Artist Biographies

Graphic design studies at Budapest’s Almos Jashik Academy led to book illustration and commercial advertising. The chronicle of her life in the 1930s is unclear. She maintained a studio address in Budapest. Meanwhile, she probably flitted to and fro between Hungary and England - perhaps sometimes on visits to her elder sister, whose job was with the Anglo-Hungarian financial journal, Pester-Lloyd. By the late 1930s Klara was teaching German at a school in North Yorkshire.   Between 1935-1939 she produced three poster designs for London Transport signed simply Klara, perhaps because she was unable to obtain a work permit as an artist. A friend of Charles Rosner from Budapest days, she quietly established herself in London where, in January 1940, she married Victor Biller, a Fleet Street newspaper circulation executive. They had two sons, Stephen and Peter. Bringing up a young family in a North West London suburb, Klara Biller built a freelance practice as a children’s book illustrator. In the 1940s she worked principally for Collins, writing and illustrating seven of her own books and contributing to children’s annuals. She also worked on some 160 issues of Child Education (1948-68) with the Quaker editor, Constance Sturmey, and from the 1950s to around 1970 she was a leading member of Gordon Fraser’s team of greetings card designers.  Her biggest single commission was for a new edition of the Oxford Nursery Song Book, published in 1961. Klara displayed a fresh and natural style in the playfully experimental illustrations of her 1940s books, and their publication is seen as significant in the influence exercised by central European modernism on the style of English children’s books. Though her later work in England became more conservative, you can still see her sense of fun in the stories she contributed to Child Education, which were as often as not based on her own family outings. She had been one of Budapest’s leading graphic artists in the 1930s. Although a smaller fish in post-war London, she still produced much work that was accomplished. Her archive has been painstakingly assembled by her younger son Pete, Professor of Medieval History at York University. Klara died at Northwick Park Hospital, Middlesex, in 1989.

Wood engraving as a Hungarian art-form has its origins in the folklore of Transylvania, which is where George Buday was born in 1907. His early efforts were in pastels while a schoolboy at Kolosvar Calvinist College, but he then studied law in parallel with engraving at Szeged University. He was a founder of Szeged Youth Art College. He first visited England in 1928 as a delegate to a Liverpool Christian student's congress, stopping off at the British Museum where he hoped to return on a travelling scholarship but was offered Rome instead. In Rome during 1936-37 he met, and made great friends with, the medallist Paul Vincze.

He made his way to London in late 1937. With war declared, Buday was employed by BBC External Services as a studio manager in Hungarian-language counter-propaganda and became involved in Allied dark arts at Woburn Park - none of which had prevented him making patriotic woodcuts themed on Britannia for the Times Literary Supplement in 1941. Throughout his career he was a prolific book illustrator. Stripped of Hungarian nationality in 1941 for co-signing a Times letter heavily critical of the Horthy government, Buday co-founded the Association of Free Hungarians in Great Britain. After the war he set up and became director of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in London, which was however closed down in 1949 as communism took over the Hungarian scene. Anything but a Communist, Buday sought sanctuary in work, researching The History of the Christmas Card, based on his own collection which was later donated to the V&A. Buday, a bachelor suspected by MI5 of Communist sympathies, was never granted British citizenship. Stateless, the crushed Hungarian Uprising of 1956 proved too much for him: he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the last 34 years of his life in a South London mental institution where, however, he was offered a studio and continued working much as before. At his death, as recently as 1990, he’d been forgotten by the spy agency. He was not forgotten in Szeged, where a permanent museum was created to his memory, never seen by the artist himself. Perhaps his most important single commission in the hospital was a set of stark illustrations for the 1980 Folio Society edition of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. He’s also remembered for his illustration of In Quest of the Miracle Stag, a major anthology of Hungarian poetry.

Hof followed up soon after the war with The Other London, a bleak evocation of East End poverty, hardly the “we’re all in it together” spirit of the time, but his final book, the 1976 London, Flower of Cities All, to words by Richard Church is, as the title suggests, a much more conventional descriptive guide. Separately Hof wrote several semi-autobiographical evocations of his youth in provincial Hungary, and edited a monograph on the German artist George Grosz. Living modestly in a small King’s Cross area bedsit, working non-stop in his Highgate studio, never marrying but with a wide circle of friends, Hof left behind a huge body of work of varying quality. The commissions he undertook for London Transport and the Post Office Savings Bank are accomplished, but the much earlier advertising posters from Prague days are more lively. When awarded a one-man show in Budapest in 1964 by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture, he didn’t attend. He died in London in 1989. Among Hof’s many collectors, his friends Maria del Carmen Rodriguez and her daughter Yasmina Guerda put together a website which does full justice to his work, and includes pages of tributes from those who knew him or acquired items in various sales. It’s online at imre-hofbauer.com.

She had become one of Hungary’s leading ceramists during the 1930s. Born 1900 in Eszek, now Osijek and part of Croatia, where her father was a forest manager, she had little formal education or training before she moved to Budapest in the mid 1920s to marry Victor. However, the folk arts and home industry crafts which she embraced in her work were all around her when she was growing up. The couple’s elegant Budapest apartment, designed by Lajos Kozma, was the backdrop to involvement in a burgeoning modern arts/crafts scene which saw her win major awards at international exhibitions representing Hungary in Brussels (1935), Milan (1936), Paris (1937) and Berlin (1938). Exhibits parcelled up for Warsaw (1939) were destroyed in the Nazi blitzkrieg. With a young family to look after, Lili Markus set about staking out a professional practice after the war, with the backing of people like Gordon Forsyth. An exhibition at the Batsford Gallery in 1945 was, however, her first and last major show in Britain; the Tree of Life ceramic in the V&A collection was among items sold there. Still highly productive, she turned increasingly in her home studio to tapestry as potting became difficult with chill-blains. Lili Markus died at home in Glossop aged just 61. Her late-starting career had finished early. But she will be remembered alongside Margit Kovacs as the most accomplished Hungarian ceramist of the 1930s. Her family’s contribution to Britain’s war victory, to industry in the North West (Ferrostatics was sold to Chloride in the late 1950s) and her sons’ academic careers at British universities make this immigrant story one where the host nation gained immeasurably. In 2008 Lili Markus was accorded a major exhibition, “In the Eye of the Storm”, at the Collins Gallery, University of Strathclyde, curated by Juliet Kinchin and Laura Hamilton.

