6 10 84 https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/ae0bb5283861872f211b482b4847ac74.jpg d19b5f410caa5c856766c5ebdf3c57b5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abbey residents Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946–1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 2 June 1899 Birthplace Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany Death Date [day] [month] [year] 19 June 1981 Place of death Full address is known; else city and country. Dettenhausen, Tübingen, Germany Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) Pioneer film maker, film director, animator, puppeteer, book illustrator Biography Born Charlotte Eleonore Elisabeth Reiniger in Berlin in 1899. As a child she learned scherenschnitte, the art of cutting paper designs with scissors (Reiniger, 1936, p. 13; Sterritt, 2020, p. 399). Later she became deeply involved in the cultural and intellectual avant-garde world of pre-World War II Berlin, and her earliest films were made at the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute for Cultural Research) in Berlin. Her friends included Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang and she worked with prominent young intellectuals such as Berthold Bartosch, a collaborator on many of her films during the 1920s, and Carl Koch, who had studied art history and philosophy and was involved in producing educational films and documentaries for the Institute (Guerin and Mebold, 2016). Koch was interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking and experimenting with animation and was a perfect collaborator with Reiniger. Reiniger and Koch were married in the Berlin-Schonberg registrar office on 6 December 1921 (Grace, 2017, chapter 2). Reiniger and Koch’s early films ranged from brief shorts to Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) (1923-6), which is widely claimed as the first full-length animated feature film and considered a milestone of cinema history. One of Reiniger’s most important innovations was the multiplane camera, which she called a tricktisch (trick table), explaining its use as follows: ‘Figures and backgrounds are laid out on a glass table. A strong light from underneath makes the wire hinges disappear and throws up the black figures in relief. The camera hangs above … looking down at the picture arranged below’ (Reiniger, 1936, p. 14). Reiniger wrote screenplays for her films and worked as a major contributor on several of Koch’s live action films, including wartime Italian productions of Tosca (1941, co-directed by Koch and Jean Renoir) and La Signora dell’Ovest (The Lady of the West) (1941-2) (Guerin and Mebold, 2016). Having studied traditional silhouette representation of the human figure, supplemented by her knowledge of ancient Eastern and Oriental performance traditions, Reiniger also designed costumes and sets for theatre and opera, staged puppet shows and shadow plays, illustrated books, newspapers, and magazines. She was an accomplished artist in ink and watercolor as well as a writer and a poet, and she gave public lectures on animation and experimental film history. Classical music was an important aspect of her films and she collaborated with composers Kurt Weill, Paul Dessau, Benjamin Britten and Peter Gellhorn (Guerin and Mebold, 2016). Although not Jewish, Reiniger and Koch had many Jewish friends and closely identified with leftist politics, making life in Germany under the Nazi regime difficult (Sterritt, 2020, p. 399). In November 1935 they left for England and over the next four years lived variously in London, Paris and Rome. In England Reiniger made short films for the GPO Film Unit. At the outbreak of war, in September 1939, Reiniger re-joined Koch in Rome, where he was working with Jean Renoir on Tosca. In September 1943, with the situation in Italy worsening, they were advised by the embassy to leave without delay, and moved from Rome to Venice, then back to Berlin, where Reiniger’s ill mother was living alone. In Berlin, Reiniger unexpectedly received a film commission, Die Goldene Gans (1944-7), which provided an income, but food and power shortages made living difficult. In September 1948 she and Koch visited Alexander Kardan (with whom they had earlier collaborated on Prinzen Achmed), staying with him in London until November, when Reiniger had to return to Berlin. Reiniger left Germany permanently on 31 January 1949, re-joining Koch in London where they lived for some months at 236 Latimer Court, Hammersmith, W6, before moving in late 1949 to Wilton Cottage, Kings Road, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire (Happ, 2004, p. 67). In London they received further commissions from the GPO Film Unit (renamed after the war the Crown Film Unit, part of the Central Office of Information), making many advertising films for them such as Post Early for Christmas (1950). Other promotional films included The Dancing Fleece (also known as Wool Ballet), for the English Department of Labor, and Grain Harvest (1950) for the Ministry of Agriculture. In 1952 they established their own company Primrose Productions, with Viviana Milroy as producer and the financial backing of Louis Hagen Junior. Primrose Productions was primarily concerned with producing animated silhouette fairy tale films for children. Between 1953 and 1954 twelve such were produced and the 1950s would represent a highwater mark in Reiniger’s long career. These were made on a tricktisch that Hagen bought for Reiniger, and which was installed at the Abbey Art Centre, New Barnet, where Reiniger and Koch moved to in 1952. Whitney Grace writes that ‘Reiniger and Koch were welcomed at the Abbey Arts Centre, finding that being around fellow artists helped inspire their own work’ (Grace, 2017, chapter 7). Reiniger later told Alfred Happ that the Abbey Art Center residents ‘… live in their separate households, but close enough to inspire one another. The museum provided me with a number of artworks from different parts of the world, it’s not only ideas, but a widening creative atmosphere’ (Reiniger cited in Happ, 2004, p. 82). When William Ohly, the founder of the Abbey, died in 1955, Reiniger painted a <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1342#?c=0&m=">memorial window of St Francis of Assisi</a> for the Abbey tithe barn, where it remains to this day. Reiniger became a mentor to a younger Abbey resident, the English-born sculptor Peter King, whose experimental animated film, <a href="http://www.peterkingsculptor.org/PEKFilm.htm">13 Cantos of Hell (1955)</a>, was made using Reiniger’s shadow puppet techniques. Reiniger and Koch were also godparents to King’s first two children, Michael and Janet, born at the Abbey in 1953 and 1954 respectively. New Zealander Daryl Hill, who worked as assistant to Henry Moore during the mid-1950s alongside Lenton Parr and who was a probable visitor to the Abbey, became interested in film at this time through Reiniger and Koch, later citing their influence on his own experimental filmmaking in Australia in the 1960s (Laurie Thomas, ‘Those who are alone’ [interview with Daryl Hill], The Australian, 22 July 1967, p. 8). Given that Reiniger and Koch were two of the Abbey’s longest term residents—Koch lived there up until his death in 1963 while Reiniger remained until 1980—it is likely that other Abbey residents also came within their circle of influence. After Koch’s death, Reiniger retired from film making but continued lecturing at film festivals and workshops in Europe and Canada during the 1970s. Her tricktisch lay disassembled in parts in her room at the Abbey until early 1980, when the director of the Düsseldorf Stadtmuseum, Hartmut W. Redottėe, wrote to Reiniger and asked to purchase it for the museum. After agreeing on a price, he flew to England to oversee the table’s packaging and removal from the Abbey and while there, observing Reiniger’s sadness, spontaneously invited her to come to Düsseldorf and make a film on the table at the museum as part of an exhibition he was organising for that September. The result, Düsselchen und die vier Jahreszeiten (Düsselchen and the Four Seasons), would be her final film. Reiniger left the Abbey permanently that year, moving to Germany where she lived her final year with the Happ family at Dettanhausen, Tübingen. Sheridan Palmer Bibliography Lotte Reiniger, ‘Scissors Make Films’, Sight and Sound, vol. 5, no. 17, 1936, pp. 13–5. <a href="https://www.awn.com/animationworld/lotte-reiniger">William Moritz, ‘Lotte Reiniger’, Animation World Network, vol. 1, no. 3, 1 June 1996 </a>(accessed June 2021). <a href="https://www.stadtmuseum-tuebingen.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Lotte-Reiniger.pdf">Alfred Happ, Lotte Reiniger: 1899–1981 Schöpferin Einer Neuen Silhouettenkunst, Tübingen: Kulturamt, 2004</a>. <a href="https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/lotte-reiniger/">Frances Guerin and Anke Mebold, ‘Lotte Reiniger’, in Women Film Pioneers Project, Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta (eds), New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016</a> (accessed June 2021). Whitney Grace, Lotte Reiniger: Pioneer of Film Animation, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2017. <a href="https://ff2media.com/blog/2020/09/09/lotte-reiniger-was-a-talented-and-inventive-pioneer-in-animation">Nicole Ackman, ‘Lotte Reiniger Was a Talented and Inventive Pioneer in Animation’, FF2 Media, 9 September 2020</a> (accessed June 2021). David Sterritt, ‘The Animated Adventures of Lotte Reiniger’, in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 37, no. 4, 2020, pp. 398–401. Photograph (i) Who owns the copyright of the photograph (as opposed to the artwork)? Do not use the © symbol here. Just state the name of the photo credit. e.g. Leonard Joel, Melbourne PLUS we need to credit the owner of the photo if the photo is in private ownership or part of an institutional repository. If part of an institutional collection, need to also include any identifiers (accession numbers etc). e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy Marcus Zikaras e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy State Library Victoria, H2008.142/4 No full stop at end. Lotte Reiniger working at a table outdoors in the garden of the Abbey Art Centre, c. 1952-63, courtesy Lotte Reiniger Estate Collection, Stadtmuseum Tübingen, Germany Date modified Date record modified: [day] [month] [year] 15 January 2026 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 131.000 Title A name given to the resource Lotte Reiniger (1899–1982) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Subject The topic of the resource Reiniger, Lotte, 1899–1982. Koch, Carl, 1892–1963. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Sheridan Palmer Relation A related resource <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/997">Carl Koch (1892–1963)</a> Abbey Art Centre animation animators Carl Koch Daryl Hill émigré artists fairy tales film German artists in England Jean Renoir Lotte Reiniger Louis Hagen Jr Peter King Primrose Productions shadow puppets Viviana Milroy William Ohly https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/b00c10d30634bef668eb1a43717facf3.jpg 6d0f97b95a8fffb29a17f08b4681d975 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abbey residents Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946–1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 21 May 1917 Birthplace Adelaide, South Australia, Australia Death Date [day] [month] [year] 17 July 1999 Place of death Full address is known; else city and country. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) artist (draughtsman), artist (printmaker), artist (painter) Biography Born in Adelaide to Marion Dove Wigley (née Dale) and Henry (Harry) Vandeleur Wigley, James Wigley’s father died in 1927 and the family thrown into financial stress. James’s maternal grandfather, James Ernest Dale, an Anglican priest, facilitated his attendance at Poultney Street School (later Poultney Grammar School) as a fee-exempt student. There Wigley befriended fellow student and future anthropologist Ronald Berndt. Both Wigley and Berndt disliked school and left at an early age—Berndt, at fourteen, to study bookkeeping and business correspondence, and Wigley, who dreamt of joining the circus, at fifteen (<a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen">James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman</a>, 1987, NLA). Their friendship, however, would prove important. Berndt’s father, a jeweller who collected Aboriginal artefacts, awakened an interest in Indigenous cultural material in both Berndt and Wigley, who began collecting from an early age (Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘<a href="https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_2_no2/papers/cluttering_up_the_department#nav">Cluttering up the department’, Ronald Berndt and the distribution of the University of Sydney ethnographic collection</a>’, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, September 2007). In 1937 Wigley enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Tynte Street, North Adelaide, where his Slade-trained art instructor, F. Millward Grey (1899–1957), considered drawing more important than painting, resulting in an emphasis on life classes and commercial art. While at art school, c. 1937-38, Wigley began to draw local Adelaide people as well as undertaking cartooning work under the nom de theatre of ‘Creigh’ (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article131989669">Fine work by students</a>’, News, Adelaide, 12 December 1939, p. 11). He was invited to take part in group exhibitions in Adelaide around this time, including the Royal Society of Arts where, in June 1937, he was shown alongside such established artists as Dorrit Black, Ivor Hele and Hans Heysen (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article74199371">Student Artist Invited to Exhibition</a>’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, 30 June 1937, p. 18). In February 1938, with the support of Heysen, Wigley held a private exhibition of his work at the Mount Lofty home of Mrs Mellis Napier (Heysen’s role in helping arrange the exhibition is recounted in ‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article47807945">Artist's studio among Aborigines</a>’, The Australian Women's Weekly, 23 September 1964, p. 13). An Adelaide arts commentator, signing themselves ‘Palette’, reported that ‘people from every part of Australia saw the potentialities of this young South Australian, and eagerly bought up what was shown’ (Palette, ‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article131902287">Young S.A. Artist in Sydney Studio. James Wigley’s Prospects</a>’, The News, Adelaide, 17 February 1938, p. 8). The same commentator described Wigley’s work as ‘a compound of that of the late Will Dyson and the Englishman Stanley Spencer’ and the artist as a ‘sensitive shy dreamer’ ‘of whom great things are expected’. Shortly afterwards Wigley moved to Sydney and took a studio on George Street in the city. At the end of the year, in November 1938, he joined a group of young contemporary artists exhibiting at Preece’s Gallery in Adelaide. His co-exhibitors were Mary Elizabeth Bell, Dora Cant, Nora Young, Geoffrey Francis, J. Rosemund Stokes and his future wife Molly Burden. One reviewer praised Wigley’s exhibit, Suburban Ladies, for its ‘delightful balance between irony and gentle satire, somewhat in the manner of Daumier’ (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article36593434">Students Show Courage and Promise</a>’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, 18 November 1938, p. 9). In 1939 he saw Keith Murdoch’s Herald exhibition of French and British modern art when it began its touring itinerary in August at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). However, with his Slade-influenced training and its emphasis on drawing, painting remained a mystery. Moreover, the AGSA was ‘overweighed by British nineteenth-century art’ and held little to no appeal to the young student (<a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen">James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman</a>, 1987, NLA). With Ronald Berndt—who was then still untrained in anthropology—Wigley spent time at Murray Bridge (76 km north of Adelaide) from November 1939 to February 1940. There he produced a series of sensitive portraits of Indigenous people (reproduced in Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt with John H. Stanton, A world that was: the Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia, Melbourne: MUP, 1993, plates 3, 4 and 10). This was Berndt’s ‘first anthropological field experience with living people’ (A world that was, 1993, p. 94) and Wigley’s first series in which Indigenous Australians took centre place. After the outbreak of war, Wigley enlisted in the 2nd Survey Regiment R.A.A.