Cartoon Couple — Art-Deco Sculpture, Hotel Terrace, Budapest

The hotel opened in 1936 and has been restored twice. The terrace is the building’s best feature and the one thing on it that was not original was a photograph of the founding family in a frame nobody looked at.

The brief

A couple, on the terrace, about 2 m, in the visual language of the building. The general manager was explicit that she did not want a portrait of the founders. She wanted a couple that could have been any two people who dined there in 1936.

Building in deco geometry

The two figures are the same cartoon construction as everything else we make — oversized heads, reduced bodies — but their silhouettes are cut with the period’s toolkit. Both gown and jacket are built as stacked stepped bands, four on the gown and three on the jacket, each band lipped about 4 mm proud of the one beneath. The shoulders are squared rather than rounded. The heads are left smooth, because that is where the cartoon has to survive.

Her hair is a fluted bob: a series of narrow vertical ridges, which is the one place on the piece where the fluting runs against the direction of the form instead of with it.

Black, and a little gold

Deep black lacquer, built up in nine coats and hand-flatted. The gold leaf is restricted to the earrings, a single band at the waist of the gown, the cuff links and two narrow bands on the hem, and it is applied over red bole so it has a warm weight to it rather than a yellow sparkle.

On the terrace

It stands at the eastern end of the terrace, where the late sun rakes along the fluting and the stepped bands throw real shadows. The hotel has not publicised it and reports that guests find it on their own, which is what they wanted.