Július Bartfay — The Dancer

The intimacy of Bartfay´s work ´The Dancer´ urges to think about the motif that insipired the artist to create this artwork. The theme was the immortal poem ´The song of songs´. The protagonists are a woman – shepherdess – identified as Shulamite and the king Solomon, and the poem suggests movement from courtship to consummation and how the tender and emotional being who loved her sovereign died for her love. The composition of Bartfay´s work, the cut marble shapes and sensual dance of a girl dancing in a dynamic and rythmic movement, in the deep-felt love, with loose hair, blowing in the rhythm of music. The figure of a girl is anatomically perfect with characteristic touch by Július Bartfay. He was able to penetrate the psychology of the model and give the artwork itself the authenticity. It definitely belongs to the brilliant artworks of his most prolific period in the 1930s.

Július Bartfay entered the Slovak art scene at the beginning of the 1920s. At this time he came across the artwork of an influential French sculptor Émile Antoine Bourdella (1861 – 1929), at whose studio he also studied. Bourdell´s approach found its response in Bartfay´s artwork, especially in the realization of portrayal and figural work. In 1926 he created his self-portrait as well as portraits of many famous music composers, such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, W.A. Mozart and other scientists and thinkers. While studying his work in more detail, we can also observe the influence by Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917).

The lifetime work of the prominent representative of Slovak sculpture follows three creative phases. The first one is the portrayal work in which he tries to monumetalize the expression of the sculpture, capturing the mental state and inner tension of the model. The second part of his work is based on the literary and musical motifs in which he personalizes famous literary and musical artworks, also mythological motifs in which the symbol and allegory serve the socially expression of a deep-felt and remelted experience from the artwork. The last phase presents Works with social undertone and belongs to his most convincing ones. They display the critical realism of the author in the context of domestic artistic development and perform an important addition to the socially oriented movement in the Slovak sculpure. The most productive period of the artist were already mentioned 1920s and 1930s in which his thematic and contextual resource were rustic environment, but also the rich historical era of The Great Moravian Empire – he represented different famous historical personalities: Pribina, Koceľ, Svätopluk. In his sculptural work we can find many sacral motifs, too.

The importance of the lifelong work by Július Bartfay embodies his contribution of the dynamic expressionistic elements into the modern Slovak sculpture in the 1920s.