Eva Besnyo - Foto: Kop Jan Toorop (beeld John Raedecker) - Sold

Photo of bronze statue by Jan Toorop. It concerns the head of the monument in The Hague that was made by John Raedecker. Year: 1933. Dimensions of the depiction: H25 x W 19.5 cm. The work is stamped on the back: "Eva Besnoy". On the back is written in pencil: Kop Jan Toorop bronze. 1933. Literature: See catalog Sted. Sparrow. no. 148. Eva Marianna Besnyő (Budapest, April 29, 1910 – Laren, December 12, 2003) was a Hungarian-Dutch photographer. She grew up in a liberal Jewish family with two sisters. When she was 18 she took a course in advertising and portrait photography with Jozsef Pécsi. He encouraged her to go to Berlin where she met the Dutch photographer John Fernhout. Fernhout, son of the painter Charley Toorop, returned to the Netherlands in 1930. Due to the rise of the Nazis, Éva Besnyő decided to leave Germany and in 1932 she followed Fernhout to the Netherlands. They got married in 1933. As a member of the exhibition committee, Besnyö was, alongside chairman Paul Schuitema and Cas Oorthuys, one of the driving forces behind the organization of the exhibition Foto '37, which was organized in the summer of 1937 under the auspices of the VANK in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Until the Second World War she did a lot of portrait photography, but she was also interested in photographing architecture. During the occupation she had to go into hiding and she became active in the resistance. In 1939 she started a relationship with graphic designer Wim Brusse. In 1945 she divorced Fernhout and married Brusse with whom she had a son and a daughter. After the children got a bit older, she started taking more photographs, and in the early 1970s she mainly focused on capturing the actions of Amsterdam feminists, especially the Dolle Mina group. In 1985 Besnyő was awarded the Annie Romein Prize. In 1994 she was awarded the Piet Zwart Prize. In old age, she had to stop shooting because of problems with her eyes. The last years of her life she lived in the Rosa Spier Huis in Laren, where she died in 2003 at the age of 93.