Still life with eastern sculptures (around 1925)

Mária Hacker graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Music at the same time.  She was a favourite student and later a loyal friend of Leó Weiner. She was active in both fields during the 1910s, participating in exhibitions at the Kunsthalle, the Kunsthaus (Művészház) and the National Salon. She also visited Nagybánya and Paris, where she was influenced by Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic she was a music teacher and one of the developers of the new music education curriculum. After the fall of the Soviet Republic, she was deprived of her teaching post. In the first half of the 1920s, she was mainly involved in music and made the news with her piano concerts. After a six-year hiatus, her paintings were exhibited again in 1925. At the National Salon's group show, she exhibited, among others, her painting Ady in Paris. Her husband, Dr. Géza Turán, died tragically in 1930.

Buddhism and the various occult teachings entered the European public consciousness alongside irrationalist explanations of the world and 20th century crisis philosophies. By studying Eastern teachings, European intellectuals sought an intellectual escape from the crisis of Western civilisation. At the same time, the European man's turn to the East also reflected an attempt at self-definition: faced with 'otherness', 'strangeness', it was perhaps easier to introspect. The exoticism of Eastern teachings also conquered the bourgeois salons. 'Wise' gurus arrived from India, graphology became popular, tarot card playing and occult practices became part of social entertainment. Symbolic objects of Eastern religions, such as statues of Buddha or the modelled figures of Buddhist monks (bonce), became decorative objects in urban homes. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, still lifes by János Vaszary, István Csók, Géza Vörös, etc., were decorated with Oriental sculptures. Maria Turán Hacker was also interested in the idea of confronting different cultures, and in her still life, two Egyptian and a Buddha statue are shown alongside a Chinese vase, using the lessons of post-impressionism (cloisonism) in a decorative style. The painting was shown in a group exhibition at the National Salon in 1925.

Mária Turán Hacker was a resident of the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. In 1949 she organized a collection exhibition at the Alkotás Kunsthaus. In the following decades she found her place in the school. She taught art history, music history, piano playing and was an active member of the Budapest Music Schools.