Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (1893-1965) was a German/Australian artist.
Mack was born in 11 July 1893 in Frankfurt am Main. He attended Arts and Music School in Frankfurt, and the Art school in Munich.
During the World War I, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack was an infantry officer.
In 1920, he was a student in printmaking at the Bauhaus in Weimar, from which he graduated in 1921 in etching, then in 1924, obtained a Bauhaus graduate diploma in lithography. He remained there until 1926 and conducted experiments in light projection following Kurt Schwerdtfeger in developing the “Farbenlichtspiele” (colour-light play), a light and colour modulator which provided a visual translation of music he, today wieved as an early form of multimedia.
In 1926, Mack taught art in the Free School in Wickersdorf. In 1929 he taught color and general morphology. at the University of Craft and Architecture in Weimar.
Year later, he became professor at the Pedagogical Academy in Frankfurt .
1932 he taught at the University of Kiel, until that was closed in 1933 by the Nazis. He moved in 1935 to the Jöde-Schule/Güntherschule in Berlin and taught the construction of simple musical instruments.
Mack was joint participant, with the former Bauhaus master Gertrud Grunow, in the Second Congress of color-sound research in 1930 in Hamburg. Music and colour theory remained life-long interests, informing his art production in a number of media, and it was the inspiration for his well-respected and influential teaching.
Because of his part-Jewish heritage, Mack fled the Nazis and emigrated to England in 1936. There he taught art for the Subsistence Production Society, a sustenance program in South Wales.
His wife Elenor Wirth remained in Germany while daughter Margarita followed him into English exile. However his other daughter Ursel (17) committed suicide in Germany in 1937.
In 1940 Mack was deported to Australia as an “enemy alien”, spending time in internment camps, before being granted Australian citizenship. Imprisonment and the longing for freedom were the theme of his small, stark, poignant relief prints of this period, including the woodcut Desolation, Internment Camp, Hay 1941.
He taught at the Geelong Church of England Grammar School in Victoria, introducing colour-coded guitars and colour ‘organs’. He became the art master of the School and was guest lecturer at the University of Melbourne, where he exhibited his work in 1946. He showed also at the Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne, in 1953.
When Walter Gropius came to lecture at the RAIA convention in Sydney in 1954, Mack made a special trip to Geelong Grammar School to visit his former colleague.
Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack died on 7 January 1965 at Allambie Heights, in Sydney.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, included his work in its Bauhaus retrospective of 1938.