Plan de Paris
by Ilonka KaraszParis, France
1927
A rare and evocative map of the post-WW I Paris of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce.
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Karasz was born in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, the oldest of three children of Mary Huber Karasz and silversmith Samuel Karasz. One of her younger sisters was the fashion designer and textile artist Mariska Karasz. She studied art at the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts during a period when the reigning aesthetic owed much to the Wiener Werkstätte and was one of the first women to be admitted to the school. She immigrated to the United States in 1913, the year of her 17th birthday, and began to make a career for herself in New York City‘s Greenwich Village, where she established herself as an influential practitioner of modern art and design. In 1914, Karasz co-founded (with Winold Reiss) the European-American artists' collective Society of Modern Art, and shortly afterwards she was commissioned to create advertising for the department store Bonwit Teller. For a few years in the late teens she taught textile design at the Modern Art School.
