PROFILE OF ANNA VERTES (1920 - 2011)

 

Anna was born 21 July, 1920, in Budapest, Hungary, to a family of modest means. In fact, the family moved frequently due to financial difficulties. Her older brother had died in infancy and she had two younger sisters the first of whom was sickly.

 

Anna’s father, Paul Vlcsko (later changed to Viraghalmi), was a fine bootmaker of exclusive shoes. Due to an atrophied and permanently bent leg after a bout of polio, he was unable to stand for long periods and so could not join his father and brothers in the family business of carriage building in the city of Bekescsaba, 215 kilometres south-east of Budapest, on the Great Hungarian Plain. He was sent to Budapest to learn his trade and that is where he met Maria Halasz, a domestic helper who became his wife.

 

Anna showed her creative bent at an early age, drawing and composing poems. At school she was a bright student who was enlisted to tutor a classmate, the daughter of a master bookbinder. Anna watched, fascinated, as the craftsman worked with leather, embossing book covers and applying gold leaf decorations; she knew then that she wanted to learn his trade and create beautiful artefacts. In order to follow her desire, she entered an apprenticeship at a small bookbinding firm located adjacent to a small printing business. 

 

George Klein, the son of the well-to-do Jewish printer fell in love with Anna, the pretty gentile girl, who initially was reluctant to return his affection. It seems that she was unable to deny her feelings because in 1941, Anna agreed to marry George knowing that the Third Jewish Law which prohibited any social contact or intermarriage between Christians and Jews, was about to be passed. 

 

George, who had noted her love for art and her own desire to paint, whenever a day or two was available, took her to Vienna to see the treasures on display in the heart of the old Empire and to study. Unfortunately, there are few details of this period in their life together. 

 

Their happiness was short-lived; in 1942 George was conscripted to the Hungarian Forced Labour Camp and Anna remained in their home above the printing business. The conscripts were sent to the eastern front where they were set to building defences against a Russian counter-attack. Many of the conscripts perished in the harsh conditions, others were shot or beaten to death for the most trivial infractions. Whenever she could, Anna visited George to give him additional food; he sent postcards, always heavily censored, from the different places he was stationed. He was allowed a brief leave to visit his family immediately after the birth of his daughter, Annamarie, in 1943. In November of the same year, he was granted six days leave and he and Anna were able to engage a professional photographer to take some family group portraits. Between 21 June 1944 and late November of the same year, the Hungarian government decreed that the buildings in which Jews lived were to be marked with a yellow star. When the printery was designated a yellow star house, Anna took her daughter with her to live with her parents. 

 

The last postcard Anna received was dated 19 September 1944 and forwarded by the censors three days later; George asked for warm clothes in anticipation of the imminent winter. Nothing further was heard from him. When the war ended, Anna waited for George in the hope that his delayed return was due to illness or because he had been captured as a prisoner of war by the Russians and was awaiting release.  Anna kept waiting until late 1948 or early 1949 for formal notification that George had died in on 15 October 1944 – just three weeks after sending his last postcard. Nothing further is known of his fate.

 

As the Russian army advanced westward, food shortages in Budapest became more severe and Anna often ventured outside the city to search for food. In December 1944, while outside Budapest, Anna was caught and deported to a camp near Potsdam. She returned to Budapest and her daughter in June 1945. They remained with Anna’s family until 1950 to assist with the care of her younger sister who had developed schizophrenia.

 

The Klein family was secular and aspired to acceptance within Budapest high society; given her devotion to Judaism and her lowly origins, Anna did not fit in. Furthermore, the communist government nationalised the printing business in 1947 which meant that Anna could no longer receive a salary from the family business. Proud and resourceful, she made her own way using her manual skills to repair stockings (the price of a pair of stockings was so high at that time that women paid to have their torn or snagged stockings repaired) and she organised a group of women to knit woollen garments to order.  She was thus able support herself and Annamarie and even to resume her private study of painting. As she could, she collected books on art. Unfortunately, all her early works have been lost.

 

In the early 1950s, Anna met the man who would become her second husband, Julius Vertes, a Jewish widower. They were planning to marry when the Hungarian Revolution broke out in late October, 1956. Julius escaped to Austria where he found refuge in a DP Camp. Because he had a brother in Sydney, he was accepted by Australia as a refugee immigrant. His brother, Stephen, helped him obtain Australian visas for Anna and her daughter; the Australian visas were issued in 1957 but Anna had to wait until 1964 for permission to leave Hungary.

