How NGV guiding led me to become volunteer coordinator for a Melbourne House Museum

Another great post from Wendy Hughes Chuck which also highlights the extraordinary diversity and commitment of guides. Wendy writes:

Back in 2011 when I was a trainee guide, and the Vienna: Art & Design Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition was being installed, a lady called Eva de Jong-Duldig came to talk to the guides on a Tuesday morning about her parents, Karl and Slawa Duldig, who trained as artists in their home town of Vienna at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Austrian School of Applied Arts) and later at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste (Academy of Fine Arts).

Karl Duldig (1901-1986) trained under the sculptor Anton Hanak, a member of the Viennese Secession movement and a friend and colleague of Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffmann. Slawa, née Horowitz, was a private student of Hanak’s. This is where the two art students met, fell in love and eventually married.

A sculpture by Karl, Mask, 1921, carved in Salzburg marble, was included in the 2011 NGV Vienna: Art and Design Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition.

In 1921, when Karl was aged 19, this sculpture had been selected to represent the Kunstgewerbeschule at an international exhibition in Munich.

Eva’s talk

Imagine my surprise when Eva told the guides how she had converted her parents’ home in Burke Road, East Malvern into a house museum. The ‘Duldig Studio’ was no more than 10 minutes’ drive away from my home in Ashburton.  I just had to get there! However the museum at that time was open by appointment only for groups of 15 or over.  The solution was to pull together a group from among my fellow trainee NGV guides. Some of the 2010/11 guides’ intake may remember that trip.

Eva served us tea and coffee and took us on a guided tour of the house which the family had bought in 1955.  After escaping Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 with their baby daughter, Eva, the Duldigs had arrived in Australia in 1940. Like so many refugees they had struggled to remake their lives and re-establish their artistic careers. Karl and Slawa were now established senior art teachers in Melbourne schools, Mentone Grammar and St Catherine’s, respectively.

We were intrigued not only by the house full of art, the sculpture garden created by Karl, the studio he built in the garden where he taught private students and worked on his own sculptures, but also the modernist 1930s Viennese furniture designed and commissioned by Slawa in 1931, the year she married Karl.

Karl and Slawa were modernist artists and their work shows the influence of primitive African and pre-Columbian art as well as classical Greek, Roman and Oriental sculpture. Their East Malvern house contains both the art they had created in Vienna and work they had completed after their arrival in Australia.

Eva told us the remarkable story of how the Viennese furniture and works of art had been transported from Vienna to Paris by her mother’s sister, Rella, who had married a Frenchman in 1939. It was stashed away in the basement of their apartment in Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau throughout the Second World War.

After the war, via the Red Cross, Slawa found out that her sister had survived and gradually over the next five decades the furniture and also the sculptures and paintings were shipped from Paris to Melbourne.

The Annual Duldig Lecture

Since 1986 Eva and the Duldig Studio have sponsored the annual Duldig Lecture on Sculpture. Until 2014 this free lecture took place at the NGV and it is now delivered in collaboration with Melbourne University. In 2011, the speaker was Dr Christian Witt-Dörring, formerly of the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts and a contributor to the NGV ‘s Austria: Art & Design exhibition. His topic, related to the exhibition at the NGV, was Viennese Sculpture and the Wiener Werkstätte.

After the lecture I signed up as a friend of the Duldig Studio and responded when the Studio sent out a call for volunteers.

Volunteering leads to guiding

Initially my role as a volunteer was to greet booked groups on arrival, serve them tea and coffee, and generally assist Eva, the Founding Director. Of course, nothing beats being guided round a house museum by the artists’ daughter, and gradually as the number of visitors grew, the museum opened regularly on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to walk-in visitors.

It was not easy for Eva to cope with the extra visitors and so she asked me to put together a tour. It was with some trepidation that I learned that the first group I would be guiding were guides from the Jewish Museum of Australia. I felt a bit of a fraud recounting the story of Jewish refugees from Vienna when so many of their families had undergone similar experiences whereas I had only ever read about them. My NGV guides’ training came to the rescue and they enjoyed my tour. Several revealed similar stories and at least two had also been born in Vienna and like the Duldig family, had escaped via Switzerland.

Soon I was guiding booked tours regularly but never on a Tuesday morning which, as you are well aware, is devoted to guides’ lectures at the NGV.

Exhibitions at the Duldig

A small house museum operates somewhat differently from the NGV. Today under the professional Directorship of Lyndel Wischer, it is largely volunteer run and depends on local government and philanthropic support for its exhibitions and programs. Exhibitions usually run for around 18 months.

Visitors love the permanent collection of art and furniture which is displayed in the original rooms of the house and the artists’ studio, much as it was during the lifetime of the artists. Changing temporary exhibitions take place in the new gallery space adjoining the house.

The exhibition, The Studio of Karl Duldig, A Living Legacy was postponed due to Covid 19, and we hope it will open to the public once restrictions are lifted.

Training Volunteers and Guides

To be a volunteer at the Duldig Studio means being a Jack-of-all-trades. We have a loyal team of volunteers some of whom are also guides. There is no comprehensive training programme like the one we enjoy at the NGV. After an induction given jointly by the museum director and myself as Volunteer Coordinator, new volunteers are paired up with an experienced volunteer for a few months. Some may  become guides while others are happy to concentrate on “meet and greet” activities, serving delicious Austrian cakes (Zwechkenkuchen or Kugelhupf) and coffee to booked tour groups on arrival, guiding groups around the house and garden, assisting the disabled, taking bookings and handling book sales. There is also an opportunity to help the resident curator with the clay modelling classes which are run for schoolchildren and residents of aged care homes.

Our volunteers are a mixed bunch of talented people, mainly retirees or art students. At present we count among our group a former primary schoolteacher, an oncologist, a librarian, an actress, a conference marketing executive and a fluent German speaker and former NGA guide.

Interesting visitors

Some of the most interesting visitors to the Studio are people who come via an introduction to Eva, the Founder. A few that spring to mind are: the Austrian Ambassador to Australia; Wesley Enoch, playwright and Director of the Sydney Festival; Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, National Gallery in Canberra; Sue Course, the granddaughter of  Melanie Langer, owner of the Langer Apartment in the NGV; and  Margaret Adamson, Australian Ambassador to Poland (1998-2002).

More information:

For more information about this art and social history jewel in East Malvern, go to: http://www.duldigstudio.com or read Driftwood – Escape and Survival through Art by Eva de Jong-Duldig, http://www.duldig.org.au/books-catalogues/

Thank you Wendy for sharing your knowledge about this wonderful space.