Tom Kublin Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Tom Kublin was born in 1924 in Zalaszentgrót to a working-class and middle-class family. After his father's sudden death at the age of 42, he and his brother Jean were raised by their mother. Read the full biography

Tom Kublin was born in 1924 in Zalaszentgrót to a working-class and middle-class family. After his father's sudden death at the age of 42, he and his brother Jean were raised by their mother. At the age of 13, Kublin began to be interested in photography and studied at the Budapest photography school. In 1944-45, at the age of 20, he served in the Hungarian army as a photographer and at the end of the war he was commissioned to photograph the damage that Soviet bombing had caused in Budapest. In 1946 he moved to Zurich, where he opened a photography studio specializing in advertising which put him in contact with the textile industry and he discovered the world of fashion, photographing a Jacques Fath exhibition held in Saint Moritz. In 1951-52 he opened another studio in Paris. In the mid-50s and 60s he met Cristóbal Balenciaga, and worked for the brand creating photographic documentation and filming the projects of the Balenciaga fashion house for the protection of copyright and artistic photographs of the models that Balenciaga wanted to share with the press . Kublin took these types of photographs of the 1955 Balenciaga collections. Over the years, he continued to work with Balenciaga, filming collection presentations and also producing advertisements. In the mid-1960s, the crisis in the haute couture sector worsened, and the house Balenciaga asked Kublin to produce these last edited versions of its collections. Kublin also made films in which the couturier is seen working to finalize his creations. At the time of his death, Kublin was working on an American television documentary about fashion that never saw the light of day.