Zsuzsi Roboz was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, in 1929. Surviving the Second World War in hiding, she and mother fled Budapest in 1946, first for Austria and then for France, finally immigrating to London, England, in 1947. After studying art in London and Florence, she established her reputation as a painter, in particular of portraits, absorbed in the worlds of theatre, art, music, dance and literature.
Painter, draughtswoman and printmaker, Zsuzsi Roboz was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, on 15 August 1929. Her father, Imre Roboz, was manager of the Vígszínház (Comedy Theatre) of Budapest, and her mother, Edith Roboz, was a society hostess. Roboz had a comfortable upbringing but during the Second World War her father was forced out of his job and into hiding. He is thought to have been killed during the Siege of Budapest, when Soviet forces surrounded the Nazi-occupied city. Roboz and her mother also went into hiding during the war; in January 1946, they left Budapest, first for Vienna and then France. For a time Roboz lived with her aunt and uncle in Paris, where it was decided that she should enter secretarial school in order to be able to support herself. After studying shorthand in Paris, she immigrated to London, England, in 1947.
Roboz attended secretarial school in Hampstead, north west London and then began working for the Hungarian-British film director and screenwriter Alexander Korda, an old friend of her father's. While working for Korda, she started drawing and modelling, attending life drawing classes at the Studio Club in Swallow Street in the evenings. Seeking formal tuition, she enrolled at Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art, and was later accepted as a student at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1954, Roboz studied for a year in Florence under Pietro Annigoni, whom she met at an exhibition of his work in London. She returned to London an accomplished draughtswoman. After showing some of her drawings to Korda, in 1956, he commissioned a series of portraits of his contracted actors from her. Many leading figures in British theatre and cinema were then under contract to Korda, and Roboz's first work for him was a portrait of the actress, Mary Ure. In 1958, Roboz had her first solo exhibition, at Walkers Gallery in London, which was followed by numerous commissions for portraits. In 1964, she was invited to work backstage at London's Windmill Theatre, renowned for its nude tableaux, drawing the female performers before and after shows in the theatre's final days before it closed. Her Windmill drawings were exhibited in 1965 at the Upper Grosvenor Gallery in London, and featured in an exhibition on the Windmill Theatre at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in 1978.
In 1970, Women and Men's Daughters was published, containing interviews with 30 women accompanied by portrait sketches by Roboz. Subjects included Barbara Hepworth, Sheila Fell, Virginia Wade, Judi Dench, Antoinette Sibley, and Jacqueline du Pré. Roboz's interest in depicting ballet dancers and musicians led to her sitting in on rehearsals and performances whenever she could. She spent two years working on the publication British Ballet Today, during which time she witnessed the creation of Rudolf Nureyev's Romeo and Juliet for the Festival Ballet. Roboz produced a series of portraits of actors who had contributed to Chichester Festival Theatre's first ten years for Chichester 10: Portrait of a Decade, published in 1975. A series featuring artists, including Paula Rego, David Hockney and Lucian Freud, was produced for British Art Now, and published in 1993. Her Face to Face series (2011) captured British and Irish writers. Roboz also became interested in printmaking and attended classes at Sir John Cass Polytechnic in London's East End. She turned her Windmill drawings into lithographs, and produced a portfolio of limited edition prints, Backstage at the Windmill Theatre, in 1975. In 1982 she contributed to Jewish Faces (a contemporary view), an exhibition presented by The Contemporary Portrait Society at the Ben Uri Gallery. At the turn of the millennium, she experimented with photo-based collages, laser prints based on individual photographs with added elements of collage, paint and pastel.
Although best known for her portraits, Roboz did not regard herself as primarily a portrait painter, but as a painter who sometimes did portraits. Her work nevertheless brought her into contact with leading artists, designers, musicians, performers and writers. She expressed her interest in depicting the creative arts and their performers thus: 'Maybe it's because of the wish to create a world of my own to escape reality that I have been drawn to interpret five groups of people often similarly inclined. Theatre, Dance, Music, Visual Art and Literature, provided the necessary excitement and the practitioners the inspiration' (opening quote from Zsuzsi Roboz, 1929-2012: A Retrospective Exhibition). Her lithograph Rehearsal at Donmar Studios, set in a modern Covent Garden theatre space, was acquired by Ben Uri in 1991. Over the course of her career, Roboz exhibited extensively in London, and internationally, including in Hong Kong, New York and Budapest. Zsuzsi Roboz died in London, England on 9 July 2012. A retrospective exhibition was held in London in 2013. Examples of her work are held in numerous UK public collections, including the Ben Uri Collection, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Festival Hall, Tate Britain, Graves Gallery, Sheffield, and the Theatre and Performance Collection of the V&A Museum.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Zsuzsi Roboz]
Publications related to [Zsuzsi Roboz] in the Ben Uri Library