselves sculpturthe sculptur-al-ar- sculptural-ar-tistic artefacts invested with extraordinarily profound and complex symbolic content, in multiple ways when they appear in a combinative way, as phenomena cob-bled together from different elements. In this matter, it will perhaps be sufficient to refer to the fish on wheels. However, in the case of Nikmond sculptures utilisation of symbol analysis – and likewise attempts to unravel epic content – are enterprises that are un-workable, futile, and lead to wrong paths, as the fig-ures, the animals, too, are merely embodiments of aesthetic beauty, of an interesting and exciting stock of forms, thematic pretexts for a beautiful and strange, sometimes clumsy, rustic sculptural object. There is no complicated content in the background. Here things are not bearers of indirect meaning, but sim-ply sculptures-in-themselves infused with an austere beauty and strangeness. The secrets are the original ones and are not secret. The root sentence-like ex-pressions are dense, three-dimensional summaries proclaiming ideas from before the classical period.
They are syntheses of forms. Black and grey, reddish, polished smooth, gleaming in some places, or dull, they are invariably fashioned in block-like shapes.
Composition is built from organic body masses that emphasise massiveness, are formed without pierc-ings, and, almost sprawling, erupt from each other and melt into each other. The array of forms is organ-ised from hard stone bodies, or slightly softer wooden ones, and radiates massiveness, solidity, closedness, unalterability, perpetuity, and stability. The anthropo-morphic elements run into blockiness almost unob-served: the hands and legs in equilibrium along with the trunks and heads whose depiction is attended not by the creation of separate forms, but often only
by token-type contours scratched on the surfaces of the blocks. The faces staring into the distance, the bodies locked in immobility in postures of repose, the figures that are not gesturing, and the strange proportions all recall the way of seeing and the type of figural fashioning that are characteristic of archaic times: present in this art in a concealed, strange way are tribal art and Egyptian art. So, too, are the les-sons of the sculpture of great predecessors – Ferenc Medgyessy, Dezső Bokros Birman, László Mészáros, and Constantin Brâncuşi also – gently, reinterpreted, and in essence. As the art historian Orsolya Mohay stated in a critique she wrote of a retrospective ex-hibition of Beáta Nikmond’s work staged at the Nagy Balogh János Exhibition Hall in Kispest in 2014, ‘Her powerful and strictly aesthetic motivations can be easily discerned in her works. On the one hand, they are characterised by perfect proportions, by perfect unity, by distensions resembling embryonic spheres, by endeavour. On the other hand, she loves symme-try, and increasingly, composition within geometrical shapes. Her works deal with the concrete: concrete people, connections, relationships. A significant number of them are made after models, although on their faces a timelessness character and a calm state without feelings are to be seen. They are beautiful, with their built-up geometry, their gesture-free pos-tures facing straight ahead, and their immobility. No self-reflection can be detected; the impress of her life appears merely in the aesthetic reality of the forms.
She does not force additional meaning beyond the ap-pearance of the sculptures.’6
Resonating with these sculptures, as products of pic-ture-creating work from the first decade of the 21st century, is a series of pastel pictures in which the artist captured real figures from her close circle. In
the com-positions, grotesque characters, more than once a family member or artist colleague, appear in strange situations. These works are not ‘sculptor’s sketches’, characterised on occasion as a separate form of ex-pression, that feature strong links with sculptures yet to be created or already completed. The works in ques-tion are in their own right examples of expression in the pictorial sense. This is attested by the circumstance that while Beáta Nikmond’s sculptures are for the most part locked in immobility, the figures in the pictures are invariably in a state of movement. Beáta Nikmond – whose ideal as a painter is that master of Naturalistic compression István Nagy – records her pastel pictures on medium-sized sheets of paper using an original way of seeing that casts aside the conventional rules for depiction and representation. In her compositions, she moves between plasticity and two-dimensionality;
scenes showing the duality of spectacle and appari-tion open before us in a forced way. Placed in a neutral environment (or in an environment characterised
in-dicatively by a single artefact only) and constructed of fields of colour bordered by thick contours, the clum-sy figures devoid of detail endure strange contortions.
The pastel compositions sketched and painted in deep colours are painterly recordings of visions sublimated from life that set aside experiential, speculative com-position and reflect an approach that is very much the artist’s own.
In one of his studies on modern sculpture, the eminent writer and thinker Béla Hamvas stated that opti mally
‘…a sculpture is more than a sculpture: it should be a recitation, a poem, a meditation, a discourse.’7 This character bursting asunder sculpture’s artistic bound-aries; this fruitful extendedness, this declamation, poetry, preaching, meditation, and discourse inviting the viewer into the magical sphere of timelessness, – all make the works by the sculptor Beáta Nikmond outstanding, autonomous, authentic, and era-marking creations.
Notes
1. Nikmond, Beáta: ‘Nikmond Beáta képzőművész, szobrász (Kispest, 1938. március 12.)’ (Beáta Nikmond, Visual Artist and Sculptor
(b. Kispest, 12 March 1938). Napút 2007/10: 36 2. Fülep, Lajos: ‘Magyar szobrászat’ (Hungarian
Sculptu-re). In: A művészet forradalmától a nagy forradalomig.
Cikkek, tanulmányok (From a Revolution in Art to the Great October Revolution. Papers, Studies), vol. 1. Budapest: Magvető Könyvkiadó, 1974, pp. 301–302 3. Nikmond, Beáta: Napút 2007/10: 36
4. Szakál, Ernő: Kőfaragók műhelytitkai (Secrets from the Ateliers of Sculptors in Stone).
Budapest: Magyar Kőszövetség, 2007, p. 16
5. Szakál, Ernő: Kőfaragók műhelytitkai (Secrets from the Ateliers of Sculptors in Stone).
Budapest: Magyar Kőszövetség, 2007, p. 16 6. Mohay, Orsolya: ‘50 év munkái. Nikmond Beáta
szobrászművész kiállítása Nagy Balogh
János Kiállítóterem, 2015. I. 30-ig’ (Works of 50 Years.
An Exhibition by Beáta Nikmond, Sculptor.
Nagy Balogh János Exhibition Hall, until 30 January 2015). Új Művészet 2015/1–2: 74–75
7. Hamvas, Béla: Modern szobrászat és művészetelmélet (Modern Sculpture and Art Theory). In. Öt meg nem tartott előadás a művészetről. Művészeti írások I.
(Five Undelivered Lectures on Art. Writings on Art, Vol. 1). Budapest: Medio Kiadó, 2014, p. 91
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Nikmond Beáta műterme – 2017., Kispest
I
n der Ausgabe der Zeitschrift Napút über die „Sieb-ziger“, die im Jahr 2008 aus Anlass des siebzigsten Geburtstags der Künstlerin erschien, fasste Beáta Nik-mond ihren Lebensweg und ihre künstlerische Arbeit im Rückblick knapp und kompakt, so wie ihre Bildhauerei auf das Wesentliche konzentriert zusammen:„Meine Eltern besaßen in Kispest bis 1952 eine Wirt-schaft mit dem Namen Kispipa. Mein Vater starb 1957, meine Mutter 1997. Nach den acht Jahren Volksschule besuchte ich zwei Jahre lang das Bánki-Donát-Techni-kum, dann eine Fachschule für Bürowesen (Stenografie
„Meine Eltern besaßen in Kispest bis 1952 eine Wirt-schaft mit dem Namen Kispipa. Mein Vater starb 1957, meine Mutter 1997. Nach den acht Jahren Volksschule besuchte ich zwei Jahre lang das Bánki-Donát-Techni-kum, dann eine Fachschule für Bürowesen (Stenografie