Indian sunset (1930 körül)

Mrs Sass Brunner, or as she signed her paintings in Hungary, Mrs Sass Farkas Böske, learned to paint from her husband, Ferenc Sass Brunner. Ferenc Sass passed on to his pupil the vision of light and colour and the view of nature in the Nagybánya school. Mrs Sass' early paintings (of which only a few have survived) were rich in colour and light effects. The paintings from 1925 to 1929 are on the one hand a humble reflection of nature, individually experienced, and on the other hand, they are often expressions of inner experiences related to natural experiences, often in a similar colour scheme. The experience of nature and the inner experience, the vision, are often derived from one another. A later sentence of Mrs Sass applies to almost both groups: 'Natural phenomena in my pictures expressed my state of mind' (from the preface to the album published in Japan in 1937). The essence of the visions is a 'universal experience' in which sun and moon, light and darkness, God and man, the universe and the individual appear as identical.

In May 1929, Mrs. Sass and her 19-year-old daughter (Elisabeth Brunner) went first to Rome and then to Sicily. There she (the younger) had a dream in which a man with a white beard handed her a lighted candle, asking her to take this light to all corners of the world. Her mother feels that Rabindranath Tagore spoke to them, and that Tagore did indeed reply to their letter in Hungarian, addressed 'Tagore - India', with an invitation. They reached India through Egypt. Over the next few years they travelled to almost every corner of India, painting landscapes, people, copying ancient statues and buildings. It was a conscious effort to them to absorb the traditions of Indian art. Their journey was accompanied by unanimous acclaim, handed down from hand to hand by the maharajas. But their greatest experience was when they have met Mahatma Gandhi in 1934. 

The above painting is one of the so-called "iconic paintings" of Erzsébet Brunner Sass, made during her first trip to India (1930-1935). It captures the extraordinary natural phenomenon of the setting sun and the night coming down on us from above, meeting in the sky. The landscape is then bathed in extraordinary colours, and the plants and man-made buildings seem to be covered in a bluish-purple veil of mist. Mrs. Sass Brunner is still interested in the mystery of light and life, combining in her style the achievements of the Impressionist and Fauves. As she writes to Károly Lyka: "My pictures are mostly symbolic, but I am also very much concerned with the Indian light - the vibration of air, swimming in light almost without shadow, a serious and beautiful problem [...] In the colour diffusion of the eastern sunrise, in the sombre palm silhouettes, in the lotus lakes, I see and find the essence that Lake Balaton first revealed. Its quiet murmur, its angry ripples, its mercury diamond reflections, encompass all values, dissolve and dissolve all colours, focus and unite."