(M) at Southwark, South Australia, in August 1940 (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=6275724">series B884, WIGLEY James, service number V110218</a>). Barely two months later, on 8 October 1940, he married Molly Burden at St Columba’s, Hawthorn, Adelaide, and left shortly afterwards for Melbourne—then considered the place for figurative artists (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article55760524">Artists to marry</a>’, The Mail, Adelaide, 5 October 1940, p. 10). They settled on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne at ‘the picturesque artists’ colony of Warrandyte’ (Palette, ‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article131432458">Local artist moves to colony in Victoria</a>’, The News, Adelaide, 8 February 1941, p. 2). In Melbourne Wigley began meeting painters such as Albert Tucker, who lived in an old flat in Powlett Street, East Melbourne, with Joy Hester—a vital person who, in Wigley’s opinion, was overshadowed by Tucker. Photographs by Tucker of <a href="http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1cl35st/SLV_VOYAGER1812325">James Wigley</a> and <a href="http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1cl35st/SLV_VOYAGER1812244">Molly Wigley</a> from this period exist in the State Library Victoria. Through Tucker they met Yosl Bergner, Danila Vassilief, John and Sunday Reed, and the Koornong School people at Warrandyte. Molly taught at the Koornong school and James found work there as a maintenance man. Vassillief taught blacksmithing and building; he was then constructing his own home Stonygrad. The Wigleys rented a little cottage from Connie Smith who had bought Penleigh Boyd’s studio, where she held open house parties for actors and artists. When Sidney Nolan came up to Warrandyte to meet Adrian Lawlor, Wigley found Nolan aloof. Wigley’s mother, Dove, also moved from West Croydon, Adelaide, to Warrandyte and rented another small cottage from Connie Smith. Wigley joined the newly formed Victorian branch of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), where he met and befriended Noel Counihan, but he was never affected by the factionalism raging within the society. He met Vic O’Connor at Gino Nibbi’s Leonardo Art shop, thereby forming friendships with the Melbourne social realists. In December 1942 Wigley contributed three works to <a href="http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1cl35st/SLV_ROSETTAIE2423585">The Contemporary Art Society of Australia Anti-Fascist Exhibition</a> at the Athenaeum Gallery. He attended the George Bell school once but didn’t fit in due, he said, to his ‘Slade school’ training in Adelaide; he also felt ‘swamped’ by the expressionists Percival, Boyd and Vassilieff (<a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen">James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman</a>, 1987, NLA). He found a studio in Brunswick and discovered the importance of books, especially Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky—‘a heady mix for the dark times’ (<a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen">James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman</a>, 1987, NLA). In April 1941 Wigley enlisted in an army survey regiment at Noble Park racecourse, a unit that made relief maps and model planes used in training officers. Camp training was at Balcombe and Watsonia. In 1942–3 he applied unsuccessfully for the post of Official War artist. In 1943, just after his son Julian was born, Wigley was transferred to Sydney. The waiting around ‘in mobs’ to be sent here or there wore him down and he went AWOL, for which he was fined, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in October 1943. He was sent to Caufield where the records state: ‘Discharged NOT on account of Misconduct/or Discreditable Service’, but because he was ‘considered unsuitable for any further military service’. He was formally discharged 23 November 1943 with five days’ pay (National Archives of Australia, Canberra, <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=6275724">series B884, Wigley James, service number V110218</a>). Back in Warrandyte the Viennese émigré architect Fritz Janeba designed for James and Molly Wigley The Stone House (1943), with Australia’s first butterfly roof (Philip Goad, ‘‘Austria in Australia’: Fritz and Kathe Janeba in Warrandyte’, in Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: transforming education through art, design and architecture, Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2019, p. 226). Janeba also designed the Dove and Bill Wigley House, for James’s mother and brother, just down the hill, in 1948 (Wynne Scott, ‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2981835728">Planned economy</a>’, The Australian Home Beautiful, July 1949, pp. 34-5, 37). According to Wigley’s second wife, Eugenie Knox, both houses were built with Molly’s money (Eugenie Knox, Indelible Memories: Into the mouth of the tiger!, 2010, p. 75). Marion Dove Wigley would remain at Warrandyte until her death, aged 94, in 1984. In late 1945, at the invitation of Ronald Berndt, Wigley travelled to the Northern Territory and spent several months at Daly River where A.P. Elkin had sent Ronald and Catherine Berndt to work as liaison and welfare officers for Vestey Brothers while researching labour conditions on Vestey’s cattle stations (Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘<a href="https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_2_no2/papers/cluttering_up_the_department#nav">Cluttering up the department’, Ronald Berndt and the distribution of the University of Sydney ethnographic collection</a>’, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, September 2007). Berndt thought Wigley should come and see ‘the real Australia, the real subject’, and, like ‘two outcasts’—the artist and the anthropologist—they settled amongst a group of white ‘combos’ (‘whitefellas gone native’) who had taken up land and employed Indigenous people from mixed tribes (<a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen">James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman</a>, 1987, NLA). More officially, Berndt advised E.W.P. Chinnery, director of the Northern Territory Native Affairs Branch, that Wigley would collect and document ‘examples of native art—such as drawings, basket work and other handcrafts (these of course will go to the Dept. Anthropology, together with series of his own drawings). Also he is to act as an observer, so that later his work should form a basis for our own’ (Ronald Berndt, letter to E.W.P. Chinnery, 28 October 1945, Chinnery Papers, National Library of Australia, MS 766, cited in Geoffrey Gray, ‘“He has not followed the usual sequence”: Ronald M. Berndt’s Secrets’, Journal of Historical Biography, no. 16, Autumn 2014, p. 70). While Berndt lobbied Vestey’s to improve their workers’ labour conditions, Wigley sat around the camp sketching and absorbing the vitality of the Aborigines in their own environment. He found the experience wonderful but said that the Aborigines ‘can disappear in front of your eyes if they want to, [and] you cannot see the landscape through their eyes’ (<a href="NLA,%20https%3A//nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen">James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman</a>, 1987). Wigley found it hard to convince the old men, who had been initiated, to talk; ‘they don’t care much for us’, he said. In Darwin, which was still occupied by the military, he found racism rife but during this period he produced hundreds of drawings of outback camp life. On his return to Melbourne, Wigley attended the National Gallery art school for two years, funded through the Commonweath Rehabilitation Training Scheme, c. 1946-48. William Dargie, who was then head of the school, had his special students and didn’t bother about the ‘expressionists’ who had moved to the basement. He reportedly ‘tried to sack Wigley on the grounds he had been a practicing artist before the war’, but Wigley stayed on for the duration of the course (Philip Jones, ‘Painter found inspiration among the oppressed’, The Australian, Sydney, 29 July 1999, p. 9). Wanting to digest his Northern Territory experience, Wigley joined the students in the basement where he and Yosl Bergner painted the dispossessed. In May 1947 Wigley held his first solo exhibition at the Velasquez Galleries at Tye’s (later known as Tye’s Gallery) in Melbourne. Sir John Barry QC opened it and was photographed at the opening with Wigley and Bill Onus, president of the Australian Aborigines League (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article206022137)">Aboriginal Life</a>’, The Age, Melbourne, 7 May 1947, p. 2. The work, nearly all drawn from his experiences at Daly River, and comprising both paintings and drawings, sold well and was critically acclaimed (Clive Turnbull, ‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article245584229">Social value in artist’s work on Aborigines</a>’, The Herald, Melbourne, 5 May 1947, p. 14). A few months later he exhibited Tobacco Hand-Out with the Studio of Realist Art (SORA) at the David Jones Gallery in Sydney, but the exhibited was disparaged by the Sydney critics (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article18040299">Exhibition by Studio of Realist Art</a>’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 August 1947, p. 7). With the proceeds of the Velasquez Galleries exhibition he accepted Yosl Bergner’s invitation to travel to Paris with himself and his sister, the dancer <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/possessed-with-a-passion-for-the-art-of-dance-20210808-p58gwd.html">Ruth Bergner (1917–2021)</a>. Wigley had by then begun an affair with Ruth, which would continue sporadically throughout his two marriages and indeed for the remainder of his life (<a href="http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1o9hq1f/SLV_VOYAGER3239429)">Rhonda Senbergs’ 1990 slide photograph</a> of the pair—with only Wigley identified—is now in the State Library Victoria). They sailed via Perth, Colombo and Aden to Marseilles (Julian Wigley interview, 2 July 2020), possibly on the Orient Line ship, The Tidewater, which departed Melbourne in late January 1948 (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article206875721">Shipping</a>’, The Age, Melbourne, 12 January 1948, p. 6). Ruth sailed separately on the Stratheden under her married name, Blima Pilley (having married in 1942 CAS member George Pilley, who would later marry Erica McGilchrist), arriving at Tilbury Docks, London, on 30 December 1947, and giving as her intended destination an address in Paris. Wigley found Paris magical, even after the German occupation, ‘full of bullet holes and flowers’ (<a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen">James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman</a>, 1987, NLA). The three lived frugally in the Marais, which even after the war remained the Jewish quarter. One of Wigley’s letters home was addressed from the Hotel d’Anvers, 11 Rue des Quatre-Fils (Wigley family collection), while Counihan described Yosl and Ruth Bergner living ‘in a humble hotel in the Jewish quarter’ (<a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=12213862">Noel Counihan to Pat Counihan, 24 April 1949</a>, Canberra: National Archives of Australia: A6119, 179/REFERENCE COPY pages 153-155 of 206). Wigley gave English lessons and attended life classes at the Académie Julian and the Atelier Fernand Léger, in the 18th Arrondissement, but found these packed with American and British students. He visited the Louvre often, as well as Delacroix’s house and Rodin’s garden, and felt he could have stayed in Paris forever. While in Paris he briefly rendezvoused with artist friends from Melbourne; Max Newton would later tell a reporter from The Argus that in Paris ‘there was a reunion between [Grahame] King and [Max] Newton from Italy, [Peter] Graham and [Doug] Green from London, [James] Wigley and [Yosl] Bergner from Marseilles, and Dot and Laurie Phillips from London’ (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article22781141">Melbourne Artist On World Tour</a>’, The Argus, Melbourne, 24 September 1949, p. 12). This was most likely in October 1948, when King and Newton returned from Italy. Towards the end of the year Wigley exhibited with Yosl Bergner at the Galerie Gentilhommiere (67 Boulevard Raspail), where just one work sold. They drank the proceeds. However, French critics noticed the exhibition; Wigley sent the clippings home to his mother Dove on 22 December 1948 (Wigley family collection). Bergner had by then met up with former National Gallery School student Audrey Keller, with whom he travelled to New York and Montreal in 1950 before returning to Paris, where they married, and thence onto Israel, where they settled. In early 1949 Wigley flew to London to meet Molly and Julian, who had arrived on The Straithaird on the 16th January. King, Newton, Graham and Green—the so-called ‘bush boys’—had probably told Wigley of the Abbey Art Centre, when they had met in Paris the previous year. By March 6th the Wigleys were living at the Abbey in a large room in the main house, with plans to travel to Paris then Italy the next month (letter from James Wigley to his mother, 6 March 1949, Wigley family collection). The family were in Paris in mid-April (Julian recalls seeing the shop windows decorated for Easter), but Italy never transpired—possibly owing to the difficulties of travelling with their five-year-old son. On returning to the Abbey, Wigley rented Inge King’s studio while she, in turn, spent six months in Paris from April to September 1949 (Inge King, conversation with Jane Eckett, 19 June 2012). Julian, who attended a nearby school, remembers there was a travellers’ camp in the field next to the Abbey. He also recalls the kitchen and dining room at the Abbey, with its large table and many chairs, where communal meals were had, as well as talk of poltergeists and paintings coming off the walls and down the stairs (Julian Wigley, ‘<a href="https://www.wigley.com.au/the-abbey/">The Abbey</a>’, 17 May 2019; and Julian Wigley interview, 2 July 2020). In the garden he played in the thatched roofed huts with Bienchen Ohly, who was two years older. However, by October 1949 Molly and Julian had left the Abbey and were living at 8 Hampstead Grove. They set sail for Melbourne on The Otranto on 20 October 1949. Wigley was back in Paris by February 1950, which is when his French identity card was stamped (Wigley family collection), but soon returned to London with Ruth Bergner. Together they lived in a half-bombed shop in Whitechapel. Wigley took rough jobs at factories and as a dishwasher at the Lyons Corner House café on Coventry Street, Piccadilly, where the German-born artist Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) also worked. Wigley greatly admired Frankfurther’s work. They shared a common feeling for the working class and the socially marginalised, as reflected in their respective studies of the Lyons staff, who hailed from all corners of the British Commonwealth (see Sarah MacDougall, Ben Uri Gallery, <a href="https://evafrankfurther.benuricollection.org.uk/lyons.php">catalogue of Frankfurther’s Lyons Corner House series</a>). Wigley also painted the patrons of various Jewish teashops in Whitechapel and several scenes inside the Grey Eagle Pub at 52 Grey Eagle Street in the Spitalfields. His final known address in London was 47 Quaker Street, which was directly opposite the Grey Eagle (UK and Ireland, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960, record for James Vandeleur Wigley, 1952). He and Bergner (who travelled under her married name Ruth Blima Pilley) both returned to Melbourne in February 1952 on board the P&O Steamship Mooltan. A small collection of Frankfurther’s work, entrusted to them, was destroyed on the voyage; Wigley blamed himself for not having packed them more securely. In Melbourne he lived for a time with Molly and Julian at Warrandyte. Wigley found Melbourne like ‘an outback town—a ramshackle culture, a sort of thinness after the deep ingrained history of Paris and London’ (<a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen">James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman</a>, 1987, NLA). He was unable to settle down and in late 1952 or early 1953 left for north Queensland, where he stopped en route at an artists’ camp outside Cairns. He wanted to look at the bush again, but only got as far as Port Douglas, where he produced the cane cutters’ series. Again, he found racism rife. He was living in Port Douglas in February 1953, when ‘Mr and Mrs James Wigley, of Port Douglas’, were reported to be holidaying in Brisbane, and still there in April, when ‘Mr James Wigley, of Port Douglas, was in Mossman’, a short distance inland from Port Douglas, for a couple of days (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article62478584">Southern Letter</a>’, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 19 February 1953, p. 6, and ‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article42785121">Mossman Notes</a>’, Cairns Post, 4 April 1953, p. 8). Later that year he returned to Melbourne and lived with Ruth Bergner, visiting Molly and Julian at weekends. Wigley joined with his old social realist comrades Noel Counihan and Vic O'Connor for a joint exhibition at Tye’s Gallery in October 1953, showing mainly Paris and London subjects. Despite the emergning Cold War politics, when social realism was deemed suspect in the United States, in Melbourne they were critically well received. Alan McCulloch described the work as romantic and perceived Wigley’s close identification with his subjects: the downtrodden slum dweller and tavern customer (Alan McCulloch, '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article245029657">Theme of realism has variety</a>', The Herald, Melbourne, 6 October 1953, illus. p. 14). Similarly, The Age art critic, Arthur Vollens Cook, found ‘James Wigley’s studies of the boisterous vulgarity of life in London slums … keenly observed and, on occasions, brilliantly interpreted’ and commended the absence of ‘propaganda’ (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article206462922">Painting outgrows politics</a>’, The Age, Melbourne, 6 October 1953, p. 2). The same critic later recalled the exhibition as one of the most important shows of the year in Melbourne (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article206917591">In the world of art</a>’, The Age, Melbourne, 26 December 1953, p. 14). Wigley’s alliance with Counihan was reflected the following year when Counihan showed his portrait of Wigley in an exhibition of drawings at the Peter Bray Gallery, alongside another of Albert Namatjira (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article205711768">Art Notes</a>’, The Age, Melbourne, 24 March 1954, p. 2). Aside from painting, Wigley worked as a wood machinist for a year, and as a temporary teacher at South Melbourne Technical School but resigned after a year. He also worked with Hymie Slade, making puppet heads for theatre and television (Julian Wigley, ‘<a href="https://wigley.com.au/jim-wigley-at-work/">Jim Wigley at work</a>’, 16 April 2016). Molly sold the Stone House at Warrandyte and moved to Erin Street, Richmond, where Wigley stayed. Visitors during this period included Brian Fitzpatrick, Peter Miller, David Armfield, James Flett and Vancer Palmer. By 1955, however, his marriage to Molly had ended. He was then working closely with Ruth Bergner, who, throughout the 1950s, was teaching, performing and choreographing for the Melbourne Ballet Guild. Bergner’s ballet, The Wedding, inspired by a painting of Breughel’s, premiered in 1956, with stage decor designed by Wigley ('<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article71654013">[Melbourne Ballet Guild...]