Judit Reigl (1923–2020)

Judit Reigl was born in Kapuvár, Hungary, to a well-to-do family. After her father died when she was three years old, she moved with her mother to Budapest. Judit attended an elite Catholic high school and in 1942, enrolled in the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. There she studied with the renowned painter István Szönyi until 1945. She won a scholarship to spend two years studying in Italy from 1947 to 1948, and hitchhiked her way to major towns and cities throughout the country. She returned to Hungary just as the "Iron Curtain" was descending on Eastern Europe.

She was determined to escape control of her artistic freedom, and after eight unsuccessful attempts, she made a dangerous crossing to the West in 1950, eventually settling in Paris. After arriving in France, she joined the community of exiled Hungarian artists and was introduced to André Breton, one of the founders of Surrealism. He became an important early supporter of her work, helping her get her first exhibition at the Étoile Scellée gallery in 1954. Two years later, Reigl broke with the Surrealists and her work thereafter served as a bridge to a younger generation of painters associated with abstractism. She formed a lifelong relationship with Betty Anderson, a British sculptor and student of Henry Moore, whom she had first met in Italy. Reigl's paintings can be found in major institutions such as the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Tate Gallery in London.