38 Facts About Inge King

Ingeborg Viktoria "Inge" King was a German-born Australian sculptor.

Inge King's work is held in public and private collections.

Inge King's best known work is Forward Surge at the Melbourne Arts Centre.

Inge King became a Member of the Order of Australia in January 1984.

Inge King was born in Berlin on 26 November 1915, the youngest of four girls in a well-to-do Jewish family.

Inge King would have liked to have gone on to university, possibly to study medicine, but, financially, that was out of the question.

Inge King was 17 when Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933.

Inge King went to live with other young people in a small Zionist commune, where she worked in exchange for board and lodging.

Inge King was starting to think about being an artist, though this was really a second choice.

Inge 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.

Inge King went to see the artist Kathe Kollwitz, whose work she admired.

Inge 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.

Inge 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.

Inge King was forced to leave about a year later, not long before Kristallnacht.

Inge King finally got out of Germany in 1939, with the help of German friends.

Inge King spent about a year in domestic service with families in southern England.

Inge King found England far more old-fashioned and conservative than the Berlin she had come from.

Inge King was accepted at the Royal Academy on the basis of the drawings she had brought with her and her time at the Berlin Academy.

Inge King spent two terms there, in 1940, before it was closed on account of the German bombing raids on London.

Inge King 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.

Inge King then applied to the College of Art in Edinburgh, which accepted her, but Edinburgh was in a restricted area and Inge King, as a foreign national, could not live there.

Inge King's home was a meeting place for artists, actors, writers, politicians and cultural leaders.

Inge King was an outstanding individual: energetic, intelligent humane and charming.

Inge King was an intelligent master who encouraged her to explore.

Inge King was impressed by the cosmopolitan atmosphere and wider experience of the world brought to the Glasgow School by King and the other refugee students.

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 Inge King, who understood its relevance to the times.

Inge King's later piece, Musicians: Homage to Zadkine, was a response to this work.

Inge King spent the time teaching in nursery schools, a job she liked but which she found demanding.

Inge King did not do any further work of her own until she returned to live in London.

Inge King found the American painters inspiring because of their vitality.

Inge King offered to facilitate a scholarship for her for the Institute of Design in Chicago.

Back in London, she and Grahame Inge King decided to marry.

The windows at the front of the house look over a garden where Inge King's sculptures sit among the eucalypts and shrubs.

The bush at Warrandyte looked strange to her when Inge King first went there in 1951.

Inge King was at the forefront of the development of non-figurative sculpture in Australia.

Inge King was a founding member of the Centre 5 group of sculptors.

Inge King had more than 26 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 60 group exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand and in London and New York.

Inge King had a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1992 and a joint exhibition with her husband, the print-maker Grahame King, at McClelland Gallery in 2004.