Harald Vike 1906-1987 : A Retrospective

AUSTRALIAN ART

100 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 30 cm. #010823

• Vike, Harald, 1906-1987
• Painters — Australia — Biography
• Harald Hansen Vike (1906-1987), artist, illustrator and cartoonist, was born on 30 August 1906 at Kodal, Norway, one of six children of Oskar Hansen Gallis, farmer, and his wife Berte Hausdatter, née Haugtuft. As a child Harald moved with his family to Vike, from where he took his name. He left school at 14 to work on the family farm but in 1923, aged 17, he began working as a stoker on board whaling ships. In 1927 he jumped ship and spent six months in Western Australia before returning to Norway.

  Interested from an early age in drawing and painting, he decided to settle in Western Australia and to become a professional artist. He arrived at Fremantle on 1 August 1929. Five ft 10 ins (178 cm) tall, of solid build and physically strong, he first earned money in Perth as a professional boxer. He took art lessons at James W. R. Linton’s Institute of Art and from George Pitt Morison, the curator of art at the Western Australian Museum and Art Gallery, who became a good friend and mentor. Drawing and painting both the city and its inhabitants and the surrounding countryside, in 1933 he won the West Australian Society of Arts’ prize for landscape in watercolours. He worked for J. Gibbney & Son Pty Ltd, a graphic arts studio, as an illustrator.

  Late in 1934 Vike became a founding member of the Workers’ Art Club (from 1936 the Workers’ Art Guild) and in 1935, influenced by the trade unionist Maurice Lachberg and a fellow artist, Leith Angelo, he joined the Communist Party of Australia. Using the pseudonym Rau (Norwegian for red), he drew cartoons for the party’s newspapers, Red Star and Workers’ Star. An active member of the guild, he acted in plays, designed and constructed sets and conducted weekly drawing classes for no pay. In 1934-37 he shared a studio with Herbert McClintock and regularly exhibited his landscapes and Perth city scenes. Other work, including the cartoons, banners for trade unions and designs for floats used in Perth’s Labour Day parades, made use of modernist stylising and heroic imagery and reflected his progressive political views and fear of fascism: labourers performing heavy physical work, and the hopelessness of the unemployed, often depicted reading or involved in intense discussion in the Perth Public Library.