Mihály Biró Pathos in Red

The designer Mihály Biró (1886-1948) was the graphic voice of Soviet communism in Hungary. He joined the Social Democratic cause early in life, and between 1910 and 1920 designed some of the most widely admired posters and illustrations of the era, for the SZDP (Hungarian Social Democratic Party) and then the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The advent of Miklós Horthy’s fascist regime soon forced him to flee to Vienna, where he created The Horthy Portfolio (1920), a set of color lithographs that documented the atrocities of the Horthy regime. Alongside such political works, Biró also created posters for individual businesses and the booming Austrian film industry. He was soon forced to leave Austria, and relocated to Czechoslovakia, then to Paris, returning to Budapest one year before his death in 1948. This revelatory monograph surveys Biró’s political posters, as well as commercial work, postcards, photographs and lithographs.