Eye Magazine

Anita Klinz was born in 1923, in Abbazia, now the Croatian coastal town Opatija. It was then part of Italy, though still deeply Austro-Hungarian in cultural terms. Klinz was the daughter of Carmen Vio and Giuseppe Klinz, a doctor, and her full name was Anna Maria Leucodia Klinz. Her father moved to Prague to work, taking the family with him when she was two years old, though she returned every summer for the holiday. In Prague, she attended German-speaking schools: primary school, Realgymnasium, a school of economics and finally two years at the Bohemian-language Štěpánská school of graphics.

Life in Prague was dramatically interrupted by war and in February 1945 the Klinzs’ home was bombed. When the family tried to leave, Giuseppe was arrested (as an Italian citizen) and thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp for two years.

A few months after the Liberation, Klinz found jobs as a governess and translator, then for a year as foreign correspondent at the central Credito Italiano offices in Piazza Cordusio, Milan. Then she was taken on at the publishing house Dea, where she worked as compositor and illustrator for the launch of the magazine La Vispa Teresa in 1947, a ‘Saturday weekly for big girls and little women’, and freelanced as an illustrator.

In 1951 Klinz was hired by Mondadori to join the staff of Epoca, where she met the weekly’s art director, Bruno Munari. As she would say, ‘He gave me lessons in living and in creative fantasy’. When she transferred to the books division she had the chance to work with the great artist and designer Fulvio Bianconi, another source of inspiration …

Her work from those twenty years of activity at Mondadori are undeniable proof of a unique contribution, an unparalleled figure in design. Her path may have been solitary, with few close relationships in an almost totally male environment, but above all it was a path that had to be ‘invented’ …

Luca Pitoni, editorial designer, writer, Tomo Tomo, Milan

Read the full version in Eye no. 106 vol. 27, 2024