Creator Bio
Anna Lesznai
1885–1966
Amalia Moscovitz was born in Budapest and raised primarily on the estate of her affluent, assimilated family in Alsókörtvélyes (today Hrušov, Slovakia). Anna Lesznai—her artistic pseudonym—became active in Budapest’s avant-garde salons as a teenager. She wove her many different media—painting, poetry, illustration, scholarship, folktales, and Hungarian embroidery (himzés)—into a coherent artistic-intellectual modernist aesthetic. In 1939, Lesznai fled Hungary for America, with her soon-to-be (third) husband, Tibor Gergely. There she taught pedagogical and applied arts at Wellesley College and elsewhere.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
The Wanderings of the Little Blue Butterfly in Fairyland
Illustration from the children’s book The Wanderings of the Little Blue Butterfly in Fairyland, first published in Budapest, Hungary, in 1912.
Primary Source
The Wanderings of the Little Blue Butterfly in Fairyland
The little blue butterfly was born in the red bell of a morning glory. She had been a caterpillar before that and had lived for a while in a cocoon, but she could remember nothing about it.
She peeped…