Robert Klippel

A documentary film, Make It New: A Portrait of the Sculptor Robert Klippel, was produced in 2003.

He died in Sydney on his 81st birthday, 19 June 2001.

In 1988 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to art.

Klippel’s work commonly utilized an extraordinary diversity of junk materials: wood, stone, plastic toy kits, wooden pattern parts, typewriter machinery, industrial piping and machine parts, as well as bronze, silver, oils, photography, collage and paper. He is also notable for the great diversity of scale of his work, from intricate whimsical structures in metal to the large wooden assemblages of the 1980s. His mature work was usually untitled, being distinguished by simple number sequences.

Klippel’s last decades were extremely prolific. In the 1980s he completed a major series of small bronzes, as well as a large number of monumental wooden assemblages, made from the pattern-parts of early twentieth century maritime machinery. Working with wood, metals, plastics, junk, machinery parts, oils, watercolours and paper, and utilising the techniques of casting, assemblage, painting and collage, he had completed over 1,200 sculptures by the end of the 1990s.

In 1964, art critic Robert Hughes called Klippel “one of the few Australian sculptors worthy of international attention”. The statement cemented his international reputation, but he struggled to win acceptance in his own country. During the 1970s and ’80s, when the traditional distinctions between sculpture and architecture, design, photography, performance and painting were frequently presented as obsolete, Klippel remained committed to the idea of sculpture as abstract, as occupying sculptural space, and as sustaining in ways beyond literary or narrative function.

In 1957 he sailed to the United States, living in New York . He taught sculpture at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design) from 1958 to 1962 and returned to New York until 1963. He then returned to Sydney, where he remained until his death. He taught at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education from 1975 to 1979.

He spent a year in Paris where he attended lectures by Jiddu Krishnamurti. This strengthened a lifelong interest in Eastern religion and philosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zen. After 18 months in Paris, Klippel returned to Australia in 1950.

By the time Klippel returned to Sydney in 1950, he was committed to construction as a method and was producing totally abstract sculptures. His work was received with little enthusiasm in Australia at first, with his first sculptural work was not selling in his country until 1956. Forced to work full-time, his production dropped to a mere 18 pieces between 1950 and 1957.

By the 1950s Klippel had grown apart from the surrealists and in New York he was invigorated by the rise of abstract expressionism and the New York School. He moved away increasingly from traditional sculpture and produced his first junk assemblages in 1960. He began incorporating machine parts, pieces of wood and industrial piping into his works.

His parents’ business was successful and with their support, he left Australia in 1947 to study at the Slade School of Fine Art where he remained for six months. He lived and painted at The Abbey Arts Centre in New Barnet, London, along with artists Leonard French, James Gleeson, Peter Benjamin Graham, Douglas Green, Stacha Halpern, Grahame King and Inge King. In November 1948, Klippel, Gleeson and the young Lucian Freud exhibited together in London. André Breton, the originator of Surrealism, arranged for Klippel’s work to be exhibited in Paris the following year.

While in London, he met other expatriate Australians including the surrealist painter James Gleeson. The two collaborated on several works, including Madame Sophie Sesostoris (1947–48), a Pre-Raphaelite satire, combining Klippel’s sculpture with Gleeson’s painting. For a time, Klippel embraced the surrealist ethic, exhibiting at a major surrealist show and meeting André Breton.

Robert Klippel AO (19 June 1920 – 19 June 2001) was an Australian constructivist sculptor and teacher. He is often described in contemporary art literature as Australia’s greatest sculptor. Throughout his career he produced some 1,300 pieces of sculpture and approximately 5,000 drawings.

Klippel was born in Potts Point, Sydney on 19 June 1920. At the age of six, he made his first model ship after being taken on a ferry ride on Sydney Harbour. Model making became a passion. He was educated at Sydney Grammar School. He trained to work in the wool industry but in 1939 he joined the Royal Australian Navy. He was employed to make models of planes while he was serving in the Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships at the Gunnery Instruction Centre during World War II.