Lajos Tihanyi

Background

Ethnicity: Lajos Tihanyi was born to a Hungarian-Jewish family.

Tihanyi was born in Budapest, Hungary, on October 29, 1885. He had a younger sister Berta.

Education

Lajos Tihanyi suffered from meningitis, as a result, he became deaf and mute when he was eleven. This narrowly restricted his schooling. Between 1904 and 1905 he studied drawing at the School of Arts and Crafts (the present-day Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design), as Hungary did not then have a fine art academy. However, he is considered to be a largely self-taught artist.

Tihanyi studied in the summer of 1906 at the Nagybánya artists' colony, in present-day Baia Mare, Romania. He was associated with them for some time.

Career

Tihanyi started working in Budapest. He was connected with younger painters, who were ready to absorb new directions, including the brilliant use of colour by Fauvists.

He helped introduce the Post-Impressionist concepts and techniques of Cubism and Expressionism to art circles in Hungary. As one of a group called the "Neos," the artist adopted techniques other than the naturalism adopted by Simon Hollósy and others of the colony. This group later developed into the Hungarian avant-garde. Károly Kernstok was its leader, among other members were Béla Czóbel, Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba, Béla Iványi Grünwald, and Sándor Ziffer. They all were influenced by the work of French artists, including Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse.

At the age of 24, Tihanyi became a member of The Eight (A Nyolcak), an avant-garde art movement of Hungarian painters active mostly in Budapest from 1909 to 1918. It included the painters Kernstok and Czóbel, Dezső Czigány, Dezső Orbán, Róbert Berény, Ödön Márffy, and Bertalan Pór. The sculptors Márk Vedres and Vilmos Fémes Beck were also associated with the group. They had three exhibits as a group. Besides, they were influential for participating in numerous events related to literature and music.

The members of the Eight were part of the radical intellectual movements in the early 20th century Budapest. The Eight's style was quite complex, as its representatives worked with the rationalism of cubists, the decorative use of colour as seen in the Fauves, and the emotional depth of German Expressionism. Lajos Tihanyi, along with Ziffer, Czóbel and Berény, was considered to be one of the Hungarian Fauves. In 2006 he participated in the exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery.

Lajos Kassák, a writer and journalist, founded A Tett (Action) in 1915, and later Ma (Today). Both periodicals published articles on literature and art and provided reproductions of different artworks. For instance, they featured Tihanyi, and he had a one-man exhibit in their offices in 1915.

When World War I was over, Lajos Tihanyi participated in the radical movement of Activism. The Activists pushed the cubist and expressionist innovations into a radical direction. Among its followers were József Nemes Lampérth and Béla Uitz. Tihanyi was one of the few young artists who had achieved recognition before the 1919 revolution. That year, after the fall of the Hungarian Democratic Republic, Tihanyi just like many other artists and intellectuals left the country.

Lajos Tihanyi worked and lived for the rest of his life abroad. He briefly resided in Vienna, then for a few years in Berlin. The latter was flooded with radical artists and intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to Hungarians, by that time Russians were arriving in Berlin, including the Ukrainian artist Archipenko. In 1924 Tihanyi moved to Paris, where he lived most of his life. Due to his unwillingness to sell his artworks, in his early years abroad, he sometimes relied on some financial help from his father.

Tihanyi painted many of his friends, mostly fellow foreigners. Among his models were the American composer George Antheil, the writer Ivan Goll, Louis Gruenberg, a Russian-American composer; the German writer Johannes Becher, Leonard Frank, Henri Guilbeaux, a French socialist; Vincent Huidoboro, the architect Adolph Loos, and the writer Karl Kraus.

By 1933 Lajos Tihanyi had joined the "Abstraction-Creation" group. He sometimes showed his works with the group, and also had solo exhibits. Tihanyi became well-known for his painting and lithography, with much of his best work held by museums outside Hungary.

Achievements

• Lajos Tihanyi was a prominent artist of his time. His artworks were exhibited not only in Hungarian museums and galleries but also abroad. Among the countries where he displayed his paintings were Germany, the United States, France, etc.
  
  To commemorate his achievements, numerous posthumous exhibitions were held. An exhibit entitled "A Nyolcak (The Eight): A Centenary Exhibition" was held at the Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs from 10 December 2010 to 27 March 2011; in 2012, "Lajos Tihanyi - A bohème painter in Budapest" took place at the KOGART Haz, Budapest, between 20 April and 20 August 2012.
  
  Moreover, from 12 September till 2 December 2012 "The Eight. Hungary's Highway in the Modern" (Die Acht. Ungarns Highway in die Moderne) was organized by Bank Austria Kunstforum, Wien, in collaboration with Museum of Fine Arts and Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Portrait of Grósz Andor

  • Street in Trencsén

  • Still-life with Flowes in a Pot

  • Self-portrait

  • Three Trees

  • Pont St. Michel

  • Still-life

  • Nude

  • Portrait of Jacques de la Fregonniere

  • Still-life with Pipe

  • Composition

  • Portrait of György Bölöni

  • Self-portrait Wearing Cap

  • Main Square in Nagybánya

  • Nudes

  • Portrait of Tristan Tzara

  • Portrait of a Child

  • Portrait of a Young Girl

  • Landscape

  • Hills in Buda

  • Chatting

  • Chatting

  • Forest Landscape

  • Self-Portrait

  • Compositional sketch

  • Still-life with Bottle and Glass

  • Woman in Red with Green Background

  • Self-Portrait

  • Self-portrait

  • Nagybánya View

Politics

Tihanyi aided the communists during the revolution of 1919. Subsequently, he was among the victims of reprisals against allies of the revolution.

References

• Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890-1939 This pioneering and award-winning study provides the world with the first coherent narrative of Eastern European contributions to the modern art movement.
  1999