Károly Koffán
Károly "Charles" Koffán (* 1909 in Geresd ; † 1985 ibid) was a Hungarian artist, art teacher and professor at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest.
During the occupation of Hungary by Germany from 1944 to 1945, he saved Jewish citizens from being deported to concentration camps by hiding them in his art school and apartment and getting them false papers.
Life
In the thirties he emigrated with his wife to Paris , where he worked as a puppet maker and led a lively social life in left-wing intellectual, artistic circles. In 1940 he moved back to Budapest and founded the Free Art School on Elisabeth Square in the city center , into which he incorporated the Parisian ideas of free education. Well-known students of Koffán were u. a. Edith Weinberger and Klára Szilárd as well as László Ridovics and André Mészáros .
Due to the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, which was followed by a large wave of arrests, Koffán and Lajos Szentiványi , teacher at the school, decided to resist and to save as many people as possible by peaceful means. In the rooms of his art school, but also in his own apartment, in which he lived with his wife and children, he hid several known and unknown Jews and other persecuted people.
His skill in drawing enabled him to imitate every handwriting perfectly, so that even the supposed author of the signature could not distinguish it from his own, which means that the forged documents were never revealed as such.
After the war, Koffán became a professor at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. After the uprising of 1956 he lost his professorship. As a result, he largely gave up drawing and specialized in photographing birds.
Works
- De profundis , 32 gravures sur bois et linoléum; Paris 1934-39; Preface by François Gachot; Self-published, Budapest 1940
- Birds in front of the camera , Corvina Verlag, Budapest 1961
- Koffán Károly: Retrospective , Magyar Nemzeti Galéria , Budapest, 1980 (exhibition organized by Éva Pénzes)
documentary
- Laurent Kruppa: The Art of Resistance - the Free Art School of Károly Koffán , DE / HU / IL, documentary film (in progress).
Web links
- Article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
- Documentary (in progress) about the resistance group of the Koffán School
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Koffán, Károly |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Koffan, Charles |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Hungarian artist and photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1909 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Geresd |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1985 |
| Place of death | Budapest |