Ferenc Hatvany
Hungarian artist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Baron Ferenc Hatvany (29 October 1881 – 7 February 1958) was a Hungarian painter and art collector. A son of Sándor Hatvany-Deutsch and a member of the Hatvany-Deutsch family, he graduated in the Académie Julian in Paris. His collection[1] included paintings by Tintoretto, Cézanne, Renoir, Ingres and Courbet, most notably L'Origine du monde and Femme nue couchée.
Ferenc Hatvany | |
|---|---|
| Born | 29 October 1881 |
| Died | 7 February 1958 (aged 76) Lausanne, Switzerland |
| Spouse | Lucia Királdi-Lukács |
| Parent(s) | Sándor Hatvany-Deutsch and Emma Hatvany-Deutsch |
Artworks from his collection were initially confiscated and socialized during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. They were exhibited in the Hall of Art from 14 June onwards.[2] During the Second World War, his art collection was placed in a bank vault in Budapest to protect it from the pro-Nazi Hungarian government, and the Hatvany family, which was Jewish, fled the country just before the Nazi takeover of Hungary in March 1944.[3]
Mystery surrounds the fate of the paintings, which appear to have been looted by Germans and then by Soviets.[4] Towards the end of the Second World War his paintings were looted by Soviet troops but some were ransomed by Hatvany. In 1947 he emigrated to Paris.[5] In 1955 L'Origine du monde was sold at auction for 1.5 million francs (the buyer was psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan). The lawyer Hans Deutsch filed a claim on behalf of Ferenc Hatvany against the German government and obtained compensation for him.[6]
Paintings that were looted from Hatvany's collection are still hanging on museum walls in Budapest, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod.[specify] In 2005, the Hatvany heirs recovered Femme nue couchée (1862) after it resurfaced in 2000 in the hands of a Slovak art dealer. In 2014 an agreement was reached with the Tate for John Constable's Beaching A Boat, Brighton [7] In 2021 Courbet's Baigneuses dans la forêt (1862) was restituted to the Hatvany heirs.[8] The Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art printed the image of one of the missing paintings on a playing card in an effort to relaunch the search.[9]
Hatvany died in Lausanne in 1958.
