The Estate of Lajos Tihanyi

Lajos Tihanyi (1885–1938), one of the leading figures of modern Hungarian painting, died in Paris in 1938. His personal belongings letters, and works of art that were left behind in his Paris studio were taken by his friends—Brassaï , the photographer (Gyula Halász), Jacques de la Frégonnière, and Ervin Preiss Marton—who divided Tihanyi’s entire estate among themselves and kept it in their studios and apartments for decades. Over the years, they always agreed that it should eventually end up in a place worthy of its significance, a museum in Hungary. As their first choice fell on the Hungarian National Gallery, they contacted the museum as well as the Hungarian authorities in the 1960s. The negotiations for transferring the ownership of the Tihanyi Bequest and arranging its transport to Budapest proved to be a lengthy process. The artworks, together with the artist’s personal documents, letters and photographs, were finally delivered to Hungary in 1970. In 1973, the Hungarian National Gallery organised a large-scale exhibition of Lajos Tihanyi’s life and oeuvre, which also included these objects from Paris.

The ADK collection of the Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History (formerly the Art Archive of the Hungarian National Gallery) contains, among other things, Tihanyi’s correspondence with his artist and writer friends—a valuable and significant resource—as well as the artist’s notebooks revealing his network of professional contacts. From the point of view of art history research, the photographs of Tihanyi’s works constitute a particularly important group of artefacts. On the backs of many of these photos, Tihanyi wrote not only the basic data of the given painting or graphic piece, but also the name of its owner and the exhibitions where the given work had been showcased, thereby making it possible to trace the precise history and provenance of each piece.

/Judit Galácz/