Horváth János: Kunffy Lajos - A somogytúri Kunffy Emlékmúzeum katalógusa (Kaposvár, 2005)

_ . _ _ fe^s^^&y ô^yf^K — _ — — La Touche, Paul Albert Besnard and Leon Lhermitte. He gave soirées at his home where his wife and Emil Sauer played piano concerts. It was never his intention to sever all connections with Paris. He returned home after an artistically important trip to Tunis. He furnished a home in the grand manner on the Ferenc József Quai in Budapest. At his country estate he also intensified his involvement. He mechanized agricultural activities on his lands, created fish hatcheries, propagated vineyards and bred outstanding livestock. His artistic efforts were concentrated on depicting holidays, the intimate scenes of daily life and the exhausting work of the people of Somogy, he was equally inspired by the surrounding landscape of the village. His attraction to naturalism yielded many successes in portrait paintings. With increasing frequency he also painted self-portraits. Impressionistic pointillism appears only in sketches and studies. Of these the most outstanding are the sketches of Tunis and the series entitled „The Proclamation of the Republic" in 1918. Following the outbreak of the First World War and for tenyears afterwards, his paintings and personal belongings remained in Paris. Then in 1924 he organized the introductory exhibition at the National Salon in Budapest and there showed his pictures that had been stored in Paris as well as some more recent paintings. The imposingly large yet highly selective material, consisting of 3000 canvasses, made the expected successful impression. The press wrote of Kunffy with great deference and eminent critics like Karoly Lyka, Dezso Rozsaffy and Arthur Elek praised him. The association of Fine Art selected him vice president. In 1925 he received the prize for Harvesters (1921). These successes spurred him on to a new large project. In 1926 he painted a triptych, Life of a Farming Family. The realism of this series calls to mind the work of those Hungarian artists who painted in the region called the Great Plain. The thermes were selected from the intime moments of peasant life: Birth, Bread Cutting and The Death of the Mother. That same year he travelled to Spain with his family. Of his considerable artistic output in Spain, his most outstanding work is The Doorman of the Generalife Hotel (1926). In 1927 he had another exhibition at the Fine Arts Salon in Budapest. In 1930 he and Ivanyi-Grunwald accompanied a collection of Hungarian paintings to Belgrade and later, alone, he travelled to Bucharest with the collection. With his diplomatic abilities he garnered appreciation from the Serbian grand duke and the Romanian prime minister. This was an era of political tension caused by the recent rearrangement of national borders, and Kunffy's missions resulted in such surcess that a Hungarian Department was established at the University of Bucharest. In 1934 Kunffy gave up his home in Budapest and moved permanently to Somogytur. At this time he started to experiment with his painting technique. By painting with transparently thin oils on canvasses prepared with white base, he created a fresh, delicate impression similat to that of an aquarelle. He also took part in civic activities in Kaposvár and organized an exhibition of paintings by Ivanyi-Grunwald and himself in 1932 and again in 1934. He was the first to select paintings for the 69