KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Over the years, retired lawyer Tom Baker had done a lot of business with Jim Santilli, owner of Kansas City Upholstery. But the phone call Baker received from his friend in early July had nothing to do with furniture.
"There's this artist I'm exhibiting," Santilli told Baker, "and she says there's a piece of her work hidden behind a mirror in your building."
Baker told Santilli, "Come show me."
A few days later, Santilli arrived with a newspaper clipping from 1957 that showed a mosaic-covered wall with two elevators set into it in the Regency House on the Country Club Plaza.
The two men stood in the north lobby, where a mirrored wall surrounded the elevators. Santilli told Baker, "She says it's behind those mirrors."
Baker, who is president of the homeowners association of the Sulgrave Regency condominiums, consulted with his board of directors. Nobody remembered a mosaic, even 20-year residents. But everyone was intrigued, and the consensus reaction was, "By all means, let's take a look," Baker said.
Three days later, about 30 people crowded into the small lobby to watch as a mirror expert and maintenance staff tried to locate the hidden treasure.
Curious residents chatted excitedly, but Santilli was silent, his stomach tense. He wanted so badly for the mosaic to be intact, but he feared the worst.
Workers chipped off a small section of mirror, then cut a 1-foot-square hole in the plywood backing. Through the hole, everyone could see part of a mosaic, in pristine condition.
"A big cheer went up," Baker said. "It was like being at an archaeological dig and discovering King Tut's tomb right here in our midst."
Seeing that the mosaic was undamaged, he gave the workers the go-ahead to pull off the rest of the mirrors.
Standing at the front of the onlookers was the 91-year-old woman whose delicate hands had placed each of the thousands of tiny pieces of Italian marble more than 50 years earlier.
In the 1950s and '60s, Gabriella Polony-Mountain was at the peak of her career. The Hungarian-born emigre collaborated for decades with prominent Kansas City architects, including Edward Tanner, Peter Keleti and Howard Nearing, on large-scale artworks in banks, churches, schools, hospitals and private homes.
She won prestigious national fellowships, received an award for contributions to American culture from the Daughters of the American Revolution and earned honors from the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
And yet, until Santilli mounted an exhibition of her work in May (her first ever in Kansas City) and embarked on a quest to locate dozens of her commissions in public and private buildings around the region, almost no one in Kansas City had ever heard of her.
Walking through the showroom at Kansas City Upholstery, 4646 Belleview Ave., where "Through Gaby's Eyes" is on display through the end of October, the first thing that strikes you is the diversity of media that Polony-Mountain worked in.
Sculptures in travertine and granite, high-relief copper panels, marble mosaics, stained glass and woven tapestries all vie for contemplation.
Abstracted figures of dancers, horses and birds faintly echo Picasso, Chagall, Klimt and earlier masters such as El Greco, even the ancient Assyrians.
And yet certain elements -- orbs, undulating lines, elongated forms -- appear again and again, like a signature.
Who is Gabriella Polony-Mountain, this woman with the melodious name, born at the tail end of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire?
Whose childhood home -- Bratislava -- changed hands four times in her lifetime, shifting from Austria-Hungary to Hungary to Czechoslovakia to Slovakia?
Who led a life of privilege and gaiety until it collapsed into chaos and want?
Who fled to America with $120 and reinvented herself as a working artist who was not too proud to take commercial commissions?
Walking up the steps to the covered entrance of the 1960s modern ranch home that Polony-Mountain shares with her husband, and pause to take in the double copper repousse doors, whose swirling nude figures lean out in welcome.
I've come to ask whether she will accompany me to the sites of some of her commissions in Kansas City and the surrounding region, many of which she has never seen installed, I've been told, because she fabricated everything in her studio.
I still haven't rung the bell when the right door swings open. A petite woman with flame-colored hair and an upright carriage is framed by the doors she wrought half a century ago.
She is wearing slim tan silk pants covered with floral embroidery and a black blouson top with gold appliques at the waist and shoulder.
"Won't you come in?"
She looks like a dancer and sounds like Eva Gabor. I could listen to her voice for hours, and over the course of several excursions in the coming days, I will.
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"I was born in 1918, in April, in Sasvar, Hungary. My parents lived at that time in a castle where Maria Theresa of Austria used to entertain a paramour. When I was just a few months old, the Hungarian soldiers came back from the war and started a communist revolt there. My brother came back from the front, and that night he put us all on a train to Bratislava."
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Polony-Mountain and her husband, Herman Adrian "Rocky" Mountain, 94, have lived here since 1990, when they surprised friends by selling their home in the Country Club district to buy a larger house. The living room alone is more than 30 feet long and wide. It is filled with Polony-Mountain's tapestries and sculptures.
