Margaret Michaelis: love, loss and photography
Helen Ennis, 2005
About
‘A remarkable synthesis of art criticism, biography, history and exploration, combining scholarship and fine writing.’ – Judges’ report, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2006
“Take the photographs,” the elderly photographer Margaret Michaelis said in October 1985 to Helen Ennis, then a young curator from the National Gallery of Australia. Michaelis died a few days later and her archive was donated to the Gallery. Like many of her generation, Michaelis’s life in Europe was dislocated by the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II, following which she suffered acute personal losses and challenges in finding a new path for her art and life in Australia.
For Ennis, the injunction from Michaelis resulted in a journey through the hundreds of photographs in Michaelis’s archive and to sites across the world in Vienna, Berlin, Barcelona, and Cracow. Crucial to the story are the dozens of love letters exchanged between Michaelis and her first husband, a prominent German anarchist imprisoned during the Spanish Civil War. Helen Ennis has approached the artistic legacy of Margaret Michaelis through a lucid and eloquent interweaving of her subject’s professional and personal life.
- 250 pages
- illustrations
- ISBN: 978-0642541208
- Published by the National Gallery of Australia
Awards
Winner of The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2006.
Highly Commended in the Museums Australia Multimedia and Publication Design Awards (Book category) 2006.
Winner, Best Book at the Art Association of Australia & New Zealand 2006 awards
Table of Contents
Names used in this book
- Mrs Sachs
- Dusk
- Vienna
- Dear Gretl
- Lovers
- A sorry state
- Berlin
- Cracow
- Encounter with Spain
- Parting
- A new spirit
- The stage of history
- Exile
- Sydney
- The dark chair
- Forty-eight photographs
- Redemption
- Vienna
Endnotes
Note on the sources
Further reading
Author’s acknowledgments
Resources
National Gallery of Australia exhibition website: Margaret Michaelis: love, loss and photography
A Shared Space: Photography and Intimacy, speech at the Love and Desire conference held by the National Library of Australia in September 2006.
Reviews
Art Monthy Australia, issue 182, August 2005 by Drusilla Modjeska
Goodreads review by Debbie Robson