</a>', The Argus, Melbourne, 25 August 1956, p. 13), and Wigley designed the sets and décor for the Jewish ballet, Bontche Shvaig, choreographed by Bergner and performed at the Kadimah in St Kilda in 1955 (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article262441041">”SKIF”: Concert “with a difference”</a>’, The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 4 November 1955, p. 9). In 1957 Wigley wrote to Don McLeod who, in 1946, had helped organise 800 Aborigines to walk out on strike from the pastoral stations at Port Hedland and Marble Bay regions of the Pilbara, demanding higher wages. McLeod had been arrested for inciting unrest. This struck a deep chord with Wigley, who held serious concerns about racism and oppression. By 1955 Pindan Pty Ltd, an Aboriginal-owned mining co-operative, had been established with McLeod’s help. In December 1957 Wigley travelled north-west to the Pilbara, where McLeod sent him to help mine beryl at Roebourne and work with the Pindan people on the coast, helping construct fibreglass boats for their pearling operations (Bain Attwood and Anne Scrimgeour, '<a href="https://www.pilbarastrike.org/content/timeline">Timeline</a>', The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike, website, Melbourne: Monash University, 2018). Wigley’s drawings of the Pindan people, made during the three months he camped with them, formed the basis of a series of oils that would be exhibited with Counihan and his social realist associates in Moscow and Prague in 1960 and 1962, and comprised his first solo exhibition with Australian Galleries, Melbourne, in July 1959. Tam and Anne Purves of the Australian Galleries began showing Wigley’s work in 1957, in their first anniversary exhibition, and successfully promoted it particularly among their corporate clientele. One of Wigley’s Queensland paintings, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/942">Burning Cane</a>, c. 1958, entered the ICI collection after Daryl Lindsay selected it from Australian Galleries for the chemicals industry giant; the same work had also been awarded first prize by Eric Westbrook in the May Day exhibition that Counihan had helped organise at Melbourne’s Town Hall in 1958. The 1959 exhibition was a commercial success and heralded a fruitful decade with Australian Galleries, with a further three solo shows to follow. In June 1960 Wigley’s painting <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/936">Refugees</a> was chosen for the front cover of the gallery’s gala fundraising event, an Exhibition of Australian Art by Victorian, Interstate and Expatriate Artists for World Refugee Year. Three years later, when the Purves were asked to assemble the <a href="https://collection.maas.museum/object/415264#&gid=1&pid=8">Viscount Collection</a> of work by seven leading Australian artists, for tobacco manufacturers Godfrey Phillips International to present to the six state galleries and nascent National Gallery, Wigley was selected alongside Arthur Boyd, Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan, John Olsen, Albert Tucker, and Fred Williams. His inclusion drew criticism from some quarters, but the event created considerable publicity and Godfrey Phillips presented his <a href="https://collection.artgallery.wa.gov.au/objects/1148/government-reserve-roebourne">Government Reserve, Roebourne</a>, 1963 to the Art Gallery of Western Australia (for a full account, see Caroline Field, Australian Galleries: The Purves Family Business, The First Four Decades 1956-1999, Collingwood, Vic.: Australian Galleries, 2019, pp. 97, 103-8). In March 1961 Wigley married the nineteen-year-old dancer Eugenie Knox (known as Janie), protégé of Ruth Bergner and daughter of Eltham landscape architect Alistair Knox, at the Melbourne Registry Office. For the next six months they lived with Don McLeod’s mob at Port Hedland—Wigley sketching by day and Janie teaching English and reading and writing. They returned to Melbourne for the birth of their first daughter, Jasmine, living in a bungalow at the back of the Knox property (see ‘<a href="http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1o9hq1f/SLV_VOYAGER1782047">James Wigley and his wife and baby daughter</a>’, c. 1962, Herald and Weekly Times Limited portrait collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne, H38849/4915). Christabel was born the following year. In July 1963 the young family left Melbourne, driving north in a jeep with a custom-built caravan to Queensland via Mount Isa then on to Broome and Port Hedland, where they stayed in a broken-down station. Janie and the children flew home and by 1964 the marriage had ended. Ruth Bergner, who had left for New York in 1964, to join her father, returned to Sydney in 1967. Wigley met her in Sydney and they lived together in Glebe from 1967-8. However, he found it hard to break into the Sydney scene and they both soon returned to Melbourne. In 1969 a letter from Don McLeod, who was ill, prompted Wigley to again return to Port Hedland. There he became closely involved with the McLeod-led Aboriginal workers' co-operative, Nomads Pty Ltd, which purchased Strelley sheep station and lobbied for federal funding to build there a school and suitable housing for teachers. His son, Julian, joined him in 1973 and designed ‘experimental homes’ for the group (Julian J. Wigley, <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/35377277">Report to the Australian Nomads Research Foundation on the proposed experimental homes for the nomad group of Aborigines</a>, [North Melbourne, Vic.]: Australian Nomads Research Foundation, September 1973). The Strelley Community School opened at Port Hedland in 1976. Still in existence, it is the oldest continually operative independent Aboriginal community school in Australia. Wigley established a literature centre at the Strelley school, installing an offset press on which he printed books that he designed and illustrated. They were written in Nyangumarta with English alongside (for a sample, see <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3625226">Original illustrations by James Wigley for Waljamarri Marrngu</a>, 1977, and other books [picture] / James Wigley, National Library of Australia, Canberra). Wigley returned to Melbourne in 1979, ‘to digest, reflect and paint again’ (James Wigley: Survey 1936–1992, Richmond, Vic.: Niagara Galleries, 1992, p. [2]). His first wife Molly died that same year [check]. While in Melbourne, in January 1980, Cyclone Amy hit Port Hedland and destroyed much of the Strelley settlement (‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article137008816">Settlement ‘shattered’ by cyclone</a>’, The Canberra Times, 16 January 1980, p. 11). Wigley lost his caravan and all his belongings including sketchbooks and many paintings. He never returned. In Melbourne he resumed painting and began pulling his own prints on an Enjay printing press he had installed in his home studio in Elwood. Rachell Howley organised his first retrospective exhibition at Acland Street Galleries in St Kilda (June 1981). He was included in two major group shows: <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/22109521">Aspects of Australian Figurative Painting, 1942–1962: Dreams, Fears and Desires</a> at the S.H. Erwin Gallery for the Fifth Biennale of Sydney (1984) and <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/18296417%20">Art and Social Commitment: An End to the City of Dreams 1931–1948</a>, which toured all state galleries (1984–5). Throughout the 1980s he exhibited successfully with Niagara Galleries, in Richmond, and in 1992 had a large survey exhibition there. Wigley died in Melbourne in 1999. Sheridan Palmer and Jane Eckett 9 August 2021 Bibliography Wigley mobilisation papers, 1940-43: Canberra: National Archives of Australia, <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=6275724">B884, V110218</a>. John Hetherington, ‘James Wigley: City Painter Found His Destiny Outback’, The Age, Melbourne, 30 June 1962, p. 18. ‘<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article47807945">Artist’s studio among Aborigines</a>’, The Australian Women's Weekly, 23 September 1964, p. 13. <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3625226">Original illustrations by James Wigley for Waljamarri Marrngu</a>, 1977, and other books [picture] / James Wigley, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Christine Dixon and Terry Smith, <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/22109521">Aspects of Australian Figurative Painting, 1942–1962: Dreams, Fears and Desires</a>, Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney in association with the Biennale of Sydney, 1984. Charles Merewether, <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/18296417%20">Art and Social Commitment: An End to the City of Dreams 1931–1948</a>, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1984, pp. 113, 130, 158-9, 165. <a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen">James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman</a>, 22-23 September 1987, c. 303 minutes, National Library of Australia, 1987. James Wigley: Survey 1936–1992, Richmond, Vic.: Niagara Galleries, 1992. Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt with John H. Stanton, A world that was: the Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993, plates 3, 4 and 10. Philip Jones, ‘Painter found inspiration among the oppressed’, The Australian, Sydney, 29 July 1999, p. 9. Geoffrey Gray, ‘<a href="https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_2_no2/papers/cluttering_up_the_department#nav">‘Cluttering up the department’, Ronald Berndt and the distribution of the University of Sydney ethnographic collection</a>’, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, September 2007. Eugenie Knox, Indelible memories: into the mouth of the tiger!, Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris Corporation, 2010. Geoffrey Gray, ‘“He has not followed the usual sequence”: Ronald M. Berndt’s Secrets’, Journal of Historical Biography, no. 16, Autumn 2014, pp. 61-92. Julian Wigley, ‘<a href="https://www.wigley.com.au/4748-2/">Me and Danila</a>’, 30 March 2016, (accessed 1 May 2021). Julian Wigley, ‘<a href="https://wigley.com.au/jim-wigley-at-work/">Jim Wigley at work</a>’, 16 April 2016, (accessed 1 May 2021). Julian Wigley, ‘<a href="https://www.wigley.com.au/the-abbey/">The Abbey</a>’, 17 May 2019 (accessed 1 May 2021). Caroline Field, Australian Galleries: The Purves Family Business, The First Four Decades 1956-1999, Collingwood, Vic.: Australian Galleries, 2019, pp. 87-9, 97, 103-8. Julian Wigley correspondence with Sheridan Palmer, June 2020. Julian Wigley interview with Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer, 2 July 2020. Date submitted Date object first catalogued: [day] [month] [year] 9 August 2021 Photograph (i) Who owns the copyright of the photograph (as opposed to the artwork)? Do not use the © symbol here. Just state the name of the photo credit. e.g. Leonard Joel, Melbourne PLUS we need to credit the owner of the photo if the photo is in private ownership or part of an institutional repository. If part of an institutional collection, need to also include any identifiers (accession numbers etc). e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy Marcus Zikaras e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy State Library Victoria, H2008.142/4 No full stop at end. Passport photograph from James Wigley's 1950 Paris Carte Valable (family collection) Date modified Date record modified: [day] [month] [year] 2 May 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 143.0000 Title A name given to the resource James Vandeluer Wigley (1917–1999) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Subject The topic of the resource Wigley, James, 1918-1999. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Sheridan Palmer and Jane Eckett Abbey Art Centre Aboriginal people Académie Julian Adelaide artists Albert Tucker Australian Galleries ballet Daly River Danila Vassilief Don McLeod Eugenie Knox Eva Frankfurther Fernand Léger Fritz Janeba indigenous Australians Julian Wigley Koornong School Millward Grey Molly Burden Murray Bridge National Gallery School Noel Counihan Northern Territory Paris Pilbara strikes Port Douglas Port Hedland Ronald Berndt Ruth Bergner social realism social realist painting South Australia Strelley Community School Tye’s Gallery Velasquez Gallery Vestey Brothers Vic O'Connor Viscount Collection Warrandyte Western Australia Yosl Bergner Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abbey residents Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946–1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) author, historian, research assistant, translator Date submitted Date object first catalogued: [day] [month] [year] 10 August 2021 Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 3 March 1915 Birthplace Streatham Hill, London, England, UK Death Date [day] [month] [year] January 1989 Place of death Full address is known; else city and country. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Bibliography Bernard Smith, A Pavane For Another Time, South Yarra, Vic.: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2002, pp. 11–5, 27. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 103.0000 Title A name given to the resource Kate Beatrice Hartley Challis (1915–1989) (also known as Ruth Adeney and Kate Smith) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett Relation A related resource <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/590">Bernard William Smith (1916–2011)</a> https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/501888c3bccb88d985e8559c4a56c6e0.jpg 2d023b1dceeb1c2176ca2d3868933b3f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abbey residents Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946–1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 5 March 1921 Birthplace Ballarat, Victoria, Australia Death Date [day] [month] [year] 2002 Place of death Full address is known; else city and country. Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) painter, draughstman Date submitted Date object first catalogued: [day] [month] [year] 10 August 2021 Photograph (i) Who owns the copyright of the photograph (as opposed to the artwork)? Do not use the © symbol here. Just state the name of the photo credit. e.g. Leonard Joel, Melbourne PLUS we need to credit the owner of the photo if the photo is in private ownership or part of an institutional repository. If part of an institutional collection, need to also include any identifiers (accession numbers etc). e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy Marcus Zikaras e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy State Library Victoria, H2008.142/4 No full stop at end. Douglas Green in Inge King's room at the Abbey Art Centre, with Grahame King's artworks on the wall, 1950; photo attributed to Picture Post, courtesy the artist's estate Date modified Date record modified: [day] [month] [year] 14 March 2023 Biography Douglas Allan Green studied at the Melbourne Technical College (MTC, later renamed RMIT) under watercolourist John Rowell (1894–1973) and printmaker Murray Griffin before WW2. Green worked as a cartographer in the AIF during World War 2. In March 1941, at age 20, he enlisted at Royal Park in the AHQ (Army Headquarters) Cartographic Company. His occupation was given as commercial artist and he had by then completed six years of study at the 'School of Applied Art' [Working Man's College, Melbourne, now RMIT, 1937–41]. Throughout 1941 he was in camp in Melbourne and Caulfield. In December that year he was transferred the 2/1 Corps Field Survey Company and sent to Echuca, on the New South Wales border. He was back in Melbourne in January, before being transferred in April 1942 north to Darwin. He arrived two months after the Japanese first bombed Darwin in the largest single air raid in Australia's history and was present during subsequent smaller air raids on Darwin including that of 16 June 1942, when ships in Darwin Harbour were destroyed. Leaving Darwin in June 1943, he was initially sent south to New South Wales before joining the 2nd/1st Australian Army Topographical Survey Company in Queensland in September 1943. For fifteen months he was stationed in north Queensland. Portrait sketches of Indigenous people from Atherton and a VADs nurse near Kuranda exist from this time. With the Topographical Survey Company he sailed in December 1944 on the SS Jean-Pierre Chouteau from Townsville to Hollandia, near Jayapura, in what was then known as Dutch New Guinea (now Papua, Indonesia). A series of sketches from the army camp at Lake Sentani, near Jayapura, exist from this time and are in the collections of AWM and MAGNT. Promoted to the rank of Corporal, he transferred in June 1945 to the 1st Australian Mobile Lithographic Section at Morotai. As Charles Green later wrote: 'Along with a group of other young Australian artists, he moved from island to island with General McArthur’s command, just behind the front line, making the maps each night that bombers used next day' (artist's statement, Gagprojects, Kent Town, South Australia, 2010). After eight months in Papua New Guinea he was flown to Manila, for two months, just after the US had liberated the Philippine capital. In October 1945 he returned by plane to Melbourne, where he joined the Design Division in East Malvern. There he met fellow artist Grahame King, with whom he would later share a studio at the Abbey and travel with through England and France. He was discharged from the army in April 1946. Back in Melbourne, he studied under George Bell, 1946–47, and enrolled at the National Gallery School with the returned serviceman’s stipend that assisted many artist-returned soldiers into art schools at that time. At the completion of that Diploma, during which he shared studios with John Brack, he entered and won the famous Murdoch Travelling Fellowship; this was very controversial since Melbourne’s realist/tonalist community was enraged (the other finalist was tonalist AME Bale). Green’s winning work was the first modernist painting to win this award; it reflected both his close study of worked in the NGV collection, and in particular the recently acquired unfinished large painting by Veronese. Green departed Melbourne 10 June 1948 on the Fort Cologne, a cargo boat operated by McIlwraith McEacharn Ltd. One of the partners in the firm, the Scotsman Captain Neil McEacharn, had a substantial collection of Australian modern art (notably the work of Dobel), amassed during the war. Green carried a letter of introduction to McEacharn and would later visit McEacharn at his renowned Villa Taranto, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, with his wife Helen in 1950, a short stay at which McEacharn’s friend, painter Donald Friend, was also present, working on a commission to document the flowering of a rare plant for the magnate. In London he settled at the Abbey Art Centre, where his Melbourne friends Max Newton, Grahame King, and Peter Graham were already resident. From mid-1948 until 1950 he studied under Bernard Meninsky at the London City Council School of Arts and Crafts (later called the Central School of Arts and Crafts). In his travels across ruined Europe, accompanied by different friends, he encountered the great Romanesque cathedrals of France and Italy, which had a transformative and galvanising effect on him. He was also deeply affected by his encounters with Irish modernist Gerard Dillon, whom he and Helen visited in Ireland. He maintained close friendships with several artists from The Abbey circle, including artists who were not resident but whose stay in London coincided with his, for the rest of his life, including the Kings, Grahame and Inge, and Michael Shannon (who he had met around the time of his National Gallery studies), and Peter Graham. On returning to Australia, the Greens moved into Helen’s parent’s beachouse at 2 Newington Lane, Chelsea (a then completely undeveloped string of semi-isolated beach-shacks) and he worked in advertising and design, in a partnership with Grahame King. During this period he was commissioned to create a mosaic for a new, modernist church in Balwyn. When the new Bonbeach High School opened in 1957 [or 1958?], he decided to retrain as a secondary school teacher. First he needed to upgrade his qualifications, so he gained his Diploma of Art at RMIT in 1960 with a folio of drawings completed at RMIT as well as a group of new paintings he had commenced in 1959 including the Schoolyard painting now in the NGV collection. He joined the Victorian Education Department as a part-time art teacher at the new Bonbeach High School (c. 1957/58), where Helen Green was already working fulltime (she gained her teaching qualifications after graduating with an Honours degree at Melbourne University during wartime; she worked in small rural schools up until she sailed to the UK to join Douglas; when she returned to teaching in the later 1950s, Douglas became the carer for their three young children). Later solo exhibitions include Meditations on a blue-gum (coloured pen drawings, Murphy Street Print Room, South Yarra, Vic., 8–24 April 1975), marking his return to an intensive studio practice. He exhibited twice at the legendary Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond, introduced to gallerist Bruce Pollard by his son Charles Green, an exhibiting artist at the gallery; these shows were The Ten Thousand Heavenly Clouds, or Sunset and the You Yangs: watercolours by Douglas Green, Pinacotheca, Richmond, Vic., 22–28 June 1986 (a tribute to framer Les Hawkins, who loaned Green his books on JMW Turner just the day before his death; these paintings in an elongated horizontal scroll format drew on close observation of the sunset skies throughout the year from his Chelsea residence, which he had recently moved from at the time of the Pinacotheca show); and A Solstice Cycle: The Ten Thousand Heavenly Clouds & The Ten Thousand Earthly Trees, Pinacotheca, Richmond, Vic., 14 June – 1 July 1989 (a series of twelve gouache vertical scroll-like works on paper, each representing a different month of the year, and each taking as its motif Mount Alexander and its foothills observed from the outskirts of Castlemaine, where he had recently settled after his wife Helen retired; they had been resident in Bendigo from 1977 to 1985). The Lyttleton Gallery, North Melbourne, held a survey of his early works from the 1940s and 1950s, including war time works on paper and postwar travel observations, in 1994. Green also took part in several group shows, particularly at the Castlemaine Art Gallery including their 9x5 Centenary Exhibition (5–27 August 1989) and then at the Ballarat Regional Art Gallery, for Ten Regional Artists(13 October – 3 November 1991). He was awarded the Dominique Segan Drawing Prize at the Castlemaine Art Gallery in the 1990s. Bibliography Canberra: National Archives of Australia, service record for GREEN DOUGLAS ALLAN : Service Number - VX66819 : Date of birth - 05 Mar 1921 : Place of birth - BALLARAT VIC : Place of enlistment - ROYAL PARK VIC : Next of Kin - GREEN BERT. Douglas Green: oil paintings and works on paper from 1942 to 1962, North Melbourne: Lyttleton Gallery, 30 July –18 August 1994. Christopher Heathcote, 'A post-war rebel without a cause', The Age, Melbourne, 3 August 1994, p. 22; Christopher Heathcote, A Quiet Revolution: The Rise of Australian Art 1946–1968, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1995, pp. 10–12, plate 1. