Mechthild Nawiasky was born in Prague (formerly Austria-Hungary, then Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic) in 1905 and was brought up in Austria. After studying art in Munich and Paris, in 1935 she immigrated to London, England, where she worked as a painter and became the first picture editor at the <em>Observer</em> magazine.
Painter and picture editor Mechthild Nawiasky was born to a family of Austrian, Russian, French and Scottish heritage in Prague (formerly Austria-Hungary, then Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic) in 1905. Growing up in Austria (initially within the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Nawiasky studied art at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and in Paris. In 1935, she immigrated to London, where she hoped to earn a living as a painter.
While in London, and struggling to survive by her painting alone, Nawiasky began working for Hungarian émigré, photojournalist and filmmaker Stefan Lorant at Lilliput magazine, a monthly publication founded by Lorant in 1937, containing short stories, art and photography. First working as an assistant, she became picture editor after Lorant left England for the USA in 1940. During the war, she was employed as an official war artist, developing a scheme in conjunction with the Civilian Committee for the Defence of Homes, to make lithographs of wartime England to sell in America to raise money for the war effort. In December 1947, she became a naturalised British citizen (a status she applied for in 1940). In 1948, Nawiasky was taken on as the first permanent picture editor at the Observer magazine, where she would transform the paper’s use of photography through a focus on original portraits and standalone photographs presented as stories in their own right, to inform, entertain, and explore universal themes. At the Observer she recruited Jane Bown, who became renowned for her portrait photographs and worked as the magazine's chief photographer for many years, and Hungarian émigré and photojournalist, Michael Peto, in 1949. Along with Peto, Nawiasky was a consultant for the 1952 short film Brief City: The Story of London's Festival Buildings, sponsored by the Observer, a retrospective of the architecture employed for the nationwide Festival of Britain of 1951 on London’s South Bank. In 1957, Nawiasky left the Observer and the following year she returned to painting.
Long interested in animals (she was rumoured to have once been a lion tamer) and circus themes, her work included a series of circus sketches. For a Christmas issue of Tatler magazine in 1961, she wrote and illustrated an article on circuses and animal acts. She also translated a scholarly volume on animal behaviour from German into English (Man and animal: studies in behaviour, 1972). Alongside her painting, writing and journalistic work, from 1964 Nawiasky also taught painting at the Royal Academy Schools, London (RAS). She exhibited with the Women’s International Art Club in London in 1964, and over the course of her career showed work with the Drian Galleries (1964, established by Polish émigré, Halima Nalecz), New Burlington Galleries, and the Goupil Gallery, London, and with the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA). In later life she maintained an interest in wider public debate around issues of the day and was noted in 1982 in