Background
He was born in Berlin, lived and died in New York City. Peter Basch was born in Berlin, Germany, the only child of Felix Basch and Grete Basch-Freund, both prominent theater and film personalities of the German-speaking world.
He was born in Berlin, lived and died in New York City. Peter Basch was born in Berlin, Germany, the only child of Felix Basch and Grete Basch-Freund, both prominent theater and film personalities of the German-speaking world.
The main body of his work was produced in the fifties and sixties. In 1933 the family came to New York due to fears of rising anti-Jewish sentiment and laws in Germany. The family had United States citizenship because Felix"s father, Arthur Basch, was a wine trader who lived in San Francisco.
When the Basch family arrived in New York in 1933, they opened a restaurant on Central Park South in the Navarro Hotel.
The restaurant, Gretel"s Viennese, became a hangout for the Austrian expatriate community. Peter Basch had his first job there as a waiter.
While in New York, Basch attended the De Witt Clinton High School. The family moved to Los Angeles to assist in Basch"s father"s career, during which time Basch went to school in England.
Upon returning to the, Basch joined the Army.
He was mobilized in the United States Army Air Forces" First Motion Picture Unit, where he worked as a script boy. After the war, he started attending University of California, Los Angeles, but his mother asked him to join her back in New New York Foreign over twenty years, Peter Basch"s had a successful career as a magazine photographer.
He was known for his images of celebrities, artists, dancers, actors, starlets, and glamour-girls in America and Europe.
His photos appeared in many major magazines such as Life, Look and Playboy. = Partial bibliography.
