Young Man Béni Ferenczy

As the youngest child of Károly Ferenczy, leader of the Nagybánya (Baia Mare) artists’ colony, Béni Ferenczy completed his general art instruction together with the pupils at the painting school, later mastering the technique of sculpture at a number of foreign schools. In Florence he attended the Scuola Libera, in Munich he learned how to carve wood, and in Paris he worked in the studios of Antoine Bourdelle and Alexander Archipenko, all the while visiting museums and imbibing the sculptural heritage of the past.
The first decade and a half of his sculptural career was a period of style-searching and experimentation. His Young Man of 1919 marks the transition between his early naturalism and the bold, stylised approach of the first half of the twenties. It is a combination of the classical ideal of beauty, the post-cubist desire for pure geometry, and the exaggerated proportions of expressionism. It fuses together the influences he absorbed abroad, while it also bears close affinities with the Hungarian avant-garde movement of the time.