Nándor Németh

GRAPHIC ARTIST

1910-1978

“The American Hungarian Community Reflected Through Ex Libris”

Graphic artist Nándor Németh was born in Újpest, Hungary in 1910. At the Academy for Applied Arts his masters were Ferenc Helbing and Jenő Haranghy, both painters and graphic artists. His talent already surfaced at that time.
As a distinguished artist he worked as book illustrator, drew animated cartoons, and drafted the plans of exhibitions. He started to make book-plates from 1935 on, among others for collector Dr. Illyés László depicting his work connected to the Hungarian Boy Scouts Movement.
During WW II, Németh was working as a war reporter and illustrator for the Cartography Institute. As many of his countrymen, he had to leave Hungary in 1945. In 1947, he married Erzsébet Pokorny, art teacher, and tried to make a living as an illustrator in Amberg, Regensburg and München, Germany. He came to the United States in 1950, illustrating books at Allen Wayne Publishing Company. Later he made animated cartoons at Audio Film. At the same time he designed bookplates for important public personalities, as Dr. Otto von Habsburg, Dr. Tibor Eckhardt, President Eisenhower and President Nixon. Németh immortalized many significant public figures of the Hungarian Community, ‘writing the history’ of the Hungarians in Exile with his drawings.

Németh designed over 200 book plates using pen and ink. The American Hungarian Museum exhibited his complete life-work for the first time in 1993. The Museum is proud owner of part of his estate, which was donated to the Museum by dr. Miklós Lippóczy a passionate collector of small graphic art. The exhibition was revealing Németh’s love for small graphic designs.

His ex libris’, drawn with excellent technique, are testimony to his Christian and Hungarian heritage. He designed the beautiful altar picture of St. Stephen’s R.C. Church in New York, immortalizing with it his art and name.
Nándor Németh died tragically at the height of his creative life, together with his wife, Erzsébet Pokorny on January 29th, 1978.
We keep his memory as the graphic art historian of Hungarians in foreign lands.

Emese Kerkay

American Hungarian Museum, No. 23, 1993