Cover  Zoltan Kemeny
Drawings  Zoltan Kemeny

Zoltan Kemeny was born on 21 March 1907 in Hungary. Painting quickly became part of his childhood world: he spent most of his time in the studio of a neighbour, a painterof war scenes, and when his schooling was interrupted by the War in 1917 he began investigating oil painting. Throughout his life he used the term "painting" for all his work, including his metal reliefs. In 1921, against the wishes of his parents, he left secondary school to become an apprentice carpenter; in 1924 he was admitted to the School of Art and Design in Budapest and three years later to the School of Fine Art there.
At the age of 23, Kemeny moved to Paris, where he had to give up painting to earn his living doing odd jobs. There he met a young Hungarian, Madeleine Szemere, also seeking a career as a painter, and they married on 25 March 1933. She found him work in the world of fashion and this would help them remain together and cope with the many difficult moments the future held. In 1938 they were involved in the launching of the Zurich magazine Annabelle, Madeleine with designs based on Paris fashion and Zoltan with illustrations whose highly personal style quickly became the magazine's trademark. They worked together at Annabelle until 1960, when international recognition meant Zoltan could make a living from his art. Annabelle had by then played a crucial part in their lives: of Hungarian Jewish extraction, the Kemenys had had to flee into France's unoccupied zone in 1940, and in October 1942, with the aid of Annabelle’s owners, they succeeded in entering Switzerland illegally. The following year the magazine obtained a work permit for Zoltan, while his wife had to remain in various work camps until the end of the war. Alone in Zurich, Zoltan returned to reading and, gradually, to the painting he had abandoned ten years before. Imbued with the stylistic freedom of the contemporary artists he had discovered in Paris, his work also bears the stamp of his early contact with decorative and popular art. Madeleine and Zoltan were finally united in 1945, but the long separation and the horror of the war years had left an indelible mark and they would henceforth conceal their Jewishness. The same year saw Zoltan's first public exhibition, at the Eaux-Vives gallery in Zurich; he also contributed to the group exhibition "Foreign Painters in Switzerland", organised by the Kunsthalle in Bern. In 1946 the Kemenys revisited Paris for the first time – for a showing of the paintings at the Galerie Kléber – and Zoltan was introduced to Jean Dubuffet