Margit Varga (1908 – 2005)

Road Repairing, Lower Manhattan at Night, 1934, oil on Masonite, signed and dated lower right, 24 x 16 inches; original label verso has title and address

$8500

Margit Varga was an artist, gallerist, art editor and author, who mainly worked in New York. Born in Hungary to a well-to-do-family, Varga immigrated to the United States as a young girl.* Although she initially found New York to be drab and lifeless compared to Budapest, she discovered creative freedom in painting and drawing. Varga studied art at the National Academy of Design, Columbia University, and the Art Students League with Boardman Robinson and Robert Laurent. She founded and operated the Painters and Sculptors Gallery in Greenwich Village in the early 1930s, a venue designed to highlight American art. News of the opening of the gallery was widely published across the United States. During the 1930s and 1940s, she exhibited often, including at the Salons of America, Society of Independent Artists, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Golden Gate International Exhibition, Dallas Museum of Art, Dayton Art Institute, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Corcoran Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Cincinnati Art Museum. She was represented by New York’s Midtown Galleries and was a member of the National Association of Women Artists. She was honored with a solo exhibition at the University of Nebraska and the Philadelphia Art Alliance. When reviewing this exhibition, the art critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer commented favorably about the artist’s New York paintings such as Road Repairing, Lower Manhattan at Night, “Margit Varga’s oils, now in the larger of the two galleries on the first floor of the Art Alliance, reveal that not too frequent ability to take familiar, seemingly commonplace city sights and transform them by imaginative magic into pictures which enchant the eye and cause those of casual minds to wonder why they too did not discover a bit of all this beauty.” From 1936 through the mid-1950s, she worked as Art Editor for Life Magazine. Varga was Life’s Assistant Art Director from 1956 to 1960 and art consultant from 1960 to 1970 for Time, Inc. She co-authored the seminal and well-reviewed volume Modern American Painting in 1939 and Waldo Pierce in 1941, as well as contributing to Studio Publications. Her work is represented in the collections of many American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Varga is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.

*NB: some sources indicate Varga was born in the United States in the upper east side of Manhattan.