| Creator: |
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| Date of birth: |
1891 |
| Date of death: |
1960 |
| Biography: |
Leonhard Adam was born on 16 December 1891 in Berlin, Germany. Adam studied at the Royal Frederick William Gymnasium, the Ethnological Museum, and the universities of Berlin and Greifswald. He was appointed judge in the provincial court, Berlin, and was also an academic lecturer and editor.
Adam was part Jewish, and in 1933, Nazi laws ended his career in Germany. In 1938, he went to the UK where he resumed his academic career at the University of London and published Primitive Art (1940). On 16 May 1940, he was classified as an ‘enemy alien’ and shipped on the Dunera to an internment camp in Australia.
The internment camp at Tatura, Victoria, held a number of eminent scholars. They organised their own ‘university’, the ‘Collegium Taturense’, and gave lectures to their fellow internees. Some Australians lobbied for Adam’s release, and on 29 May 1942 he was released to work at the National Museum of Victoria and the University of Melbourne, where he remained for the rest of his career. In 1943, he married Julia Mary Baillie.
He made field trips to central and northern Australia to study the art of indigenous Australians, and he argued for the acceptance of Aboriginal art as artistic equals to European art. His anthropological collections became the Leonhard Adam Ethnological Collection of the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne.
Adam died in Bonn from heart disease on 9 September 1960.
Source: Greg Dening, ‘Adam, Leonhard (1891 - 1960)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A130699b.htm |
| Activities/Occupation: |
Academics - Anthropology |
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