Janos Kass, Hungarian Modernist Judaica Etching Print Teffilin, Jewish Rabbi in Prayer, 1992

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From very small edition of 15 on handmade mould made paper, with Jewish star Magen David watermark. From the deluxe … Read more From very small edition of 15 on handmade mould made paper, with Jewish star Magen David watermark. From the deluxe boxed portfolio edition. Hand signed in pencil. János Kass (December 26, 1927 – March 29, 2010) was a Hungarian illustrator, printmaker, graphic designer, postage stamp designer, animated film director and teacher. Hungary's foremost graphic artist and book illustrator. Born in Szeged, he was the storyboard artist for the first fully digital animated film. This is done in a manner reminiscent of Saul Raskin, Tully Filmus and William Gropper, this is a modern take on a classic judaic subject matter, similar in style and tone to Abram Krol, Jakob Steinhardt, Josef Budko and Hermann Struck. Beginning his artistic studies at the Applied Art Academy, Kass finished in 1951 at the Academy of Fine Arts, a student of Gyula Hincz, György Kádár and György Konecsni. From 1956 to 1959 he held the Derkovits scholarship. From 1961 to 1962, he was assistant professor at the Book-Art Academy in Leipzig, Germany. Kass regularly took part in every major national exhibition at home and abroad. He had one-man shows in Italy (1963), Australia (1970) and Switzerland (1976). He participated in the Venice Biennial (1960), the Youth Biennial in Paris (1961), and Biennials in Lugano, Tokyo, Ljubljana, São Paulo and Buenos Aires, along with "Intergrafik" exhibitions in Berlin. He made many friends within the British graphic art fraternity while spending some months in London during 1980, working on one of the earliest, fully digitized computer-animated films, Dilemma, with John Halas. He had already won recognition with his illustrations and book designs. At the 1973 Leipzig book fair, his work was awarded the title of best illustrated book at the fair. This accolade was repeated at the Frankfurt fair in 1999. The 11-minute Dilemma was nominated at that year's Cannes Film Festival for the Golden Palm for Best Short Film, and is considered the first fully digital animated film. Kass was also a background artist for the "So Beautiful and So Dangerous" segment of Ivan Reitman Productions' 1981 animated feature film Heavy Metal. Kass' drawings, etchings and silk-screen prints were exhibited in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1989 and in 1990 at London Olympia. He later held a one-man show in Edinburgh. He illustrated something like 400 books, classical novels and children's stories, among them an elegant edition of Imre Madách's 19th-century drama The Tragedy of Man, published in Iain MacLeod's translation by Edinburgh's Canongate press in 1993. He won Hungary's highest artistic award, the Kossuth prize, and was an elected member of the Széchenyi academy. János Kass’ s numerous works can be found in the Hungarian National Gallery. Since 1985, the János Kass Gallery in Szeged shows a constant exhibition. Continuing in the tradition of Isidor Kaufmann, Hugo Scheiber he shows us the beauty of the Jewish ritual experience. Works in public collection Bankside Gallery, London Deutsche Bücherei, Leipzig Fitz William Museum, Camridge Ottó Herman Museum, Miskolc Katolische Akademie, Hamburg Kunstmuseum, Basel MIT, Boston Moravska G., Brno Museum of Modern Art, Society of Printers, Cleveland Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest National Gallery, Pozsony Pinakhotek, Vienna Petofi Literature Museum, Budapest Shakespeare Museum, Stratford See less