Dora Ohlfsen-Bagge

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The cancellation came as a great shock to Ohlfsen, who feared it would damage her reputation; she wrote to F. Graham Lloyd, the gallery's London agent, in November 1919: "I cannot tell you how amazed I am, nor how incomprehensible it all seems to me nor how unexpected." She complained about it to William Holman, Premier of New South Wales, because in 1916 the gallery had spent £4,920 on two statues by Gilbert Bayes. To keep costs down, she suggested to the trustees that they install the plaster cast and paint it a bronze colour until bronze returned to its pre-war price. But the cancellation stood; the chair of the trustees, John Sulman, wrote to Mann in January 1920: "Miss Ohlfsen is a woman, and although she has no case, can cause mischief." The space above the front entrance remained empty for over 100 years. In October 2019 the gallery opened an exhibition, Dora Ohlfsen and the façade commission (12 October 2019 – 8 March 2020) to explore the cancellation. Six female artists from New South Wales were asked to examine Ohlfsen's photographs and reflect on what to do with the space.

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During World War I (1914–1918), Ohlfsen and Kuegelgen trained as Red Cross nurses. She wrote to Gother Mann of the Art Gallery of New South Wales:

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R.I.P
Dora

Adela Dora Ohlfsen-Bagge (22 August 1869 – 7 February 1948), known professionally as Dora Ohlfsen, was an Australian sculptor and art medallist. Working mostly in Italy, her first prominent work was a bronze medallion, The Awakening of Australian Art (1907), which won an award at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition in London and was purchased for the Petit Palais in Paris. Other notable works include the Anzac Medal (1916), created to raise funds for Australians and New Zealanders who fought in the Gallipoli campaign, and Sacrifice (1926), the war memorial in Formia, Italy. Ohlfsen's portrait medallions were commissioned by or on behalf of a wide range of public figures, such as the actor Mary Anderson, the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, and several senior politicians, including H. H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, Billy Hughes, and Mussolini, who allowed her to sketch him in 1922 at the Palazzo Chigi while he worked. In 1948 Ohlfsen and her lifelong partner, Hélène de Kuegelgen, were found dead in their apartment in Rome as a result of a gas leak, deemed by the police to have been an accident. The women were buried together in the city's non-Catholic cemetery, and friends packed up the contents of Ohlfsen's…Citește mai mult

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R.I.P
Dora

The fourth of seven daughters, Ohlfsen was born in Ballarat, Victoria, to Kate Ohlfsen-Bagge, née Harrison, an Australian whose family were from England, and Christian Hermann Ohlfsen-Bagge, an engineer born in Grabionna (now Poland) of Norwegian stock. The family was well known locally. Kate Ohlfsen-Bagge was the daughter of Captain John Harrison—born in Cumberland, England, and known in Australia for land squatting and political activism—and granddaughter of the first government printer in Victoria, George Howe. Christian Ohlfsen-Bagge moved to Australia in 1849 and made money during the Victorian gold rush. In 1855 he was the architect of the Olympic Theatre in Melbourne (demolished in 1894), which had been constructed in England and shipped to Australia, and he was involved in the construction of the Ballarat public library and the Bondi Ocean Outfall Sewer. When Ohlfsen was 14, the family moved to 4 Mona Terrace, Darling Point, a suburb of Sydney, and from 1884 to 1886 she attended Sydney Girls High School. A 1908 Sydney Mail profile described her when she left school as a "tall, willowy girl of 16, with a very distinguished manner, beautiful dark eyes, and hair, and a brilliant complexion". From around 1888 she studied piano under…Citește mai mult

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R.I.P
Dora

Berlin and St. Petersburg Information about Ohlfsen's life in Europe derives in large measure from Ohlfsen herself, mostly in letters to journalists and friends, including Gother Mann, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. There are inconsistencies between the accounts. The historian Ros Pesman writes that "either [Ohlfsen], the journalist, or both constructed a romantic narrative of the life of the 'lady artist', a little outré and eccentric, including early exotic adventuring and later participation in a cosmopolitan and sophisticated art world." In Berlin she attended Theodor Kullak's Neue Akademie der Tonkunst, where she studied under Moritz Moszkowski and said she had played for the Kaiser. Her time in Berlin was cut short by health problems, which she attributed to neuritis in her left arm. "All arrangements were made for my debut," she told an interviewer, "and a concert tour through Germany arranged, for which I was to be paid. Now, it was almost unheard of for a debutante to receive payment, and a foreigner appearing there had never previously been paid. My master had arranged that I should. Just as everything was ready, neuritis of the arm developed in a bad way, and I had to give…Citește mai mult

