Douglas Grant and Rudolf Marcuse: Wartime encounters at the edge of art

Abstract

In 1918, in a German POW camp, German Jewish sculptor Rudolf Marcuse modelled a bronze bust of Australian Indigenous serviceman Douglas Grant. We discuss these two men’s lifehistories, the political impetus for creating racialized images of POWs, the early twentieth-century globalization of colonial power structures, and the capacity of a personal, arbitrary encounter to resist simple, deterministic imperatives.