Inge King

Ingeborg Viktoria "'Inge" King' was a German-born Australian sculptor. She received many significant public commissions. Her work is held in public and private collections. Her best known work is Forward Surge at the Melbourne Arts Centre. She became a Member of the Order of Australia in January 1984.

Early years: Berlin to Melbourne

Berlin

Inge King was born in Berlin on 26 November 1915, the youngest of four girls in a well-to-do Jewish family. Her early childhood was typical one for a child of her class and time in a European city. But after World War I, conditions in Germany became increasingly difficult. The period of the Weimar Republic, though a culturally stimulating time, was never stable. Conditions were made more difficult by the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s and the depression of 1929. During that time, things became increasingly difficult for the Neufeld family. By the time King's father died in 1930, when she was 14, the family had lost most of its money. Her older sisters supported her to stay at school until she finished, in 1932, which enabled her to get a good education. She would have liked to have gone on to university, possibly to study medicine, but, financially, that was out of the question.
King was 17 when Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933. Two of her older sisters, now married, decided to emigrate: one to Palestine, another to the US. By 1934, when she was 18, King was effectively on her own. She went to live with other young people in a small Zionist commune, where she worked in exchange for board and lodging. She said of this experience: "I owe them a lot... This commune... gave me or taught me some independence, which was invaluable", and, most importantly, taught her "to survive without money".
King was starting to think about being an artist, though this was really a second choice. But art was something she could do with minimal resources, so long as she could support herself. King was influenced both by mediaeval sculpture and by Expressionist sculpture, an important part of German avant-garde art, and particularly by the work of the wood-carver, Ernst Barlach. The Nazis considered such art to be decadent and later attempted to suppress it. King went to see the artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose work she admired. Kollwitz' advice to King about a career in art was "Don’t do it if you can help it. It is so difficult". Nevertheless, King did go on. She said: "I haven’t regretted it. I agree with her, it’s difficult."
King found a teacher, Hermann Nonnenmacher, a wood-carver influenced by Ernst Barlach, who taught her the basic skills of wood-carving and modelling in clay. King worked with him until she was accepted into the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts in 1937, when she was 21, one of only three non-Aryan students there. She was forced to leave about a year later, not long before Kristallnacht. While she was there, she supported herself by undertaking commercial work for the sculptor, Otto Hitzberger, who was on the staff there.
King finally got out of Germany in 1939, with the help of German friends. One helped her get a visa for England. Another warned her that he had received his mobilisation papers and that she should leave as soon as possible. She spent about a year in domestic service with families in southern England. She found England far more old-fashioned and conservative than the Berlin she had come from. This was quite a shock.