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Dora

Fearing the onset of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Ohlfsen and Kuegelgen moved to Rome in 1902. "From an artist's viewpoint," she wrote, "there is no country like Italy. Its very air breathes the cameraderie and Bohemianism which every artist craves." In letters and interviews, Ohlfsen said she had taken painting classes from Manuel Benedito-Vives at the Spanish Academy; Kuegelgen apparently worked there in or around 1906, perhaps as a model. Ohlfsen also said she had been taught sculpture by Camille Alaphilippe at the French Academy in Rome; Paul Landowski, creator of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro; and the metal engraver Pierre Dautel. Art historians Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller note that the French Academy was open only to male French citizens at the time, so Ohlfsen probably attended evening classes there. They write that Dautel, who specialized in medallion portraits and had been compared to Pisanello, had the greatest influence on Ohlfsen. The women settled into a studio and apartment at Via di S. Nicola da Tolentino 72, opposite the church of San Nicola da Tolentino agli Orti Sallustiani and near Piazza Barberini. It seems they lived there until their deaths in 1948. The Via di S. Nicola…Citește mai mult

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The first of Ohlfsen's art to be added to a public collection was The Awakening of Australian Art (1907), a bronze medallion 29.5 cm in diameter, which the French government purchased in 1907 for the Petit Palais. "Australia is personified as the New Dawn or Venus arising from the sea," Chanin and Miller write. The pastoral scene on the back, with its "strangely living flock of sheep and the lonely shepherd", conveys "the whole soul and spirit of wide spaces of marvellous solitude and of newness and freedom", in the view of one reporter. "Miss Ohlfsen has caught the spirit of Australia." In June 1908 the medal won an award at the Franco-British Exhibition in London. A few months earlier, Ohlfsen's work had been praised in Rivista di Roma, in a three-page cover story by Rusconi:

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The spirit of a Pisanello, a Boldù or a Matteo de' Pasti is revived in the tenuous and robust medals of the very young sculptor. In their subtle, low relief, of necessity restrained as to light and shade, they vibrate with an intense spirit of life, as do some of the most famous medals of our Renaissance. And while in the male portraits, character and thought are so energetically expressed, those of women breathe a spirit that some of the great masters themselves have not known how to express. The Art Gallery of New South Wales bought a full-sized cast of The Awakening of Australian Art in 1910. According to Chanin and Miller, Ohlfsen used several processes to create medals. The more traditional method was to work from the model in wax, after "cut[ting] the design on a soft block or a die. The die was then hardened and placed in a hydraulic press and the medal struck down from this." They offer her medal of Gabriele d'Annunzio (1907) as an example. For The Awakening, they believe she used a reducing machine. After creating a design in wax or clay, she would create a plaster cast and "from this, a…Citește mai mult

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By 1912 Ohlfsen's work was highly regarded. In 1909 she became the first Australian to be added to the Biographical Dictionary of Medallists, and the following year she was said to be working on a medallion of Archduke Eugen of Austria after Princess Marie of Windisch-Graetz introduced them. She sculpted three nudes around this time: The Pitcher Goes to the Fountain (c. 1909), Le septième voile (1911), and Dawn (by 1912), all lost. Hoping to receive a commission in Australia, she returned for 15 months in July 1912. She had made clear in 1908 that she missed Australia: "The scent and sight of a piece of wattle, the scent of gum leaves, even the trying hot winds of Rome affect me indescribably, and bring with them a nostalgia which shows me that my heart is always entirely Australian." The Art Gallery of New South Wales bought five of her works after she submitted 20 pieces, including three statuettes, to a Royal Art Society of New South Wales exhibition in September 1912. Among the works shown was a medallion portrait in lead of Hélène de Kuegelgen, showing "that fair-haired beauty as a woman of noble elegance of face and figure, who…Citește mai mult

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The visit to Australia led to one of Ohlfsen's greatest artistic disappointments, when an important public commission was cancelled. The Art Gallery of New South Wales had commissioned her in August 1913—for £350, equivalent to $48,032 in 2022—to produce low-relief panels in bronze, 24 ft x 4 ft 6 in, to be installed on the façade directly above its front entrance. Two round panels on either side would display bronze portraits of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; the Siot-Decauville foundry in Paris would do the bronze casting. Deciding to depict a chariot race—the Sydney Morning Herald called it "A Roman Chariot Race" in April 1914—Ohlfsen began work on it after returning to Rome in October 1913. She told the newspaper she needed to work in her own studio "with my friends coming in and out, criticising and helping"; she hoped to return to Australia the following year to see it installed. Chanin and Miller write that, inspired by Classical Greek art, Ohlfsen exaggerated the physicality of the men and horses so that a sense of movement remained evident from a distance. She had declared herself an admirer of Ivan Meštrović, the Serbian sculptor; she told a niece he was "the…Citește mai mult

