CSÁKY, József
(1888, Szeged - 1971, Paris)



Sculptor. He was a pupil of Lajos Mátrai at the School of Industrial Design from 1905, then worked in the workshop of László Kimnach. In 1907 he was employed in the Zsolnay Factory in Pécs but was dismissed as untalented. He worked as a metal founder in Budapest, then went to Paris on foot where he arrived in summer 1908. He made a living there by doing odd jobs: he worked as a peddlar, stone cutter and posed for artists. In 1910 he won the "Ferenc József Art Scholarship" in Szeged for the period of three years. He attended the Blanche, then La Palette, a private school in Paris. After several exhibitions, he started to work for "Montjoie", a journal on literature and joined the society of Strawinski, Apollinaire, Picasso and Cendras. His art was influenced more and more by cubism ("Standing Woman" 1913, "Head" 1914, and "Abstract Statue" 1919, etc.).

In 1914 he became a French citizen and fought as a French soldier in World War I. In 1918 he signed a contract with Léon Rosenberg, an art dealer in Paris and soon he became a well-known artist. He had several exhibitions, e.g. in London in 1930, in New York in 1931, in Paris in 1935 and in Budapest in 1936. It was Csáky who designed the "Rákóczi Memorial" erected in Grosbois in 1937 and produced a puppet-show version of "The Tragedy of Man", a drama by Madách, together with Géza Blattner at the World Exhibiton in Paris in 1937.

His sculpture was first under the influence of naturalism, then cubism. He took over geometrical structure and stylization from cubism, thus making his statues become static compositions.



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