Melbourne Modern: European Art & Design at RMIT since 1945
Publisher RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2019
Publication Details paperback, 29 x 21 cm, weight: 755 g, 151 pages, 148 plates plus 8 chapter heading bleed-offs, ISBN: 9780648422655
Editors Jane Eckett and Harriet Edquist.
Authors Jane Eckett, Harriet Edquist, Sheridan Palmer, Victoria Perin, and Sarah Scott.
Preface Paul Gough
Abstract Melbourne Modern celebrates the contribution of European émigré artists, architects and designers who taught at RMIT after 1945. Successive waves of migrants in Australia arrived shortly before, during and after World War II from Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, while assisted passage schemes in the 1950s attracted further numbers from Britain and the Netherlands. Together they brought a wide range of ‘modernisms’ tempered by different national folk traditions. Alongside these European‐trained teachers were migrants who arrived in Australia as children and Australians who had studied at length in Europe. Linking them all is an internationalist perspective and immersion in two or more cultures.
Written by the exhibition co-curators Professor Harriet Edquist and Dr Jane Eckett, the catalogue provides an examination of how architecture and interior design, industrial design, painting, sculpture, printmaking and gold and silversmithing benefited from the professionalization instituted by the émigré staff. The European impact is perhaps most evident in the gold and silversmithing program at RMIT, which under the guidance of Czech goldsmith Vaclav Victor Vodicka, who migrated to Australia in 1950 as a displaced person under the International Refugee Organisation program, developed into the most successful and influential gold and silversmithing program in post-war Australia. Similarly, the impact spanning three decades of post-World War II European émigré teachers Teisutis Zikaras, Vincas Jomantas, Hermann Hohaus and Inge King in the sculpture department was profound. With the emphasis on the sculptor as a highly skilled professional who could help shape the public sphere by working closely with architects, their positive legacy continues to this day.
Published in 2019 to mark the centenary of the founding of the German Bauhaus, Melbourne Modern contributes to the study of modernist diasporas and, in particular, their impact in the arena of art, design and architectural education. Melbourne Modern furthermore explores the multitude of European modernist influences in art and design at RMIT and examines how these influences impacted those who studied under the European émigré teachers. Of the ninety-two artists featured in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue, sixty-nine are RMIT alumni. In this way the exhibition and catalogue trace a distinct lineage of modernist influences from 1945 to the present day.
Jane Eckett is an ECR at the University of Melbourne, currently engaged on an ARC Discovery Project, 2020-2022, and commencing a Melbourne Research Fellowship in 2021. As the Ursula Hoff Fellow, 2018, she examined the monotypes of Bauhausler Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and the NGV. Her PhD, conferred in 2017 at Melbourne University, examined the Centre 5 group of sculptors.
Harriet Edquist is Professor of architectural history at RMIT University and Director of RMIT Design Archives. An author and curator, Harriet’s research covers a broad field of twentieth-century Australian art, design and architectural history and she has produced pioneering studies and exhibitions on subjects as various as the Arts and Crafts, émigré architects and designers and automotive design. She was a CI on the recently completed ARC Discovery Project ‘Bauhaus Australia; Transforming Education in Art, Architecture and Design’.