October 19: Lajos Tihanyi (1885-1938)

[Visual description: A 1912 self-portrait by Lajos Tihanyi, showing the influence of cubism--he depicts himself as a pale man with expressive eyes and raised eyebrows, wearing somber browns, against a backdrop of white and crimson.]

Deaf avant-garde artist Lajos Tihanyi was born on this date in 1885, in Budapest, Hungary. His father owned a coffeehouse. Young Lajos survived meningitis at age 11, which was the origin of his deafness. (Though he's sometimes referred to as "deaf and dumb" or "deaf-mute" in older sources, Tihanyi spoke--he was just hard for many to understand.)

He briefly attended the School for Industrial Drawing in Budapest, but he learned the most from being with other artists. His work reflects the influences of the broader artistic movements of his day. In 1911, he was one of the founders of "the Eight," a group of modern artists in Budapest. His portraits subjects in the 1910s included many of the leading writers, composers, philosophers, and artists of Hungary.

Tihanyi and many other artists fled Hungary in 1919 after the fall of the short-lived Soviet republic, and never returned. During his later years in Paris, he lived in the Hotel des Terrasses and was a regular at the Dome Cafe, where he came to know Brassaï (a fellow Hungarian artist), Picasso, and novelist Henry Miller. At his death, the contents of Tihanyi's studio were donated to the Hungarian National Gallery.

See more of Tihanyi's works, here and here.

See also:

Valerie Majoros, "Lajos Tihanyi and his friends in the Paris of the nineteen-thirties," French Cultural Studies 11(3)(2000): 387-396.