46. Livia Kadar
(1894-1945)

The Nativity

(click on image to print)
Kadar: The Nativity

The Nativity

Etching, ca. 1928, 130 x 158 mm. Fine impression on thick, buff wove paper with full margins, signed in pencil. Kadar was born in Hungary and came to America we don’t know when – but presumably before 1929, as she exhibited a dozen works (including this one) with the Chicago Society of Etchers in that year. Apart from such exhibition listings (there are other, later ones), her life and career are a complete mystery, for she has somehow escaped mention in the standard dictionaries of artists, American and European alike. Her work has both a near-Eastern and a fairytale-like quality, is unlike that of any other American etcher, and perhaps most closely resembles the etchings of the German artist Heinrich Vogeler, her near contemporary.