Tag #138062 - Interview #78465 (Egon Lovith)

In 1957 I made a lot of sculptures with peasant themes, for instance the 907. That’s what it was called, 907. [Editor’s note: The name is referring to 1907, commemorating a Romanian peasant rebellion of that year.] In Mexico I grew up among Indians and I saw what working in the fields was like. The problem was that I made peasants who looked thin just like the field workers in Mexico. One of my sculptor colleges from the sculpture department, without telling me, wrote a very negative article in Fratia [Brotherhood], a local Romanian newspaper: ‘Lovith makes fun of Romanian peasants. Lovith’s peasant figure rather resembles a mosquito.’ He wrote that because the peasants were thin and they were under hardship. I created four bony peasants under a tree, with crows up on the tree, waiting for these peasants to die because their death was inevitable. They were made out of plaster and I was supposed to cast them. In my anger I only left one piece and broke into pieces all the others. Many people told me I was crazy when I said, ‘I’m sick of this, I will not use a subject like this ever again’. My remedy came when in 2002 the Kolozsvar Art Museum asked me to give them my one remaining peasant sculpture, which I hadn’t broken. I took the sculpture to the museum myself by car.