Kisfaludi-Stróbl, Zsigmond

Born July 1, 1884, in the village of Alsöraik, in the county of Zala. Hungarian sculptor. People’s Artist of the Hungarian People’s Republic (1952); honorary member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR (1958).

Kisfaludi-Stróbl studied at the Institute of Decorative and Applied Art in Budapest from 1900 to 1905, at the Academy of Applied Art in Vienna from 1905 to 1906, and at the Académie Julien in Paris from 1906 to 1908. He became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1924. Kisfaludi-Stróbl did a number of sculptures of women between 1910 and 1930 that revealed the influence of academic salon art. During this period he also executed large decorative sculptures, distinguished by the dynamic crispness of composition (for example, The Archer, bronze, 1918–19, the Hermitage, Leningrad).

After the establishment of the people’s power in Hungary, Kisfaludi-Stróbl created his principal work, the Liberation Monument on Gellert Hill in Budapest (1947), which became a symbol of the new life. He also did a number of portraits, in which he faithfully reproduced the features of his sitters (for example, Somerset Maugham, bronze, 1948, National Gallery, Budapest), and several other small-scale works that are distinguished by the combination of a realistic representation of nature with a symbolic interpretation of the subject (for example, The Wandering Petöfi, 1949; The Haymaker, 1954—both bronze, National Gallery, Budapest). Kisfaludi-Stróbl was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1950 and 1953.