You and I live with Alu, a strawberry-blonde dog, and Esteban, an ebony cat, in a house that is too large for the four of us.
Lajos Tihanyi
Three painting by Lajos Tihanyi.
The Critic, Self portrait, and Woman in Red, 1916-1918.
A self-taught artist, Tihanyi combined the fragmentation of Analytical Cubism and the psychological intensity of Expressionism in his portraits. The Critic figure has been identified as a particular individual—Andor Halasi, a literary critic Tihanyi knew well—yet the sitter’s sharply rendered features almost suggest a physical type for the profession, with a high, intellectual forehead, alert eyes, long nose, and pinched mouth. From the collections of the Brooklyn Museum.

The Slow Work of Unlearning
I am headed somewhere other than our sense of things,
where I am supposed to believe in notions I do not believe—

A Delicious Silence
Evelyn, an unfortunate name for a boy, knew how to make the dogs howl. He’d been aware of this gift,…