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There is a great need of nurses and now a branch of the English Red Cross Society has come to Rome and English women are asked & go through a Voluntary Aid course. Great preparations are being made for bringing English wounded to this country and one sees crowds of English, French and Serbian officers and soldiers about ... I also told you that when I first [contacted] Paris I found my founder was dead and my reducers for medals—all killed. The number of artists killed too is appalling. In January 1915 she helped to nurse the injured during the Avezzano earthquake, and later worked in the Italian Auxiliary Hospital near her studio in Rome; photographs of her in her nurse's uniform were published in Australia. Art historian Juliette Peers noted that Ohlfsen's "anecdotes of life on the Italian front found a ready market amongst Australian journalists". Other artwork at this time included a medallion of her friend Colonel Duke Fulco Tosti di Valminuta.

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In October 1916 Ohlfsen created the work she is best known for in Australia, the Anzac Medallion, originally intended to help and commemorate members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) who took part in the Gallipoli campaign (1915–1916) during World War I. Sixty thousand Australian soldiers, out of an overall population of four million, died during the war. She told Mann that, although she had created it for Gallipoli, the medallion "could be dedicated to those fallen in this war in general. If it should be put to any use by the Government I should like half of the proceeds to go the mutilated." When it was issued in 1919, the original 1915–16 date range was changed to 1914–18. The front of the medal depicts a young woman, who represents Australia, bending over a young man to place a laurel wreath on his head; the back, showing an Anzac soldier with a rifle, bears the inscription "Anzac. In Eternal Remembrance. 1914–18", and in smaller letters "Dora Ohlfsen 1916". The woman was based on 21-year-old Alexandra Simpson, who lived in Rome, the daughter of the British High Commissioner in China. Ohlfsen wrote to Mann: "I have made 'Australia'…Citește mai mult

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To promote sales of the Anzac Medal, Ohlfsen visited Australia in 1920 for the first time since 1913. She set up a studio in Sydney at 110 Bathurst Street, and Dame Margaret Davidson organized an exhibition of her work there. Exhibits included Mrs. Grey (1917), a painting of Alexandra Simpson, model for the Anzac medal; The Awakening of Australian Art; a pastel of the Austrian bombing of Venice; a small sculpture called the Blind Ardito (the Arditi were an Italian World War I elite unit); and medallion portraits of General Birdwood, David Lloyd George, H. H. Asquith, General Giuseppe Garibaldi II, Sir Charles Wade, William Holman, and Cardinal William Henry O'Connell. A writer who met her in 1922 described her as "[t]all and of one figure":

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[A] commanding presence, and beautifully gowned, her finely moulded features suggested more the influence of her Polish father than of her English mother. The dark eyes held the inscrutable depths of the visionary, and, somehow, she reminded me irresistibly of Paderewski, a fellow countryman. Her exquisitely modulated voice unmistakably revealed an Italian accent. Her other work at this time included medallions of Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes (1921) and one of Robert Randolph Garran—Solicitor-General of Australia and an old friend of her father who acted as Ohlfsen's mentor— and a bust of Nellie Stewart (1922) that appeared in Women's World. She had apparently hoped during the visit to resolve the issue of the façade commission for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In September 1920 she told the Sydney Sunday Times that the trustees were "waiting until bronze is cheaper to have it cast". The delay was inconvenient, she said, because she had been storing the plaster cast, 8 x 2 yards, in her studio in Rome for the last three years. She considered staying in Australia—in June 1919 she had told Gother Mann that "the coming winter will be my last [in Rome]"—but having failed to reach the…Citește mai mult

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In 1922 Ohlfsen was commissioned, by a man with mining interests in Italy, to create a medallion of Benito Mussolini, Prime Minister of Italy from October 1922 to July 1943. After apparently giving her two-hour sittings at the Palazzo Chigi while he worked, Mussolini signed the plaster cast and added the inscription "per ardua ad astra" (through adversity to the stars). An early supporter of Mussolini and the National Fascist Party, Ohlfsen was in the crowd during the March on Rome on 30 October 1922 when the fascists took power. "We have been passing through many thrilling times here," she wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald in January 1923, "no less than a revolution with a king the head of it. ... At 1 pm I went down to the Café Aragno, on the Corso, with a party of friends. ... We stood on chairs there till 5:30, watching the Corteo march past. ... The Corteo was headed by Mussolini, and the entire procession composed of 100,000 Fascisti, marched past the tomb [of the unknown soldier], giving the Fascisti salute—raising the arm—as in the days of ancient Rome." She described Mussolini in 1925: