At auction i bought a small collection of design books , previously owned and collected by Ben Bos, one of the founding members of the Total Design agency. Bos was presented with this chinese edition on Dan Reisinger who wrote a personal note and letter to Ben Bos. These are both included and the book is now fro sale at www.ftn-books.com.
Born in 1934 in Kanjiza, Serbia, Reisinger lost several family members in the Holocaust, including his father. He survived the Nazi occupation in a hideout and as a teenager became active in the partisan Pioneer Brigade, immigrating with his mother and stepfather to the new State of Israel in 1949. Reisinger initially lived in a transit camp and then worked as a house painter in order to earn money from almost any source. He later attended Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design as the youngest student accepted to the school at that time.
In 1954, Reisinger served in the Israeli Air Force, where he put his design skills to use art directing military publications. During this time in the Air Force he attended a class on postage-stamp design taught by the British graphic designer Abram Games, who became his mentor and friend. Subsequently, Reisinger travelled, studied, and worked in Europe: from 1957 in Brussels and then onto London where, from 1964–66, he studied stage and three-dimensional design at the Central School of Art and Design. He designed posters for Britain’s Royal Mail, and worked for other clients while making intermittent visits to Israel. In 1966 he returned permanently to Israel and established his Dan Reisinger Studio in Tel Aviv. The same year he was commissioned to design the Israeli Pavilion at the Expo ’67 in Montreal.
Reisinger soon became one of the most prolific Israeli designer of his generation and won many prizes. He designed a new logo for El Al (1972), and the 50-meter-long aluminium-cast relief of a biblical quotation in Hebrew on the exterior of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims in Jerusalem (1978). He designed three Israel Defense Forces (IDF) decorations: the Medal of Valor, the Medal of Courage and the Medal of Distinguished Service. He also created the logos for the Tel Aviv Museum of Arts, Tefen Museum of Arts, and Habima National Theatre, and the symbol and posters of the 9th-15th Maccabiah Games.
He had his first solo exhibition at the Israel Museum Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1976-77, and has since exhibited his works in Israel and around the world in numerous group and one-person exhibitions. In 1998 Reisinger was awarded the Israel Prize – one of the state’s highest honours – the first designer to be the recipient of such an award, exactly 40 years after his first award, the 1958 Brussels Expo first medal for poster design. For his 70th birthday, the Hungarian Government honoured Reisinger with a comprehensive one man show at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest.
