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Ferenc Pintér (31 October 1931, Alassio – 28 February 2008, Milan) was a Hungarian-Italian painter, poster designer, and one of the defining illustrators of post-war Italian publishing. Born on the Ligurian coast to a Hungarian father and an Italian mother, he spent much of his childhood in Budapest, where his father sought medical care. Orphaned during adolescence and politically at odds with the Stalinist cultural regime, he was denied entry to the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts. After supporting the 1956 Hungarian Revolution he fled to Italy, settling first in Rome and soon after in Milan, where his vigorous brush-work and cinematic flair won early commissions for advertising and cinema posters. In 1960 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore hired him as a staff cover artist, inaugurating a thirty-two-year collaboration during which he produced hundreds of tempera-on-board jackets for Mondadori’s most visible lines, including fourteen noir covers for the “Segretissimo” spy series and the Italian editions of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels, Agatha Christie’s detective fiction, and the mass-market “Oscar Mondadori” paperbacks that shaped the visual landscape of Italian popular literature.
Pintér’s mature work extended beyond commercial assignments into personal projects that revealed his fascination with allegory and archetype. In 1989 he painted the twenty-two Major Arcana for a Tarot deck published by Lo Scarabeo of Turin, prefaced by the art historian Federico Zeri; he completed the fifty-six Minor Arcana between 2000 and 2002. Throughout his career he signed his art “Pintér Ferenc,” retaining the Hungarian name order even as Italian usage rendered him “Ferenc Pinter,” a subtle assertion of his dual cultural identity. Synthesising Central-European expressionism with the bold pragmatism of Italian graphic design, Pintér left an indelible mark on European illustration; gallery retrospectives and robust auction results continue to affirm his status as a master of twentieth-century visual narrative.
