GEORGES CSATO 1910–1983

works

georges csato landscape
Oil on canvas
1956
98cm x 48.5cm
38.5″ x 19″
Signed
Framed
£2300

Click image to enlarge

biography

George Csato was born in 1910 and was 19 when he decided to become a painter. After completing classical art studies in Vienna, he moved to Berlin in the 1930’s and became a pupil of Archipenko, the Kollwitz and Carl Hofer.

He then moved to Prague and mixed with painters, musicians, writers, all whom had also taken refuge there from Nazi Germany. Further studies were with Kokoschka and Thiele. He was also a talented draughtsman and worked for newspapers as a famous cartoon caricaturist and portrait painter.

He was taken prisoner by the Russians and only survived by painting portraits of his captors. At this time he also painted Stalin. He later became a distinguished portrait painter whose sitters read like a catalogue of the most famous names of the 30s, 40s and 50s from Colette to Einstein, from Rachmaninov to Bertrand Russell. His first exhibition, organized by Jean Cocteau, was held in Paris in 1948. Throughout the post-war years he produced abstracts of great purity and harmony, a salve to the horrors he had experienced during the war.

England, (where he meets his wife, Diana), then Canada, and the U.S.A, all have a warm welcome for George Csato. His first show during 1953 in the Hanover Gallery London is a hit, with nearly all the works exhibited soon gone to buyers’ walls.

From the middle fifties onwards, his abstract landscapes glow into warmer colours. With the sixties some feminine curves show up, accompanied crisp and even acid tones providing, in Csato’s phrase, a therapy against the creeping onset of age.

His work resides in major collections in many parts of the world.

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