Famous for pioneering the art of the political poster, Mihály Biró was born into a Budapest family that had changed its name from Weinberger. He studied at the Budapest School of Applied Arts and, after some time in Munich and in England, he returned to Budapest where he became an illustrator for the Social Democratic Party’s Nepszava newspaper. Biró’s Red Hammer Man (which debuted in 1912) was reproduced throughout the years as a key figure of socialist propaganda. He created antiwar, antifascist, feminist, and other political pieces, notably Horthy (1920)—a twenty-piece lithograph series depicting the antisemitic pogroms and White Terror in Hungary—as well as art nouveau theater posters and commercial advertisements. After World War II, having survived the war in France, he was welcomed back to Hungary by the new Communist regime.
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Places:
Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire (Budapest, Hungary)
Art, which gives men the means to persevere and cure some sicknesses, seems nowadays to depend on philosophy, which is that great and clear source that produces all that is luminous and useful. I am…
Among the Jews of Europe, acute feelings of difference always fade with the passage of time. The school, the army, and politics have a unifying force; integration comes about through cultural channels…
Now the days of the pogroms came, and the hands of the masses were raised against the Jews to strike and destroy them. Socialism disgusted me. Not from the idea, which I still hold even more strongly…