Rayner HOFF

English 1894–1937
worked in Australia 1923–37

Rayner Hoff arrived in Australia in 1923 to take up the position of Public Instructor in Drawing and Sculpture at East Sydney Technical College. Until his premature death in 1937, Hoff was one of the most significant artists of the interwar period and, as a teacher, had a persuasive influence on future generations of Australian sculptors.

Although these decades are often perceived as a period of avant-garde artistic production, for many, the unprecedented devastation caused by the war led to a renewed interest in art of the past and, especially, subjects from classical antiquity. Hoff drew close parallels between ancient Greece and contemporary Australia and produced sculptures that celebrated the vitality and potential of the human body:

I doubt if ever the Ancient Greeks produced better examples of physical beauty and grace. We are so fortunately endowed with almost ideal climatic conditions, we are naturally an outdoor people … We don’t allow our bodies to become flaccid and misshapen through stagnation. The call of the sun and surf, great open roads and wonderful bush is all too strong for any to resist. Hence we are active, virile and well … Few nations can show such an average of bodily perfection.1

Faun and nymph, 1924, produced one year after Hoff’s arrival in Australia, is amongst the most pagan and overtly sexual of all of the artist’s sculptures. The climactic union of two natural spirits from classical antiquity combines naturalistic modelling with highly stylised detail. Although relatively compact in scale, the use of a sinuous line that stretches from the head of the faun to the arched neck of the nymph provides a highly charged and energetic composition. Initially, the overall symmetry and balance of the figures suggests a union of mutual pleasure; however, the manner in which the faun straddles the nymph and presses his weight against her lower body implies masculine sexual domination, and reinforces Hoff’s tendency to attribute masculine energy to control and to portray feminine energy as eroticised sexual abandon.2

In images such as Faun and nymph and his numerous public sculptural commissions, Rayner Hoff reworked classical themes that promoted Australia as the Antipodean Arcady:

For the first time the previously deserted beaches became playgrounds where the young could rejoice in the beauty of their bodies and meet the challenge of the sea … a challenge by no means physical but resembling the Olympian spirit of Greece … The nude figure was portrayed out of doors, golden against the golden shores and the harbourside became peopled with the gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece.3

1 R. Hoff, ‘Our physique’, Health and Physical Culture, 1 December, Sydney 1931.

2 D. Edwards, ‘This Vital Flesh’: The Sculpture of Rayner Hoff and His School, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1999, p. 24.

3 L. Rees, The Small Treasures of a Lifetime: Some Early Memories of Australian Art and Artists, Sydney, 1969, p. 83.

Geoffrey Smith