Biography
Lajos Tihanyi was a Hungarian avant-garde painter, a member of MIÉNK, Nyolcak and Ma circle. One of the outstanding artists of the Hungarian avant-garde. His style was influenced by Cezanne, Fauvism and Expressionism and also Cubism. In his art, he researched the tensions of objectivity and analytical breakdown of form.
He was the son of waiter József Tihanyi and Heléna Schlesinger. At the age of 11, he lost his hearing due to meningitis; because of his deafness, his voice was distorted, he read lips, and when he spoke, he spoke a few words in a kind of guttural voice. Because of this, he was forced to give up his high school studies. He started drawing, then continued his studies at the model drawing school and various private schools. He was interested in all arts, including music. In 1907, he made a short study trip to Paris, where his art was primarily influenced by Fauvism, as well as to Italy. For four summers (1907–1910) he painted in Nagybánya, but he did not join the school, he painted outside the free school, he was essentially self-taught. In Nagybánya, he was close to the "neos" group, and from 1909 he became a founding member of Nyolcak. Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists (WE) II. exhibited his pictures for the first time at his exhibition (1908).
At the end of the 1910s, he met Lajos Kassák, who in 1918 organized an exhibition for him in the Váci street salon of Ma. After the fall of the Soviet Republic, he emigrated to Vienna, from where he soon moved to Berlin. In 1923 he moved to Paris. The art world there quickly accepted him: he was in contact with Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, Brâncuşi and Utrillo. His still lifes, portraits and cityscapes, showing signs of analytic and then synthetic cubism, created around 1920, were replaced by more and more abstract compositions, and by the beginning of the 1930s he reached complete abstraction. He joined the Abstraction-Création group in 1933.