![]() ![]() In the 1940s she worked principally for Collins, writing and illustrating seven of her own books and contributing to children’s annuals. Bringing up a young family in a North West London suburb, Klara Biller built a freelance practice as a children’s book illustrator. 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. ![]() 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. By the late 1930s Klara was teaching German at a school in North Yorkshire. 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. ![]() She maintained a studio address in Budapest. The chronicle of her life in the 1930s is unclear. Graphic design studies at Budapest’s Almos Jashik Academy led to book illustration and commercial advertising. Bato’s final years were spent back painting, and researching Cro-Magnan Man cave drawings in France, Spain and the British Museum for a novel he wrote in English, The Sorcerer, published posthumously in the United States. No records survive of his artwork for these movies. He designed sets at Shepperton for “The Third Man”. By 1945 he was ensconced as a leading art director at London Films, credited with very British classics like “The Sound Barrier”, “The Happiest Days of Your Life”, “The Heart of the Matter”, “An Inspector Calls” and “The Belles of St Trinians”. He and his English wife, Muriel, had a son, Andrew. A selection was used to illustrate Defiant City, with an introduction by J.B.Priestley (Victor Gollancz, 1942). Earlier he had negotiated a sketching permit to record Blitz damage in London - drawings and watercolours now in Imperial War Museum and Museum of London collections. His first movie credit is as costume designer for Powell and Pressburger’s celebrated 1943 film, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp”. His landscape painting had an international clientèle.īato crossed the Channel in 1936 and found informal work via the Hungarian-born film producer Alexander Korda. ![]() Photographs from the early 1930s by Abraham Pisarek show him at his Berlin studio easel in a tie and white coat, looking more like a lab assistant than an artist. He painted art deco murals for Steglitz Town Hall and the Allianz Palace in the late 1920s. Berlin was to become Bato’s base until the mid 1930s, though he travelled widely in the Balkans, France and Denmark. Conscripted to fight for Austro-Hungary in the First World War, Bato became an officer-artist, recording graphic scenes from the Russian front - which didn’t prevent him contributing to a 1916 Berlin anti-war journal, Der Bildermann. After studying at the Nagybanya, the influential back-to-nature painting school in Transylvania, he found his way to Paris where he became a pupil of Matisse, studied with the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and held his first exhibition in 1909. Born Budapest 1888, Bato was the oldest of the 14 artists represented at the 1943 Hungarian Club exhibition and perhaps had the most varied career. ![]()
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