Student and Experimenter
Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack enrolled at the Bauhaus Weimar around 1919–1920, after earlier training in Munich. He studied in the preliminary course under Johannes Itten and worked in the printmaking workshop under Lyonel Feininger, while absorbing colour theory from Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. What Itten, Klee, and Kandinsky taught in those years was largely static: colour relationships on paper, form exercises, systematic perceptual training. Hirschfeld-Mack began asking what those lessons would look like in time.
The Colour-Light Plays
Working from 1922 with fellow student Kurt Schwerdtfeger, Hirschfeld-Mack developed a series of light projection performances he called Farbenlicht-Spiele — Colour-Light Plays. The apparatus consisted of a large frame or screen onto which moving fields of coloured light were projected or reflected from behind. Operators — up to four of them — worked the projectors by hand, blending, transitioning, and modulating the colours: yellow, red, green, blue, moving from darkness toward full intensity and back. Hirschfeld-Mack composed music to accompany the performances. In 1925 he published an explanatory booklet, Farben Licht-Spiele, documenting the method.
The work transposed Bauhaus colour exercises into time-based, spatial experience: the same formal relationships Kandinsky and Klee mapped on paper, made to move and develop in a room. The performances were shown at the Bauhaus, in Berlin, in Vienna, and at the 1923 Der Absolute Film festival in Berlin, where abstract cinema was becoming a recognised form. Hirschfeld-Mack also made a pedagogical toy alongside the performances — an Optical Colour Mixer spinning top (1924) that demonstrated colour mixing through motion, designed for children.
He remained affiliated with the Bauhaus until around 1925–1926, working as a junior master or workshop assistant, before leaving.
Australia
Hirschfeld-Mack was Jewish. He left Germany, and in 1940 arrived in Australia as an “enemy alien,” interned by British authorities alongside other German and Austrian refugees. He was released in 1942 through the intervention of James Ralph Darling, headmaster of Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, who secured his appointment to the school’s art faculty.
He taught at Geelong Grammar and later at other Australian institutions until his death in 1965. The practice he brought to those classrooms drew directly on what he had learned in Weimar: colour theory, sensory awareness, material economy, the idea that art education should train perception and creative thinking rather than technique for its own sake. The Farbenlicht-Spiele were among the first kinetic light performances in the Western tradition; their afterlife was in secondary school studios in a country that had nothing to do with the Bauhaus until one of its students arrived there in a wartime internment camp.