Marcel Ronay was born to a Romanian-Jewish father and aristocratic Hungarian-Roman Catholic mother in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) in 1910. Brought up in Berlin and then Vienna, he trained at the Kunstgeberweschule under a renowned master-carver. Arriving in England with his family in 1936 after the rise of Nazism, he worked primarily as a costume jewellery designer in the family business, as well as a painter and sculptor.
Painter, sculptor and jewellery designer, Marcel Ronay was born, one of five children, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) in 1910 to a Romanian-Jewish father and an aristocratic Hungarian-Catholic mother. Around 1914 the family moved first to Berlin in Germany, but then, following the outbreak of the First World War, re-settled in Vienna (apart from a brief return to Budapest in 1918) where Ronay was educated. In 1928 he was invited to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule under master-carver Professor Eugene Steinhof, despite having had no previous formal training in art, and he completed his five-year-course in less than half the usual time. In 1931 Ronay was nominated for the State Prize for Art but one of his paintings, Monks and Nuns, depicting an orgy set in Austria, was considered too erotic, and his nomination was revoked due to the content. He subsequently exhibited at the Vienna Secession before travelling in Italy, where he also exhibited. Much of his artwork, in a New Objectivity style and often with an underlying suggestion social critique and acute observation, was completed before he immigrated to England in 1936.
In England he established 'Ronay Studios' in St Peter's Square, Hammersmith, west London, where he held an exhibition in 1943. The following year, in nearby Chiswick, he married Czech-born Anita Jellinek, with whom he had a son, Andrew, and a daughter, Barbara. Ronay spent most of his life working in the family business, designing and decorating costume jewellery, some of which was shown at the British Industries Fair in 1950. During the 1950s and 1960s he also painted English country landscapes but reverted to carving in the 1970s. He exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI), and in 1952, at the International Exhibition of Sculpture. In 1986 Ben Uri Gallery hosted an acclaimed solo exhibition, Marcel Ronay - Drawings and Watercolours: Vienna 1929-36, and almost all works were sold on the opening night. Ben Uri's Secretary, Barry Fealdman, writing as art critic in the Jewish Chronicle observed: 'An outstanding talent is revealed [...] Ronay spent his formative years in Vienna before coming to Britain as a refugee in 1936 [...] There is a masterly evocation of atmosphere and character in Ronay's drawings of Vienna in the inter-war years. He has a flair for observing real life and is moved by the urge to express exactly what he feels in an uncompromising manner that gives a heightened personal vision of the scene. He can be quite unsparing in his portrayal of the aberrations of society, yet there is always a presence of humour in his work (Jewish Chronicle, October 1986). John Denham Gallery (which specialised in the work of the so-called Hitler émigré artists and designers) held a further exhibition of his drawings in 1995.
Marcel Ronay died in Woodford Halse, near Daventry, England in 1998. In 2014 The Lightbox Woking held a posthumous exhibition of his paintings, prints and drawings exploring Vienna's hedonistic interwar years, The Art of Marcel Ronay: A New Objectivity in the Wake of World War I, followed in 2018, by a companion show entitled Marcel Ronay: Tranquility and Stability after two World Wars, bringing together pastoral and bucolic works addressing, in contrast, themes of tranquility and peace, created in England during the 1940s and 1950s. In the same year, his work featured in Ben Uri's exhibition Out of Austria: Austrian Emigre Artists to the UK. Marcel Ronay's work is held in the UK public domain in the Ben Uri Collection.
Marcel Ronay in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Marcel Ronay]
Publications related to [Marcel Ronay] in the Ben Uri Library