Völkerbund (League of Nations) 1920: Bauhaus woodcut. His yearning for peace. Unborn child probably his second daughter.
The following post is by Felicity Renowden who is working on a biography of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack (1893-1965) a German who came to Australia in the same refugee/prison boat as my father HMT Dunera. He was a remarkable man. To enable me to show you some lovely illustrations, I’m breaking it into two parts. Comments in the captions to the pictures are Felicity’s unless otherwise indicated.
Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack was born to be an artist.
His was a life of extraordinary talent, creativity, innovation, experimentation and progressive thinking- in Germany until 1936 when he was forced out by the Nazis, in UK until 1940 and in Australia until his death in Sydney in 1965.
He trained and taught at the famous Weimar Bauhaus 1919-1925 in association with big names like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer and Josef Albers.
Frauen im Gasofen 1933. A resistance painting when the Nazis were already detaining and torturing any opponents to their regime. Just as well this painting remained hidden until after WW2.
His interests and abilities were various. One major preoccupation was with the application of colour theories. In 1923 he ran a comprehensive Colour Seminar at the Bauhaus attended by Masters Klee and Kandinsky. His didactic spinning tops can still be purchased in Berlin to this very day.
His 1920s colour-light plays (Farbenlichtspiele) are an astounding result of this fascination for colour, a precursor of moving images and cinematography. He experimented with capturing the ‘actual’ movement implied in the illusionary tensions of abstract art.
War (as I see it- there is no glory in it whatsoever!) 1940, maybe begun before capture in July 1940, or on the Isle of Man. It’s confronting isn’t it?
From September 1940 on arrival per HMT Dunera he was interned at Hay, Orange in NSW and in Tatura in Victoria.
Hate and Madness: a sketch in Tatura. Young men were frustrated, angry, Nazis and Jews were too close, mental breakdown etc
Behind barbed wire his creative genius, innovative and enterprising nature manifested again. Using red gum firewood he carved figures, a crib, and sculptures as well as musical instruments including a xylophone. He fashioned pipes out of bamboo collected from the banks of the Murrumbidgee River and led pipe bands. He made many beautiful woodcuts.
1941 Story of a shell: In contrast, this harmonious abstract, an internment painting. He was developing a vision and theory about peace, with women in leadership!
In early 1942 he was ‘released on parole’ to take on the position as Art Master at Geelong Grammar School [GGS]until 1957. His responsibilities were for art at Corio and Bostock House in Geelong, Glamorgan in Melbourne from 1947 and later, for Timbertop from 1953.
Continued here.
when I look at his pictures I remember the old Monty Python sketch I mightn’t know much about art but I know what I like.
You say he was born to be an artist. I cannot see that that. sorry.
Nicholas Did you meet him?…. were he and your dad friends?
No I never did, and he wasn’t a friend of Dad’s. I don’t know if they met. I think there were nearly a couple of thousand Dunera Boys after all. Oddly I got interested in the Dunera only towards the end of my father’s life – he found my interest quite peculiar. Couldn’t imagine why I was interested. I bought a Hirschfeld-Mack painting about five or six years ago. It’s colourist – not unlike the last image above – and very like Paul Klee’s stuff.
It’s funny the negative reactions there have been on this blog. I put up a woodcut of LHM in this post and got this toxic comment.
It’s hard not to like the last image I would have thought. My guess as to the negative reactions is that some people look at the paintings that are selling some kind of message and apply to them the kind of filter one might apply to some high school artist with a ‘message’. But when the artist really is scared and/or suffering, then perhaps we might be more wary of the self-indulgence of the critic in the safety of their armchair than that of the artist. Just putting it out there as my daughter says.
Anyway who knows? I like his colourist works like the last one best – and there are two lovely ones like that in the next post.
Things either move you or they don’t, I am an artist not a critic.
As for applying ‘aesthetic’ judgements to things that are in the nature of personal diary stuff … especially the diary of somebody who went through the sort of things that they went through, I happily leave to the martinets
I like many of his paintings and almost all of them move me. The gates he designed for Geelong Grammar move me very much – but they’re just simple ‘children holding hands’. You’ll see them in the next instalment.
Interesting snippet about this chap on wikipedia:
‘at the Bauhaus-University Weimar … following Kurt Schwerdtfeger[1] he further developed “Farblichtmusiken” (‘coloured-light-music’), a light and colour modulator which provided a visual translation of music;[2] in fact an early form of multimedia. Hirschfeld Mack was joint participant, with the former Bauhaus master Gertrud Grunow,[3] in the Second Congress of color-sound research in 1930 in Hamburg.[4] Music and colour theory remained lifelong interests, informing his art production in a number of media, and it was the inspiration for his well-respected and influential teaching.’
This is the area of Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and (before them) Scriabin. Gave rise to some of the most interesting art and music of the 20th century.
I’ll be interested in the follow up Nick. Did he become an abstract artist, following a similar path there to Kandinsky and Schoenberg?
No not really. His later colour works are not unlike the last one above. But he did plenty of other things like sculpture and architectural fittings.
The snippet about him making musical instruments out of bamboos he found on the Murrumbidgee, leading pipe bands, and making new musical instruments out of redgum makes him sound like Percy Grainger, too, the Australian-born genius/eccentric. If you visit his Grainger Museum (I guess you probably have) you’ll find rooms full of instruments he basically invented. Another example of those polymaths who found inspiration in the crossovers between various arts.
I really enjoyed this post, Nicholas. I didn’t know that your Dad was a Dunera boy. When I was back in Armidale in 1981-1982 doing my somewhat ill-fated PhD, one of those I had a fair bit of contact with in a day to day sense was one of the Dunera boys. It’s frustrating; before writing this post I an hour or so trying to check on his name and details in case my meory failed me, but without success.
Like you father, he didn’t much want to talk about it, although he did talk a little bit about his German experiences. I have this powerful memory of his description of Kristallnacht. They apparently received a warning from a friend, and spent the night travelling by train as the safest place..
What a remarkable group they were. My strongest memory of Klaus was of a gentle, civilised intellectual who I liked and admired greatly. I could also talk to him about ideas without the intellectual combat that sometimes marked those conversation. Combat can be fun, but sometimes you just want to converse. .
I don’t understand the negative comments on the art. I suppose that I saw them in a context, several contexts, but I also enjoyed them as pieces. My thanks to Felicity for sharing.
Klaus Loewald was my Godfather, though a very distant one. He didn’t take much interest in me, but he caught up with the family when we seemed to be in the same city. He died of cancer a good while ago now. He was a very cultivated man, though I don’t think a particularly happy or warm one.
I always thought of him as a disappointed man, somehow adrift for reasons he didn’t fathom (though I didn’t know him well and I may be quite wrong). He was what I’d call an Adlai Stevenson liberal. He was angry with the state of the world – which is fair enough I guess. But seemed to have come to assume that the wisdom of things must be on the left. That probably gave him a good perspective of most debates in the 1950s when he was a young man (though of course people like Orwell had seen the dark side well before then), but left him stranded later on as the world became progressively more unsympathetic to what he regarded as the core of decency and commonsense.
And my apologies for the typos in the previous comment.
Jim, If you’re interested, here are some speeches given at my father’s memorial, and the link above to LHM’s other work is to a speech I gave about the Dunera.
How interesting, Nicholas. What a small world! Obviously my relationship with Klaus was in a different context to yours. I thought of him as a reserved man. He was very private. I didn’t see him in the ideological context, although I did think of him as a European (as in Europe) intellectual. Thank you very much for the links. I will follow up.
On re-reading my comments on Klaus, I should clarify that I was not seeking to convey disapproval. Rather I was trying to paint the picture of him from what I’d taken in and (rightly or wrongly) imagined about him.
I fully understood. To speak of a person as we understand them or seek to understand them is not disapproval.
Congratulations on a fascinating, fascinating post. What a thing, for sophisticated Europeans coming to a place like Australia, in the midst of enveloping chaos.
The Walter Benjamin generation, sent out to bring in the wheat harvest, shovel sheepshit or dig ditches and you’d presume that they would have been mucked around no end by petty bureaucrats.
Must be good to be gifted (sighs).
My agent in Melbourne was George Mora, wonderful man. After surviving the war (and the holocaust) he and Mirka simply wanted to get as far away from ‘europe’ as possible- he wanted to go to Saigon she wanted Melbourne.. they tossed a coin. He once said to me that whilst the food and coffee (in 1951) was very basic, there was lots of food, the people were really friendly and nobody was trying to kill them…. it was a good place .