Caricaturist, book illustrator and painter Walter Trier was born on 25 June 1890 to German-Jewish parents in Prague, then the capital of a province within the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Hungary). He trained briefly at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, before attending the Munich Academy in 1908, where he learnt from Franz von Stuck. Trier’s illustrations were first published in 1909 in the celebrated German satirical magazines Simplicissimus and Jugend (Youth), appearing alongside the work of well-known artists including Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz. He became the regular press illustrator of Berlin-based Lustige Blätter (Funny Pages) and within ten years was one of the most sought after cartoonists in Berlin. In 1929, Trier began a long-standing working relationship with children's author Erich Kästner for whom he illustrated Emil and the Detectives, an instant sensation and literary classic. Following the rise of Nazism, he fled Germany with his family, settling in England in 1936. >/p>
There he was able to continue working, designing in the region of 150 title pages for the humorous monthly magazine 'Lilliput', as well as illustrating anti-fascist pamphlets for the British Ministry of Information during the war. He participated in the 1938 Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art at the New Burlington Galleries in London, organised as a riposte to the Nazi so-called 'Degenerate Art' show mounted in Munich in 1937. After the war, in 1947 Trier had a shared exhibition at Ben Uri Gallery, Paintings by Walter Trier, Sculpture by Else Fraenkel and Erna Nonnenmacher, and he and his wife became British citizens in this year; only a few months later they followed their daughter to Ontario, Canada. Walter Trier died in his studio in Craigleith, Collingwood, Ontario 8 July 1951. In the UK his work is represented in the Ben Uri Collection.
