The 20 year old Endre Ady (1924)

When Endre Ady died in 1919, several artists made drawings and death masks of him on his deathbed. Although Bokros Birman was presumably not one of these artists, his work may have been based on the mask, which was reproduced in numerous copies. This is evident from the external features of the sculpture: the closed eyes, the smooth face and the absence of a skull. Although the sculpture does not depict Ady in the year of his death: the bronze version of the statue is described in the artist's 1928 book as 'The 20-year-old Ady'. In the book, Máriusz Rabinovszky writes of the portrait sculpture that 'The reconciled smoothness of death flows over the face, the harmonious contours of the hair'.  Bokros Birman, who also modelled the poet on other occasions (for the 1927 Ady memorial), said about the portrait: 'My most intimate, most inner vision of the great lyric poet'. The combination of Ady's youthful portrait with his death mask evokes an atmosphere of timelessness and serenity, placing the poet in the field of eternal memory. 

In 1925, Bokros Birman first exhibited a version of the statue in the Mentor bookshop exhibition space, which was purchased for the publisher by Jenő Heltai, then literary director of the Athenaeum publishing house. The other copy was given to the sculptor Goga Octavian in 1927, but its fate is unknown, and another bronze version is in the collection of the Hungarian National Gallery. The Petőfi Literary Museum has two terracottas and a plaster copy of the statue.  A terracotta version is also known from the collection of István Gádor, which was auctioned by BÁV in 2019. 

With its geometric forms and clean lines, the sculpture reflects the stylistic features of African masks, cubism and art deco. Its closed forms are articulated by the ornamental curves of the eyebrows, eyelids and mouth. This kind of plastic formulation, in which the artist has combined the specific and the general into a unity, is typical of Bokros Birman's art of the 1920s.