Amusingly and amazingly, Dr Palmer tells us of ‘the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor in 1942’. Did this happen after it was bombed on 7 December 1941? When Dr Palmer informs us in her characteristic batting-list style of criticism that ‘Einstein, Freud, Marx, Mahler and Schönberg had eminently contributed to German culture between the wars’, we may legitimately ask which wars? The Franco-Prussian War and World War I? Marx and Mahler were dead well before 1914. For an art historian to describe the National Gallery of Victoria’s fine quattrocento panel painting, Profile of a Lady, as a ‘magnificent Florentine miniature’ is to risk basic competence. How such sloppiness escaped her academic supervisors or her readers and editors beats me. All this suggests an author out of her depth who should have been gently coaxed to the shore.

Had Palmer sharpened the focus of her book on her three principals and refrained from the alternately clumsy or pretentious potted cultural histories, a shorter, better book might have emerged. Who needs to be told that in the early twentieth century ‘humanity was at a turning point’? What are we to make of the claim that besides Rimbaud and Rilke, the young Sidney Nolan had absorbed ‘Malevitch’s constructive existentialism’?

It is ironic and regrettable that such an unscholarly book should be published on the origins of art historical scholarship in Australia, because the trio of Hoff, Philipp and Burke are fascinating and fruitful figures to study. Each, in different ways, remains a puzzle.

Ursula Hoff (1909–2005) was the first to arrive, in 1939. Like Philipp, who was transported to Australia a year later on the infamous Durnera, she was the classic refugee from Hitlerian Europe. Well educated at Hamburg University, she was a cadet member of the Warburg Library circle, which included such luminaries as Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. She received her doctorate in 1935, with a thesis on Rembrandt und England. Although she spent much of the 1930s in London, Hoff never really got her career going as art historian and curator. There were too many eminent émigrés and too few jobs.

And so Hoff, aged thirty, took up the unpromising position of Secretary of University Women’s College. Wheels turned quickly in wartime Melbourne. Daryl Lindsay succeeded the loathsome J.S. MacDonald as Director of the National Gallery of Victoria and invited Hoff to give public lectures at the Gallery in 1942. This was her breakthrough into Melbourne cultural life, and the following year Lindsay appointed her Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings.

This became Hoff’s powerhouse. Over the next thirty years she created the finest Print Room of any Australian gallery, both with judicious individual acquisitions and such monumental ones as the Felton purchase of Sir Thomas Barlow’s Durer collection. Hoff’s taste encompassed old masters and moderns, Australian and European. She trained and influenced a succession of gifted museum professionals such as Harley Preston, James Mollison and Irena Zdanowicz, not quite disciples but close.

As connoisseur and curator, Hoff ranks highly. Even if Dr Palmer unwisely singles out her acquisition of a Bernard Buffet lithograph as an example of her perspicacity, she was not the only eminent Melbournian to be conned by the meretricious Frenchman. During her tenure the Melbourne Print Room acquired comprehensive collections of Durer and Goya’s graphic work along with such dull (‘historically important’) purchases as Van Dyck’s Iconographia.

Therein lies the puzzle of Hoff. As an art historian, she earned high marks for precision and low ones for imagination. Her finest achievement was the catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture before 1800 in the NGV. She did pioneering work on the Heidelberg School and the Australian years of Charles Conder, but she was a dull, even pedestrian, lecturer. When she gave her series on Flemish painting and illumination to honours Fine Art students at Melbourne, she rarely strayed beyond Panofsky’s then canonical Early Netherlandish Painting.

Hoff ended her professional career as a somewhat testy Felton Adviser in London. Her disappointment, which she hid well, was that during her career of more than thirty years at the NGV she was never made Director. Opportunities arose and she had to watch men of lesser talent receive the palm. Of her three protagonists, Palmer writes best about Dr Hoff, as she was universally known, and her early and happiest days at the Gallery under Daryl Lindsay. Palmer’s characterisation of the sphinx of the Print Room as ‘enigmatic, prudent, discreet and dignified’ is absolutely right.

If Ursula Hoff’s path to a profession in art history was difficult, Franz Philipp’s was downright agonising. Educated at the University of Vienna in the treacherous years of the 1930s, he knew, as a Jew, repudiation and worse. He and his brother at one stage had to be liberated, or ransomed, from Dachau. When he saw the light failing in Vienna – one of the most prominent members of the Viennese School of Art History, Hans Sedlmayr, was overtly and enthusiastically pro-Nazi – he appealed to Fritz Saxl to take him into the overloaded ark of the Warburg Library now established in England. Dr Palmer records the dusty answer he received:

Thank you for your letter. I cannot give you the smallest hope that you will be able to complete your studies. Art history is hardly a university subject, and nobody would be prepared to sponsor a university education for you and in the end you would have no employment. I would advise you urgently to give up art history.

Even the ghastly privations of the Durnera and two years of internment camps may have seemed better than the trials and denials of Europe. Once Philipp made his way to Melbourne, things began to look up. He was a brilliant student in the History Department and formed a lasting friendship with Arthur Boyd. Who better to understand the dark import of Boyd’s masterly diptych of The Mockers/The Mourners (1945) than Philipp: ‘… dominated by bewilderment and terror of the violent and sanguinous events we have witnessed during these last years.’

Unsurprisingly, a warm and mutually respectful friendship developed between the two continental exiles. Dr Palmer makes much – too much – of Philipp’s Viennese School background in contrast to Hoff’s orientation to the Panofsky-Saxl-Warburgian mode of art history. Philipp was also much under their sway intellectually, but he did prize primary sources and documents in the conduct of art history, a legacy from his deeply admired teacher, Julius von Schlosser. When Philipp subjected his honours students to a two-hour seminar on sources of early Giotto, he showed not a single slide and all the sources, cryptic themselves, were either in fourteenth-century Italian or Latin.