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 117.0000 Title A name given to the resource Douglas Allan Green (1921–2002) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Charles Green https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/76ac37bc237475c034037317decb1a94.jpg 3a60ad99bd3489170887a3d1e0659ea4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abbey residents Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946–1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 27 May 1925 Birthplace Vienna, Austria Death Date [day] [month] [year] 21 June 1988 Place of death Full address is known; else city and country. St Mary's Hospital, Praed St, Westminster, London W2 1NY, England Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) painter, muralist, printmaker, art teacher Date submitted Date object first catalogued: [day] [month] [year] 10 August 2021 Photograph (i) Who owns the copyright of the photograph (as opposed to the artwork)? Do not use the © symbol here. Just state the name of the photo credit. e.g. Leonard Joel, Melbourne PLUS we need to credit the owner of the photo if the photo is in private ownership or part of an institutional repository. If part of an institutional collection, need to also include any identifiers (accession numbers etc). e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy Marcus Zikaras e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy State Library Victoria, H2008.142/4 No full stop at end. Helen Grünwald in the Abbey Cottage, c. 1950, attributed to Picture Post, private collection, England Date modified Date record modified: [day] [month] [year] 28 January 2026 Biography Helen Mary Therese Grunwald was born in Vienna, as Helene Lillith Grunwald, and educated there at the Rudolf Steiner School. Her father, Robert Grunwald (1896–1951), was a concert violinist who reputedly worked with Bertolt Brecht, though would later give his occupation variously as teacher and writer, while her mother, Lillian Gladys Grunwald (1901–1982), ran a nursery school in Vienna and was later a kindergarten teacher in London (see <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiajoTK-Ij4AhXc9zgGHRW7BKwQFnoECBcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegazette.co.uk%2FLondon%2Fissue%2F38541%2Fpage%2F873%2Fdata.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0YOfCC8eUzdtYt6xsgDnqt">‘Naturalisation: Grunwald, Helene Lillith’, The London Gazette, no. 38541, 18 February 1949, p. 873</a>; <a href="https://ajr.org.uk/search-journal/?journal_exact_search=Yes&swpquery=&journal_year=1982&journal_month=04&submit=search">‘Obituary: Lillian Gladys Grunwald’, ARJ Information, Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain, vol. XXXVII, no. 4, April 1982, p. 10</a>). In July 1939 Grunwald and her parents fled Vienna for Britain. Robert and Lillian Grunwald found temporary employment as wardens at ‘Loxleigh’—a hostel at Ilkley in West Yorkshire established by local Quakers and the Ilkley Committee of Jewish Refugees to accommodate teenaged boys arriving on the Kindertransport (see Caroline Brown, Ilkley at War, Cheltenham, UK: The History Press, 2006). Helen, then fourteen years of age, was billeted some twenty-seven kilometres away with a family by the name of Dickonson at 20 Kensington Terrace, Leeds (The National Archives, UK, 1939 Register, reference RG 101/3458A and RG 101/3670J). Her parents faced internment trials in October 1939 and, despite being initially exempted, were soon afterwards interned when the national policy towards ‘enemy aliens’ was tightened. Robert Grunwald was released from internment (location unknown) in September 1940 while his wife Lillian was released from the Isle of Man in February 1941 (The National Archives, UK, WW2 Internees (Aliens) Index Cards 1939–1947, reference HO 396/175). Lillian’s address prior to internment was given as 50 Northfield Road, N16, indicating the family had moved to Stoke Newington, in North London, by early 1940. From 1941 to 1944 Helen Grunwald studied full-time at Beckenham School of Art, initially under official war artist <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/henry-carr-ra">Henry Carr RA RP RBA</a> (1894–1970) before he was deployed to Algeria and Italy in 1942. Grunwald obtained her senior drawing certificate from the Kent Education Committee in May 1943 and proceeded to the Slade but did not continue owing to war conditions. Throughout the second half of the 1940s she continued to paint, whenever possible, from her parents’ lodgings at 11 Fairfax Road, NW6 (Swiss Cottage), exhibiting in group shows at the Leicester Galleries, Leger’s, the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA) and the Artists International Association (AIA). From September 1945 to August 1948, she worked for a firm of religious art publishers—Pax House in Westminster—painting plaster saints. Despite her Jewish origins, Grunwald was, according to family friend Käthe Deutsch, ‘a passionate Christian, [and] an almost mystical believer’ (communication with the author, 2 June 2022). Certainly, Christian subjects were in evidence as early as 1946. When Grunwald’s Descent from the cross was exhibited, alongside the work of Mona Moore, a twenty-year-old Bryan Robertson—future curator of the Whitechapel Gallery—commended it as being ‘subdued in feeling and colour, full of thoughtful painting, well conceived and executed’ (Bryan Robertson, ‘The Younger British Artists’, The Studio, vol. 131, no. 636, March 1946, p. 75). The same painting was soon afterwards incorporated into a war memorial at St Andrew’s parish church in Croydon, where it was inscribed ‘A tribute to the fortitude of my people from 1940–1945’ (‘St. Andrew’s Memorial unveiled by Sir Ernest Cowell’, Croydon Times, London, 16 November 1946, p. 5). The work's present whereabouts are unknown (email from Lesley Carr, St Andrew's Church administrator, 17 June 2022). Sir Kenneth Clark first saw her work at an AIA exhibition at Pall Mall, in 1945, and commented favourably. Clark’s comments were conveyed to Grunwald some three years later by <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/carel-weight-ra">Carel Weight CH CBE RA</a> (1908–1997), in response to which Grunwald wrote to Clark on 10 May 1948—the first in a four decades’ long correspondence now preserved among Clark’s papers in the Tate Gallery Archives (TGA). Grunwald’s meticulously hand-written letters and Clark’s duplicate typescript replies reveal Clark’s willingness to assist a relatively unknown artist as he repeatedly provided letters of recommendation for Grunwald, assisting her whenever possible and occasionally purchasing her work. Indeed, on Clark’s first visit to Grunwald’s Fairfax Road studio, on 19 May 1948, he purchased her painting Victoria Station. Grunwald held her first solo exhibition at <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/485">William Ohly’s</a> Berkeley Galleries, Mayfair, in July 1948. The modest exhibition comprised ten ‘atmospheric paintings of London’ (Our Time, vol. 7, no. 1 [or vol. 8, no. 14?], July 1948, p. 165) including Victoria Station, which Clark loaned for the occasion, and ‘quite a number of drawings’ (Grunwald to Clark, 27 June 1948, TGA 8812.1.2.2679). Ohly wrote to Clark, while the exhibition was on view, to ask his advice about Grunwald whom he believed was ‘very talented’, adding, ‘I should very much like to discuss with you what possibilities there would be to help this young lady, and to enable her to leave the factory work she is doing’ (Ohly to Clarke, 23 July 1948, TGA 8812/1/2/4847). This ‘factory work’ was the painting of plaster saints, which Grunwald found ‘uncongenial’, admitting to a loss of self-respect ‘working at this wretched job’ (Grunwald to Clark, 10 May 1948, and 27 June 1948, TGA, 8812.1.2.2675 and 2679). The exhibition was, in Grunwald’s view, ‘rather a success’, with the sale of ‘quite a number of paintings and drawings, which was a pleasant surprise’ (Grunwald to Clark, 1 August 1948, TGA, 8812.1.2.2681). The exhibition at the Berkeley Galleries led to Grunwald moving soon afterwards to the Abbey Art Centre. A fortnight after the exhibition closed, Clark wrote to Grunwald: ‘Someone told me that you are working in Mr. Ohly’s monastery at Barnet, which I hope is true’ (Clark to Grunwald, 25 August 1948, TGA 8812.1.2.2682/1). The letter, however, was addressed to Fairfax Road, suggesting Grunwald may have initially only worked in a studio at the Abbey rather than taking up living quarters. By November 1948, when Grunwald applied for admission to the Royal College of Art (RCA), she gave her address for correspondence as that of the Abbey’s—89 Park Road, New Barnet, Herts (Helen Grunwald student file, registration forms, RCA, 26 November 1948). At the same time, Ohly again wrote to Clark that ‘Miss Grünewald [sic] is now at the Abbey & I hope she will be doing some good work’ (Ohly to Clark, 24 November 1948, TGA 8812/1/2/4848). The move, however, seems not to have been permanent for the following year she was back ‘in lodgings’ at 11 Fairfax Road (Helen Grunwald student file, registration forms, RCA, 29 September 1949), though in December 1949 she was listed among the Abbey’s residents in the electoral register (Electoral register record for 89 Park Road, Barnet East, London, 20 November 1949, London Metropolitan Archives). <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG223949">Alice Mary Fitzpayne</a>, who first met Grunwald when sitting the RCA entrance exams, in February 1949, believes Grunwald only moved permanently to the Abbey after her father’s death in 1951 (correspondence from Alice Mary Fitzpayne, 22 March 2021). Nevertheless, Grunwald was evidently in residence in mid-1950, as was her newly arrived schoolfriend from Vienna, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1007">Angela Varga</a>, when, at Grunwald’s invitation, Clark visited them both at the Abbey on 26 May 1950 (Clark to Ohly, 18 May 1950, TGA 8812/1/2/4850). A love of baroque music attracted her to choirs and orchestras, which she regularly sketched in rehearsal. In August 1948 she attended the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, where, in addition to sketching during performances of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, she drew portraits of such renowned composers and musicians as Sir Ivor Atkins (1869–1953), Zoltan Kádaly (1882–1967), Sir George Dyson (1883–1964) and Edmund Rubbra (1901–1986) as well as painting a portrait of contralto Kathleen Ferrier CBE (1912–1953), who gave her two sittings (Grunwald to Clark, 18 September 1948, TGA 8812/1/2/2684). Grunwald held a second exhibition at the Berkeley Galleries in May 1949. This time she showed thirty-five paintings, all made at the Abbey over the previous six months (Grunwald to Clarke, 16 May 1949, TGA 8812/1/2/2687) and described on the invitation as ‘Impressions and paintings of London: The churches, markets, life of the city’. In addition to her work, visitors to the gallery that month could also see that of Swiss dramatist, painter, and illustrator <a href="https://www.zhdk.ch/en/researchproject/estate-georgette-boner-426796">Georgette Boner</a> (1903–1998), who exhibited her illustrations to the Chinese classic, Monkey (which she also transcribed into German), sculptor <a href="https://www.redfern-gallery.com/artists/70-george-kennethson/biography/">Arthur Mackenzie</a> (who later changed his name to George Kennethson, 1910–1994), and drawings by German émigré <a href="https://www.cosmankellertrust.org/milein-cosman/milein-cosman-centenary-2021/">Milein Cosman</a> (who had attended the same Swiss school as Ohly’s son Ernest during the war). The combined invitation to all four shows billed Grunwald and Cosman as ‘Two Young Artists of Promise’ being ‘presented’ by the Abbey Art Centre (despite Cosman not being an Abbey resident). A quote from one of Clark’s references for Grunwald was used on the invitation: ‘Thoughtful and independent. A remarkable combination of the poetical and the concrete’ (see <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1080">Invitation to four exhibitions at the Berkeley Galleries, London: Georgette Boner, Milein Cosman, Helen Grunwald, and Arthur Mackenzie, opening 6 May 1949</a>). The exhibition was a success, with Clark purchasing from it several more works of Grunwald’s and Eric Newton personally congratulating her (as conveyed by Grunwald to Clark, 24 May 1949, TGA 8812/1/2/2688/2). In July 1949 Ohly included Grunwald in a group exhibition at the Berkley Galleries, this time alongside several Abbey residents: <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/636">James Gleeson</a>, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/897">Peter Graham</a>, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/993">Grahame King</a>, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/586">Robert Klippel</a>, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1002">Max Newton</a>, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1008">Mary Webb</a>, and Inge Winter (who would become <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/994">Inge King</a> the following year); see ‘<a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/589">Exhibition of small paintings & sculpture during July, Berkeley Galleries, 20 Davies St, London, July [1949]</a>’). In addition to these Australian expatriates from the Abbey, the exhibition included the usual eclectic array of cosmopolitan émigré and refugee artists such as Karin Jonzen, Uli Nimptsch, Anthony Levett Prinsep, and Fred Uhlman, as well as Belfast-man Gerard Dillon, and sculptor Henry Moore, whose work effectively underwrote the risk of showing lesser-known artists from central Europe and the former British dominions. Grunwald sat the three-day entrance exams for admission to the RCA in February 1949 and commenced the Diploma course in September 1949, with the hope that the course would qualify her to teach art therapy. Over the preceding summer she doubted the financial feasibility of studying, writing to Clark she might need to stop painting and instead take up work with the Land Army (‘I prefer cows to chimney pots + smoke’), but a special scholarship from the College was arranged, putting an end to this drastic move (Grunwald to Clark, 24 May 1949, TGA 8812/1/2/2688/2). Clark also supported her applications to various local authorities for financial assistance; one reference from him described Grunwald as an artist of ‘exceptional promise’ who had surmounted ‘a number of very serious difficulties in order to keep on with her painting’, showing herself to be ‘conscientious, determined and independent’, and noting that while her painting was occasionally uneven, with ‘wooliness of handling’, this was compensated for by ‘real quality and imagination’ (Clark, reference for Grunwald, 17 October 1949, TGA 8812/1/2/2692). Carel Weight, who had first encouraged Grunwald to apply, in late-1948, oversaw her three-year course of studies. Comments (presumably Weight’s) on her student record include: ‘produces interesting work on a very small scale’ and ‘interesting personal work’ (RCA, Progress reports during college course, Special Collections, RCA, 1950/51 and 1951/52). Grunwald confided in Alice Mary Fitzpayne, whom she first met at the RCA, ‘that she felt sure she was to be as fine an artist as Rembrandt, or, if that was not the case, she would have 20 children!’ For her part, Fitzpayne acknowledged Grunwald’s ‘tremendous artistic gifts’ while also recalling an occasion when Sir Kenneth Clark was about to give a talk to the RCA students and Grunwald ‘appeared in front of him with a board she had prepared for him, the paint glistening with oily wetness, he attempting to receive the present without getting his hands and clothes covered in oil paint’ (Alice Mary Fitzpayne, London, written responses, March 2021). She also recalled Grunwald had always ‘yearned for an artistic circle’ and ‘the Abbey Art Centre certainly fulfilled this need’. Grunwald was joined at the Abbey in early 1950 by her Viennese schoolfriend: fellow artist <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1007">Angela Varga</a> (whose sister Kate Varga was then working in England as a nurse; Kate would later marry Abbey sculptor <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/589">Peter King</a>, whom she met at the Abbey). In March that year, Clark’s secretary gave Grunwald and Varga a private tour of his collection, Clark being away at the time. Writing to thank him for the privilege, Grunwald invited Clark to the Abbey: ‘I don’t think you have ever been to the Art Centre, and I don’t think it would be wasting your time if you could manage to come and see everything out here. The place itself is quite fascinating, so it would not merely mean bothering you on account of my work. The Abbey is not a very great distance from Hampstead [where Clark lived, at Upper Terrace House], so I hope I am not suggesting something impossible. Incidentally, there are other “Artists at work” here, whose work might interest you, so I am very much hoping you would care to come’ (Grunwald to Clark, 24 May 1949, TGA 8812/1/2/2693). A second letter followed, asking him specifically to view the work of Angela Varga, who ‘only narrowly escaped being transported by the Nazis during the war’; Varga was due to return to Vienna in June, and Grunwald hoped Clark might write a reference for her to support her return to England to study at ‘one of the London Schools of Art, or possibly, the Slade’ (Grunwald to Clark, 24 May 1949, TGA 8812/1/2/2696). Clark accepted Grunwald’s invitation, writing in advance to Ohly that ‘Miss Grunwald is very anxious for me to see the work of a girl named Angela Varga, who is a student at the Abbey’ and proposing a mutually convenient date (Clark to Ohly, 18 May 1950, TGA 8812/1/2/4850). The visit eventuated in the late afternoon of 26 May 1950. Ohly introduced Clark to the Abbey’s residents, including <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/985">Alan Davie</a> (whose jewellery Clark saw, and was impressed with, but whose paintings he had not time to see), and new arrivals <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/590">Bernard Smith</a> and <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/981">Kate Smith</a>, later apologising ‘for introducing so many people but they would have been so disappointed’ (Ohly to Clark, 6 June 1950, TGA 8812/1/2/4852, and Davie to Clark, 10 January 1951, TGA 8812/1/2/1730). Clark soon afterwards provided the much-needed reference for ‘Miss Weiss-Varga’, commenting to Grunwald that ‘it must be lovely for you to find someone with a talent so akin to your own, because, although there are naturally differences in your work, the vision and sympathies are very much the same’ (Clark to Grunwald, 30 May 1950, TGA 8812/1/2/2698). A week later, Varga was accepted at the Slade (Grunwald to Clark, 7 June 1949, TGA 8812/1/2/2699) and by mid-October had returned to the Abbey to embark on her studies at the Slade. Grunwald holidayed