Mauricio Amster Cats

Place: Lemberg

Born: 1907

Death: 1980

Biography:

Mauricio Amster Cats was born in Lemberg, Ukraine, in 1907 and died in Santiago, Chile, in 1980. He was a typographer, calligrapher, illustrator, graphic artist and designer, educator, writer, translator, and book collector who designed more than 500 books in Chile. Amster was born into a Sephardic Jewish family and finished his bachelor education in Lviv. In 1927, he left for Austria, leaving his family behind. Shortly after arriving in Vienna, he was unable to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts; he left for Berlin, where he studied at the Reimann School between 1927 and 1930. In Depression-ravaged Germany, he could not find work and subsequently moved to Madrid, Spain. He worked as a freelance artist for publishers Dedalo, Oriente, Zeus, and Ulises. Before mid-1936, he joined the Communist Party, and in his position as the person 'responsible for transport of the National Artistic Treasure' traveled to Valencia, protecting paintings evacuated from the Museo del Prado. In July 1937, he participated in the Congress of Anti-fascist Intellectuals, where he met Chilean poets Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda, who since 1935 had been a cultural attaché in the Chilean embassy. He worked in the Ministry of Public Instructions and Arts, where he de...