Robert Klippel was born to Polish-English immigrant parents in Sydney, Australia on 19 June 1920. In 1947, he moved to England to pursue an artistic career and lived in the artists’ colony at the Abbey Arts Centre outside London and primarily worked in sculpture. His years in London and then Paris were to prove particular formative influences on his subsequent sculptural practice.
Sculptor, illustrator, collagist and teacher, Robert Klippel was born to Polish-English immigrant parents in Sydney, Australia on 19 June 1920. As a child, he enjoyed constructing objects, especially model ships, something he would put to professional use when he became a model maker at the Navy Gunnery in 1943. In 1944, he attended a sculpture course at East Sydney Technical College, exploring the figure through life drawing, modelling in clay, and carving in stone and wood. However, apart from this course, he was largely a self-thought artist, who was primarily known as a constructivist sculptor.
To further his artistic career, Klippel left Australia for London in 1947. Upon his arrival, he visited an exhibition of Henry Moore's small bronzes and drawings at the Berkeley Galleries. It was possibly on this occasion that he met William Ohly, Director of the Berkeley Galleries, who also owned and ran the Abbey Arts Centre (Pierse 2012, p. 28). The Abbey, a large three-story house on the outskirts of north London, was an artists' colony where a number of young Australian artists lived and worked. Klippel was the first Australian artist to move there in May 1947, soon followed by the painter James Gleeson and the sculptor Oliffe Richmond. It was probably Ohly's large collection of ethnic sculpture, kept in a storeroom at the Abbey, that drew these young artists to The Abbey (Pierse 2012, p. 28). Klippel also met Scottish-born sculptor, Eduardo Paolozzi, who suggested he should attend classes at the Slade School of Art. However, Klippel found the Slade ‘sterile […] the most deadening of places,’ but continued ‘[…] going up to the Slade every day doing about three hours a day under intense misery, all the time wanting to go to the British Museum, Natural History Museum, examine and draw trees, carve, experiment,’ (Klippel cited in Pierse 2012, p. 28).
Klippel found the Abbey a far more stimulating place in which to work than art school, where he could share his thoughts on art with the recently arrived Gleeson, with whom he collaborated on the surrealist polychrome carving Madame Sophie Sesostoris (a Pre-Raphaelite Satire) (1947–48) now held at the New South Wales Art Gallery in Sydney. Titled after T.S. Eliot’s ‘famous clairvoyant’ in The Waste Land, Madame Sophie presented a woman in a languid pose reminiscent of a classical Venus but with her gaze mimicking that of a devout Madonna, as she emerged from her wooden cocoon, whose painted exterior reveals, x-ray-like, the 'dazzling whirr' of an underlying organic machine. The figure, carved by Klippel and painted by Gleeson, was a satirical reinterpretation of the demure young women depicted by Victorian painters, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which the artists had seen in London galleries. With this piece, the two Australians challenged concepts of the internal and the external, presenting a 'vital inner structure of an apparently simple form, to suggest that by some kind of x-ray magic one could look through the opaque skin and see all that lay within' (www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au). The sculpture, now considered one of the most successful artistic collaborations in 20th-century Australian art, was included in the 1948 exhibition of surrealist-influenced work by the two artists held at the London Gallery, where the young Lucian Freud showed upstairs. The Spectator described Klippel's works as ‘three-dimensional pleasantries […] which suggest models of crystalloid or molecular structures, or perhaps solid versions of some of Picasso’s blotting-paper doodles. These are gay and by no means unpleasant,’ (The Spectator, 1948, p. 663). Klippel's other works included Entities Suspended from a Detector (1948) and Fever Chart (1948).
During his London years, Klippel produced many drawings and filled his notebooks with diagrams of organic and mechanical objects (everything from screws and cogs to insects and shells) and made detailed drawings of forms used by modernist artists such as Henry Moore and Picasso. Klippel's interests ranged from the collection of the British Museum to exotic plants in Kensington Gardens and catalogues of industrial machinery. At the end of 1948, Klippel and Gleeson visited Paris, where they met André Breton and other French surrealists. Klippel returned to Sydney in 1950, where he continued mixing with abstract artists, exhibiting with William Rose, John Olsen, John Passmore, and Eric Smith in the exhibition Direction I at the Macquarie Galleries in 1956. In 1957, Klippel moved to New York, USA, where he experimented with compositions made of junk metal. From the late 1960s, he turned to bronze, with these works gradually becoming larger in scale and simpler in form. He also experimented with wood, plastic, and metal to create both monumental and miniature sculptures. From 1967 until his death, Klippel lived in Australia, continuing to work and exhibit prolifically during the last 20 years of his career. Robert Klippel died in Sydney, Australia, on 19 June 2001. In the UK public domain his work is represented in the British Museum collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Robert Klippel]
Publications related to [Robert Klippel] in the Ben Uri Library