Nickolas Muray

Nickolas Muray (born Miklós Mandl; 15 February 1892 – 2 November 1965) was a Hungarian-born American photographer and Olympic saber fencer.

Early and personal life

Muray was born in Szeged, Hungary, and was Jewish. His father Samu Mandl was a postal worker, and his mother Klara Lovit was a homemaker. In 1894 his family moved to Budapest. He then married Leja Gorska in 1921, but they also divorced.

Between 1920 and 1940, Muray made over 10,000 portraits. His 1938 portrait of Frida Kahlo, made while Kahlo sojourned in New York, attending her exhibit at the Julien Levy Gallery, became the best known and loved portrait made by Muray. Muray and Kahlo were at the height of a ten-year love affair in 1939 when the portrait was made. Their affair had started in 1931, after Muray was divorced from his second wife and shortly after Kahlo's marriage to Mexican muralist painter Diego Rivera. It outlived Muray's third marriage and Kahlo's divorce and remarriage to Rivera by one year, ending in 1941. Muray wanted to marry, but when it became apparent that Kahlo wanted Muray as a lover, not a husband, Muray took his leave for good and married his fourth wife, Peggy (Margaret) Muray. He and Kahlo remained good friends until her death, in 1954.

After the market crash in 1929, Muray turned away from celebrity and theatrical portraiture, and become a pioneering commercial photographer, famous for his creation of many of the conventions of color advertising. He was considered the master of the three-color carbro process.

Muray's magazine and fashion pictures from the 1930s and 1940s are regarded as fine examples of color photography and what the International Center for Photography called "the postwar American advertising aesthetic of excess." Muray fused technical mastery with a lively wit to produce portraits of refined elegance and subtle insight, alongside vibrant, boldly commercial images that captured the spirit of his time.

Fencing career Muray competed for the United States at the 1928 and 1932 Summer Olympics (when he came in fourth in sabre team) in the sabre fencing events. He won the US Team Saber National Championship in 1927 and 1928, and the National Saber Championship in 1929. In 1935 and 1936 he won the National Foil Team Championship. He won the Metropolitan Saber Fencing Championship in 1934, 1942, 1950, and 1951. In addition to the NYAC, he fenced for the Washington Square Fencing Club, the Fencers Club, and Salle Santelli, representing each one during his career.

Muray represented the New York Athletic Club and was a lifelong fencer for the club. He suffered a heart attack on 9 February 1961, four years prior to his death while fencing at the club, and was saved through the efforts of a fellow fencer and physician Dr. Barry Pariser who performed heart massage. On the second occasion in the very same fencing room Muray was struck again in a final and fatal attack on 2 November 1965. There is a plaque in his honor on display at the fencing room dedicated to his memory. In his lifetime he had won over 60 fencing medals.