Bela Ivanyi Grunwald Art for Sale and Sold Prices

b. 1867 - d. 1940

Béla Iványi-Grünwald (6 May 1867 – 24 September 1940) was a Hungarian painter, a leading member of the Nagybánya artists' colony and founder of the Kecskemét artists' colony.

Born in Som, Iványi-Grünwald began his artistic studies under Bertalan Székely and Károly Lotz at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (1882–86) and continued them at Munich in 1886-87 and at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1887 to 1890. From 1891 he again worked in Munich; in 1894 he travelled with Ferenc Eisenhut to Egypt, where he painted several oriental-themed works. Beginning in 1889 he had regular exhibitions at the Palace of Art in Budapest. Characteristic of his early pictures is A Hadúr kardja ("The Warrior's Sword", 1890), a proto-Symbolist treatment of rural genre showing the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage. After his return to Munich, Iványi-Grünwald painted a large-scale genre painting entitled Nihilisták sorsot húznak ("Nihilists Drawing Lots", 1893), a work as notable for its dramatic use of chiaroscuro as for its deeply felt subject-matter. In response to a state commission for the 1896 Millennium Exhibition in Budapest he produced an enormous academic history painting, Béla király visszatérése a tatárjárás után ("King Béla IV's Return following the Invasion Suffered at the Hands of the Tartars").

In 1896, together with Simon Hollósy and his circle (whom he had known at Hollósy's anti-academic painting school in Munich), Iványi-Grünwald arrived at Nagybánya (from 1918 Baia Mare, Romania) in order to concentrate on plein-air landscape painting; there, he became an important member of the Nagybánya artists' colony. Two years later he married Irén Bilcz, the daughter of a Greek Catholic priest, and settled in the city. After Hollósy's departure in 1901 he became one of the professors at the free painting academy there. At the Budapest National Salon in 1909 he won great acclaim for his paintings in a new style (Secessionism), which gained him the support he asked from the mayor of the small town of Kecskemét, who asked him to set up an artists' colony. Thus from 1911-18 he led and worked at the Kecskemét artists' colony. After 1920 he lived in Pest, painting near Lake Balaton in summer. That year he was among the founders of the Szinyei Merse Pál Society. He received a number of important commissions, for instance painting a monumental canvas for the University of Debrecen Library. From 1928 he was president of the Szentendre Painters' Association. Along the years he had regular exhibitions in Budapest and displayed his paintings at the Fränkel Salon a number of times. He died in Budapest in 1940.