Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1915 Berlin, Germany

Died: 2016 Melbourne, Australia

Year of Migration to the UK: 1938

Other name/s: Ingeborg Viktoria Neufeld, Inge Neufeld, Inge Winter

Biography

Sculptor Inge King (née Ingeborg Viktoria Neufeld) was born into a comfortable, middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, Germany on 26 November 1915. Following the political and economic instability of the Weimar Republic, and her father’s death in 1930, her family struggled financially and, unable to afford university, she enrolled instead in the Berlin Vereinigten Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst [United State School for Free and Applied Arts], taking lessons in wood carving and clay modelling under sculptor Hermann Nonnenmacher from 1936–37. In 1937 she progressed briefly to the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts but owing to the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation following Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship, she was excluded in 1938 because of her Jewish origins (although she later recalled that the family identified themselves as German, rather than Jewish). Her mother and two of her siblings left Germany, while King lived briefly in a Zionist commune and, then, in lodgings where she worked as a home help until the November pogrom known as Kristallnacht, when she fled to England on a British visa arranged by friends.

In London, King initially worked as a domestic, then gained a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in 1940, also attending evening classes in life drawing at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts until it was evacuated to Northampton in 1941, where there were no facilities for sculpture. Her RA studies were also interrupted by the Blitz in 1941 and, with the aid of a grant from the International Student Committee in London, she transferred to Glasgow School of Art, where she trained under the Estonian-born sculptor Benno Schotz, who later described her as 'a very demanding student' because she worked 12 hours a day. King 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’ (Gleeson 1979, p. 21). She received early patronage from Moray Glassser, a Glaswegian furrier and prominent member of the Glasgow Jewish Institute (who also supported refugee artists Jankel Adler and Josef Herman), who commissioned a cast of her small figurative bronze, Warsaw (1943-45), her response to the Holocaust. After completing her studies in 1944, King struggled to find work as an artist and supported herself by teaching in nursery schools. In 1947 she settled at the Abbey Art Centre, an artists’ community on the outskirts of north London, owned and run by William Ohly, the Director of the Berkeley Galleries in London. The Centre attracted Canadian, English, South African and Australian artists, including Robert Klippel, James Gleeson, and King’s future husband Grahame King. During this time, she moved away from figurative sculpture, producing works such as Musicians, Homage to Zadkine (1947, now at the National Gallery of Australia), a cubist ensemble tribute to a work by Belarusian-born French sculptor Ossip Zadkine (which she had seen at the Exhibition of Jewish Art organised by Schotz in Glasgow in December 1942). In 1949 she held her first solo exhibition at the London Gallery in Mayfair.

Afterwards, King travelled with her husband to the USA where in New York she saw Jackson Pollock’s inaugural exhibition and met artists at the forefront of the abstract expressionist movement, including Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. In 1951, the couple relocated to Melbourne, Australia, where they settled for the rest of their lives, although she compared her arrival to ‘opening a can of flat beer’, finding Australian artistic circles ‘almost Victorian’ after her exposure to progressive art in Germany, Britain and New York (cited Daily Telegraph obituary, 30 June 2016). Drawing on her interest in the abstract expressionist style, she abandoned her formal training in wood and stone in preference for more modern materials, such as steel and aluminium; in particular, she excelled in welding. During the 1960s she was at the forefront of the development of non-figurative sculpture and founded the influential modernist Centre 5 group of mainly European émigrés with the aim of fostering greater public awareness in contemporary sculpture which forged links between Australia’s sculptural and architectural communities (Daily Telegraph, op. cit). Much of her production consisted of large-scale public statuary. From 1969 she held regular solo exhibitions and participated in group shows. She had two major retrospective exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1992 and 2014. In 1984 she was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia. She continued to work until she was 98. Inge King died in Melbourne, Australia on 23 April 2016, aged 100. Her sculpture can be seen in numerous Australian collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, but is not represented in UK public collections.

Related books

'Sculptor who Specialised in Huge Geometric Structures', The Daily Telegraph, 1 July 2016, p. 29
Sasha Grishin, Jacqui Henshaw, Jenny Zimmer and Jane Eckett, eds., The Art of Inge King: Sculptor (South Yarra, Australia: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2014)
Judith Trimble and Jane Eckett, Inge King: Summer Solstice (Collingwood: Australian Galleries, 2011)
Judith Trimble and Ken McGregor, Inge King: Small Sculptures and Maquettes (South Yarra: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2009)
Inge King and Judith Trimble, Inge King (Sydney & Melbourne: Australian Galleries, 1999)
Judith Trimble, Inge King Sculptor (New South Wales: Craftsman House, 1996)
James Gleeson, Transcript of Interview with Inge King, 18 October 1979, for the National Library of Australia, Canberra, p. 21.

Public collections

Related organisations

Central School of Arts and Crafts (student)
Glasgow School of Art (student)
Royal Academy of Arts (student)
Vereinigten Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst, Berlin (student)

Selected exhibitions

Happy Birthday Inge King, National Gallery of Australia (2016)
Retrospective exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2014)
Inge King Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (1992)
Inge King, Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne (1969)
Clay Club, New York, USA (1949)
London Gallery, Brook Street, London (1949)
London Group, London (1948)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Inge King]