Balazs Szabo

Balazs Szabo is a Hungarian-born artist and author who has lived in the United States since 1956. He is best known as a fine artist influenced by the Viennese "fantastic realists" style. He derives his artistic inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. His portraits, large murals and surrealist works are internationally-known and can be found in private and in corporate collections throughout Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Europe and the United States. Balazs Szabo's selected works are in the museums of Hawaii, New Jersey and North Carolina. Mr. Szabo's art book The Eye of the Muse (1987) won the 1987 USA Print Design Excellence Award and his historical memoir Knock in the Night (2006) has been translated into the Hungarian from the original English in 2008.

Biography

Balazs Szabo is the younger of Sandor Szabo's two sons. Balazs's parents divorced in 1947 and Sandor remarried in 1948 to then renowned Hungarian film star Barczy Kato. Szabo was an acclaimed Hungarian American who was awarded the highest awards an actor can claim in Hungary including the Kossuth Prize. Balazs at the age of three years was sent to live with his maternal grandparents, Paula and Eugene at Lake Balaton, while his older brother, Barna, lived with his father in Budapest. Educated and cultured, his maternal grandparents taught him literature, music and art in the small space they shared as a family in the villa which previously belong to them prior to the Communist confiscations. At age seven he met his father again and a few years later was taken back to Budapest to live with his birth mother. But this arrangement did not last. Battered by her, Balazs ran away and testified in court. The Court ruled to have Balazs live with his father, brother and stepmother, Barczy Kato in Budapest.

In 1956 after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution, his family was placed under house arrest. Balazs escaped, with the rest of his family following hours later. They all crossed the Austro-Hungarian border at different points, all uncertain of each other's fate. After a few weeks, Balazs was reunited with his brother, father and stepmother at the Eisenstadt refugee camp outside of Vienna, Austria. Because of his father's stature in Hungary, the family was granted special status with immediate asylum in the United States. After surviving a bumpy emergency crash landing at Ireland's Shannon Airport, the family finally landed in Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.

Balazs's father was soon awarded honorary citizenship in Rhode Island, and later moved to New York City where he enjoyed a prolific Broadway, as well as film and TV career. During his twenty-year stay in the USA he played on Broadway, off Broadway at the Lincoln Center in NYC, in the Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis and in Hollywood. Balazs and his brother attended boarding schools with the help of Robert and Ann Scott Morningstar. Sandor arranged for Pal Fried, a talented Hungarian painter and former student of Renoir in Paris to privately tutor Balazs. At nineteen, he studied art in Vienna at the Vienna Fine Arts Academy and the Angevandte School of Applied Arts financed by his summer jobs in Sweden. He returned to the United States in 1965.

Balazs had his first big break with a commission in Chicago to paint the portrait of Ray Kroc, McDonald's founder, at the age of twenty-three. Relocating to Hollywood, Calif. in 1967, he became art director at Liberty Records, which was later acquired by United Artist Records. From 1967 to 1971 Szabo lived in L.A. Following the 1971 devastating earthquake, he moved to Hawaii where he resided for the next twenty years.

While in Hawaii, Balazs painted murals for the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and various corporations, including the AFLA-CIO. He was selected for a solo exhibition in Honolulu's city hall by Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi for the national Bicentennial in 1976. He exhibited in Hawaii, Hong Kong along with Andy Warhol, Detroit, Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, and North Carolina. In 1986, Szabo released his first art book with a 3D relief cover, titled Eye of the Muse, a 40-year retrospective collection containing 106 pages in color plates. In 1987 it won the U.S. Print Design Excellence Award. In late 2009, Szabo published the sequel, Eye of the Muse II.

Knock in the Night

In 2006, on the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, Szabo published Knock in the Night, a memoir based on his experiences under Soviet Communist occupation prior to and up to his solo escape after the defeat of the revolution in 1956. In this conflict the Hungarian freedom fighters suffered 50,000 dead or wounded by the Soviets. The book gives a gripping historical account of growing up under Communist rule. It is enthusiastically endorsed by Mr. Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler. In 2013 Refugee Press became Knock in the Night's new publisher.

Current activities

Now living in Hillsborough, North Carolina, Szabo is raising funds for The Balazs Artist Discovery Museum, which will also be located in Hillsborough, outside of Chapel Hill. This museum will launch young North Carolinian artists’ careers as well as teach them how to successfully manage their livelihood. The 3,500 sq ft. eco-friendly museum in its current seed location, will include a gallery,^[1] library, art studio.

References

External links

• American Hungarian Foundation
• Shortley, Vanessa C. "Toasting Living Artists in Shangri-La", News of Orange County.
• Szabo, Balazs. Knock in the Night Refugee Press ISBN 978-1482566871