In 1929, two fragile old women started off for India. All they had was some money and giant amount of vocation. They reached the country of their dreams after a series of luck. The country welcomed them with a great number of things to see. They painted Mahátmá Gándhí, the 'Grand Soul', the Nobel prize awarded poet Rabindranath Tagore, several members of the Nehru family and the Dalai Lama. Throuhout their eventful lives they painted thousands of pictures of which 62 was taken in by the Hopp Ferenc Museum after the recent death of Brunner Erzsébet. We show these paintings at the exhibition opening on Museums' Night.

The muse of the art of Brunner Erzsébet was the religion of India but several landscapes and portraits are also included in the collection. She lived as a Buddhist and supported the Tibetan refugees. The Delhi Hungarian Institute showed her artworks several times. The paintings of the two painters were shown in Hungarian in 1981-82 after a along time. Brunner Erzsébet donated a selection of her pictures to the Kanizsa Museum in 1987 and later he gave the museum 30 more. At the opening of the exhibition of her pictures in 1989 Dr. Marosi Ernő acclaimed the art of the two female artists. Brunner Erzsébet died in 2005 in Delhi.

The art of the Brunners is the embodiment of the relationship between Hungary and India and the research of those who traveled to India to find our spiritual roots. The feeling of spiritual closeness of Hungarians and Indians is a real phenomenon that is important for both the Indians and Hungarians. The oeuvre of the Brunners is the continuation of the work of Kőrösi Csoma Sándor, Zajti Ferenc, Medgyaszay István among others and a great example of Hungarian and Indian cultural relations.

We owe acknowledgment to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for helping us in the transportation of the pictures to Hungary.


The curator of the exhibition was Renner Zsuzsanna