in France in the summer of 1950, writing afterwards to Clark: ‘I have been to France and since then my colour has lightened, and I hope there is an improvement generally. I may exhibit a number of works in December’ (Grunwald to Clark, 16 October 1950, TGA 8812/1/2/2700). Clark was in Italy for much of 1951, but on his return to London at the end of the year invited Grunwald and Varga to bring ‘some specimens’ of their recent work to his home in Hampstead (Clark to Grunwald, 17 December 1951, TGA 8812/1/2/2705). As a result of the visit, Clark purchased two small works of Varga’s: 'Paris Meat Market [which] was marked 12 gns at the Exhibition’ and The Fish, which were not priced at all but for Grunwald suggested 4 or 5 guineas given its small size (Grunwald to Clark, 5 January 1951 [sic, should be 1952], TGA 8812/1/2/2707, and Clark to Grunwald, 16 January 1952, TGA 8812/1/2/2708). Grunwald’s father Robert died in October 1951. At the time of Robert’s death, Grunwald’s parents were living a short walk south of the Abbey Art Centre at 18 Bohun Road, East Barnet. Grunwald’s mother Lillian now joined Helen at the Abbey. Whether Lillian continued teaching at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Jewish Kindergarten (attached to the synagogue in Norrice Lea, Lyttlelton Road, N2), which she had assisted Miriam Bornstein in establishing in 1949, is unknown (‘Hampstead Garden Synagogue. Jewish Kindergarten Opened’, The Jewish Chronicle, London, 20 May 1949, p. 20; ‘Naturalisation: Lillian Gladys Grunwald', The London Gazette, no. 40232, 16 July 1954, p. 4166, both articles courtesy Ben Uri Research Unit / BURU). However, by May 1952 Grunwald confided in Clark that her mother was in ‘a mental home’, suffering from a nervous breakdown, adding that the experience of looking after her mother during the upheavals of her mother’s ‘frequent illness’ had led Grunwald to consider a career in art therapy (Grunwald to Clark, 19 May 1952 and 23 June 1952, TGA 8812/1/2/2708/1 and 8812/1/2/2709). In the lead-up to her RCA Diploma Exhibition, 9–15 June 1952, Grunwald warned Clark that ‘it is rather a “restrained” output, for although I feel I have learned a great deal [about] drawing and constructive thinking, I have not been influenced by “modern” trends of thought or technique’ (Grunwald to Clark, 19 May 1952, TGA 8812/1/2/2708/1). She graduated ARCA Diploma in Painting in 1952 with a disappointing ‘Pass’ (the grading of Diplomas as first, second and pass being then a recent development). Grunwald again wrote to Clark: chagrined that her work should have been hung in college exhibitions and even awarded (with two other students) a drawing prize, yet the ‘the spirit of my work was not altogether pleasing to some of the people concerned in this matter’. She reported that Carel Weight tried to intercede on her behalf but had advised her it was ‘not sufficiently colourful and “modern”’ (Grunwald to Clark, 23 June 1952, TGA 8812/1/2/2709). Clark responded sympathetically and pragmatically: writing he was ‘more than ever shocked that you did not receive a higher diploma’, purchasing another of her works for £25, and offering advice re the massing of light and dark areas in a way that the subject can be easily grasped—suggesting she look to Sickert in this regard (Clark to Grunwald, 10 July 1952, TGA 8812/1/2/2710). Grunwald spent that summer working at a National Union of Students (NUS) camp at Catfield, Norfolk, picking fruit and sketching landscapes in her spare time, afterwards painting landscapes at Essex and Suffolk (Grunwald to Clark, 17 July 1952 and 22 August 1952, TGA 8812/1/2/2711 and 8812/1/2/2713). She commenced teaching in February 1953, initially at a private school—possibly Ashby Secondary Modern Girls’ School at Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, for which Clark agreed to supply a written reference while hoping she would secure a more sympathetic post (Clark to Grunwald, 17 December 1952, TGA 8812/1/2/2717). After six months she moved, in September 1953, to Fort Pitt Technical School at Chatham in Kent, where she found the art department facilities to be excellent though she struggled to find sufficient time to paint (Grunwald to Clark, 22 November 1953, TGA 8812/1/2/2718). During the 1960s and 1970s Grunwald taught art at Paddington and Maida Vale High School (originally an all-girls school, it amalgamated with North Paddington School in 1972 to become the mixed-sex Paddington School; see T F T Baker, Diane K Bolton and Patricia E C Croot, ‘Paddington: Education’, in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 9, Hampstead, Paddington, ed. C R Elrington (London, 1989), pp. 265-271. <a href="http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol9/pp265-271">British History Online</a>). There her students included the future Turner Prize winner <a href="https://lubainahimid.uk/">Lubaina Himid</a> (information from Louise Shalev née Gordon via Monica Bohm-Duchen, 11 May 2022). Among the many student exhibitions that she organised for the school was People to People, ‘which set out to create mutual understanding and interest among different peoples’ (‘People to People Art’, Marylebone Mercury, London, 1 December 1967, p. 4). While she later referred to this aspect of her work as ‘the dreaded teaching’, she appreciated its ‘beneficial side — simplifying ideas, formulating and observing things which one had perhaps neglected as a student’ (Grunwald to Clark, 11 October 1976, TGA 8812/1/3/1235/1). She remained as art mistress at Paddington School until the late 1970s. In addition to teaching, Grunwald also painted murals. An extension to St Thomas of Canterbury Church in Canterbury, Kent, in 1963, saw the construction of a new chapel on the north side of the church, for which Grunwald received her first major commission. The Canterbury Saints depicts Christ surrounded by a dozen saints, including St Augustine of Canterbury (founder of the Christian church in southern England) and Pope Gregory, as well as nuns and monks, all set within a trompe l’oeil architectural structure. Grunwald later glimpsed her mural on television, which prompted her to think further about ‘the three fold unity of the sound, structure of building + drawing’ and resulted in a new series of work that she exhibited in 1975 (Grunwald to Clark, 10 March 1975, TGA 8812/1/3/1234). She also painted murals for the Americana club in Croydon, London, c. 1975 (as mentioned briefly in The Stage and Television Today, 18 September 1975, p. 6). Helen and Lillian Grunwald eventually left the Abbey in the mid-1970s, moving to a flat at 48 Blomfield Road, Little Venice, where they remained for the rest of their lives (their presence at the Abbey as late as 1965 is documented in the London Metropolitan Archives, Electoral Registers, Barnet, England, LCC/PER/B/2986). They continued to live together until Lillian’s death in 1982. Mother and daughter shared many of the same interests, both becoming adherents of the esoteric philosophy group centred about George Gurdjieff (who died in Paris in 1949) and his London followers, particularly the group centred around the Jungian psychoanalyst Maurice Nicholl (1884–1953). Another friend of Grunwald's and Fitzpayne's, also associated with the Nicholl group, was Dorothy King who headed the South London Art Gallery. Mary Alice Fitzpayne sketched Helen and Lillian performing what she referred to as ‘Grecian’ dancing, in long robes, to the sounds of an accompanying gramaphone; the sketches remain in Fitzpayne’s possession. The dancing was likely inspired by Gurdjieff's 'sacred movements' or Rudolf Steiner's 'Eurythy', which is taught at Waldorf schools worldwide. Lillian died in January 1982; Helen would survive her by only six years (General Register Office, UK, vol. 15, pp. 1479, 2323). Grunwald’s love of music—particularly Bach—drew her to the Tilford Choir and Orchestra, which she regularly sketched throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. In June 1975 she exhibited these pen and ink sketches along with large, abstracted paintings in the porch and baptistry of St George’s Church, Hanover Square, W1, coinciding with the Tilford Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra’s third annual week of Bach in London (Janet Watts, ‘Colouring Bach’, The Guardian, 25 June 1975, p. 11, article courtesy BURU). She also executed a number of what she termed ‘decorations’ for the Tilford Bach Choir, which were used, for instance, for their 1976–77 season program. Clark thought them ‘beautifully drawn, but … You are best at drawings of living people, like the Orchestra, and the Tilford Bach Choir, and they do not gain by being made into decorations’, suggesting again she consider going into book illustration (Clark to Grunwald, 14 October 1976, TGA, 8812.1.3.1236). She again exhibited at St George’s, Hanover Square, for the third London Handel Festival (27 April to 4 May 1980). In the month before the exhibition, Sir Ernst Grombrich visited Grunwald at her Blomfield Road studio to inspect the work—about which he had agreed to write for the festival program. Grunwald reported Gombrich’s visit to Clark: ‘Sir Ernst says Ruskin would have liked my work—& that I could do stained glass design’ (Grunwald to Clark, 27 March 1980, TGA, 8812.1.3.1237). In May 1985 she exhibited new paintings and drawings under the title ‘Bach in Splendour’ at St Anne and St Agnes on Gresham Street in the city of London (The Times, London, 16 April 1985, p. 36). The canal-side scenes and streets of old houses around Little Venice became an increasing focus for her work in the 1970s and she became well-known in local artistic circles, even initiating ‘an experimental “group” about once every four weeks, when a few artists and musicians meet, to paint, or write together, or make music, or even just relax!’ (Grunwald to Fitzpayne, 8 October 1976, private collection). She also experimented with lithography and linocut printmaking at this time. In 1978 the Marylebone Local History Room acquired forty-two of drawings and lithographs of north Westminster scenes and exhibited them at Marylebone Library (Westminister City Libraries, Annual Report of the City Librarian, 1978-79, p. 7). In November 1980 she held a second exhibition of drawings of Marylebone, Mayfair and Paddington at Marylebone Library. Studies of old houses—including Handel’s home in Brock Street—were interspersed with market studies (Noreen Caffrey, ‘Historic scenes captured in local exhibition’, Marylebone Mercury, London, 28 November 1980, p. 11, illustrated). An exhibition in the visitor’s gallery of the Stock Exchange, in 1984, was titled Helen Mary Grunwald: the changing, changeless city; drawings, paintings, prints, indicating her preoccupations with her physical environs. A vignette drawing of the Saint Mary Magdalene Church, with canal boats moored in the foreground, near to her home in Blomfield Road, would constitute her personal letterhead in the 1980s. Her final major commission, received in 1985 and part-funded by Westminster Council, was to paint a series of Byzantine-style murals for the apse of a 130-year-old Russian Chapel at 32 Welbeck Street, Marylebone (‘A Russian Chapel in Marylebone’, Ecclesiological Society Newsletter, no. 16, April 1985, p. 11). The chapel had been unused for many years and the building’s then tenants, the Variety Club of Great Britain, who had applied without success to alter the building, accepted the council’s offer to meet half the cost of restoring the chapel. Grunwald’s commission formed part of the restoration process. Local newspapers compared Grunwald to Michelangelo, as she worked on scaffolding for six months to complete the work. ‘The main theme of the murals’, she initially told a reporter, ‘is healing the sick because Variety Club do a lot of charitable work in this field especially with children’ (Graham James, ‘Restored to glory’, Paddington Mercury, London, 24 January 1986, p. 24, illustrated). However, the Association of Jewish Refugees in Britain later reported that Grunwald chose the theme of human suffering and resurrection, with many parallels to Nazi persecution and racial intolerance, and a depiction of the gas chambers (<a href="https://ajr.org.uk/search-journal-index/?journal_exact_search=Yes&swpquery=&journal_year=1986&journal_month=12&submit=search">C.A. ‘Helen Grunwald's Murals’, ARJ Information, vol. XLI, no. 12, Dec 1986, p. 6</a>). When unveiled in mid-1986, the Variety Club reportedly ‘reacted in horror’, claiming Grunwald ‘had got carried away with her own enthusiasm’ and that the religious atmosphere was not ‘conducive to work’ (‘‘Niet, niet’, to work of art’, Marylebone Mercury, London, 14 August 1986, p. 1). Despite the work being praised by Canon David, Bishop of Norwich Cathedral and chairman of Art in Churches, the tenants erected screens to block the view of the murals, which were eventually painted over (Barlett School of Architecture, University College London, Survey of London: vols. 51 and 52, South-East Marylebone, London: UCL, 2017, chapter 14, p. 23 of draft version, check page ref for printed publication). Helen Grunwald died of a cerebral infarction and vasultis, 21 June 1988, aged 63, at St Mary's Hospital, Westminster (General Register Office, UK, 1988, vol. 15, p. 1479, and Death certificate, registered City of Wesminster, 14 June 1988, application no. 12179018/1, QBDAC 347492). She was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. Her will requested she be buried according to the rites of the Church of England, but with the service shared with a Catholic priest, a Buddhist, and a Rabbi. While she left no next-of-kin, she made generous provision for the care of her cat and left her flat to a friend, Miss Marjorie Wardle. The remainder of her estate was split between various named charities and her artworks sold. The final paragraph of her will read: "May religion cease to be a cause of division and may our trickle of endeavour and love penetrate the chemical waste land of inner and outer destruction and desolation" (information kindly supplied by Catherine Hill, The National Archives, Kew, 24 April 2023). Jane Eckett 31 May 2022 (updated 25 April 2023) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 118.0000 Title A name given to the resource Helen Grünwald ARCA (1925–1988) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/16a82990d5a715d298306ea8c3715d25.jpeg 52e51750cc92994e89bc64f500493ab6 https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/540f3119ff8b31cf918fbf14d9289ca6.png 0bb1aba2754de81e0e7e38b6a38a087d https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/9bb4eaf27aa7b5384e4822e5a1991471.jpg 67f1fbc7b4a03c935983ae60d63ae450 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abbey residents Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946–1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 3 January 1897 Birthplace Leipzig, Germany Death Date [day] [month] [year] 12 June 1972 Place of death Full address is known; else city and country. 17 Gerald Road, London SW1, England Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) sculptor, painter, printmaker, watercolourist Date submitted Date object first catalogued: [day] [month] [year] 10 August 2021 Bibliography Ernest Fooks, '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article263089836">Margret Kroch-Frishman Exhibition</a>', The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 17 August 1945, p. 7. Alan McCulloch, '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article965726">Art Exhibitions Reviewed ... Magaraet [sic] Kroch-Frishman</a>', The Argus, Melbourne, 21 August 1945, p. 4. '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article263090096">Margret Kroch-Frishman Exhibition</a>', The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 24 August 1945, p. 7 (including photograph of her portrait of violinist and cellist Issy Spivakovsky, exhibited at Kozminsky Galleries). Alan McCulloch, '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article22248792">Art Exhibitions Reviewed: Flower Paintings</a>', The Argus, Melbourne, 30 April 1946, p. 8. '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article261389884">Preview of Art Festival</a>', The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 11 June 1948, p. 8. F.F. [Frank Fitzgerald], '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article22552914">Exhibition of Jewish Art</a>', The Argus, Melbourne, 17 June 1948, p. 6. '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article22679848">The Life of Melbourne</a>', The Argus, Melbourne, 21 September 1948, p. 7. <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article279532623">George Bell, "Kroch-Frishman," The Sun News, Melbourne, 2 October 1948, p. 11.</a> '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article261377939">Mrs. Emmy Monash</a>' [obituary for Margret Kroch-Frishman's sister with family biographical detail], The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 6 January 1950, p. 3. '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article261418907">Family returned last week to Holland</a>', The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 16 March 1951, p. 2. Ann M. Mitchell, "Monasches and the Holocaust: Family Stories Part 1," <a href="https://collections.ajhs.com.au/Detail/objects/48620">Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, 22, 3 (2015):395-449/</a> Federica Frishman, unpublished notes on her husband Martin Julius Frishman (1932–2016), 8 August 2020. Date modified Date record modified: [day] [month] [year] 13 March 2026 Biography Margret Kroch, known to friends and family as Grete, was one of seven children born in Leipzig to Martin Samuel (Schmaryahu) Kroch (1853–1926) and Hermine Marion (Hendele) Kroch (née Risch, 1857–1929). The Krochs were a prominent Jewish family in Leipzig, Margret's grandfather being the renowned Talmudic scholar <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/kroch-jacob-leib-ben-shemaiah">Jankev Leib Kroch (1819–1898)</a>. She studied printmaking at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig under <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Tiemann">Walter Tiemann</a> followed by printmaking and painting at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts under <a href="https://www.lbi.org/griffinger/record/246958">Hans Meid</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Hofer">Karl Hofer</a>. There she also met <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Kokoschka">Oskar Kokoschka</a> and her future husband, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1345">Marcel Frishman</a>, who she married 10 August 1923. During her student years in Berlin, she reportedly supported herself by working as a trapeze artist at the Circus Busch (Federica Frishman, unpublished notes on her husband Martin Julius Frishman (1932–2016), 8 August 2020). She also began contributing illustrations to German periodicals including Die Dame, Berliner Illustrierte and Die Jugend. In 1933, with the advent of National Socialism, the Frishmans and their then one-year-old son Martin (born 19 July 1932) left Germany to work initially in Paris, then Copenhagen, and by 1934 Brussels, where they lived for a period at an arts centre for refugees at Berchem-Sainte-Agathe. In Brussels Marcel Frishman worked with <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/911">Lotte Reiniger</a> and <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/997">Carl Koch</a> on an animated film, Dream Circus (1936/37), inspired by Stravinsky’s Pulcinella though never finished owing to the outbreak of war. The Frishmans are believed to have later encouraged Reiniger and Koch to settle at the Abbey Art Centre. In 1938 the Belgian authorities rejected the Frishmans' visa renewal, compelling them to return to Berlin where they experienced the trauma of Kristallnacht