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(b Rome,1850; d Rome, July 2, 1881).

Italian painter and art teacher active in Australia. He trained at the Accademia di S Luca, Rome. His conservative style emulates his teacher Alessandro Capalti’s use of drape, column and rhetorical gesture, as seen in Capalti’s portraits at the University of Sydney. On Bishop James Quinn’s advice, Anivitti emigrated to Brisbane in 1871 with the sculptor Achille Simonetti. In 1875 he was appointed first teacher of painting and drawing at the Art Training School of the New South Wales Academy of Art, founded in 1871. Among his 30 recorded pupils were medal winners Frank Mahony (1862–1916), artist for the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, whose drawing of Anivitti is at the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and A. J. Fischer, staff artist for the Illustrated Sydney News and Bulletin.

Anivitti’s duties at the Academy included curatorship of a collection of paintings acquired by the Academy with government funds. These paintings became the foundation of the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, whose antecedents were in the Academy....

(Rossi)

(b Alderstone, England, Jan 27, 1851; d Bondi, Sydney, April 27, 1942).

Australian painter and writer . He attended the West London School of Art and, following the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1878 the newspaper owner David Syme invited Ashton to Melbourne to produce black-and-white illustrations for the Illustrated Australian News. After a disagreement with the management he transferred to the rival Australasian Sketcher. In 1883 he went to Sydney, where he joined the staff of the Picturesque Atlas of Australia and also contributed to the Sydney Bulletin. Ashton was an ardent disciple of Impressionist painting and claimed to have executed the first plein-air landscape in Australia: Evening, Merri Creek (1882; Sydney, A.G. NSW). Much of his work, as in the watercolour A Solitary Ramble (1888; Sydney, A.G. NSW), had a strong sentimental streak. In addition to his outdoor works Ashton painted a number of portraits, such as that of Helen Ashton...

(b Wyong, NSW, Dec 6, 1940).

Australian painter, photographer and teacher. Binns trained as a painter at the National Art School, Sydney (1958–62) and held her first solo exhibition at Watters Gallery, Sydney in 1967. It comprised vividly coloured and decorative paintings, with explicit representations of female genitalia. This symbolic imagery predated a collective push by Australian women artists to produce work that they believed was inherently female. She initiated many community arts projects from the beginning of the 1970s and was an influential force in re-positioning women’s work. This took into account collaborative projects and a respect for amateur techniques and traditions that thrive outside the art world of metropolitan centres. Her community projects included Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories for Blacktown Municipality (1979–81) and the art workshop program Full Flight, which Binns conducted for women throughout rural New South Wales (1981–3). Her Tower of Babel, an ongoing work open to contributors by invitation, was initiated in Sydney in ...

(b London, Nov 13, 1905; d Hobart, Jan 1, 1985).

Australian architect of English birth. In 1918 Blythe obtained a scholarship to attend the London County Council School of Building (later known as the Brixton School of Building). Blythe’s family moved to Tasmania in 1921, where he continued his architectural training at the Hobart Technical College (HTC) while articled to local architect William Rudolph Waldemar Koch. Between 1925 and 1930 Blythe worked for the Electrolytic Zinc Company and the Public Works Department (PWD), Tasmania. In 1927 Blythe received an honourable mention for his Beaux-Arts inspired entry in the Australian Canberra War Memorial Competition.

Towards the end of 1930 Blythe returned to London. In 1933 he was awarded second place in the Building Centre Cottage Competition and in 1934 he returned to Tasmania to a position with the PWD. Between 1935 and 1949 Blythe designed all the principal PWD buildings in Tasmania. Of particular note are the many schools that Blythe designed, including the Ogilvie High School (...

[Akitt]

(b London, March 23, 1905; d Auckland, Jan 28, 1965).

New Zealand architect of English birth. He was educated at Highgate School, London, and arrived in New Zealand in 1927. After working for several architectural firms in Auckland, he began his own practice in 1937. From 1945 he taught at the School of Architecture, University of Auckland. During the 1940s and 1950s he designed a series of simple, austere timber-frame houses clad in dark-stained weatherboards with low-pitched roofs, for example Redwood House (1943), Orakei, and Melville House (1947), Epsom. The plans of these houses were economical and rigorously organized, while construction techniques and details were those commonly available. Brown was one of the first New Zealand architects to discover in the principles of the Modern Movement the key to an authentic architectural idiom for his own time and place. Through his example as a practising architect and as a teacher, he exerted a strong influence on a generation of post-World War II New Zealand architects, encouraging them to find their own identity rather than relying on imported concepts and styles....

(b Isle of Man, Nov 27, 1894; d Sydney, Nov 19, 1937).

Australian sculptor of British birth. He studied at Nottingham School of Art from 1910 to 1915 and again, after active service in World War I, in 1919. He then transferred to the Royal College of Art, London, and was awarded a diploma in sculpture in 1921. In 1922 he received a British School in Rome scholarship for study in Italy but cut this short and emigrated to Australia in May 1923 to become head teacher of the sculpture department at East Sydney Technical College.

Hoff’s work belongs to an inter-war classical revival and his sculptures attest to his absorption of the Paganist–Vitalist theories promoted in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s by his close associate Norman Lindsay. Hoff’s work was generally life-affirming and sexually adventurous for its period. His major paganist sculpture is the relief Deluge: Stampede of the Lower Gods (4.5 m wide; 1925–7; Canberra, N.G.), which depicts crowds of mermaids, dryads, tritons, satyrs and Australian Aborigines. The life-size ...

[Friedrich; Fritz]

(b Vienna, Dec 15, 1928; d New Zealand, Feb 19, 2000).

Austrian painter and printmaker. Born to a Jewish mother, he foiled the Nazis and was able to shield some of his relatives for a time. During Nazi rule he studied in Vienna, at public schools and at the Montessori school before briefly attending the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. His floridly patterned works with their haunting and rich colours are dependent on the decorative tradition that produced Art Nouveau. The luxurious, sinuous forms and expressive distortions affiliate him to figurative artists such as Klimt and Schiele. Hundertwasser’s subject-matter modified these stylistic sources and was often influenced by his great interest in a sane environment expressed as a stable relationship between man, the built world and nature. He travelled widely and developed a pictorial vocabulary unspecific to any place or time. Hundertwasser made significant contributions to printing techniques with such works as the woodcut series Nana Hiakv Mizu (1973; with Japanese artists). The decorative and technical opulence of his work made him a controversial figure with the critics, while assuring him a large popular following....

(b London, Oct 12, 1882; d Sydney, Sept 20, 1973).

English architect and teacher, active in Australia . He was apprenticed in 1900 to C. E. Kempe, a stained-glass designer, and later that year to the architect J. S. Gibson. Wilkinson studied architecture at the Royal Academy, London, from 1902 to 1906, winning the Academy’s Silver and Gold Medals and subsequently travelling in England, France, Italy and Spain. He joined the staff of the School of Architecture, University College, London, serving as an assistant professor from 1910 to 1918. He held a commission from 1914 to 1918 in the London University Officer Training Corps, and in 1918 he was appointed as Australia’s first Professor of Architecture, at the University of Sydney. Dean of the Faculty of Architecture there from 1920 to 1947, he was a witty, erudite and influential teacher, discouraging ‘fads’ and stressing the importance of correct orientation for buildings and rooms. He designed various buildings on the university campus, the Physics Building (...