Having graduated from the Royal National School of Applied Arts in 1910, Ripszam’s career was, like all his contemporaries, interrupted by the First World War. Conscripted, he was captured in Poland and sent to a Siberian labour camp. A few drawings survive from that period; many of his compatriots didn’t. Somehow Ripszam found his way back to Sweden and eventually to Hungary where one of his commissions was the design of a stamp to raise funds for the Paris 1924 Olympics. By the late 1920s he was visiting England, and exhibiting in Manchester, where the Manchester Guardian reporter and latent novelist Howard Spring bought a couple of Siberian pastels. Showing typical expediency Ripi (as he was known) met, fell in love with, and in 1932 married Mollie Keay, daughter of a Birmingham industrialist. Apart from travelling the world in style the couple, who had no children, lived contentedly at Ockley. Mollie died there in 1968, Henry in 1976. Their ashes are interred together at Ockley Parish Church. Because Ripi obtained British citizenship in 1935 he was able to help others like Szegedi-Szuts just beginning the painful process. He also supported the Hungarian stained glass artist Ervin Bossanyi, a friend from college days. Dodging Hitler, Bossanyi had abandoned a successful Hamburg practice and was living north of London in straightened circumstances. His son Jo recalls being taken shopping for clothes by Ripi in the West End, and being invited to Ockley for weekends. The Ockley studio was used to stage informal concerts by leading musicians like Artur Schnabel and Joseph Weingarten, but a fire there after the war destroyed much of the artist’s work. Today Ripi is still remembered locally for his generosity of spirit. He was, for instance, president of the Oakwood Hill Football Club and instituted the Ripszam Cup for road running. According to his obituary in the parish magazine, he always added – when praised for community initiatives - “yes, but it was my dear wife who helped me do that”.

The exercise illustrates challenges surrounding the reputation of artists who cross cultural lines. While Szegedi-Szuts, born 1892, did not settle in Britain until 1936, his best-known work, My War, a classic anti-war book published in 1931 by The Bodley Head, has an introduction in English. However, its pictorial account of an ordinary soldier’s life and death in the First World War is Hungarian in experience, concept and execution. The same applies to a humorous cartoon short, “Legi Titanok” (the Battle of Titans) each frame drawn by the artist in Hungary during 1933 but later given a British Board of Control certificate. However, Szuts was refused an extension of his work permit in London after the cartoon’s success interested film producers there who fancied establishing a European industry in competition to Disney. Having returned to London to marry Gwynedd Jones-Parry in 1937 and then move to Cornwall, Istvan exhibited with the Newlyn Society of Artists and the Penwith Society of Arts, yet was never quite part of the burgeoning St Ives scene. The couple, adjudged by the authorities to be enemy aliens, were made to move away from their home on the Lizard during 1940-41, but when allowed to return they billeted an RAF airman flying Mosquitos from a nearby airfield, where Szuts also helped pull a crashed pilot from his aircraft. The real adventures had happened years before. Born in Budapest and having trained at the Budapest Academy he found a teaching job at Csongrad, near Szeged, but then came the war where he served as an artillery officer on the Romanian front. Hospitalised by a bomb until 1919, he found himself evading the Bela Kun Communist regime and, according to Michael Snow, guarding the deposed Queen Zita of Hungary before returning to Csongrad. Istvan’s failing health in the 1950s, and an inability to obtain paid work in Cornish institutions, left his utopian beliefs untroubled. He died in Penzance Hospital in 1959 following an operation.

The problem with this story is that Zsoter was six years younger than Hitler, that he studied in Berlin not Vienna, and that he was the real artist. It is however true that he was, like Imre Goth, a pupil of Hitler’s favourite painter, Alfred Kampf, at the Charlottenburg Art School. The second story concerns Kenneth Clark, head of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and director of the National Gallery during the Second World War, who became Lord Clark of Civilisation. He was apparently on hobnobbing terms with Zsoter, visiting him frequently in his West London studio and buying his oils. Whatever happened to them? What’s for sure is that Zsoter was an energetic participant in the London art scene from the time he arrived in 1937 to his death in 1983. He had a 1938 exhibition (shared with the sculptor Frank Kovacs) at White’s Gallery, showed during the war years with the London Group at the Leger Galleries, and, some 40 years later, shared an exhibition with Charlotte Mensforth at the Medici Galleries. He also showed at the 1967 Paris Salon. He died in London in 1983. Like Jean-Georges Simon, Zsoter had spent years on the Continent between leaving Hungary and arriving in London. He lived and worked in Germany and Holland, as well as in Paris. Like Henry Ripszam, he was captured fighting on the Russian front in the First World War and was imprisoned in Siberia. He exhibited there – in Irkutsk and then Petrograd – before returning to complete his studies in Budapest. Zsoter has an enthusiastic collector, the Worcestershire-based artist Malcolm Victory, who was also a family friend. His work, unrepresented in British public galleries, still occasionally comes to light at auction sales around Europe.