 

After arriving in Sydney with her library and other possessions, Anna was eager to immerse herself in the world of art. Julius arranged for her to meet a fellow Hungarian artist, the accomplished painter Jeno Kohary, who had vast experience in art appraisals. He was a graduate of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Art in Budapest where he had conducted his own Studio before the war. Jeno noted Anna’s talent and determination and encouraged her to paint; she attended his studio from shortly after her arrival in 1964 until his death in 1971. Kohary also taught Anna the skills of restoration and framing, and encouraged her to expand into different styles and genres of painting. On his death, he bequeathed to her his vast collection of art books. She also enrolled at the National Art School at East Sydney Technical College (old Darlinghurst Gaol) under the tutelage of Jean de Courtney lsherwood, a renowned landscape painter and teacher under the influence of the Modernist movement who insisted that her students understand perspective, anatomy and design. During this period of resettlement, Anna displayed her works in the Apache Coffee Lounge, co-owned by Julius, in the Sydney CBD.

 

When Anna felt confident and ready to open her own Gallery, her husband was already very ill with cancer. Nevertheless, he managed to help her to open "Anna Art Studio and Gallery" in Paddington, an area noted for galleries, in 1971. During the period that Julius was in his final illness, Anna painted feverishly - portraits of Julius, Annamarie and other members of her family, and self-portraits.

 

Julius died shortly after Passover on 10 April 1972. At this point Anna’s mood darkened noticeably and this was reflected in her work; she used dark hues and used a fine knife rather than a brush to apply paint to her canvases, but as her grief became less intense, she expressed her nostalgia for Hungarian life; harvest scenes and the washer woman in the courtyard of an apartment building.

This was the beginning of her golden period, her most fruitful time, when she allowed her creativity full expression. In due course, she returned to using fine brushes and worked in many genres; painting with aquarelles, crayons, pastels, oils on board, oils on velvet and drawing with charcoal. She produced her own hand-carved plaster frames and became a printmaker using linocuts. She also conducted art classes and undertook restoration work. All the while she collected works by other artists, applying her critical eye. 

 

Anna’ never allowed her creative drive to prevent her spending time with her newly expanded family on holidays – in fact those family holidays widened her horizon and she began increasingly to depict the Australian bush and Australia’s unique landscapes. Her love of the beauty to be found in nature inspired many of her students also to depict those shapes, colours, forms and beauty in their own paintings.

 

She sold her works at her Gallery and enthusiastically entered others in many exhibitions sponsored by local councils and for fund raising events. Many of her works were purchased by overseas collectors in places like the USA, Canada, Hungary and Israel, to name a few.

 

In the two years from 1998 to 2000, some of her images were reproduced by the French TV Stations France 3 and TV5 as the backdrops for a series of documentaries called "A Century of Writers" for which she received royalty payments.

 

ln 1985, due to problems with the building in Paddington she moved her studio to her large apartment in Bellevue Hill, continuing every strand of her work there – painting, teaching, restoration and framing. Her apartment was crowded with her large library, artefacts, statues, vases, her own works and her collection of works by other artists.

 

By the year 2000 her concentration was faltering and she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Anna she continued to teach and paint for as long as she could and always remained a most dignified and proud lady. She passed away during Passover, on 26 April 2011, just three months short of her ninety-first birthday.

 

The legacy of her paintings shows a dedicated artist, who loved colours and the beauty of nature, possessed of an optimism that belied the difficulties she had overcome during her lifetime.

 

Anna was a:

• Painter,

• Linocut printmaker

• Sculptress (raised reliefs)

• Restorer of oil paintings and frames

• Teacher - Educator

 

Her works are held in private collections in Australia, South Africa, USA, Canada, lsrael and Hungary. Altogether 170 of her works are held in European Collections.

 

Listed on the Women's Art Register since 1984.

Member of NAVA since 1994 (membership No. 5101).

Member of AICCM, as an Art Restorer since 1994 (membership 0843).

 

Ten of her works in slides are registered at the NSW Ministry for the Arts Slide Register and database in November 1996.

 

Between 1998 and 2000 images of her works were reproduced as backdrops to the documentary series "A Century of Writers" broadcast on French Television Channel France 3 and TV5 for which she received Royalty Payments.