A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
In Perth, the history of the Art Gallery of Western Australia was fairly similar. It too was founded on the crest of the wave of the Federation debate, and a new growing sense of national pride, achievement and future possibilities. Having said that, its origins were modest, and from 1911 it was managed by government as part of a trio of related cultural entities, linked to the (far better funded) Public Library and the Museum of WA. In 1897, perhaps hopeful of a brighter future, external advisers were appointed: Sir Edward Poynter PRA and the painter George Clausen, in London (the latter had previously acted briefly as adviser to the NGV in Melbourne) and the Melbourne-based art impresario Joshua Lake, who had had responsibility for the fine art collections of the Centennial Exhibition in 1888. The first acquisitions, predictably, were predominantly contemporary British, largely, though not entirely, academic, with Clausen commissioned to produce a significant work, The End of a Long Day. There was a substantial collection of plaster casts of antiquities (mostly acquired from the British Museum and reflecting its collections) some European old masters, and some Australian works, though an early concentration on local art production was perhaps not as emphatic as elsewhere.
The English geologist Bernard Woodward, whose father worked in the geology department of the British Museum, was appointed to run the Museum in 1889, and was assigned responsibility for the fine art collection from 1895; in 1892 the government of Western Australia purchased the collections of the Swan River Mechanics’ Institute for incorporation into the government institution. Woodward was formally appointed joint director in 1901, when the King’s son the Duke of York, en route back to London from presiding at the opening of the first federal parliament in Melbourne, laid the foundation stone for a new building, which finally opened in 1908. The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) Council’s former chaiman, J. Winthrop Hachett, left a bequest of £3000 in 1926, used to acquire a group of late 19th and early twentieth century artworks, including a masterpiece of modern British plein-airism, Philip Wilson Steer’s Yachts Racing on the Solent. On his appointment as adviser in 1896 Joshua Lake was allocated £7000 to spend, and recommended that it should be dedicated to modern pictures, and Clausen received the same amount in 1897. Joseph Pennell, the London-based expert on drawings and “black and white” had £300, which stretched to include three major avant-garde drawings by Beardsley.
It has to be admitted that the fortunes of the AGWA ebbed and flowed through the first half of the twentieth century with lacklustre government commitment, and it was left with no director in post in the period 1916–1947. It was not until a new building was conceived and delivered in the late 1970s that the AGWA as we know it today really achieved a national standing. Inevitably, the collections developed slowly, with an increasing emphasis on local Australian content in the post WWII period, although global contemporary art, as well as Indigenous Australian, began to be acquired as budgets permitted from the early 1980s, after the opening of the new building.
The Federation Period
By the time of Federation in 1901 – with Melbourne selected as the new country’s “temporary” capital – each of the colonial state capitals had a dedicated fine art collection, in most cases signified with the word “national”, and generally linked to library and museum (natural history, ethnography, anthropology and science) facilities. In some cases they shared joint management, and in others were legally and constitutionally separate though physically integrated, or at least proximate. The cultural complex in Melbourne came to look rather like the British Museum complex in Bloomsbury, with a huge library octagon (completed and opened in 1913) occupying a central courtyard, and galleries for museum exhibits and fine arts collections occupying the lateral spaces. It remained in this configuration until the National Gallery of Victoria moved to a new building immediately to the south of the river in 1968, followed much later by the Museum of Victoria, which only occupied its new building in 2001, leaving the State Library of Victoria as the sole occupant, reverting therefore to the situation at its original founding in 1853.
The Felton Bequest and the NGV
The Felton Bequest,13 established in 1904 under the will of the prominent businessman Alfred Felton, transformed Australia’s museological landscape. At last, an Australian fine art collecting institution had acquired an income which allowed it to compete with the world. It is clear that the establishment of the Elder Bequest for the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) in 1897 served as a model, but Felton provided an endowment 16 times larger, though the will provided for half of the income to be dedicated to good causes concerning women and children, which continues today.
The NGV could now expand its collecting remit, which it did rapidly. Its policies and activities were closer, in many ways, to the US experience of large art museums with multiple departments. The NGV’s collections remit now extended from antiquities to old to modern masters, to collections of Asian material (though still representing an established “European” orientalist taste and connoisseurship), and of course historical and modern Australian art.
The structure envisioned by the will was complex, providing for an independent Felton Bequests Committee, which made funds available, but only after agreement with proposals made by the Director and also approved in principle by the NGV’s Council of Trustees. To ensure efficiency and access to expertise, a London-based advisor was appointed to provide advice on what was available, and to serve as the Bequest’s agent.14
In the field of old masters, works of incomparable quality and art historical importance began to be acquired, ranging from Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child (often referred to as the Ince Hall Madonna), to Poussin’s Crossing of the Red Sea, three Rembrandts (one of which is no longer accepted as entirely autograph) at the center of a significant collection of seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish masters, Tiepolo’s sensational 1748 Banquet of Cleopatra, to great British portraits and landscapes (Gainsborough, Reynolds, Wright of Derby, Beechey, Raeburn, Turner and Constable), and substantial collections of works on paper, essentially definitive in the case of Dürer and Rembrandt, and deep in those of Blake and many others.
There were, however, huge battles fought on the matter of collecting modern art, with a fascinating history of debates and disputes between directors and advisors, and the two committees in Melbourne, who did not always agree. It is an intriguing (and often infuriating) story. Inevitably, the buying power of the Felton Bequest has declined substantially from its peak in the early–mid twentieth century due both to steep rises in the value of art, and to the policy of spending the entire income, which in time reduced the acquisitive value of the capital. Conversely, this policy ensured the availability of higher levels of funding to support the purchase of great masterpieces.
Given that both Melbourne-based committees represented in their membership a grouping of sound and sober community leaders, Anglophile to a man, it was never easy for the avant-garde to be given consistent support and priority. If the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern acquisition proposals made by the early twentieth century London advisors, often (though not always) with the support of the director, had mutually been agreed, the NGV would today have an Impressionist and Modern collection of global significance.15 Instead, it holds a small, though highly distinguished, group of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, some excellent early twentieth century avant-garde works (including significant Vienna holdings of Hoffmann and Loos, resulting from the presence in Melbourne of émigré collections), and overall strong representation of the British avant-garde. Throughout the twentieth century, the Felton Bequest purchased modern British works fairly readily, as was the case with the other public art galleries in the state capitals.
While the NGV – because of the Felton Bequest, the on-site presence of its School of Art, and Melbourne’s then financial and political dominance over Sydney (both to change later in the century) – remained pre-eminent among the other Australian public galleries, interesting and consistent patterns developed elsewhere. For the smaller state galleries, more modest funding allocations meant inevitably that it was easier, and more relevant to public expectations, to collect the art of local practitioners, and a notable parallel between public state-funded collecting, and private collecting, existed with many areas of overlap.