"Rocky has always given me beautiful homes. I always wanted more room for my art," Polony-Mountain says with a wide smile. "We've had 47 good years. It's a good life, isn't it?"
This is a recurring theme with Polony-Mountain, the wonderfulness of life.
Even though sciatica forced her to give up tennis two years ago, at age 89, and now threatens her ability to stand at her loom.
Even though, over the past three decades, loss of strength in her hands took from her one beloved medium after another -- sculpture, repousse, mosaic, stained glass.
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"In Bratislava, when I was a young girl, we had a house overlooking the castle and the cathedral and the Danube, and it had a big balcony, and it was in a big park. One night I took a white robe and draped it like a gown, and I put on a record and started dancing around on the balcony. It was dark, and suddenly onlookers started clapping.
"Until I was 20 I had no idea that life was not purely a beautiful thing."
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The oft-repeated orbs in Polony-Mountain's works represent the sun, she explains.
"It is round, and round shapes give a good feeling and warmth."
The undulating lines are waves, which represent life.
"Life is up and down. The wave always comes back, in a slightly altered form."
She speaks often of interconnectedness.
"My feeling is that the cosmos is God, and we are all bound up with the cosmos, because we are the same material as the cosmos."
One afternoon, as Polony-Mountain is leaving the Regency after revisiting her newly uncovered mosaic, she is approached by a woman walking a dog. The woman, who introduces herself as Pamela Moffitt, has a story to tell.
"When we moved here," Moffitt says, "I wondered: 'What happened to the mosaic? Am I crazy?'"
She remembered visiting a friend's grandmother at the Regency as a teenager in the '70s and admiring the elaborate tableau of abstracted familial scenes: a young couple, a family with young children and a dog.
"It's gorgeous, and I'm so happy it's back," Moffitt says, adding that she can't believe her good fortune in running into the artist.
Polony-Mountain smiles and says: "Everything is the way it is meant to be. At the time when you took the doggie out, we were destined to meet."
When I was a girl, my father constantly said: "Gaby, look! That's beautiful!" And I would say: "Dad, don't tell me. I want to discover it for myself."
She didn't attend church as a child, but Polony-Mountain soaked up the beauty of the great European churches.
Beauty is central to her life and her art. She admires physical beauty and tends to describe people's appearance and dress when she tells stories.
She also loves beautiful prose. She read all the major writers of the early to mid-20th century: Rilke, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Francois Mauriac.
She feels part of the same modernist avant-garde movement that was taking place in literature and music during her formative years.
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"In the summer of 1936, my parents sent me to Saint-Servan-sur-Mer in France to improve my French. It was on the English Channel. I met a young man there, a good-looking young man named Delabrosse. Isn't that funny that I remember his name? He had a sister, and the three of us would sit on his boat and enjoy life by the sea. It was very pleasant."
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At the One Ward Parkway office building, Polony-Mountain steps off the elevator, resplendent in gray silk pants, a gray suede jacket, purple satin flats and the gold disc earrings she always wears that recall the suns in her mosaics.
As soon as she spots the pair of 6-foot-tall copper repousse panels on a brick wall, she backs up as far as she can, until her back is pressed against the windows opposite the panels from 1957, which originally hung in Regency House.
Between the panels stands a 3-foot-tall planter of tall sansevieria, which apparently will not do, because Polony-Mountain abruptly crosses the room and begins dragging the planter off to one side.
With the offending planter out of the way, she appraises the abstracted hunting scenes of riders, horses and a falcon.
"This was my best period," she says softly.
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"In January of 1939 I went to Cheltenham Spa in England, in the Cotswolds, to visit my English teacher. She lived in a palace a king had built. It had huge rooms and fireplaces. There were cocktails before dinner, and we had to wear evening dresses. I like that sort of thing.
"There was an art school there, and I inscribed in the painting department. But as I was looking around, suddenly I was in the sculpture department, and that was it. I knew this was what I wanted to fill my life with, so I switched to the sculpture department."
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"It will be overwhelming when it all comes back," Polony-Mountain says in the car as we are driving to Warrensburg, Mo., to see three commissions she did at the University of Central Missouri in 1959. She is animated but also apprehensive. She says she is worried she won't be pleased with her work when she sees it.
Because she did most of her commissions -- dozens of them -- 40 to 50 years ago, her memories of them are limited to often poor-quality black-and-white photographs.
Her anxiety mounts when a stained-glass window she did for the university chapel is no longer there. That window gets added to the list of other missing pieces, alongside a "History of Money" mosaic that once hung inside Mercantile Bank and the hammered doors in an abstracted bone motif that graced the entrance to Osteopathic Hospital. Both have changed owners over time, and current tenants do not know what happened to the works.
But in a residence hall called Houts-Hosey on the Central Missouri campus, we find a 5- by 4-foot stained glass window by Polony-Mountain.
