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Their Safe Haven : Hungarian artists in Britain from the 1930s, Paperback / softback Book

Their Safe Haven : Hungarian artists in Britain from the 1930s Paperback / softback

Edited by Robert Waterhouse

Paperback / softback

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April 1943. To mark a move by the Hungarian Club to new premises at 33 Pembridge Square, London W2, the emigre critic and publisher Charles Rosner organised a graphics show including work by 14 Hungarian-born artists living in Britain, all but one of whom were to be granted British citizenship. The 14 were: Joseph Bato, painter and art director; Klara Biller, illustrator; Val Biro, illustrator and author; George Buday, illustrator and organiser; Imre Goth, painter and inventor; Imre Hofbauer, illustrator and author; Peter Lambda, sculptor; Lili Markus, ceramist; George Mayer-Marton, painter and teacher; Henry Ripszam, painter and sculptor; Jean-Georges Simon, painter and teacher; Istvan Szegedi-Szuts, painter and author; Paul Vincze, medallist; Akos Zsoter, painter. All found haven of a sort in Britain, although George Buday, denied citizenship by MI5's false allegation of Communist sympathies, suffered a nervous breakdown when Moscow crushed the October 1956 uprising. To mark 75 years from the original show, and the centenary of Armistice Day, Robert Waterhouse followed the tracks of all 14 artists from Glasgow to Penzance via London, Vienna and Budapest, turning up archives, working through family collections and searching the vaults of public galleries.

He came across long-lost images, unpublished diaries, memoirs and out-of-print titles which flesh out caricatures of exile, showing how each artist came to terms with British life, making a living and an individual mark.

Seven of the 14 had fought as Austro-Hungarian conscripts in the First World War.

Driven from their homeland by the punitive terms of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, then pushed from Berlin, Prague and Vienna by the rise of the Third Reich, their arrival in London, where they were treated as enemy aliens, was anything but auspicious.

Yet they survived. The anthology rediscovers a forgotten generation-and-a-half whose contribution to our national culture as Hungaro-Brits has clear messages for today's Hungary, questioning democratic institutions, and today's Britain, intent on cutting bonds with the Continent.

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