Desolation, Internment Camp, Hay, NSW

Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack
Australia/Germany
1893 – 1965

Desolation, Internment Camp, Hay, NSW
1941
woodcut on paper
Place made
Hay, New South Wales
Medium
woodcut on paper
Dimensions
22.0 x 13.4 cm (image)
26.1 x 20.7 cm (sheet)
Credit line
Gift of Olive Hirschfeld, the artist's widow, 1985
Accession number
859G18
Signature and date
Not signed. Not dated.
Media category
Print
Collection area
Australian Prints
Copyright
© Estate of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack
Image credit
Photo: Stewart Adams

  • The ideas about humanity held by the Bauhaus artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack were shaped by the horrors experienced as a soldier during the First World War, as well as his incarceration during the Second World War. He left Germany in 1936 to escape Nazi oppression and settled in England. In 1940 he was detained as an ’enemy alien’ and then deported to internment camps in Australia at Hay and Orange in New South Wales and then at Tatura, Victoria.

     

    Created with rudimentary materials in an internment camp, this woodcut depicts a lone figure looking through the barbed wire fence into a black abyss of nothingness. In this unevenly inked impression, the constellation of the Southern Cross can just be discerned in the sky.

     

    Following the intervention of James Darling, headmaster at Geelong Grammar school, in March 1942 Hirschfeld-Mack was released from detention and appointed art master at Geelong Grammar. An inspirational teacher, he remained in this position until his retirement in 1957.

     

    Julie Robinson, Senior Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs

     

  • Andreas Gursky and Melancholy in German Art

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 5 November 2016 – 30 April 2017
  • [Book] Draffin, Nicholas. Two masters of the Weimar Bauhaus: Lionel Feininger and Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack.
  • [Book] McCulloch, Alan. Encyclopedia of Australian art.