Design and Art Australia Online

Ludwik Dutkiewicz was born in Stara Sol, outside Lwow, Poland, in 1921. He trained at Lwow Polytechnic before and during the war, and after many traumatic experiences, during which time he was protected by his older brother, Wladyslaw, he found his way to a Displaced Persons’ camp in Bavaria, where he stayed for four years, working in a touring theatrical troupe and in administration.

He migrated to Australia in 1949 and settled in Adelaide. In 1951 he held a joint exhibition with Wladyslaw at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts (RSASA), after which he was elected Fellow. In 1953 he was awarded the Cornell Prize at the Contemporary Art Society of South Australia (CASSA) for his tachist painting Boats after storm, and won it again in the following year for his abstract composition Green village (now in Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection).

He was one of several of South Australia’s most progressive artists of the era featured in the film Painting 1950-1955 South Australia, directed by Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski. He exhibited with a selected CASSA group in London in 1954, and was a member of the Adelaide Group, which showed work in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne until 1957. He was Vice-President or committee member of the CASSA from 1954-58, and lectured for several years at the South Australian School of Art, until c.1965.

Ludwik arrived in Australia as an expressionist painter but soon became a committed abstractionist. At that time there was almost no abstract art in Adelaide: indeed, he and his brother Wladyslaw pioneered this territory in the southern capital. The brothers were attracted to this mode as a reaction against the kind of art promulgated by the Nazis in Western Europe and Stalinists in the Eastern Block. They also believed fine art should be imaginative and should free itself of tired and clichéd representational forms; and that it had evolved in modern times to expand beyond illustration of people and their environment.

Ludwik joined the staff of the Botanic Gardens on 19 February 1953 as a botanical illustrator. His work in this field was published in many journals and books, and has received international recognition. During his final years in the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium he concentrated on line drawings and his work features extensively in the early volumes of the Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, the fourth edition of The Flora of South Australia by J.P. Jessop and H. Toelken (1986) and, in his year of retirement, Flowering Plants in Australia by B. Morley and H. Toelken (1983).

In the early 1960s he was both a performer and costume and make up designer for his brother’s theatrical troupe, the Art Studio Players, which performed a number of Australian premieres and explored The Method on Adelaide stages. From 1964, Ludwik shifted much of his creative energy into film, inspired by the filmic theories of Sergei Eisenstein. He directed Transfiguration, which featured the music of Anton Bruckner and was featured in the Sixth Adelaide Film Festival; it received an AFI award for Best Black and White Photography and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He made two other films in the mid-late 1960s with Ian Davidson: Reflections and Time in Summer. Both were black and white, the latter a feature film that was selected for presentation at the Berlin Film Festival.

The artistic output of Ludwik Dutkiewicz shows a remarkable dicotomy between the mostly expressionist and abstract paintings over a period of more than 30 years and carried out in his private time, and the accomplished botanical illustrations undertaken as a public servant. The artist explored a wide range of media, painting in oils and acrylics, but he also worked in a number of graphic forms and black and white and colour photography. In the latter his subjects ranged from portraiture, nudes, landscape, architecture and experimenting with superimposition, colour and texture – directions that informed his figurative and abstract painting as well as his film-making.

Writers:

Dutkiewicz, Adam Note:

Date written:

2008

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed