19 Facts About Ilonka Karasz

Ilonka Karasz, was a Hungarian-American designer, interior decorator, painter and illustrator known for avant-garde industrial design and for her many New Yorker magazine covers.

Ilonka Karasz studied art at the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts during a period when the reigning aesthetic owed much to the Wiener Werkstatte and was one of the first women to be admitted to the school.

In 1914, Ilonka Karasz co-founded the European-American artists' collective Society of Modern Art, and shortly afterwards she was commissioned to create advertising for the department store Bonwit Teller.

Ilonka Karasz and a group of other European-born artists and designers, including Winold Reiss, founded the Society of Modern Art in 1914.

Ilonka Karasz's first work presented in the journal was a theatrical poster with checkerboard motifs, a common Austrian-German graphic style.

Ilonka Karasz was the founding director of Design Group, a firm of industrial designers, craftspeople, and artists.

Ilonka Karasz did textile work throughout her career for manufacturers in the United States, including Mallinson, Schumacher, Lesher-Whitman, Dupont-Rayon, Schwarzenbach and Huber, Cheney, Susquehanna Silk Mills, Standard Textile, and Belding Brothers.

Ilonka Karasz ventured into a number of unusual areas connected with textile design and production.

Ilonka Karasz was known as a pioneer of modern textile designs requiring the use of the Jacquard loom, and she became one of the few women to design textiles for planes and cars.

Ilonka Karasz experimented with many new materials and manufacturing processes throughout her career.

Ilonka Karasz's furniture was often rectilinear and strongly planar, inspired by the European De Stijl movement; she designed a number of multifunctional pieces.

The latter is considered possibly the first modern nursery designed in America, and Ilonka Karasz followed it up with several later nursery designs pragmatically featuring convertible furniture and washable fabrics.

Ilonka Karasz tried to incorporate elements that would help very young children learn, such as color-coded knobs on dressers.

Ilonka Karasz began painting covers for The New Yorker in 1924 and continued up to 1973.

Ilonka Karasz had a total of 186 New Yorker covers across those six decades, many of them featuring lively vignettes of daily life viewed from above and drawn using unusual color combinations.

In 1920 Ilonka Karasz married Dutch chemist and pianist Willem Nyland, with whom she had two children.

The couple lived in Java between 1929 and 1931, where Ilonka Karasz complemented her eclectic mix of modern and traditional furnishings with murals that paid homage to the surrounding tropical foliage.

In 1924, Ilonka Karasz and her husband attended a lecture by the Armenian-born spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff during his first trip to the United States.

Ilonka Karasz died at her daughter's home in Warwick, New York, seven weeks before her 85th birthday.