When she catches sight of it, she is visibly relieved, her face breaking into a wide smile.
"It is very good, I think."
The motif, appropriate for the one-time women's dormitory, depicts the Bible parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins.
"I think these are the foolish ones," she says. "You see how their oil has run out, and so it is darker on that side."
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"I returned home to Bratislava from England in June of '39 for a vacation, and two months later the war broke out, so I couldn't go back. I got on one of the last trains into Budapest, because the Fine Arts Academy was there. I spent three years there during the war. It was a wonderful time then in Budapest. There were a lot of Hungarian intellectuals, people who enjoyed life, there."
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We make our way from Houts-Hosey to Utt, a music building where hammered aluminum panels representing the Seven Virtues adorn the lobby.
As Polony-Mountain sees them, she holds her hands apart wide, then claps them together.
"Oh, these are nice. They are modern," she says.
Her eyes fill with tears, and she says, "Maybe people will see these pictures and say, 'Gaby was a good artist after all.'"
The feeling that she was overlooked by the arts community because of her commercial commissions nags at her.
Paul Dorrell, owner of Leopold Gallery in Kansas City, thinks it's not surprising that Polony-Mountain did not receive more recognition when she was most active.
"Art creation in Kansas City when she was at her peak was not nearly at the fever pitch it is now," Dorrell said. "It was not unusual for an undiscovered gem like that to go on working for years in relative obscurity, especially when a person of exceptional talent stayed in a small city like Kansas City. Normally, people of exceptional talent would have moved to New York or Chicago."
But Dorrell doesn't think obscurity lessens the intrinsic value of Polony-Mountain's work.
"What was relevant and well-executed then is relevant and well-executed now," Dorrell says. "She deserves recognition, and I'm glad she's finally getting it, because she's truly a master."
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"I met my first husband, Elemer, at the academy. He was a painter. In 1944 he had to go to Russia to fight with the Russians. Everyone else in Budapest was living in the cellars, because no one knew when the Germans and the Russians would begin making war on each other. They were both advancing toward Budapest. But I didn't want to live in a cellar, so I was living in a tiny cabin with a dirt floor and no running water in the hills above the city, alone. These were very tumultuous times."
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It's a chilly, blustery day as Polony-Mountain gingerly makes her way up the steps on the north side of Kansas City School District offices at 12th and McGee streets. Her sciatica is giving her trouble.
But she looks glamorous in charcoal silk trousers, a soft gray sweater jacket with huge lapels and a periwinkle-blue wool scarf.
A week earlier, when district officials learned that Polony-Mountain was interested in seeing a 100-square-foot marble floor mosaic she created in 1960, when the building opened as the main branch of the Kansas City Library, public relations director Susan Lanning charged facilities maintenance foreman Eric Berry with the daunting task of cleaning the mosaic, which is in an unused vestibule.
Half-inch wide cracks between three sets of glass doors had let in leaves and dust. Berry and his team worked long hours, using a special cleanser to clean the marble tiles and then waxing the floor.
"I got chills when I saw how beautiful it looked after it had been cleaned," Lanning says.
Polony-Mountain rests in a chair next to the diamond-shaped mosaic depiction of the arts and sciences. But only for a moment.
She is back up, walking back and forth across the scene, when recently appointed district Superintendent John Covington walks in. He has stepped out of a meeting to meet Polony-Mountain.
"How do you do?" Covington says. "This is very nice."
He asks Polony-Mountain when she made the mosaic. When she says 1960, he lifts his head and raises an eyebrow.
"You mean this is 50 years old?"
"Yes, and I am twice that old," she says.
Polony-Mountain tells Covington he should hang a photograph of the mosaic inside the new downtown library building.
"You'll have to talk to (library director) Crosby Kemper about that," Covington says. "I'm just glad we've got it now."
Leaving the building, Polony-Mountain has a spring in her step. I offer my hand as we approach the stairs. She squeezes it and says: "This is wonderful. I'm revisiting my life."
Then she drops my hand and glides down the stairs under her own steam.
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"They let him, Elemer, come home for Christmas in 1944, and he found me somehow. But the Russians made Hungarians build pontoons on the Danube, and Elemer got sick there, and my brother said, 'Come back home to Bratislava,' and I worked for a month to get permission to leave. It was a month of sitting and asking and cajoling."
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The first time Polony-Mountain met Jim Santilli was another example of the interconnectedness she sees everywhere. Santilli, trying to persuade Polony-Mountain to agree to an exhibition, said her work had special meaning to him.
He had loved repousse ever since he was a teenager in Leavenworth, Kan., he explained, because there had been these beautiful copper repousse doors at a bank. He always admired them when he was cruising around in his car.
"I made those doors," she told him.
