József Bató (Joseph Bato) was born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1888 and studied at the School of Applied Arts in Budapest, with Henri Matisse and Georges Desvallièrs in Paris, and at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. He fled Nazi Germany, setting in London in 1936, making sketches and lithographs of London during the Second World War, then working as a costume and set designer, and later, art director, for the British film industry post-war.
Painter, draughtsman and film director Joseph Bato was born József Bató into a Jewish family in Budapest, then in Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) in 1888. He studied at the School of Applied Arts, Budapest and in 1906 joined the second generation of painters at the Nagybánya (now Baia Mare, Romania) artists' colony. The following year, he took private classes under Henri Matisse and Georges Desvallièrs in Paris, completing his studies between 1909 and 1912 at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. Afterwards, he moved to Berlin, where he joined the Secession Group, experimenting with murals in the Neo-classical style and oil paintings influenced by both French Post-impressionism and German Expressionism. During the First World War, Bato returned to Hungary, serving on the Russian Front as an official Austro-Hungarian war artist; celebrated as a pioneer in this genre, he depicted battles and the resulting destruction in minute detail. In 1916 he was invalided out and returned to Berlin, where he produced designs for the anti-war periodical Der Bildemann (which also employed Oskar Kokoschka and Ernst Ludwig Kirschner). Shortly after the war, he returned to Berlin, and in 1928 worked as a teacher at a private art school, also designing posters for cultural events, most notably theatrical productions. During the 1920s he lived with the Hungarian author Sári Ferenczi, whom he later married, but the couple separated in 1936, when they had to flee Berlin to avoid Nazi persecution, with Bato moving to London and Ferenczi returning to Budapest.
After arriving in London in 1936, Bato was one of only two foreign artists (the other being Austrian émigré Joseph Flatter), granted a Home Office sketching permit in February 1941 to record the ravages of war on London. He intended some sketches for a book to be published by Allen & Unwin; three drawings were purchased by the War Artists' Advisory Committee (now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum) for 35 guineas (after Bato queried the 25 originally offered) and he also planned an (unrealised) exhibition of his war work at the Silberman Galleries in New York, but in April his sketching permit was withdrawn when Hungary entered the war on the opposite side and Bato became an 'enemy alien'. His plea: 'Apart from this fervent wish to show my gratitude for the unparalleled hospitality of this Country, it is my most vital interest to fight Nazism and whosoever may be their allies. I still believe that the most effective part I could play in this struggle would be to put my artistic capacities at the service of this Country' (cited Robert Waterhouse, Their Safe Haven, p. 102), was rejected, however, his extant charcoal drawings and lithographs formed the basis of his book, Defiant City (1942), summarising his experiences and impressions of London during the war. In his foreword, celebrated playwright J. B. Priestley declared: 'It is, in the end, the artist who will tell us most. What he gives us is not merely a pictorial record but also his vision of life. […] No photographs can suggest this horror, the disgust, the compassion, the enduring grace, the rich warm humanity that we discover in these drawings.' He concluded that Bato's drawings revealed him as 'a man of notable breadth and depth of feeling, the kind of man who should be on hand to tell the World about bombed London. We were fortunate in having him with us.'
Bato participated in both the Exhibition of the Works of British War Artists, organised by The Artists' International Association at Charing Cross Underground Station in September 1941 and another of works by British War Artists at Cheltenham School of Art in November 1941. He was also among the 14 artists who exhibited at the April 1943 Hungarian Club show in West London, but disillusioned by his reception as an artist, he abandoned painting for a career as a West End stage designer, working on plays including Lajos Biro's School for Slavery, which premiered at The Westminster in March 1942. Subsequently, Hungarian émigré and renowned film director Alexander Korda (who had been working in London since 1931), helped him obtain a position as a costume and set designer with the film-making partnership Powell & Pressburger (Bato was responsible for the historical costumes in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), among other films). In 1945, Bato became a leading art director at London Films (founded by Korda) working on more than 25 acclaimed productions including An Inspector Calls, The Belles of St Trinians and The Third Man, but the destruction of the sets after filming, means there is little extant evidence of his extensive contribution to the British film industry. In 1949, he married Muriel Lies and the couple had a son, Andrew. In his final years, Bato again focused on painting, while travelling extensively in France and Spain to study prehistoric cave paintings, which inspired his novel titled The Sorcerer, about the adventures of a Cro-Magnon man, published posthumously in the USA in 1976. Joseph Bato died in London, England in 1966. Forty of his war drawings are in the Museum of London; a further example is in the Cuming Museum Art Collection, Southwark. Recently, Bato's career has been re-examined by Robert Waterhouse in his survey Their Safe Haven: Hungarian artists in Britain from the 1930s (2018), accompanied by a (postponed) exhibition at the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Joseph Bato]
Publications related to [Joseph Bato] in the Ben Uri Library