Ludwik Dutkiewicz a pioneer of abstract art in South Australia; also botanical illustrator and film maker in 1960s

Ludwik Dutkiewicz and examples of his botanical line drawings for Adelaide Botanic Gardens at State Herbarium. Individisible (oil on board 1967) was part of his pioneering abstract art, with his brother Wladyslaw, in South Australia.

Ludwik Dutkiewicz, who, with brother Wladyslaw, pioneered abstract art in South Australia from the early 1950s, also excelled as an illustrator with the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium..

Ludwik Dutkiewicz was born in Stara Sol, outside Lwow, Poland, in 1921. After traumatic experiences during World War II, when he was protected by an older brother Wladyslaw, he found his way to a displaced persons’ camp in Bavaria, where he stayed for four years, working in a touring theatrical troupe with his brother and in administration.

He migrated to Australia in 1949, followed by Wladyslaw later that year, and both settled in Adelaide where they held a joint exhibition in 1951 at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts with Ludwik electeda  fellow. In 1953, Ludwik was awarded the Cornell Prize at the Contemporary Art Society of South Australia and won it again in 1954. He was recognised as one of several of South Australia’s most progressive artists of the era, featured in the film Painting 1950-1955 South Australia.

Ludwik Dutkiewicz exhibited with a selected Contemporary Art Society of South Australia group in London in 1954, and was a member of the Adelaide Group that showed work in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne until 1957. Dutkiewicz was vice president or committee member of the Contemporary Art Society of South Australia from 1954-62, and lectured for several years at the South Australian School of Art.

Ludwik Dutkiewicz had arrived in Australia as an expressionist painter but soon became a committed abstractionist with his brother. They were attracted to the abstract as a reaction against the kind of art promulgated by the Nazis in Western Europe and Stalinists in the Eastern Block. They also believed fine art should be imaginative and should free itself of tired and clichéd, representational forms; and that it had evolved in modern times to expand beyond illustration of people and their environment.

Ludwik Dutkiewicz joined the staff of Adelaide Botanic Gardens in 1953 as a botanical illustrator. His work in this field was published in many journals and books and has received international recognition. During his final years in the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium he concentrated on line drawings and his work features extensively in the early volumes of the Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, The Flora of Central Australia (1981), The Flora of South Australia by J. P. Jessop and H. Toelken (1986) and, in his year of retirement, Flowering Plants in Australia by B. Morley and H. Toelken (1983). He was also included in the sixth International Exhibition of Botanical Art & Illustration, Pittsburgh (1988). There were 1,500 of his illustrations in the Adelaie Botanic Gardens’ archive.

From 1964, Ludwik shifted much of his creative energy into film. With scriptwriter/photographer Ian Davidson ,he directed Transfiguration, featuring the music of Anton Bruckner and was shown in the sixth Adelaide Film Festival. It received an Australian Film Institute award for best black and white photography and was in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He made two other films in the mid-late 1960s with Davidson: Reflections and Time in Summer, the latter a feature film selected for the Berlin Film Festival.

• Information from Ludwik Dutkiewicz: Adventures in Art by Adam Dutkiewicz (Adelaide: Moon Arrow Press, 2009)