Nickolas Muray

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Nickolas Muray, photo portrait by Carl van Vechten , 1933

Nickolas Muray (born Miklós Mandl ; born February 15, 1892 in Szeged , Hungary , † November 2, 1965 in New York City ) was an American photographer of Hungarian descent who became known for his celebrity portraits and color advertising photographs. At the same time he was an athlete: He was national champion in saber fencing and took part in the fencing discipline of the Olympic Games . Muray was also a collector of contemporary Mexican art .

Live and act

education

Miklós Mandl was the son of the postal worker Samu Mandl and his wife Klára Lövit. The family of Jewish origin changed their name to Murai. Two years after his birth, the family moved to Budapest . He felt humiliated by anti-Semitic attacks from a young age , which made him want to overcome the limitations of an unjust society and explore the world. Mandl trained in photography, lithography and photo engraving at the Budapest School of Graphics . He graduated with an international certificate and then took a three-year course in color photo engraving in Berlin , where, among other things, he dealt with the manufacture of color filters . Then he worked for the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin .

Photographic work

Photo in Ladies' Home Journal , 1932
Girl in Red , promotional photo for Lucky Strike , 1936
Santa Claus , advertisement for A&P , 1958

In 1913, 21-year-old Miklós Murai left Europe with $ 25 in his pocket and moved to New York, where he changed his name to Nickolas Muray . He attended evening classes to learn the English language and described himself as an atheist . He found a job with Stockinger in Greenpoint (Brooklyn) and in 1916 with Condé Nast . In 1916 he married his first wife, the Hungarian poet Ilona Fulop. In 1918 he received American citizenship.

In 1920 Muray also opened his own portrait studio in his apartment in Greenwich Village . A little later, his photographs of well-known New York personalities appeared regularly in Harper's Bazaar , so that he was able to give up his clerk job. In 1926 Vanity Fair sent him to London, Paris and Berlin and in 1929 to Hollywood to shoot celebrities. At the time, he photographed Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks on the beach, for example . His pictures have been featured in many other publications, including Vogue , Ladies' Home Journal , McCall’s and The New York Times . The people initially portrayed in black and white included Fred Astaire , Marlene Dietrich , Dwight D. Eisenhower , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Claude Monet , Franklin D. Roosevelt , George Bernard Shaw and Gloria Swanson . Muray created a total of around 10,000 portraits.

After the onset of the global economic crisis , Muray reduced his activity as a portrait photographer and turned more to the advertising industry , in which he was considered a pioneer of color photography and a master of the color pigment printing process (carbon print). For Ladies' Home Journal he created the first color artwork based on a color photograph in 1931, an advertising page depicting 17 models in Miami wearing bathing suits. His work has been shown internationally in many solo and group exhibitions.

Frida Kahlo

Muray was friends with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo , whom he met while visiting his friend José Miguel Covarrubias in Mexico. Kahlo and Muray have had a love affair since 1931, after Muray's second wife was divorced, and shortly after Kahlo's marriage to Diego Rivera . In November 1938, the New York gallery Julien Levy exhibited pictures by Frida Kahlo in the USA for the first time, an occasion to see each other again. The affair outlasted Muray's third wedding as well as Kahlo's divorce in 1939 and remarriage in 1940. The separation took place in 1941 because Muray wanted to marry while Kahlo only accepted him as a lover. Therefore Muray married his fourth wife, Margaret "Peggy" Schwab in 1942. But they remained friends until Kahlo's death in 1954. Muray created expressive, colorful photo portraits of the Mexican woman. From 2009 traveling exhibitions of his Kahlo photographs took place under the title "Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray"; the first exhibition location was in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery , Buffalo . 74 black and white and color portraits of the artist were shown.

fencing

In 1927, Nickolas Muray won the national saber championship. In 1928 and 1932 he was a member of the "United States Olympic Fencing Team". His biggest success was fourth place with the team at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles . After completing his sporting career, he worked as a speaker at the Olympic Games in 1956, 1960 and 1964. He had won a total of 60 medals in his life and was known as "One of the twenty greatest fencers in American History."

In 1961 he suffered a heart attack while fencing at the New York Athletic Club and was able to be reanimated. Four years later, in 1965, the attack recurred while practicing his favorite sport, which Muray did not survive.

Muray's art collection

Muray's friend, the Mexican artist José Miguel Covarrubias , introduced the photographer to his artist friends, whose work he began to collect. In addition to Frida Kahlo and Covarrubias, there were works by Rufino Tamayo , Juan Soriano , Fernando Castillo , Guillermo Meza and Roberto Montenegro . The collection, which is part of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin , was published in a book in 2004 under the title The Covarrubias circle: Nickolas Muray's collection of twentieth-century Mexican art .

Hungarian photographers in the USA

In addition to Nickolas Muray, there were other Hungarian photographers in the United States who later, after Hitler came to power in 1933, emigrated from Europe and worked successfully there. Mention should be made of André Kertész , László Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkácsi .

literature

  • I'll never forget you. Frida Kahlo and Nickolas Muray. Early unpublished photographs and letters , ed. by Salomon Grimberg, translated by Christian Quatmann. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 2004, ISBN 978-3-8296-0220-4
  • Kurt Heinzelman, Peter Mears: The Covarrubias circle: Nickolas Muray's collection of twentieth-century Mexican art . Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas Press, Austin 2004, ISBN 978-0-292-70588-3
  • William Johnson: A History of Photography from 1839 to Present; the George Eastman Collection . Taschen, Cologne, London 2005, ISBN 978-3-8228-4777-0
  • Lisa Hostetler, Katherine Bussard: Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman . Catalog for the exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum , Aperture, New York 2013, ISBN 978-1-59711-226-0

Web links

Commons : Nickolas Muray  - collection of images, videos and audio files

To person

Collections

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nickolas Muray , artnet.de, accessed on March 21, 2014
  2. ↑ Marcus Bunyan: Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray , artblart.com, accessed on March 23, 2014 (with images)
  3. ↑ Quoted from the web links nickolasmuray.com , University of Texas at Austin , sports-reference.com , George Eastman House , neuwied.de
  4. ↑ Nickolas Muray - Hungarian-American Photographer of Celebrities ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), sk-szeged.hu, accessed on March 28, 2014

Illustrations

  1. ↑ Nickolas Muray: Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks junior , photo from 1929
  2. ↑ Nickolas Muray: Gloria Swanson , portrait from 1922
  3. ↑ Nickolas Muray: Portraits of Frida Kahlo
personal data
SURNAME Muray, Nickolas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mandl, Miklós (maiden name); Murai, Miklós
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Szeged , Hungary
DATE OF DEATH November 2, 1965
Place of death New York City