| Born: | 03-29-1914 |
| Faculty: | Philosophical School |
| Category: | Expelled student |
Franz Adolf PHILIPP, born on March 29th, 1914 in Vienna/Austria (entitled residency ("heimatberechtigt") for Vienna/Austria, citizenship 1938: Austria), son of Edmund Philipp (1870–1936, textile merchant) and Karolina Philipp, née Selinko (1878–1941), lived in Vienna's 19th district, Peter-Jordan-Strasse 64. He had passed the school-leaving examination (Matura) in 1933 at the Bundesgymnasium Wien Doebling and began to study art history at the University of Vienna in the fall term of 1933/34. He was last enrolled in the spring term of 1937 at the Philosophical School in the 4th and final year and was in the dissertation stage.
He had begun in 1937 to write a dissertation on "The Mannerist Portrait in Upper Italy" under private lecturer tit. ao. Prof. Ernst Diez (1878–1961) (on leave of absence) (supervised presumably by Prof. Julius Schlosser (1866–1938) or private lecturer tit. ao. Prof. Hans Tietze (1880–1954) and was no longer enrolled at the "Anschluss". After he had no chance to finish his dissertation, he studied at a vocational college and enrolled in a horticultural school in Vienna, but was forced to leave the school for racist reasons soon after.
His younger brother Ernst Rudolf Philipp (1916–1996) also studied at the Philosophical School, but in physics, and after a long period of uncertainty was able to complete his studies and obtain his doctorate on October 31st, 1938 under numerous symbolic discriminations in the context of a "non-Aryan doctorate", while at the same time being banned from working in the entire German Reich, and was able to emigrate to England/Great Britain in 1939.
His sister Helena (1901–1941) and his mother Karolina were not able to emigrate in time, and they were both deported from their last apartment in Vienna's 1st district, Boersegasse 1/8 on November 28th, 1941 to Minsk [Мінск/Belarus] and murdered there.
Franz Philipp and his brother Ernst were deported from Vienna to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria in the course of the November Pogrom and imprisoned there on November 15th, 1938. After the release Franz Philipp was able to escape in June 1939 and emigrate to England, Great Britain. There he could not continue his studies for the time being, but worked as an agricultural laborer in Yorkshire. He was finally interned in June 26th, 1940 in London, like most German and Austrian immigrants, as an enemy alien and deported to Australia only two weeks later on the ship HMT "Dunera" (as were, among others, the medical students Julius Schwarcz/John Julian Sanders (1912–2008), Max Schwarz (1917–1943), Bernhard Cinader (1919–2001), Waldemar Eckfeld (1915–1959), Peter Tom Huppert (1914–1987), the physics student Rudolf Landauer/Ralph Steven Landers (1918–1982) and 13 other displaced Viennese students). Once there, he was interned at the camp for enemy aliens in Hay, NSW, from September 1940 to May 1941, and at the camp in Tatura, VIC, from May 1941 to January 1942. At Hay, he taught art history classes to fellow inmates – as did Bauhaus artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and Byzantinist Ernest Kitzinger.
After the release in February 1942 he did not return to England, but remained in Australia, joined the Australian Military Forces as a soldier and was stationed in Melbourne. In parallel, Philip enrolled at University of Melbourne in 1943 and studied Italian Renaissance with Professor Max Crawford, topped the class and was awarded the "Dwight prize". In 1946 he was finally able to obtain an academic degree (B.A. Hons.) and subsequently became senior tutor to Max Crawford after also being discharged from the army in February 1946 and shortly thereafter obtaining British citizenship.
In 1948 he married his fellow student June Margaret Rowley (1926–?), a teacher, and they had two children - Caroline (1951) and Helen (1958). That same year he published a paean to the Viennese school of art history, whose humanistic method had gone beyond the historicity of a Jakob Burkhardt and the formalism of a Heinrich Wölfflin. However, he declined the doctorate offered to him at that time by the University of Vienna.
In 1949 he became assistant-lecturer in history and fine arts at the Department of Fine Arts, which had only been founded in 1948 as the first independent institute for Art History in Australia, senior lecturer in 1954 and reader in 1964.
In between he was senior research fellow at the Warburg Institute in London in 1955/56, where his older Viennese colleague Ernst Gombrich became director in 1959.
In addition to his main work on Renaissance art, however, Philipp also spent two decades from 1947 on Arthur Boyd, whom he considered Australia's most important contemporary painter. He published in the journals Meanjin, Australian Historical Studies, and the Art Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria, edited by German émigré Ursula Hoff.
In 1963 he was awarded the Carnegie Corporation traveling fellowship for the USA and in 1969 had been made Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
On his sabbatical leave in 1970 Dr. Karl Philipp travelled to Europe, revisited Vienna and went further to the U.K. where died of a heart attack on May 30th, 1970 in Hampstead, London/England and is buried at Carlton North Cemetery, Melbourne City, VIC/Australia.
Lit.: Archive of the University of Vienna/enrollment forms ("Nationale") PHIL 1933–1937; Australian Dictionary of Biography; Ursula HOFF, In memory of Franz Adolf Philipp, in: Art Bulletin of Victoria, 12, 1970/71, 30; Ulrike WENDLAND, Franz Philipp, in: Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil. Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler, Munich 1999, 518f.; Sheridan PALMER, Centre of the Periphery: three European art historians in Melbourne, Melbourne 2008; Jaynie ANDERSON, Art history's history in Melbourne: Franz Philipp in correspondence with Arthur Boyd, in: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 1:2, 2000, 111–129 , doi: 10.1080/14434318.2000.11432672; Jaynie ANDERSON, Franz Adolf Philipp, in: ADB, vol.15 (Melbourne 2000), 601-602, Monica LAUSCH,·Franz Philipp and the Vienna School of Art History in Australia, in: Melbourne Art Journal, 8, 2005,117; Fritz POLLEROSS, Die "Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte" auch in Australien: Zum 100. Geburtstag von Franz Philipp (2014); Franz Philipp, in: Ken INGLIS, Bill GAMMAGE, Seumas SPARK, Jay WINTER & Carol BUNYAN (eds.), Dunera Lives II: Profiles, Monash University Publishing 2020, 327–346; information courtesy by Dr. Elisabeth Lebensaft, Vienna 08/2023.
Herbert Posch
