Dora Ohlfsen and the facade commission

On 7 February 1948, Ohlfsen and her companion Elena von Kügelgen were found dead in their Rome apartment. Their deaths were found to be accidental through gas poisoning, but some have suggested joint suicide.
The couple were buried together the non-Catholic cemetery of Rome. The epitaph on Ohlfsen’s tombstone – where her sculpture of Dionysius was placed – reads: ‘Dora Ohlfsen Bagge. Australian by birth, Italian at heart.’
Today only a handful of Ohlfsen’s works remain. Though some can be found in public collections around the world, most have disappeared …

Nellie Stewart was an Australian-born actress and singer known as Sweet Nell. This photograph shows the plaster bust which Dora Olhlfsen based on drawings she had made of Stewart on one of her return visits to Australia. A final version of the bust was carved in pink Milanese marble. Today the dimensions and the location are unknown. (Illustrated in black and white in Art in Australia, no.45, August 1932, p.43)

Dora Ohlfsen, like so many women artists, had many once-celebrated works lost to history. From press and other sources we know of at least 121 works by Ohlfsen. However, the current whereabouts of only around 25 of these works is known. The location of this work too, a striking portrait of a Mrs Piercy, is unknown.

'Le septième voile’ (The seventh veil) was one of a group of three nude sculptures that Dora Ohlfsen completed in the years between 1910 and 1914. The other two works were entitled 'Dawn’ and 'The Pitcher goes to the fountain’. A reviewer in the 'Sydney Morning Herald’ noted that this work was meant to invoke an Oriental dance: 'the arms close to the sides, with the hands upturned at the wrists, is from the dance of Salome’.

Italy’s fascist government was Ohlfsen’s major patron in the late 1920s and 1930s and many of her works from this time demonstrate their conservative ideology of race and nationalism.
She began to seek new sources of institutional patronage away from the state in the 20s, and began making work for the church.
By WWII, Ohlfsen’s reputation at home had suffered from her association with Australia’s enemies, though she declared it was ‘her heart’s desire’ to do a major project on home soil.

Ohlfsen once told a reporter she spent her life proving ‘it was possible for a woman to succeed in life without the help of men.’ She was not alone. Ohlfsen was part of a generation of ambitious and well-educated Australian women proud of their recent emancipation and the progressive spirit of their newly federated country.

Exhibition portraits by Ohlfsen’s female contemporaries include four Gallery trustees – the same men who assessed, and stilled, the progress of her panel commission.
Eccleston Du Faur, modelled by Theo Cowan, was the Gallery’s first Australian sculpture commission. It was the subject of questions in NSW Parliament about the commissioning of a sitting trustee, and the gender of the artist making it. Du Faur served as president during the entire period of Ohlfsen’s unfinished commission.

Other Art Gallery of NSW trustees represented in the exhibition include Julian Ashton, artist and art teacher, and here, artist Sydney Long, both modelled by the versatile Tasmanian artist Mildred Lovett. Lovett had moved to Sydney the year of this portrait, 1909, and soon succeeded Long as second-in-charge of Ashton’s Sydney Art School.

This portrait of an unknown subject is by English/New Zealand/Australian artist Anne, or Annie, Dobson. After moving with her husband artist Horace Moore-Jones to Australia, Dobson became better known as his wife, though she had in fact been the one to teach her husband to paint.

Jean Broome-Norton’s sculpture is also known as the ‘Keeper of Hippolyta’s horses’, Hippolyta being a famed Amazon warrior. It continues the long tradition of low relief sculptures of classical subjects that includes Ohlfsen’s own planned chariot race.

Outside the Gallery building is one of its few completed bronze panels, 'Queen Hatasu giving directions for the construction of her famous avenue of Ram-headed Sphinxes’ by Ohlfsen’s contemporary Countess Feodora Gleichen. Ohlfsen saw Gleichen, also a successful expatriate sculptor, as a rival. At one point she wrote to Mann, AGNSW director: ‘By the way, how many photographs did Countess Gleichen send out of that amateur abortion of hers which adorns the walls of the art gallery?’