Ilonka Karasz
| Ilonka Karasz | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | July 13, 1896 Budapest, Hungary |
| Died | May 26, 1981 Warwick, New York, United States |
| Nationality | Hungarian-American |
| Occupation | Designer Illustrator |
| Notable work | Covers for the New Yorker |
Ilonka Karasz (July 13, 1896 – May 26, 1981), was an American designer and illustrator known for avant-garde industrial design and for her many New Yorker magazine covers.
Karasz was born in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, the oldest of three children of Mary Huber Karasz and silversmith Samuel Karasz. One of her younger sisters was the fashion designer and textile artist Mariska Karasz. She studied art at the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts during a period when the reigning aesthetic owed much to the Wiener Werkstätte and was one of the first women to be admitted to the school. She immigrated to the United States in 1913, the year of her 17th birthday, and began to make a career for herself in New York City‘s Greenwich Village, where she established herself as an influential practitioner of modern art and design. In 1914, Karasz co-founded (with Winold Reiss) the European-American artists' collective Society of Modern Art, and shortly afterwards she was commissioned to create advertising for the department store Bonwit Teller. For a few years in the late teens she taught textile design at the Modern Art School.
During her late teens, Karasz taught textile design at the Modern Art School, an institution founded in 1915, where she taught alongside Marguerite and William Zorach. Karasz and a group of other European-born artists and designers, including Winold Reiss, founded the Society of Modern Art in 1914. The organization published Modern Art Collector, which published much of Karasz’s early designs. Her first work presented in the journal was a theatrical poster with checkerboard motifs, a common Austrian-German graphic style. The publication also showcased her bold, stylized floral patterns, cover designs, book illustrations, typography, and decorative panels.
Karasz was the founding director of Design Group, a firm of industrial designers, craftspeople, and artists. From the 1910s to the 1960s, her designs—inspired equally by folk art and modern art—found their way into a wide variety of textiles, wallpaper, rugs, ceramics, furniture, silverware, and toys. Between 1916 and 1918 she won several prizes (and gained visibility) for textile designs entered in competitions run by the fashion magazine Women's Wear. As early as 1918, she was being called "one of the best designers of modern textiles," while by 1950 she was considered one of America's leading wallpaper designers, known for experimenting with different methods for transfer and layering of images. In the 1950s, she was one of a handful of artists selected by the aluminum manufacturer Alcoa to experiment with the use of aluminum for wall coverings.
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