in November 1938. Hastily assembling exit papers, they escaped Germany 48 hours later possibly through Switzerland where one of Margret's uncles lived and the Kroch family had long holidayed (see Anne M. Mitchell, "<a href="https://collections.ajhs.com.au/Detail/objects/53941">Monasches and the Holocaust: Family Stories Part 1</a>," Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, 22, 3 (2015), p. 402). Their exit was enabled through securing visas to Australia where they were sponsored by one of Margret's unmarried sisters, Fanny Louise (Liese) Kroch (National Archives of Australia: series <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=203366387&isAv=N">B4064, control symbol SCHEDULE 10/V271</a>). The Frishmans subsequently sailed from Toulon on the Orient Line RMS Ormonde, arriving in Fremantle on 25 April and disembarking in Melbourne on 1 May 1939 (see passenger arrivals list, National Archives of Australia: <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=12078256">series</a><a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=12078256"> K269, 25 APR 1939 ORMONDE</a>). Margret's registration papers give her occupation as photographer and her address on arrival as 1a Dickens Street, St Kilda (National Archives of Australia: series <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=4013462&isAv=N">B6531</a>, NATURALISED/1946 - 1947/POLISH/FRISHMAN MARGRET). This was an art-deco three-storey block of flats, known as "La Rochelle," built in 1936 to the design of W. H. Merritt (<a href="https://www.portphillip.vic.gov.au/media/hlilz4e2/10-7-attachment-2b-ho7-review-stage-2-rba-report-appendices-g-and-h.pdf">City of Port Phillip Heritage Review, draft report</a>). By the following year they had moved to nearby 108 Acland Street. The family changed the spelling of their surname from Frishmann to Frishman by deedpoll on 28 June 1939. In Melbourne they joined another of Margret's recently arrived sisters, Emilie (known as Emmy) Monash, who was also a painter and whose husband, Leipzig patents lawyer Dr Bertholde Monash, was a first cousin of the Australian WWI general <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Monash">Sir John Monash</a>. Bertholde Monash likewise sponsored many of his and his wife's family to come to Australia in 1938-39 (see Anne M. Mitchell, "Monasches and the Holocaust: Family Stories Part 1," <a href="https://collections.ajhs.com.au/Detail/objects/48620">Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, 22, 3 (2015):395-449</a>). The Frishmans soon established a photography business called Studio Marcel, working from their flat at 108 Acland Street in St Kilda. They offered not only commerical photographic services but also reproduction and "artistic colouring" services (see their <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article261414327">advertisement</a>, The Australian Jewish Herald, 17 October 1940, p. 9). Both Frishmans donated specimens of their photography to an exhibition held to raise funds for the Red Cross, showing alongside another noted Jewish photographer Athol Shmith (see H.S., "<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article261414984">For Red Cross: Exhibition of Photographs</a>," The Australian Jewish Herald, November 28 1940, p. 3). The exhibition toured to Sydney the following year (see "<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article247568458">Governor's Family All Keen Photographers</a>" The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 18 March 1941, p. 10), and Margret's work was mentioned as comprising "outdoor photographs" ("<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article231200880">Sue sees Sydney</a>," The Sun, Sydney, 17 March 1941, p. 7). Her <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-451317110">Head of an eagle</a>, exhibited at the Victorian Salon of Photography, was reproduced in The Australasian Photo-Review 48, no. 4 (April 1941): 128). Kroch-Frishman held her first solo exhibition in Melbourne in the basement of Kozminsky Galleries in December 1943. Opened by sculptor Ola Cohn, it comprised 16 paintings of Australian and French subjects, 4 sculptures, and 8 etchings and watercolours. The catalogue (held in the State Library of Victoria AAA file for Kroch-Frishman) reveals a range of subjects from landscapes in Elwood (including "Caenwood" of Tennyson Street, Elwood, which was then until recently the home of 103-year-old <a href="%20http%3A//nla.gov.au/nla.news-article245953138">Elizabeth Harriet Booth, whose death was reported in March that year</a>), Toulon and Provence, including Olive Trees (Provence), loaned by Mrs M. Kaufman (likely another Leipzig connection, Marianne Kaufman née Monasch), as well as still life compositions of flowers and numerous portraits, including those of Collins Street photographer <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/shmith-louis-athol-15802">Athol Shmith</a> and his sister <a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/13341/">Verna Lydia Shmith</a>. She also exhibited etchings and watercolours. The exhibition received mixed press. <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lawlor-adrian-7112">Adrian Lawlor</a> found the paintings suffered a little from too many different influences (Van Gogh, the Expressionists, and Bonnard), whereas the sculpture he found more traditional and "tasteful" (A. L. [Adrian Lawlor], "<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article245802838">Three Art Shows Open Tomorrow</a>," The Herald, Melbourne, 6 December 1943, p. 6), while <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/herbert-harold-brocklebank-6647">Harold Herbert</a> was not enamoured of the textures of either the paintings or the sculptures though admitted Frishman (as she was known) had "a full sense of design and composition" (Harold Herbert, "<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11791290">Art Exhibitions</a>," The Argus, Melbourne, p. 9). <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bell-george-frederick-henry-5192">George Bell</a> on the other hand was impressed, finding the work vital and demonstrating "a full command of form" (George Bell, "<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article279370708">Three Art Shows</a>," The Sun-News Pictorial, Melbourne, 7 December 1943, p. 11). In August 1945 Kroch-Frishman's second solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures at <a href="https://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/galleries/365/history/">Kozminsky Galleries</a> was opened by <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/chisholm-alan-rowland-12315">Professor of French A.R. Chisholm</a>. It was reviewed it in highly favourable terms by the eminent Viennese architect <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Fooks">Ernest Fooks</a>, whose comments indicate the range of exhibits: "Whatever subject chosen, be it the expressive face of the mature man, or the soft features of the child, the human body or a small Street in South Yarra, crabs, flowers, or the desolate remnants of human habitation, Mrs K.F. [sic] contrives to suggest their innermost meaning, and is not satisfied with imitating nature as such" (Dr Ernest Fooks, "<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article263089836">Margret Kroch-Frishman Exhibition</a>", The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 17 August 1945, p. 7). The exhibition included Kroch-Frishman's portrait of violinist and cellist <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/spivakovsky-jascha-11745">Issy Spivakovsky</a>, which was soon afterwards illustrated in the same journal ("<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article263090096">Margret Kroch-Frishman Exhibition</a>," The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 24 August 1945, p. 7). <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mcculloch-alan-mcleod-16351">Alan McCulloch</a> found the works "show the benefit of the artist's Continental background and training. She is at her best, I feel, in her sensitive and well designed drawings and well realised sculptures. Her watercolours also are fresh and vigorous, and more convincing than her oils, which, although capably painted, are sometimes a little too broad in treatment" (Alan McCulloch, '"<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article965726">Art Exhibitions Reviewed ... Magaraet [sic] Kroch-Frishman</a>", The Argus, Melbourne, 21 August 1945, p. 4). Kroch-Frishman also took part in several group exhibitions in Melbourne, including <a href="https://www.daao.org.au/bio/event/flower-paintings/">Flower Paintings by Well-Known Artists</a> at the Myer Gallery (May 1946) and a Jewish art festival (June 1948) where she again showed the portrait of Issy Spivakovsky. In August 1946 she also applied for copyright to two literary works, Conquerer and Fox Hunt, attesting to both her adeptness in writing in a new language and the breadth of her artistic skills (National Archives of Australia, series A1336, control symbol <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=4013462&isAv=N">43308</a> and <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=4013462&isAv=N">43309</a>). Both Frishmans applied to become naturalised British subjects in November 1946; this was granted in 1947 (NAA, series A715, <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=203366387&isAv=N">control symbol 9/3019</a>). In September 1948 Margret Kroch-Frishman held a joint show with Marcel Frishman at the Velasquez Gallery, where she was billed as a "Parisian painter and sculptor." Despite the couple's financial hardships (their property in Germany having been confiscated and sold by the Nazis), the proceeds from the sale of catalogues were donated to the Free Kindergarten Union. <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dale-john-5864">Dr John Dale</a> opened the exhibition, which included his portrait by Kroch-Frishman along with portraits of Professor Chisholm, <a href="https://find.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/61SLV_INST/1dukq3j/alma9919828633607636">John Yule</a>, and Barbara Hockey (later Prof. of Sociology, Barbara Hocky Kaplan), and 15 other paintings including landscapes. She also showed 4 watercolours (including Avoca Street and Port Fairy) and 6 sculptures, which, as the titles indicate, were all portraits, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._R._Rangachari">J.R. Rangachary (Indian Test Cricket Team)</a>, Mary Patterson, John Atisayam (possibly John Athisayam, who was then an Indian medical student in Melbourne and vice-president of the India Australia Society), Miss C. Tandler (possibly the same person of this name who sailed on the Ormonde from Naples to Melbourne in 1939), and "a young dancer". George Bell extolled the merits of the paintings as "virile statements in heavy impasto, of flowers and portraiture" with an "almost sculptural texture" that he found "agreeable in effect," and commended the portrait sculptures that demonstrated Kroch-Frishman's "feeling for form." (<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article279532623">George Bell, "Kroch-Frishman," The Sun News, Melbourne, 2 October 1948, p. 11</a>). Marcel Frishman showed 20 drawings in lithographic chalk of street scenes in Melbourne and France. Their son Martin Frishman was also mentioned in the review as having artistic inclinations and preparing to soon exhibit with his mother, though he later instead became an architect. Following the death of Emmy Monash (30 December 1949), the Frishmans returned to Europe sailing from Sydney in March 1951, bound for Holland, and arriving in Liverpool 9 April 1951. The decision to come to London possibly involved Erwin Fabian, a fellow Berliner, sculptor and printmaker who, as a so-called “enemy alien,” was deported from England in 1940 on the notoriously overcrowded Dunera and had befriended the Frishmans in Melbourne before returning to London in 1949. Fabian may have learnt of the Abbey through his close friend and fellow artist-internee Klaus Friedeberger, who befriended Oliffe Richmond after the war at the East Sydney Tech shortly before Richmond’s residency at the Abbey in 1948–49. The Frishmans may additionally have heard of the Abbey through fellow Jewish artist Yosl Bergner whose good friend James Wigley showed at Velasquez Galleries a year before the Frishmans and in 1949 lived at the Abbey with his wife and son, or through Max Newton or Grahame and Inge King who left the Abbey and were in Melbourne prior to the Frishmans’ departure. Further, they may have known of Ohly through Kokoschka or Wilczynski, the latter having studied in Leipzig and Berlin around the same time as the Frishmans and later a regular visitor at the Frishamans’ home in London. Regardless of the precise connection, the Frishmans’ journey to the Abbey was the most circuitous of all the Abbey’s residents. The Frishmans likely arrived at the Abbey Art Centre in 1951. By the end of 1951, Kroch-Frishman had begun exhibiting in London, showing two works at the <a href="https://www.benuricollection.org.uk/exhibition_downloads/5.pdf">Autumn Exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings by Contemporary Jewish Artists</a> at the Ben Uri Gallery (4 November - 2 December 1951): Drawbridge at Oudekerk (no. 27) and Forget-me-nots (no. 28). The following year, in December 1952, she was included in an <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/545">Exhibition of Work by Artists of the Abbey Art Centr</a>e, at William Ohly's Berkeley Galleries. Her lithographed portrait of Black American contralto Marian Anderson was illustrated on the invitation and in <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1082">an accompanying review</a>. Marcel died at the Abbey on 28 December 1952. Some time later, Kroch-Frishman moved with her son Martin to 17 Gerald Road, Belgravia, where, according to the <a href="https://www.buru.org.uk/contributor/margret-krochfrishman">BURU</a>, "regular notable guests included historian Eric Hobsbawm, composer Thea Musgrave, painters Peter de Francia and <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1009">Katerina Wilczynski</a>, as well as writers Jakov Lind and John Berger and designer Yolanda Sonnabend, among others." She later moved to Steeles Road, Belsize Park, in 1968. In 1956 Kroch-Frishman held a solo exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Marcel Bernhein (the long-running dealers in Impressionist art), while in 1957 she showed three works at the third and final Australian Artists' Association exhibition, held at the Imperial Institute, London, alongside Erwin Fabian. The two exhibitions demonstrated the breadth of her transnational connections. Her exhibition of new etchings was held at The Everyman, Hampstead, in November to December 1960. The following year her work was included among nine contemporary British painters at Wildenstein Galleries, February 1961, the other exhibitors being Roderic Barrett, Brian Crouch, Geoffrey Genever, Roman Black, Garrick Palmer, Connie Fenn, Edward Wakeford, and the Duchess of Leeds (The Queen, London, 16/2/61, p. 6). Two further solo shows were held: at the Galerie André Weil, Paris, 18 September - 1 October 1963; and at Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester, 1967. She also exhibited alongside Italian late-Futurist painters at Galleria d'Arte Giraldo, Treviso, 1966. Editions Alecto published nine of her etchings in 1965. Examples of these are found in the Government Art Collection, UK. Jane Eckett 16 January 2026 Photograph (i) Who owns the copyright of the photograph (as opposed to the artwork)? Do not use the © symbol here. Just state the name of the photo credit. e.g. Leonard Joel, Melbourne PLUS we need to credit the owner of the photo if the photo is in private ownership or part of an institutional repository. If part of an institutional collection, need to also include any identifiers (accession numbers etc). e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy Marcus Zikaras e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy State Library Victoria, H2008.142/4 No full stop at end. Margret Kroch-Frishman, c. 1950s, courtesy the artist's estate. Photograph (ii) Who owns the copyright of the photograph (as opposed to the artwork)? Do not use the © symbol here. Just state the name of the photo credit. e.g. Leonard Joel, Melbourne PLUS we need to credit the owner of the photo if the photo is in private ownership or part of an institutional repository. If part of an institutional collection, need to also include any identifiers (accession numbers etc). e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy Marcus Zikaras e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy State Library Victoria, H2008.142/4 No full stop at end. Margret Kroch-Frishman, identity photograph accompanying her 1946 naturalisation application, Australia (National Archives of Australia, <a href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=6570821&isAv=N">series B6531, NATURALISED 1946 1947 POLISH FRISHMAN MARGRET</a>). Margret Kroch-Frishman in Berlin. Photograph courtesy the artist's estate, via the <a href="https://www.buru.org.uk/contributor/margret-krochfrishman">Ben Uri Research Unit</a>. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 126.0000 Title A name given to the resource Margret Kroch-Frishman (1897–1972) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Subject The topic of the resource Kroch-Frishman, Margret Relation A related resource <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1345">Marcel Frishman (1900–1952)</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/9871efd9f38b66c104dd8ac015f64850.tif 8acc6fdb7149e23b348824fb70594659 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abbey residents Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946–1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 14 March 1908 Birthplace Drumavally, Bellarena, Co. Londonderry, Northern Ireland Death Date [day] [month] [year] March 1996 Place of death Full address is known; else city and country. Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) painter, textile artist Bibliography Arnold Rüdlinger, Vieira da Silva, Phillip Martin, Helen Marshall, Bern, Switzerland: Kunsthalle Bern, 7 February – 8 March 1953. Alain Jouffroy, Helen Marshall, Phillip Martin: peintures, collages, gouaches, oeuvres jointes, 1950-1966, Brussels, Belgium: Palais des beaux-arts de Bruxelles, 14–26 April 1966. Nevill Drury, New art five: profiles in contemporary Australian art, Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House, 1991. Felicity St. John Moore, Classical modernism: the George Bell circle, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1992. Felicity St John Moore, 'Artist drew on innocent dreams [obituary of Helen Marshall]', The Australian, 24 April 1996, p. 10. Phillip Martin, unpublished synopsis of the life and career of Helen Marshall (1918–1996), two-page manuscript, c. 1996, Sydney: estate of Phillip Martin and Helen Marshall. Jane Eckett, '<a href="https://www.scribd.com/article/433885750/Helen-Marshall-Return-To-Beginning">Helen Marshall: Return to Beginning</a>', Artist Profile, no. 49, November 2019, pp. 136-9. Biography Born Helen Marshall Allen, in Drumavally, Magilligan, in the Bellarena district of Northern Ireland, she was the eldest of nine children born to Bessie and James Allen. Her mother hailed from Govan in Scotland while her father, some twenty years older, worked variously as a fisherman and stonemason. James Allen had three young children from a previous marriage, and he and Bessie also adopted two neighbouring children. Family stories credit the over-crowded household as being the chief reason for Marshall’s emigration in September 1926 to Australia, alone, at the age of eighteen, on the migrant ship the Baradine (though an aunt already in Melbourne probably encouraged the move). Two years later Marshall married Stephen Carlisle Walton, a sign-writer by trade, and with him had three children. Between 1928 and 1950 they lived at various addresses around Brighton and Blackrock along Port Phillip Bay. According to Phillip Martin’s unpublished notes, during these years, in addition to raising a family, she worked in landscape gardening and lectured in child psychology. In 1947, on Alan Warren’s recommendation, Marshall joined George Bell’s Sunday morning painting classes (Felicity St John Moore, 'Artist drew on innocent dreams', The Australian, 24 April 1996, p. 10). Her earliest extant works are three oils of gardens and coastal heathlands, dating to 1948-50, painted in an energetic post-impressionist mode (<a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/376">Our Back Garden</a>, 1948; <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/374">Blackrock Foreshore</a>, 1949; <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/375">Untitled (landscape with three trees and track)</a>, c. 1948-1950). In the catalogue to the exhibition Classical Modernism: The George Bell Circle, Felicity St John-Moore noted Marshall’s ‘conspicuous exuberance’ and ‘tendency towards personal expression’. Through the George Bell circle she befriended Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Danila Vassilieff (who reputedly referred to her as ‘my woman’) and Stacha Halpern with whom she worked on ceramics. She also regularly visited John and Sunday Reed at Heide. Marshall returned to Bellarena with her youngest child Stephen Walton (then aged two), sailing on the Otranto and arriving at London on 24 July 1950. She gave their intended address as her parents' address: Lenamore, Bellarena, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland. The trip precipitated a dramatic shift in her painting both in subject and style. Henceforth she channelled a child-like and deeply personal vision of cottages, farm implements, donkeys, birds, fish, boats, church spires and pagan shrines, painted with expressionistic vigour in rich hallucinatory colours. A handful of works from this visit, such as <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/287">Lennamore, Bellarena</a>, 1950, include a hand-cranked grinding stone that became a recurrent motif—a talismanic memory of her Northern Irish childhood. Soon afterwards Marshall arrived at the Abbey Art Centre, New Barnet, on London’s outskirts. There she met the young Tachiste painter, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1001">Phillip Martin</a>, who, with the encouragement of another Abbey resident, the Scottish painter <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/985">Alan Davie</a>, was then making small black and white monotypes, and dense gestural oils and collages. No works from her time at the Abbey have been traced. Early in 1951 Marshall and Martin left the Abbey and by May were living on a disused barge, The Sheila, at Thames Ditton. They began there a series of joint works in marine paints and collage, united in their visionary poetics, which would continue for the rest of their lives. In August 1951 the pair travelled to Paris then on to Schruns (Austria), Genova and Florence, where they held their first joint exhibition at Galeria Numero. Many of Marshall’s watercolours from this time are painted on crepe-paper hand towel from train station restrooms, the paint bleeding into its crevices like blotting paper. In Florence they learnt their houseboat in London had burnt, destroying all their work (hence the absence of any Abbey works, for Marshall at least). A period of extreme hardship ensued. Retreating to Tourettes-sur-Loup for the winter, they met Alphonse Chave of Galerie Les Mages, in Vence, who gave them an exhibition and, reputedly on the recommendation of Marc Chagall, purchased all of Marshall’s exhibits. Throughout the 1950s Marshall and Martin orbited with astonishing frequency between Paris, Positano, Forio d’Ischia (off Naples, where their daughter, printmaker Seraphina Martin, was born in 1954), Florence, Aix-en-Provence, Mallorca, Alicante and Formentera, as well as a summer in Connemara. Along the way they befriended the likes of Alan Sillitoe in Spain and Roberto Matta, Andre Masson, Karel Appel and Pierre Alechinsky in Paris. Mixing in Surrealist and Art Informel circles, Marshall experimented with frottage: placing cardboard cut-outs under a thin sheet of paper, which was rubbed with crayon to produce a ghostly trace. Her visual storehouse also grew: fishing harbours, a salt train engine, and an enigmatic black goddess joined Marshall’s pervading Irish imagery and memories of ‘her land’—Bellarena. Among the curators and critics who respected Marshall’s deeply personal lexicon was Arnold Rüdlinger, director of the Kunsthalle Bern, who gave Marshall and Martin a significant exhibition in 1953 alongside Viera da Silva. In the catalogue Rüdlinger attributed the childlike quality of Marshall’s work to their origins in ‘fantasy, which is located in the world of dreams, fairy tales and legends.’ He might have added that this fantasy was rooted in Irish folklore. Alain Jouffroy was another supporter. He and Jean-Jacques Lebel included Marshall and Martin in the first Anti-Procès ‘manifestation collective’ (an exhibition, a happening and a manifesto), in 1960, alongside César, Hundertwasser, Wifredo Lam and Matta among others. Marshall’s evasion of neat nationalist categories, her lack of materialism or concern for the commercial art world’s social mores, and her pacifism were consistent with the Anti-Procès group’s philosophy and their condemnation of French state violence in Algeria. In 1962 Marshall and Martin, along with the children Stephen and Seraphina, travelled to India to join the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry. Marshall’s work registered this new beginning: her palette brightened and her compositions grew more elaborate, with overlapping elements occupying the entire surface. Offering to Savitri, 1964, with its collaged scraps of Indian wrapping paper, foil and paper doilies, and <a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/5905/">To Awakening</a>, 1965, in the National Gallery of Victoria collection, indicate this new direction. India represented for Marshall the twin pole of Ireland in terms of sustaining her visual and spiritual storehouse. For the next seven years she and Martin spent part of each year at Pondicherry, returning either to Paris, London or Brussels, where they spent nearly two years and had a major joint retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1966. In 1968, they attended the inauguration of Auroville, a utopian ‘universal city’ based on the vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, commemorating the occasion with an exhibition at the Jehangir Gallery—Mumbai’s foremost modern gallery. After India they briefly return to Australia, 1969-70, to reunite with Marshall’s family who had since emigrated from Ireland. In Sydney a critically acclaimed exhibition of over 200 of Martin and Marshall’s works inaugurated Gisella Scheinberg’s Holdsworth Gallery (see Ruth Faerber's review, '<a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article263157125">Art. Coherent exhuberance</a>', The Australian Jewish Times, Sydney, 2 October 1969, p. 4), while in Melbourne Georges Mora of Tolarno was supportive (for six months they lived next door to Mirka Mora in St Kilda). But Europe drew them back: first to Milan, in 1971, and then Bellagio on Lake Como where they acquired their first home in exchange for a large collection of Martin’s paintings. Over the next six years they continued to travel—spending months at a time in Paris, Milan, Roscoff, Brittany and Gstaad, Switzerland. In 1979 they returned to Sydney permanently, purchasing a Victorian terrace-house in Glebe, which quickly filled with their paintings, relief sculptures and Marshall’s hand-stitched ‘banners’ or wall hangings. Even still they continued to exhibit in Europe, Marshall having solo shows with Galerie Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, in 1980, and Galerie Riedel, Paris, in 1987, while in Sydney she had further solo exhibitions at the Art of Man Gallery, 1980 (see Ruth Faerber's <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article263287134">review</a>, The Australian Jewish Times, Sydney, 22 May 1980, p. 16); <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/21437399">Beasts and other animals </a>at the Irving Sculpture Gallery, 1985; Richard King Gallery, 1987; and Coventry Gallery, 1991 and 1994. Elwyn Lynn, among others, appreciated Marshall’s ‘spritely, playful … presentation of people, birds and flowers all in ecstatic togetherness’ (Elwyn Lynn, The Weekend Australian, 20-21 June 1987). Marshall died in 1996, aged 88, and Martin devoted much of the next eighteen years to documenting her career before his own death in 2014. Jane Eckett November 2019 Photograph (i) Who owns the copyright of the photograph (as opposed to the artwork)? Do not use the © symbol here. Just state the name of the photo credit. e.g. Leonard Joel, Melbourne PLUS we need to credit the owner of the photo if the photo is in private ownership or part of an institutional repository. If part of an institutional collection, need to also include any identifiers (accession numbers etc). e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy Marcus Zikaras e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy State Library Victoria, H2008.142/4 No full stop at end. Helen Marshall, identity photograph pasted in her British passport, issued in France c. 1951–55, courtesy artist's estate Date submitted Date object first catalogued: [day] [month] [year] 10 August 2021 Date modified Date record modified: [day] [month] [year] 16 August 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 127.0000 Title A name given to the resource Helen Marshall (1908–1996) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Subject The topic of the resource Marshall, Helen, 1908–1996. Relation A related resource <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1001#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0">Phillip Martin (1927–2014)</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/b0ac6fe8826486abaa0a2c10aaefc092.jpg b57171196d6dcfe879cd45e7d708ec2e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abbey residents Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946–1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 1 June 1927 Birthplace Essex, England Death Date [day] [month] [year] 23 November 2014 Place of death Full address is known; else city and country. Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) painter, sculptor, collage artist Biography Of Irish heritage, Phillip Martin was an artist who believed the image transcended and transformed worldly meaning and materialism. An introverted and only child from a middle-class family, the son of a bank director, Martin spent much of his childhood and young life at the Felsted boarding school in North Essex. When war was declared he spent three years in the national service in the British Navy and in 1948 on discharge, briefly moved back to his family home. When his father caught him drawing in an abstract manner and admonished him for wanting to be an artist, Martin walked out and became estranged from them. Unsure of his direction in life, he entered a Franciscan monastery, but as his spiritual philosophy differed from the brotherhood, he left the order and a period of destitution followed. Living amongst the Soho poor, he slept rough, ate in refuge centres and wandered the London streets where his loneliness took on a hallucinatory dimension. He discovered a language of beauty and truth in the open streets and, in a city largely ruined from bombing, with its graffitied, scarred walls, discarded detritus, Martin felt that, ‘all phenomena assumed an equal importance in themselves’, and ‘being compelled to use things that other people rejected … [and] living so close to this material in the street, I began to listen to its language and watch its formations’ (Martin, 1961). This close reading of rejected materialism and evidence of peoples’ daily passage, whether a bus ticket, fragment of newsprint, a lolly wrapper, a trodden matchbox, randomly dropped until the strolling fossiker collected and turned it into an aesthetic placard, or a visual symphony of Merzbau, chimed with the collages of exiled avant-garde artist Kurt Schwitters, whose art Martin encountered at this time. By 1949 Phillip Martin was living at the Abbey Art Centre, New Barnet, an artists’ colony on the outskirts of London. As a cultural hub, the Abbey’s religious, ancient and primitive artefacts provided an environment that traversed national and temporal boundaries within a single location and encouraged cross-cultural dialogues with other resident artists. It was here that Martin established an important friendship with the Scottish artist <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/985">Alan Davie</a>, whose considerable influence on Martin is evident in his ‘small black and white monotypes and dense tachist, gestural oils’ made during 1949-50 (Jane Eckett, 'Helen Marshall: Return to Beginning', Artist Profile, no. 49, November 2019). Davie had already travelled throughout Europe and seen the first post-war Venice Biennale in 1948, where he met Peggy Guggenheim and was introduced to her major collection of avant-garde art. A strong similarity to Jean Arp’s papier déchirés, or torn paper works is also evident in Martin’s art at this time, which he may have seen in catalogues. The title of one of Martin’s collages, Required: World Interpreter, 1951, captures his existentialist approach, in which he believed ‘the artist has assumed the role of a kind of spiritual archaeologist’ (Philip Martin, letter to Pierre Matisse, Ischia, Italy, September 1954, in Phillip Martin papers, private collection). While at the Abbey Martin also met the Australian sculptor <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/586">Robert Klippel</a> and the Berlin sculptor <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/994">Inge Winter</a> (King), and in 1950 the Irish Australian painter <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/999">Helen Marshall</a>, with whom he formed a life-long relationship. Martin and Marshall left the Abbey in the spring of 1951, and from March to May lived at Camden Town. They then moved to a disused barge, The Sheila, at Thames Ditton, where they collaborated on paintings and collages. Martin was also included in group shows at Gimpel Fils and the Redfern Gallery, London. His first paintings were bought by an Austrian painter and admirer of Picasso, <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo-Damian_Sch%C3%B6nborn">Hugo-Damian Schönborn</a> (1916-1979), who went by the title of Count Schönborn. In 1951 Schönborn invited Martin and Marshall to join him and his wife, Eleonore Baroness von Doblhoff, at their castle in Schruns in the Montafon<a href="https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Montafon?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=ajax,sc,elem,se" title="Montafon"></a> in Vorarlberg, Austria. While staying with Schönborn, September to November 1951, a fire destroyed Martin and Marshall's barge on the Thames. Most of their belongings were lost. This triggered a nomadic existence for the next decade, as they restlessly travelled between Florence, Venice, Milan and Genoa, often living in impoverished conditions. They settled temporarily at Vence, in southern France, where they exhibited at Galerie Les Mages and were befriended by Marc Chagall, who reportedly advised the gallery owner to purchase the entire exhibition. They made Positano in southern Italy their base but continued travelling to Paris, Bern, Basle, Florence, Majorca, Aix en-Provence, Connemara in Ireland and Zurich. In Venice, 1954, they were introduced to Peggy Guggenheim at her villa, and in Paris they mingled with some of Europe’s most notable avant-garde artists and writers, establishing firm friendships with the American writer Henry Miller in Paris, the writer Alan Sillitoe in Spain, the French art critic and poet Alain Jouffroy, Roberto Matta, Andre Masson, Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky and Mark Tobey. The decade of the 1950s was significant for Martin and Marshall. In 1952, Michel Tapié included Phillip Martin in his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1110556">Un Art Autre</a>, a publication on the free-expressive, anti-compositional artists associated with the Art Informel movement, which included Appel, Burri, Dubuffet, Ossorio, Pollock, Riopelle and Tobey. Martin was placed next to Pierre Soulages. Post-war trends in art, such as action painting, art brut, Tachism, with an emphasis on spontaneity, gestural automatism and dynamic spatiality reflected the unsettled state the post-war world as its sought cultural renewal. In 1953 the couple were given a <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1011">significant exhibition alongside Viera da Silva at the Kunsthalle Bern</a> in Switzerland, and in 1955 Martin began exhibiting at the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/81817299">Pierre Matisse Gallery</a> in New York. In 1956 he was included in a Kunsthalle Basel exhibition <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/501573540">Japanische Kalligraphie</a>, alongside Tobey, Miro, Hartung, Klee and Kandinsky, and in 1957 he exhibited at <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1184558885">Galerie du Dragon</a>, famous for its support of young poets and artists such as Roberto Matta and Alain Jouffroy. An aesthetic and spiritual affiliation developed between Martin and Mark Tobey; both artists were extremely reserved and avoided contemporary trends and were drawn together through a mystical approach to the cityscape. Tobey showed work at the 1948 Venice Biennale and in Paris in 1954, when the ‘high tide of tachism’, was flooding galleries throughout Europe (Wieland Schmied, Mark Tobey: A wandering mystic, London: Thames and Hudson, 1966, p. 9). Martin also showed collages at the Galerie Suzanne Bollag in Zurich with Max Ernst, Henri Matisse, L. Moholy-Nagy, Picasso, Schwitters, Viera de Silva, and Sonoia Sekula, and in 1959 was included in a group exhibition at the Galerie Craven in Paris with Arp, Delauney, Dubuffet, Ernst, Kandinsky, Klee, Matta, Mondrian and Schwitters, to name just some. As is evident from these exhibitions and associations with major cultural figures, the couple were of international significance, yet their constant movement has rendered them invisible to nationalist and global art histories. In 1960 the normally pacifist couple were involved with the Anti-Procés collective in Paris and Milan, a movement organised by Alain Jouffroy and the anarchic Jean-Jaques Lebel in opposition to French military aggression during the Algerian insurrection. Martin exhibited in three separate Anti-Procés exhibitions while, at the Galerie des Quatre Saisons, a manifesto was signed by 121 artists and intellectuals including Martin and Marshall. As the politicised 1960s progressed, the couple, always ready to pack up and travel, departed in 1962 with their children—Seraphina Martin and Stephen Walton, Helen's youngest child from her first marriage—for India, where they spent the next five years at an ashram in Pondicherry. They returned to London and Europe for exhibitions, including a joint exhibition at the Palais de Beaux Arts in Paris in 1966, and also to Australia, 1969-70, where Helen was reunited with her family who had since emigrated from Ireland. Phillip Martin held an exhibition at Georges Mora’s Tolarno Gallery while in Sydney