Dan Reisinger was born to a Hungarian-Jewish family in Kanjiža, Kingdom of Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1934 and studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem. Between 1958–66 he lived in London, attending art classes at the Central School of Art and taking freelance jobs in advertising, designing posters and logos for the General Post Office, El Al Israel Airlines, Teva pharmaceuticals, Electra and Agrexco, among others, before returning to Israel.
Graphic designer Dan Reisinger was born to a Hungarian-Jewish family on 3 August 1934 in Kanjiža, Kingdom of Yugoslavia (now Serbia), a city that formerly belonged to Austria-Hungary and, even though it became the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, has retained the majority of its Hungarian population. His parents were both painters, mainly working on decorative murals and other applied arts commissions throughout the Balkans; accordingly he received a firm artistic education from an early age. When the Nazis occupied the country, ten-year-old Reisinger and his mother were hidden by Serbian families, while his father was sent to war with a forced labour troop and was killed in the fighting.
Reisinger immigrated with his family to the newly established state of Israel in 1949. A year later, he enrolled at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, specialising in painting and poster design, winning the Academy's Struck Prize for his outstanding skills in 1954. While he served in the Israeli Air Force as the head of the publishing department, he also undertook a course in stamp design given by the acclaimed Anglo-Jewish graphic artist, Abram Games, with whom Reisinger remained a life-long friend. Spending a transitional year in Belgium, Reisinger arrived in London in 1958, where he attended the Central School of Art and Design to further his studies in drawing and painting. In the following eight years he commuted regularly between Israel and England. Abram Games became his unofficial mentor and introduced him to the inner circle of graphic artists working in London, including émigrés, George Him and FHK Henrion. Meanwhile, Reisinger took various jobs in advertising and established himself as a successful freelancer, designing posters for the General Post Office among other renowned British companies. Reisinger's first solo show in London was organised by the Ben Uri Gallery in 1960, where he exhibited oils and gouaches from Israel and Belgium rather than his commercial designs. The same year he married his wife, Annabelle, with Games as the best man at the wedding. In 1964 Reisinger took on the job of art director of Tal Arieli, the most prominent commercial agency in Israel at that time. He also returned to the Central School of Art to study 3D and stage design and during this time he painted a mural at the Furniture Research Institute, Stevenage, Hertfordshire.
In 1966, Reisinger permanently relocated to Israel, designing the central section of the Israeli Pavilion for Expo'67 in Montreal, Canada. The same year he founded the AT magazine with Tomy Lapid, the first colour magazine in Israel. Reisinger established his commercial studio in Tel Aviv and expanded his repertoire to accept commissions for corporate identities as well as for individual logos, stamps and poster designs. His most memorable projects include the Let my People Go protest poster, a symbol for the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, posters for the Maccabiah Games, and corporate identity programmes for El Al Israel Airlines, Teva pharmaceuticals, Electra and Agrexco. In 1980 he was the first Israeli designer to have a solo exhibition in New York, presenting his paintings illustrating Abba Kovner's poem Scrolls of Fire. Reisinger also taught at the Bezalel Academy of Arts from the 1960s and later at Haifa University and Wizo College, Haifa in 1980–90. In 1998 he was commissioned to plan a sculpture court for the Weizmann Institute of Science outside Tel Aviv. The same year he was awarded The Israel Prize for his contribution to Israeli culture. In 2017 the Israel Museum in Jerusalem celebrated Reisinger's art in the exhibition In Full Color: 60 Years of Design by Dan Reisinger, prompted by Reisinger's decision to gift his collection to the museum. The following year, his designs of dual language TEVA packaging in Hebrew and English were shown in Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? at the Wellcome Collection, London.
Dan Reisinger died in his home in Givatayim, near Tel Aviv, Israel on 26 October 2019. In the UK public domain his work is represented in the Ben Uri Collection and at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds a calendar he designed in 1964 for the Hebrew calendar year of 5724. His poster in the Ben Uri Collection was donated by the family of renowned German émigré poster designer, Hans Schleger.
Dan Reisinger in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Dan Reisinger]
Publications related to [Dan Reisinger] in the Ben Uri Library