By Julia Szabo
As Ukraine fights bravely to save its treasured historic monuments from ruin, many are reminded of an earlier crisis in a neighboring country: postwar Hungary, where patriots also rose in protest against Russian domination. Among those speaking out against the Soviet destruction of Budapest’s monuments, including the 1950 takedown of the city’s first Lajos Kossuth memorial—erected in 1927 on Kossuth Square, symbolic center of the Magyar state—were an archaeologist and his artist wife; objectors were sternly warned to “zakroy svoy rot” (shut your mouth). In October 1956, Soviet tanks’ brutal assault on Kossuth Square left hundreds massacred, and toppled still more statues.
Four months later, in 1957, refugees George and Martha Szabo (the archaeologist and the artist) found safe haven in the United States; naturalized that year, they became my parents in 1965. Once settled in their new home, Manhattan, Martha embraced the city’s dynamically changing skyline as the main theme of her practice, using oil paint to build a sanctuary city of the imagination: her spiritual antidote to all the chaos she’d seen and survived (during the war, she was interned with her family in an Austrian concentration camp). In Martha’s imperial city, monuments are immortal and buildings, bulletproof. “Architecture, combined with the cast shadows and moody light, drew me to these paintings,” says David Eichholtz of the David Richard Gallery (Chelsea and Uptown).