they both held a critically acclaimed exhibition of over 200 works to inaugurate Gisella Scheinberg’s Holdsworth Gallery. On returning to Italy they spent a productive and settled period of three years at Lake Como. In 1979, Phillip Martin and Helen Marshall relocated permanently to Glebe in Sydney, though they continued to exhibit regularly in Europe. They held several exhibitions in Sydney, but Phillip found it difficult ‘to penetrate the local art scene’ (St. John Moore). Helen Marshall died in 1996, aged 88, and Phillip Martin devoted much of the next eighteen years to documenting her career before his own death in 2014. A complex man with a Blakean spiritualism, Phillip Martin found subtle connections and creative narratives in infinite juxtapositions of symbols, an alphabet of signs, and a poetic affirmation of the timelessness of all things. In Martin’s words, ‘It is what is left unsaid that is the mystery of a painting which can only be a substitute for the reality that lies beyond it and that is indefinable and belongs to the realm of magic. It is left to the commentators to dissect the corpse’ (Martin to Pierre Matisse, Ischia, September 1954). Sheridan Palmer 20 November 2020 Bibliography Arnold Rüdlinger, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1011">Vieira da Silva, Phillip Martin, Helen Marshall</a>, Bern, Switzerland: Kunsthalle Bern, 7 February – 8 March 1953. Phillip Martin, 'Affiche', X Magazine: Quarterly Review, ed. David Wright and Patrick Swift, vol. 2, no. 2, August 1961, pp. 127-8. Alain Jouffroy, Phillip Martin: éclatement spirituel de l’Image-Symbole, Paris: Galerie H. Le Gendre, 1963. Alain Jouffroy, Helen Marshall, Phillip Martin: peintures, collages, gouaches, oeuvres jointes, 1950-1966, Brussells: Palais des beaux-arts de Bruxelles, 14–26 April 1966. Alain Jouffroy, ‘<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/888255587">Phillip Martin et l’illumination</a>’, Quadrum: Association pour la Diffusion Artistique et Culturelle, no. 20, 1966, pp. 103-12. Alain Jouffroy, Le Cartoline di Phillip Martin, Milan: Edizioni L'Uomo e l'Arte, 1971. Phillip Martin papers, private collection, Australia. Date modified Date record modified: [day] [month] [year] 16 August 2021 Bibliographic citation List all citations referring specifically to that work of art (not to just the series that it belong to, or the artist in general). Different citations are separated by semi-colons rather than line breaks. Give in order of earliest to latest citation. Use same style as used for the DP throughout [to be decided; for now using Cambridge for Art History style but without the labels]. Full stop at end. <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/917">Philip Martin in his studio at the Abbey Art Centre</a>, c. 1949–51 (detail); photo attributed to Picture Post; scanned and digitally repaired by Simon Pierse Date submitted Date object first catalogued: [day] [month] [year] 10 August 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 128.0000 Title A name given to the resource Phillip Martin (1927–2014) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Relation A related resource <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/999">Helen Marshall</a> (1909–1996) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Sheridan Palmer abstract expressionism affiche Alain Jouffroy Alan Davie Alan Sillitoe Andre Masson Anti-Procés collage Count Schönborn graffiti Helen Marshall Henry Miller India Jean Arp Jean-Jaques Lebel Karel Appel Kurt Schwitters Marc Chagall Mark Tobey Michel Tapié Peggy Guggenheim Philip Martin Pierre Alechinsky Pierre Matisse Gallery Pierre Soulages Pondicherry Roberto Matta tachisme Un Art Autre https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/3338b52f3153771476dce58a5c829715.jpg e2905a1b89dc0094fa71f68f890a5bf6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abbey residents Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1946–1956 Type The nature or genre of the resource Person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 1925 Birthplace Vienna, Austria Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) sculptor, painter, mural artist Date submitted Date object first catalogued: [day] [month] [year] 12 August 2021 Bibliography <a href="http://www.kunstschau.at/angela-varga/avbio.html">Iby-Jolande Varga, Angela Varga website</a> Photograph (i) Who owns the copyright of the photograph (as opposed to the artwork)? Do not use the © symbol here. Just state the name of the photo credit. e.g. Leonard Joel, Melbourne PLUS we need to credit the owner of the photo if the photo is in private ownership or part of an institutional repository. If part of an institutional collection, need to also include any identifiers (accession numbers etc). e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy Marcus Zikaras e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy State Library Victoria, H2008.142/4 No full stop at end. Angela Varga with a young thrush she rescued from a cat, at the Abbey Art Centre, c. 1950–53, courtesy the artist Date modified Date record modified: [day] [month] [year] 13 January 2026 Biography Born in Vienna in 1925, the daughter of Hugó Varga and ceramic sculptor and portrait artist <a href="http://www.kunstschau.at/keramik-varga/ida.html">Ida Móricz Varga (1894–1987)</a>, and niece of novelist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsigmond_M%C3%B3ricz">Zsigmond Móricz</a>, Angela Varga's family were of Hungarian origins—part of the then recently dissolved Habsburgs Empire. She was just fourteen years old at the outbreak of WW2, when she enrolled at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule (Vienna School of Applied Art), studying jewellery and sculpture there under Eugen Mayer. This renowned pioneering school had strong ties with the Wiener Werkstätte; for an account of the school's ceramic studio see Emmanuel Cooper, Lucie Rie: modernist potter (Yale, 2012), 36–47. After the war she progressed to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, 1945–46, studying sculpture with Prof. <a href="https://www.belvedere.at/en/wotruba-international#Biography">Fritz Wotruba</a>, life drawing with <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Boeckl">Herbert Boeckl</a>, and painting with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergius_Pauser">Sergius Pauser</a>. Following this, she went to Paris in 1947 to study painting with Jean Dupas at the École des Beaux Arts. Between periods of formal study, she worked from Wotruba's studio on Böcklinstrasse, Vienna. In early 1950 Varga travelled to England, via Switzerland, to join her sister Kate, who was then working in London as a nurse and would later marry Abbey sculptor Peter King, and friend <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/991">Helen Grünwald</a>. During this period she stayed with Grünwald at the Abbey for a few months. In March that year, the private secretary to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Clark">Sir Kenneth Clark</a> gave Grünwald and Varga a private tour of his collection, Clark being away at the time. Grünwald afterwards invited Clark to the Abbey, specifically to view Varga’s work, describing Varga as "a very gifted young painter-sculptor" who "only narrowly escaped being transported by the Nazis during the war" and who, since the end of the war, "has firmly established herself as one of the foremost artists in her country" (Grünwald to Clark, 17 May 1950, TGA 8812/1/2/2696). Varga was due to return to Vienna in the first week of June, and Grünwald hoped Clark might write a reference for her to support her return to England to study at "one of the London Schools of Art, or possibly, the Slade" (Grunwald to Clark, 17 May 1950, TGA 8812/1/2/2696). Clark accepted Grünwald’s invitation, writing in advance to Ohly that "Miss Grunwald is very anxious for me to see the work of a girl named Angela Varga, who is a student at the Abbey" and proposing a mutually convenient date (Clark to Ohly, 18 May 1950, TGA 8812/1/2/4850). The visit eventuated in the late afternoon of 26 May 1950. Clark soon afterwards provided the much-needed reference for "Miss Weiss-Varga," commenting to Grünwald that "it must be lovely for you to find someone with a talent so akin to your own, because, although there are naturally differences in your work, the vision and sympathies are very much the same" (Clark to Grünwald, 30 May 1950, TGA 8812/1/2/2698). A week later, Varga was accepted at the Slade (Grünwald to Clark, 7 June 1949, TGA 8812/1/2/2699). Varga was back in London by mid-October 1950 to commence study at the Slade, specialising in painting and printmaking. She also studied mural painting and ceramics at the Central School of Fine Arts. During this time she lived at the Abbey Art Centre. <a href="http://www.kunstschau.at/angela-varga/skizzenb.html">Varga's London sketchbooks</a> include rapid pencil sketches drawn on the spot at Billingsgate Fish Market (also a favoured subject of Grünwald's), Smithfield Meat Market, and Covent Garden. Her Paris sketchbook of the early 1950s was unfortunately stolen, though she afterwards sketched Les Halles from memory. Varga returned to Vienna in 1953, working there independently and exhibiting with the Neuer Hagenbunde (established in 1948 by Rudolf Richly and Cary Hauser). In 1954 she founded the <a href="http://www.kunstschau.at/keramik-varga/">Keramik Varga</a> workshop, which operated until 1972. She held her first solo show in 1955, at the <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_n%C3%A4chst_St._Stephan">Neue Galerie Grünangergasse, </a>following which she began receiving commissions for wall designs, executed, from 1956 onwards, from her studio in Modenapark. Further exhibitions were held in 1958 at the Galerie Gurlitt in Munich, Wuppertal Museum, and London's New Art Center. In November 1965 she exhibited sculpture (bronze reliefs), jewellery and paintings at the Molton Gallery, London. The Illustrated London News reviewed it positively, describing her as "a painter and printmaker who is better known on the continent than in England" and "a master of line as her delightful small etchings, priced at only 15 guineas, show" ("Pieces for collectors," ILN, 27 November 1965, p. 53). In the same year she also exhibited at the Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Austrian Museum for Applied Arts, now MAK) and was was awarded both the Theodor Körner Preis and the Preis des Wiener Kunstfonds (Vienna Art Fund Prize), winning the latter again in 1966. <div class="VIpgJd-yAWNEb-hvhgNd-k77Iif"> In 1966 she exhibited at the Institut für Kulturelle Beziehungen in Budapest as part of a retrospective for her mother Ida Móricz Varga. Her work was exhibited at Galerie 1640 in concert with the Montreal Expo of 1967; Haus Irene Koch, Reken, 1968; Galerie Clasing, Münster, 1969; Nancy Pool Gallery, Toronto, 1972; Goethe Institute, Brussels, 1976; Mattersburg Kulturzentrum, 1980; Galerie am Edelhof, Großhöflein, 1993; and Caestecker Fine Arts Gallery, Wisconsin, 1999, which hosted a retrospective titled "Three women, three generations: Ida Móricz Varga, Angela Varga, and Iby-Jolande Varga". Jane Eckett 13 January 2026 </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 140.0000 Title A name given to the resource Angela Varga (1925–) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/files/original/a1a2c041eded2539c2239281effe70d7.jpg a65a74a0672b09687c56ffcbb4fa80db Person Abbey resident (and dates of residence if known) OR visitor to the resident OR satellite artist. Birth Date [day] [month] [year] 7 July 1894 Birthplace Poznań, Poland Death Date [day] [month] [year] October 1978 Place of death Full address is known; else city and country. 12 Bedford Gardens, Kensington, London, England Occupation Be as precise as possible; follow DAAO standards if possible. eg. painter, potter, photographer (rather than simply artist) painter, graphic artist, illustrator, etcher, printmaker Date submitted Date object first catalogued: [day] [month] [year] 12 August 2021 Biography Katerina Ulricke Wilczynski was born in Poznań, Poland, and educated in Germany. After studying at the Berlin School for Arts and Crafts, the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, and the Leipzig Academy for Graphic Arts, she worked as an illustrator in Germany in the 1920s. Awarded the Prix de Rome in 1930, she studied at the Accademia Tedesca Villa Massimo for one year on a scholarship and throughout the 1930s lived in Rome, where she was commissioned 'to draw and paint many ancient buildings, where demolition was required by replanning of the city'; these were published in book form shortly after the war, in 1946 (Katerina Wilczynski, Rome, London, Nicholson & Watson [1946], text from publisher's blurb on book jacket). A selection of her drawings of <a href="https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O40494/roma-drawing-wilczynski-katerina/">Rome</a>, <a href="https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O40491/venezia-drawing-wilczynski-katerina/">Venice</a> and <a href="https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O40495/verona-1936-drawing-wilczynski-katerina/">Verona</a>, from 1934–1936, are now in the V&A collection. Fleeing Italy for England in 1938, her name appears in the 1939 England and Wales Register, living at Redgates, Cannington, Devon, and listed as an 'artist (painter)' (The National Archives; Kew, London, England; 1939 Register; Reference: RG 101/6850C). During the war she gained permission from the Central Institute of Art and Design (CIAD) to paint views of bombed churches in London. Five of these were offered to the Imperial War Museum, of which one was purchased for 5 guineas in February 1941 (Imperial War Museum, London, war artist archive, file on Miss Kaete Wilczynski, <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1050000933">ART/WA2/03/143</a>). Another watercolour of bombed buildings in East London, <a href="http://heritage.southwark.gov.uk/objects/478/gresham-street?ctx=6891e655-fe6f-4f82-8052-0661e7732282&idx=0">Gresham Street, 1941</a>, is now in the collection of Southwark Heritage Centre and Walworth Library. She also produced during the war years a portrait series called Oxford Figures, depicting English and European emigré intellectuals such as pyschoanalyst and translator and editor of Jung <a href="https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/94774">Dr Gerhard Adler</a>, German-British art historian and East-Asian specialist <a href="https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/94691">Dr William Cohn</a>, historian <a href="https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/94775">Lord David Cecil</a>, literary scholar <a href="https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/95188">Nevill Coghill</a>, art critic <a href="https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/95378">Denys Sutton</a>, composer <a href="https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/95379">Egon Wellesz</a>, and the Australian-born British classical scholar <a href="https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/94771">Professor Gilbert Murray</a>. These are now all in the collection of the Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford. William Ohly gave her two solo exhibitions at the Berkley Galleries: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/913361461">Drawings and Watercolours</a>, in October to November 1942, and again in 1944. The connection was possibly made through William Cohn, who wrote several catalogue essays for Ohly. Wilczynski's gently comical Christmas card to Ohly from December 1943, headed <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/1010">Homage à William Ohly: Artist’s Hope and Help</a>, depicts Ohly receiving a queue of artists–folios under their arms–and various vignettes inscribed 'sehr gescheit [very nice] / Poor Papache / but even without words / not on speaking terms'. She signed it 'Kat. Wilczynski – the grateful'. At the time of the December 1939 'alien internees' tribunal, she was living at 77 Bedford Gardens, Kensington (The National Archives; Kew, London, England; HO 396 WW2 Internees (Aliens) Index Cards 1939-1947; Reference Number: HO 396/102), and by 1949 she was registered in the electoral rolls at 12 Bedford Gardens, Kensington, at which address she was still living at the time of her death some three decades later. She appears not to have ever lived at the Abbey but was a friend of former Abbey-resident, <a href="https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/998">Margret Kroch-Frishman</a>—possibly through Ohly's introduction (see Ben Uri Research Unit, '<a href="https://www.buru.org.uk/record.php?id=828">Margret Kroch-Frishman, artist</a>'). Throughout the 1940s she was included in several group shows of contemporary Jewish artists at the Ben Uri Gallery. She also held an <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/502119886">exhibition of architectural drawings</a> at Roland, Browse & Delbanco in 1946, and, at the same gallery, in 1949, a series she called '<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/82612365">Mediterranean Fantasies</a>'. After the war she resumed travelling through Europe, staying in Paris, Spain and Greece, and producing numerous illustrated books including travel books. An early example of such, An artist's diary in pictures; pen and ink drawings of a continental journey (The Hague: A.A.M. Stols; Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1949), carried a preface by the influential British art critic Eric Newton. She had supplied drawings to influential emigre publisher Bruno Cassirer since 1946, illustrating works on architecture and Ovid (Bruno Cassirer Publishers Ltd. Oxford 1940–1990: An Annotated Bibliography with Essays, ed. Jutta Weber and Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt, V&R Unipress, 2016, pp. 100–2). A <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43223444">retrospective</a> of her work was held at the New Art Centre, Chelsea, in 1980. Jane Eckett 13 August 2021 Bibliography Gretel Wagner (ed.), Katerina Wilczynski, exh. cat., Berlin: Kunstbibliothek der staatlichen Museen, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1975. Jutta Vinzent, Identity and Image: refugee artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933-1945), Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag (Schriften der Guernica-Gesellschaft, 16), 2006, p. 31. Jutta Weber and Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt (eds), Bruno Cassirer Publishers Ltd. Oxford 1940–1990: An Annotated Bibliography with Essays, V&R Unipress, 2016, pp. 100–2. <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp07733/katerina-wilczynski">'Katerina Wilczynski (1894-1978), Artist', National Portrait Gallery, London.</a> Photograph (i) Who owns the copyright of the photograph (as opposed to the artwork)? Do not use the © symbol here. Just state the name of the photo credit. e.g. Leonard Joel, Melbourne PLUS we need to credit the owner of the photo if the photo is in private ownership or part of an institutional repository. If part of an institutional collection, need to also include any identifiers (accession numbers etc). e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy Marcus Zikaras e.g. Mark Strizic, courtesy State Library Victoria, H2008.142/4 No full stop at end. Katerina Wilczynski, author photograph from the cover of Homage to Greece, London: Macmillan and Co., 1964 Date modified Date record modified: [day] [month] [year] 3 June 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 326.0000 Title A name given to the resource Katerina Wilczynski (also known as Kathé, Kaete and Kate Wilczynski) (1894–1978) Type The nature or genre of the resource person Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jane Eckett