Inge King

King went to see the artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), whose work she admired.

Kollwitz' advice to King about a career in art was "Don’t do it if you can help it. It is so difficult".

Nevertheless, King did go on.

She said: "I haven’t regretted it. I agree with her, it’s difficult."

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 (1870–1938).

The Nazis considered such art to be decadent (Entartete Kunst) and later attempted to suppress it.

While she was there, she supported herself by undertaking commercial work (such as carving architectural ornaments) for the sculptor, Otto Hitzberger (1878–1964), who was on the staff there.

King found a teacher, Hermann Nonnenmacher (1892–1988), a wood-carver influenced by Ernst Barlach, who taught her the basic skills of wood-carving and modelling in clay.

Ingeborg Viktoria "Inge" King (Neufeld; 26 November 1915 – 23 April 2016) was a German-born Australian sculptor.

She received many significant public commissions.

Her work is held in public and private collections.

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

Her early childhood was typical one for a child of her class and time in a European city.

But after World War I, conditions in Germany became increasingly difficult.

The period of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), though a culturally stimulating time, was never stable.

Conditions were made more difficult by the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s and the depression of 1929.

During that time, things became increasingly difficult for the Neufeld family.

By the time King's father died in 1930, when she was 14, the family had lost most of its money.

Her older sisters supported her to stay at school until she finished, in 1932, which enabled her to get a good education.

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

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

Two of her older sisters, now married, decided to emigrate: one to Palestine, another to the US.

By 1934, when she was 18, King was effectively on her own.

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

She said of this experience: "I owe them a lot ... This commune ... gave me or taught me some independence, which was invaluable", and, most importantly, taught her "to survive without money".

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

But art was something she could do with minimal resources, so long as she could support herself.

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 (all women).

She was forced to leave about a year later, not long before Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938).

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

One helped her get a visa for England.

Another warned her that he had received his mobilisation papers and that she should leave as soon as possible.

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

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

This was quite a shock.

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

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

She also 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.

Her best known work is Forward Surge (1974) at the Melbourne Arts Centre.

She became a Member of the Order of Australia in January 1984.