Galerie Paul Prouté

Born in 1902 in Budapest, Anton Prinner trained at the Beaux-Arts between 1920 and 1924, before leaving Hungary for France at the age of twenty-five. On his arrival in Paris in 1928, Anton Prinner, pseudonym of Anna Prinner, adopted a masculine identity, using the pronoun ‘he’. He cultivated this ambiguity about his gender throughout his career as a sculptor, engraver and painter. His work, strongly influenced by Egyptology, remains rooted in the avant-garde currents of constructivism and surrealism. A frequent visitor to the Montparnasse district, Prinner rubbed shoulders with the artistic milieu of the Paris School and learned to engrave from Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17. A great admirer of Picasso, Prinner exhibited his work during his lifetime, notably in exhibitions devoted to Franco-Hungarian art. He remains little known in his native country. The female figure is omnipresent in Prinner’s work, most often in the guise of divinities reminiscent of ancient Egypt and Greece.