Surviveor and Authority

The Outsider: A Portrait of Ursula Hoff, by Colin Holden; Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, $49.95.

This detailed and thoughtful biography of Dr Ursula Hoff AO OBE (1909–2005) appears in her centenary year. It is based largely on research by the author, a professional historian, into the surviving diaries kept by Dr Hoff, now in private hands, and other sources including Hoff papers deposited in the University of Melbourne Archives.

In his introduction, Dr Holden explains why he has deliberately chosen to describe it as a “portrait” based on the subject’s own diaries (dating in one case from 1939 and a later series of thirty volumes covering the period from 1974 to 1992); and why he has departed from the more conventional approach of mixing archival material with the results of extensive “in-depth interviews” with colleagues, friends and other contemporaries. The diaries contain a rich lode of pithy observations and reflections on people, art history and experiences, including personal struggles with depression arising from a difficult and domineering parent suffering senile dementia.

They also contain some fine miniature word pictures, almost “pen sketches” by this cultivated German-Jewish scholar, who arrived in Australia from Europe in 1939 and retired as Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1973, was Adviser to the Felton Bequest 1975 to 1983, and the authoritative doyenne of curatorship in Australia. Holden readily acknowledges the light that has been shed on aspects of Hoff’s professional lifework at the NGV and as an art historian lecturing at the University of Melbourne, by two other recent books, John Poynter’s Mr Felton’s Bequests (2003) and Sheridan Palmer’s Centre of the Periphery: Three European Art Historians in Melbourne (2008). However, the present work offers an immensely privileged view into the private world of its subject—and Hoff was a very private person, despite her formidable public image and role in the national cultural life.

Hoff, born in London whilst her father, of Jewish descent, was on a business trip there, completed her art history doctorate at Hamburg in 1935 under Dr Erwin Panofsky and Dr Fritz Saxl, both of whom had to flee Nazi Germany. Holden relates that one Examiner, Werner Burmeister, wore his Nazi Sturmabteilung uniform at her final oral examination and nearly blocked the award of her degree, using the familiar Nazi line that her thesis approach was “foreign to German thinking”—a category also later extensively used in so-called Nazi “jurisprudence” and against appeals to individual rights.

Hoff’s mother, Thusnelde (“Tussi” to the family) was by contrast, of “pure Aryan” stock and “lived up to her forbidding Christian name. She could be unbending, puritanically disapproving of even her husband’s most innocent pleasures.” Many of her family (the Bulckes) supported Nazism and they thus became estranged from Ursula. Tussi lived with Ursula, both in Australia and later back in London. She was obviously an unreconstructed product of Wilhelmine Germany: Hoff’s diary records Tussi’s disgusted reactions to the mere mention, in a 1970s radio broadcast, of the admittedly lurid aspects of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome; and they were exactly those of the Kaiserin Augusta Viktoria upon its premiere in 1905! Holden tells of Hoff’s struggle to survive the stresses of Tussi’s final descent into dementia.

Holden’s narrative, based on the diaries and filled out and illuminated by references to other materials and sources, including observations by friends and colleagues, relates Hoff’s studies in Weimar Germany, her times in London, her arrival in Melbourne to work as Secretary at the Women’s College under its Danish principal, Greta Horte, her landing of the post of Assistant Keeper of Prints at the NGV in 1943 under Sir Daryl Lindsay, after initial rebuffs from the cantankerous previous Director, J.S. MacDonald; and her subsequent distinguished career achievements. These included her role in the acquisition of many great works of art for the NGV in association with the Felton Bequest and Trustees and their successive London agents. Her contacts with the likes of Sir Kenneth Clark, Anthony Blunt, Sir Denis Mahon and other art scholars, are also mentioned. Her various international travels are also touched on, although Holden notes that they would provide materials for another whole book. This biography demonstrates the great contribution Hoff made to building up the NGV collection and also that of the National Gallery of Australia.