Another connection reveals itself when the chaplain's assistant at Whiteman Air Force Base near Knob Noster, Mo., where we have come to see stained-glass windows Polony-Mountain designed in 1959, speaks a little Hungarian. The assistant's grandmother emigrated from Hungary around the same time as Polony-Mountain.
Sunlight pours in through the windows. Of the abstract motif in vivid reds, blues and greens, Polony-Mountain says: "The shapes are based on airplanes. Can you see it?"
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"When we finally got passports to enter Czechoslovakia, we took our little dog and made our way to the station. It was chaotic and not possible to buy a ticket, so we jumped with the dog onto the caboose of a freight train to Bratislava as it was pulling out. We ran into a Russian soldier with a gun, and I started talking to him in Slovak, asking him about his mother and his children so he wouldn't kill us. You had to be on your feet, you know?"
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Standing in the dining room of a modern wood and glass home near Rockhill Country Club, Polony-Mountain says, "This was the site of a lot of wonderful dinner parties."
Around the corner in the living room is the site of a large copper repousse panel over a fireplace that won Polony-Mountain an award from the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1954.
Polony-Mountain is here at the invitation of Paul Keleti. His father, Peter Keleti, a prominent Hungarian-born architect, was one of the first people she met when she and her first husband arrived in Kansas City in 1951.
Keleti, single at the time, even shared an apartment with the couple for a while. Polony-Mountain would remain friends with him until his death last year.
But the Polony marriage did not survive the transatlantic transplanting. Elemer spoke no English and was isolated, while Gaby immersed herself in her work and posh parties hosted by high-society friends she met through a friend in the music department at the Kansas City Library.
"My first Thanksgiving, I was invited to dinner in Mission Hills, and there was snow. It was magical."
After her divorce, Polony-Mountain supported herself for 10 years with her commissions.
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"After two years in Bratislava, the communists took over there, too, so we went back to Hungary and got passports and a visa from the Italian consul to go to Rome. It was glorious to be in Rome. It is the most beautiful city in the world, and there were practically no cars then. We stayed there one year. I earned money translating and studied repousse with a professor from the Fine Arts Academy. Then we lived for a year in Fiesole, at an institute that helped refugee intellectuals. I made sculpture there."
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Polony-Mountain may have been overlooked by the Kansas City art community, but she was welcomed into artistic circles elsewhere. She met Thomas Hart Benton in Martha's Vineyard at the home of a mutual friend, and the two remained friends in Kansas City afterward.
In 1954 she was granted a Huntington Hartford fellowship, funded by the arts patron and heir to the A&P grocery fortune, to live in an artists' enclave in Pacific Palisades, Calif., for three months.
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"We arrived in the U.S. on April 1, 1951, on a Liberty ship. We changed ships in New York and sailed to New Orleans. Some nice people showed us the town. I realized at once, this is not a European city. The buildings had only fronts with nothing in back."
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There are two things everyone asks Polony-Mountain when they meet her at the site of one of her installations. The first is: Are you really 91?
She understands this is a compliment and generally replies that her secret to looking younger is wearing "nice bright things" and "a little paint, you know?"
The second is: How long did it take you to make this work of art? It's a natural thing to wonder in light of the huge scale and intricate detail that characterize her works.
She always answers that she doesn't know, she can't remember, it was a long time ago. Sometimes people press for parameters -- a few weeks? A few months? A year? To no avail.
"People always say it must have taken so much patience," she says. "There was no patience. It was joy. I lost myself in the work and was not aware of time."
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"When we left Italy, we thought we would be going straight to California. But in New Orleans we discovered our affidavit had been changed to Kansas City. Elemer's brother had been sponsored by a church in Kansas City, and a well-meaning woman at the church had changed the affidavit, thinking we would want to be near family. I cried. But there was nothing to be done. It was meant to be."
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Polony-Mountain and her husband have no children. A few years ago they began to consider what to do with all the tapestries, repousse trays, doors, panels and sculptures that fill their home.
"Rocky used to ask me, 'For whom did you do all this?' I always say, 'For myself.' I just wanted to fill my home with art," she says.
Through mutual friends, Polony-Mountain met officials from St. Bonaventure University in New York. The university bought a few pieces, and Polony-Mountain has donated some others to it.
One of Santilli's objectives in mounting his exhibition is to get her work seen by local art collectors and museums that might be unaware of it so that some of the items in her private collection might be able to stay in Kansas City.
But Polony-Mountain's commercial commissions are as important to her as the pieces in the exhibition.
"I'm glad I did them. They were some of my best works. And it pleases me to think of people getting pleasure from looking at them. I hope the people who live in the Regency House get a feeling of serenity and warmth and togetherness from my mosaic there.
"That is what I was always trying to express -- the noble aspects of life."
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