Lajos Tihanyi

Meningitis left Lajos Tihanyi deaf at eleven, and for the rest of his life he read lips and spoke with difficulty. Largely self-taught, he built a career almost entirely on looking.

Born in Budapest in 1885, he joined The Eight, the group of young Hungarians who around 1909 pulled their country's painting toward Cézanne and the French avant-garde. Tihanyi became their portraitist, building faces out of tilted planes and hot colour that owed a debt to Fauvism, the movement of Matisse and pure, unnatural colour. His portrait of the writer Lajos Kassák, a fellow radical, is among the best-known Hungarian paintings of the period.

When the short-lived Hungarian republic collapsed in 1919 he left the country and never went back, not even to visit. He drifted through Vienna and Berlin, where he knew the young photographer Brassaï, and settled in Paris, his work turning steadily more abstract. He died there in 1938, poor and far from home, at 52.