The book is jointly dedicated to Dr Ursula Hoff and to Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who funded Holden’s research for this book at the University of Melbourne. Dame Elisabeth and Hoff were both born in 1909 and each had great esteem for the other’s gift; as well as a devotion to the NGV. We gain from this biography an intimate portrait of a European scholar transplanted into Australia as it was on the eve of the Second World War and experiencing, from the perspective of a sensitive, cosmopolitan and intellectual refugee from Nazism, the signal cultural changes which the mid-twentieth century brought—somewhat delayed—to Australia. Hoff always remained uncomfortable with the phenomenon of philistinism amongst many (but of course, by no means all) of the wealthier and “socialite” patrons of the arts in the Australian capital cities. She was also ill at ease with certain aspects of crassness in many Australians that she encountered upon international tours, particularly in Asia. 

Hoff’s long absence from Europe (despite various return visits) may have obscured the fact that philistinism also existed in the continental art world; but she no doubt missed the broader and engaging outlook of that pre-war Europe in which she had her roots. As to the latter, she could become understandably exasperated; although she was by no means cut off from some appreciation of the relative informality of Australian manners. Indeed, Holden notes that at (only) one point in her diaries does she adopt the great Australian adjective: and it was due to her irritation with an instance of what she saw as insufferable condescension by one of the “bloody rich”.

A strong and recurring theme in this book is what Holden has characterised (adopting an expression used by Hoff herself) as her sense of being an “outsider” by virtue of being a refugee and a “displaced person”, less perhaps in the technical or legal sense than in her deepest feelings. She had a ready sympathy for non-conformists, for the down and out and the frail and vulnerable, especially the elderly. This showed in her recommendations of acquisitions of some socially telling photographic images for the NGV. She experienced first-hand the violence of street gangs of young unemployed Nazi thugs in the 1930s and on encountering much the same thing in Sweden on a visit there in 1979, she noted that “the halb starke tough has been part of the scene as long as I can remember”.

The book is handsomely produced and well-bound in hardback. Holden takes the portrait by John Brack which appears on the dust-jacket as his point of departure for peering into Hoff’s somewhat elusive personality. He is right to point out that Brack’s portrait belies the fact that Hoff was in her seventies when it was painted. He also notes that the large chair in which Hoff is depicted sitting is an icon or attribute of her status as the scholarly Haupt or head of her profession in her adopted Australia. Hence her authority, derived from an immense learning in the Germanic tradition, is represented by her looking out at us from her cathedra. Yet at the same time, we see in the portrait a very self-contained individual: this is the aspect of the refugee and the survivor, safe upon a foreign shore; the chair is placed on a carpet, a device common in Brack’s work, yet here also connoting, as Holden says, an “ancient tribal evocation of always moving on, a history of survival”.

Brack’s painted image is neatly contrasted by a colour photographic study of Hoff aged ninety-three, by Andrew Leong in 2002, reproduced after page 28 of the book. Hoff is here depicted at her home, seated with an austere and Germanic dignity, beneath an old family portrait of her maternal grandmother Bulcke.

There are generous colour plates, mainly of works Hoff obtained for the NGV, including paintings, prints, photographs and decorative art objects; as well as various well-chosen black-and-white photographs. Some blemishes occur in the form of occasional typographical errors in both the text and notes, but they are not so numerous as to disturb. Such things are hard to eradicate completely but still occur too frequently these days.

The book comes with the full scholarly apparatus of endnotes and a bibliography. One aspect which might have been improved is the index. It could, and perhaps should, have been made more inclusive, particularly as to listings of all the artists mentioned and their works in the NGV collection. Even so, this is a good, useful book and is a telling biography of one of the major figures of twentieth-century Australian cultural life. Perhaps someone will take up Holden’s excellent suggestion to write a book on Dr Ursula Hoff’s extensive travels in Europe and elsewhere.

Dr Douglas Hassall wrote on Ursula Hoff and the Melbourne Poussin in the April issue.