Grahame King

Grahame Edwin King (23 February 1915 – 11 October 2008) was a master Australian printmaker, who has been called the "patron saint of contemporary Australian printmaking".

Grahame Edwin King was born in Melbourne on 23 February 1915.

He left school when he was about fifteen and went to work.

In the late 1930s, King helped pioneer the new art of chromo-photolithography which transformed colour advertising in the print industry.

He was able to make use of this expertise for the rest of his career.

In 1934, he started studying commercial art at night at the Working Men's College of Melbourne (which became Melbourne Technical College and later the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)).

Later he went to the Elton Fox Academy, which taught traditional painting.

In 1939, the year of the highly influential exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art in Melbourne sponsored by the Melbourne Herald, King started attending night classes at the art school of the National Gallery of Victoria, which he continued for three years.

King was in the army from 1942 until 1946.

He was based in Melbourne, so he was also able to attend Saturday afternoon art classes with George Bell.

Bell had recently returned from overseas and had brought back news of European Modernism and enthusiasm for artists such as Modigliani, Derain, Braque, Matisse and Picasso.

King later said that Bell "opened our eyes to modern art and it was a tremendous experience".

King's painting at this time shows the influence of George Bell's style of early modernism.

In 1945, King joined the Victorian Artists Society and soon became its secretary and exhibitions manager.

In late 1947, like many young Australians at that time, King went to Europe.

He based himself in England at The Abbey Arts Centre in Hertfordshire.

Other Australian artists resident at The Abbey at that time included the painters Leonard French, Helen Marshall, James Gleeson and Noel Counihan, the sculptor Robert Klippel, and the art historian Bernard Smith.

King studied drawing with Bernard Meninsky and attended print-making classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

Later he toured Britain and Europe, producing many drawings and water-colours of buildings and scenery.

These works showed him to be an "astute observer", with a "keen visual eye and [a] mature sense of design, composition and colour" They are now held by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

In Europe, King saw the work of Cubists, Surrealists and other abstract artists such as Paul Klee.

He responded to the "modernist modes involving the flattening and fragmentation of the image and the use of free-flowing line to express movement and rhythm" and particularly to the work of Georges Braque.

This experience defined the direction of King's own work, which became increasingly abstract from then on.

While he was at The Abbey, King met his future wife, the Berlin-born sculptor, Inge Neufeld (Inge King), whom he married in 1950.

She had been trained in Berlin and Glasgow, but had spent some time in New York City, where she encountered American Abstract Expressionism.

Her own work was also tending towards abstraction.

The compatibility of their artistic interests and their support for each other influenced the later development of their art for both of them.

The couple moved back to Melbourne in early 1951.

They held their first joint exhibition in Melbourne later that year, with paintings and drawings by Grahame and sculptures and jewellery by Inge, and took part in other exhibitions during the following years.

But, for the decade after their return, most of Grahame King's time and energy was taken up with earning a living and with building their house at Warrandyte on the outskirts of Melbourne.

This house, designed by the architect Robin Boyd, now has a State Heritage classification.

During this time, King had no access to a printing press, but he continued to paint.

He was responsible for the revival of print making in Australia in the 1960s.

He helped set up the Print Council of Australia, of which he was the first Honorary Secretary and was later President.

In 1961, Vic Greenhouse, head of the art department at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) invited King to join the group of printmakers, which included Fred Williams and Hertha Kluge-Pott, who were allowed to use its printing facilities on one day per week.

He taught printmaking at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) from 1966 to 1988.

In 1991, he was awarded an Order of Australia for his services to education.

As well as teaching, King produced his own art work, concentrating on lithographs and monotypes.

He was also a skilled photographer and used his photography both in his teaching and in his practice.

While he was in the army, King met the artist John Brack, who remained a friend until the latter's death in 1999.