London and Glasgow

She was accepted at the Royal Academy on the basis of the drawings she had brought with her and her time at the Berlin Academy. She spent two terms there, in 1940, before it was closed on account of the German bombing raids on London. She also went to evening classes in life drawing at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts until it moved to Northampton, where there were no facilities for sculpture. King then applied to the College of Art in Edinburgh, which accepted her, but Edinburgh was in a restricted area and King, as a foreign national, could not live there. They suggested she apply to the Glasgow School of Art.
Glasgow was a quite cosmopolitan place. There had been a Jewish community there for many years, which brought intellectual and cultural energy to the Glasgow society. The war brought migrants and refugees into Britain. As Glasgow was not a protected area, it was one of the places where they could live. This brought a substantial increase in the number of Jewish residents in the city, as well as the development of a Polish community.
The head of sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art was Benno Schotz. Born in Estonia of Jewish parents, he migrated to Glasgow as a young man and studied sculpture at night-classes while working for a shipbuilding company. Being foreign-born, Schotz was not liable to be called up for war work, so the sculpture department at the School of Art functioned throughout the war. He was an excellent teacher: " had excellent rapport with his small group of students. Formal classes were held in the morning, then they had the studio to themselves for the rest of the day and into the evening.... Schotz had the highly developed technical skills of a successful practising artist and was alive to the hands-on realities of making sculpture as much as he was to the compelling political and social ideas of the times." He also "supported refugees and worked throughout his life to bring their suffering to public notice. His home was a meeting place for artists, actors, writers, politicians and cultural leaders. He was an outstanding individual: energetic, intelligent humane and charming."
King entered the Glasgow School of Art in 1941. She spent three years there. She said of this time: "I was very happy in Glasgow. It was actually the only time I could just work the way I wanted to and I worked very hard." She "felt comfortable with with whom she shared a European background. He was an intelligent master who encouraged her to explore.... Years later King discovered that he had found her 'a very demanding student'".
A fellow student of Schotz's at Glasgow at this time was Margaret Priest, who later emigrated to Perth in Western Australia, where she became an important local sculptor. She was impressed by the cosmopolitan atmosphere and wider experience of the world brought to the Glasgow School by King and the other refugee students. She later recollected that: "There were assorted part-time students who came and went around the School of Art... was always free with advice and help and tools and materials so that they became absorbed in our group. We were an astonishing mixture of cultures and it did us the world of good.... They all offered the same unstinting friendship and hospitality spiced with that wonderful Jewish humour. I wondered how they could all be so clever."
The artwork produced by the refugee students at the art school was quite different from that of the other students. They "were doing harsh and emotional art fuelled by bitterness and anger. They had long conversations about Käthe Kollwitz and swapped books and newspapers about politics and art in Europe. Picasso’s Guernica of 1937 and his other war-inspired painting and sculpture and the work of other European artists were now the subject of endless discussion." However, the cultural transition was not all one way. The Glasgow choirs sang Scottish folk songs and Afro-American spirituals: music that had been suppressed in Germany and was a revelation to refugees like King, who understood its relevance to the times.
In late 1942, Schotz organised an important exhibition of European Jewish art in Glasgow. Most of these works had been smuggled out of Europe. The exhibition included works by Camille Pissarro, Max Liebermann, Josef Herman, Jankel Adler, Chaïm Soutine, Ossip Zadkine, Ernst Barlach and Benno Schotz himself. The Glasgow Art Gallery acquired a bronze sculpture by Ossip Zadkine, the Music Group], for its collection. The Glasgow Herald described it as the "outstanding item" among the recent acquisitions, "the first really 'modern' piece of sculpture in the city’s permanent collection". King's later piece, Musicians: Homage to Zadkine , was a response to this work.
Warsaw was another significant work by King from this period, a small sculpture whose inspiration comes from her response to the events in Europe. Having completed it, King knew that she would never make another work like it.
King finished her formal study in 1944. The next couple of years were difficult. She spent the time teaching in nursery schools, a job she liked but which she found demanding. She did not do any further work of her own until she returned to live in London.

Abbey Art Centre

Early in 1947, she went to live at the Abbey Art Centre, an artists' community located in New Barnet, Hertfordshire, near London. King was a fairly early resident there. Quite a number of Australian artists lived at the Abbey at various times. These included Robert Klippel, James Gleeson, Phillip Martin, , Noel Counihan and Bernard Smith, who became an art historian. Grahame King, whom King later married, arrived later in 1947. King's early works at the Abbey were figurative, but not realistic. But it was during this period that King "made an arbitrary decision to move away from representational work". "I could not see how I could do any more with the figure, so I decided to move into what I call non-representational work. I don't like to call it abstraction as my work was not abstract in concept. I was groping for my own way." She had two exhibitions in London, then spent six months in Paris, which she enjoyed. In September 1949, she went to New York.
" was an incredible experience because, well, I really made a point of meeting people. I took some of my carvings with me and I exhibited them ." People she met there included the sculptor Herbert Ferber, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. She saw her first Jackson Pollock show. She found the American painters inspiring because of their vitality. Also "in 1949-50, New York... after war-torn Europe, it was sparkling, it was clean, it was very safe still." She went to see Walter Gropius at Harvard, who was interested in her work. He offered to facilitate a scholarship for her for the Institute of Design in Chicago.
Back in London, she and Grahame King decided to marry. As a German refugee, she could have emigrated to America, but Grahame, as an Australian, could not get a residency permit. She did not want to stay in Europe, and, after visiting New York, "equated Australia with the USA, as part of the bright new world where she could work in a lively and adventurous atmosphere and rear a family." The Kings left London for Melbourne early in 1951.