Remembering István Bányai
Like his masterly art, my friend István was charming, brilliant, mischievous, unique — and now, alas, he’s gone and zoomed away
In the 1990s, when magazines still consisted only of their paper editions, because the internet hadn’t yet changed everything (or practically anything), I took over the weekly New York. I orchestrated its reinvention from guggle to zatch, as Thurber would put it, including a new front section called Gotham, which led with a vibe-distilling news chronicle of the previous seven days called The Front Page. For me a big part of the fun of being an editor was working with artists and photographers. To illustrate that opening piece every week I hired an émigré from Hungary and more recently from L.A. named István Bányai. I thought his drawings — smart, witty, cool, cosmopolitan, gorgeous, occasionally fantastical, singular — would be perfect. And they were.
As the graphic design éminence grise Steven Heller put it, his was a “visual language at once mysterious and accessible,” with a superb “mastery of line, ease of distortion, confidence with composition.” István had been an architecture student in Budapest around 1970 when he saw the Beatles-inspired film Yellow Submarine, which he said “blew my mind” and helped steer him into illustration and animation. He described…