In many ways, Philipp was a difficult teacher. His unrealistic expectations of Australian undergraduates were exacerbated by lectures that were dense in subject matter confided in a rapid, Austrian-accented English with frequent self-interruptions and doubling backs as he remembered to incorporate notes attached to his lecture. But there were real art-historical insights, originality and the occasional riveting observation of an individual work.

Perhaps because there are fewer documents, Dr Palmer’s characterisation of Philipp is the least satisfactory, relying too often on the slightly sappy memories of former students. One of Philipp’s most arresting traits was that the difficult and distant teacher of undergraduates became an easy and companionable friend or acquaintance in later life.

Joseph Burke had a swansdown passage to fame and scholarship compared to Hoff and Philipp. Educated at Kings College, London, followed by a postgraduate fellowship to Yale, which in the 1930s was positively anglophiliac, he was, briefly, an Assistant Keeper at the Victoria & Albert Museum in textiles (‘Second Class’, he would always cheerily add) before being seconded into the Cabinet Office during World War II. From 1939–45 he was a private secretary to successive members of Cabinet and ended up as private secretary to Clement Atlee for the first eighteen months of his premiership.

Tall, handsome, witty, cultivated with just a hint of Wilfred Hyde White, Burke was the perfect fit as the Foundation Herald Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. He came with the warm endorsements of Kenneth Clark and W.G. Constable, lately Director of the Courtauld Institute. The Melbourne Establishment – Sir John Medley, Vice-Chancellor of the University, Sir Keith Murdoch, chairman of both the Herald and Weekly Times which had put up the £40,000 for the university chair, and the Board of Trustees of the NGV, and Daryl Lindsay among many others – were smitten and remained so for the three decades that he held the chair.

The duties of the Herald Professor were ambiguous from the start. He was to be the champion of the arts both within the university and in the wider community. In Burke’s mind the latter, the public domain rather than the academy, became his favoured playing field, sometimes to the chagrin of his colleagues. Burke developed a distinction between the art historian and the fine arts man who would willingly address a lay audience at a high level of intelligence and scholarship. Art historians were people like Panofsky, Saxl, E.H. Gombrich, Edgar Wind and Philipp. Kenneth Clark, John Summerson and Herbert Read represented the fine arts men. Remarkably, Burke embodied both qualities: both an after-dinner speaker much in demand, and a first-rate historian of eighteenth-century British art who could also range confidently across the history of art.

Burke loved to pick the talent. Hoff and Philipp were just establishing themselves in Melbourne, and Burke brought both within the fledgling Fine Arts Department. In later life, Burke always claimed, ‘Franz was the architect and I was the builder’. When Bernard Smith joined the Department in 1956, it was the most distinguished department of art history the country has ever seen.

Palmer is both attracted and perplexed by Burke’s salamander-like personality. Wrongly, she states that Hoff and Philipp thought him ‘an intellectual lightweight’. Both were too sophisticated to make such a simplistic judgement. Burke’s edition of Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1955) remained the standard edition for nearly fifty years, and many of his papers and articles such as ‘Blake’s Eidetic Imagery’ or ‘Hogarth, Handel and Roubiliac: A Note on the Interrelationships of the Arts in England’, quickly passed into the literature.

Unquestionably, Burke loved the public stage. On occasion he could become over-amused by his own sallies, which irritated rather than entertained some. His admiration for Hoff never wavered, but sadly his personal and professional relationship with Philipp ended badly, though not for the vague reasons that Dr Palmer puts forward.

In 1966 Bernard Smith went on sabbatical leave and returned as the Power Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Sydney. An increasing burden of teaching and administration fell to Philipp. Burke himself became erratic in his behaviour. He was doubly burdened. First, he was over-stretched socially and publicly. Dr Palmer notes that he was at one stage on twenty-five committees and belonged to nine clubs. Second, he was having a terrible time completing his magnum opus, the volume on the eighteenth century in the Oxford History of English Art, now years overdue. (It would not be published until 1976, twenty-five years after it had been commissioned; unfairly, it received a rather lukewarm reception.) In the midst of this intellectual crisis he became something of an absentee professor.

Philipp went overseas in 1970. According to Palmer, he was on the lookout for a job in the United States. He died of a heart attack in London before he got there. Many of his friends and former students believed that the combination of overwork and the stress of the shouting matches he had begun to have with Burke contributed to his premature death.

What makes all three figures so remarkable and so rich a field for investigation is that they brought tremendous European intellectual riches to Australia and embedded themselves in Australian culture. All had pangs and longings for Europe and America. All felt ‘the crippling remoteness’ from collections, centres of learning and libraries that would have enhanced their research. Hoff through acquisitions and exhibitions plus her work on the Heidelberg School, Philipp through his masterly monograph on Arthur Boyd, and Burke through his steady championship of Australian painting (and design) from Russell Drysdale through Sidney Nolan to Fred Williams, all made lasting contributions to their adopted country and culture. Dr Palmer tacitly acknowledges this theme, but it could have stood elaboration.

There is a good book struggling to emerge from this one. When Dr Palmer concentrates on her principals, she often has new and interesting things to say, even if her historical judgements can run haywire: e.g. that Eric Westbrook, Lindsay’s successor at the NGV, and Burke ‘were in charge of culture in Melbourne’. What a shame she was not better advised.