A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
today and is a relevant factor in relation to Australia’s strong internal art market. As suggested above, the generally Anglophile tastes and interests of the broad population (which still firmly regarded a federated Australia as a part of the British Empire) ensured that most encounters with the European avant-garde began first and foremost through less confronting British art, and the smaller state galleries remain to this day surprising repositories of exceptional masterpieces. Major works by Henry Moore are distributed throughout the country, as is the case with Stanley Spencer (some 30 paintings in Australian public collections), with AGWA having a particularly strong holding. All the major British moderns are represented: Orpen, Peploe, John (Augustus and Gwen), Nicholson (William, Winifred and Ben), Nash, Hillier, Tunnard, Epstein, Hepworth, Bacon, Philpot, Freud and many others.16
The Debate on Modernism
Given generally modest acquisition budgets, the conservatism of governing boards (and even some directors) and, at least until the 1960s, an almost total absence of professional curators (with the exception of the NGV, which was, and remains, better funded by government for its operating expenses),17 the state galleries continued to acquire and exhibit quietly but methodically. Until well into the 1960s, incoming travelling exhibitions were few, the majority supplied by the British Council in London, consisting almost exclusively of contemporary British works, which would tour to various State galleries, and often to New Zealand.18
The one great exception to this rather conventional taste occurred in 1939, when Sir Keith Murdoch,19 already a member of the Council of the NGV and fed up with the conservatism of both his fellow Trustees and its director, J.S. MacDonald, commissioned the independent critic and scholar Basil Burdett to curate a serious exhibition of the French and British avant garde, from Cézanne, Van Gogh and Bonnard to Matisse, Picasso, Dali and Ernst, bringing the most radical French art to Australia for the first time. When the NGV refused to accommodate the exhibition, Murdoch hired the Melbourne Town Hall instead and, in a short season, attracted the largest crowds Melbourne had ever seen at a temporary, imported art exhibition.20
The debate on modern art in relation to public art gallery collections continued after WWII. Under the influence of Sir Keith Murdoch, director Sir Daryl Lindsay and especially the London Felton Bequest consultant A.J. McDonnell, the type and quality of modern acquisitions lifted noticeably. In many ways, artists’ practice in Sydney both immediately before and after WWII proved to be more advanced than in Melbourne, where a more conservative form of modernist tonal realism prevailed until WWII at least – and much the same can be said of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Sydney artists and dealers opened themselves far more to global principles of abstraction than in Melbourne, where figuration, reflecting a local form of expressionist representation, often with emphatically Australian subjects, held sway.
It was in the 1960s, however, that Australian museology, particularly in terms of collections and exhibitions, changed profoundly. Once again, Melbourne led the field. Before his death in 1952, Sir Keith Murdoch had persuaded the government that a new, purpose-built NGV was required, and a site was selected just to the south of the city business center and River Yarra. Designed by Roy Grounds as a monolithic block faced in local dressed bluestone, it represented a type of public building unknown in Australia – luxurious and glamorous in its fittings and finishes, with ample spaces designed for entertaining and events, and with installation principles never experienced before.
Constructed through the 1960s with, for the first time, significant private sector financial support and under the watchful eye of its director Eric Westbrook, the new NGV opened to great acclaim in 1968, the first part of a group of cultural buildings for theatre and music performance constituting a new Arts Center. Reflecting new social, political and museological thinking about the place of Australia in its region, the first collections encountered on the ground floor were the Asian, not the European old and modern masters on which Melbourne prided itself, with the Australian and global contemporary collections installed on the level above. A new spirit was reflected in the fact that the opening exhibition, The Field, presented the work and ideas of a group of radical young Australian artists, who sought inspiration in New York rather than Paris or London, and produced Hard Edge, Color Field and Minimalist works which surprised and unsettled the public.
In the spirit of post-war regeneration and cultural revival, the new NGV stood as a beacon for the future Australian art museology.
Before long, other governments and institutions began to recognize the cultural, economic and status benefits which such a project could bring, and the 1970s saw major building projects, though all on a smaller scale, undertaken in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. The Australian art world was waking up.
A New Exhibitions Culture
The 1970s also saw the first blockbuster-type exhibitions, inaugurated by an astonishing collection of masterpieces of modern art lent to the NGV by MoMA in New York in 1975, the likes of which Australians had never seen before.21
The context was dramatically changing. A stream of major exhibitions imported from overseas inevitably lifted professional standards – new staff and new expertises were required. In 1977 a huge exhibition of Chinese antiquities toured both to the AGNSW in Sydney and the NGV in Melbourne, and it is true to say that Sydney, through the AGNSW, has achieved over decades a particularly strong reputation and track record for exhibitions of Asian historic and contemporary content.
Government also responded positively. In 1967 the Federal Government inaugurated an Australia Council for supporting the arts in Australia (modelled to a certain extent on the British Council), with a sub-committee, the Visual Arts Board, taking a special interest in the potential for supporting incoming major exhibitions, and working with the short-lived Australian Gallery Directors’ Council.22
From this point, Australian audiences came to expect major exhibitions of global stature, and since the late 1970s a huge number, many of exceptional quality, have been generated. This process continues, with an inevitable evolution of type and methodology.
To support this new phenomenon23 a management vehicle, the International Cultural Corporation of Australia (ICCA) was established, and this in turn, after a difficult period of instability, evolved in the early 1980s into Art Exhibitions Australia (AEA) with the well-known and respected Bob Edwards as CEO. To ensure a high level of professionalism nationally the federal government granted AEA a monopoly on access to federal government indemnity/insurance, without which large, ambitious exhibition projects could not proceed. This monopoly was maintained until 2009 when, after a government enquiry, it was felt that Australia’s major public art museums had reached a position where, in the field of exhibitions management, they had acquired sufficient expertise and specialist staff to act alone, should they choose to do so, and receive federal indemnity support directly. Since then, a hybrid system has operated.
The new phenomenon of blockbuster exhibitions, which transformed the way in which an ever-increasing number of Australians participated in public museology, could not be easily accommodated, as there were no dedicated permanent spaces for large temporary exhibitions. The new NGV in Melbourne had been designed just before the age of the imported blockbuster, and even Australia’s newest major public art gallery, the Australian National Gallery (rebranded as the National Gallery of Australia from 1993) was designed in the early 1970s, meaning that it opened in 1982 without a dedicated temporary exhibitions facility.
The need for the provision of such spaces necessitated, in due course, a new round of building projects, beginning with a special temporary exhibitions wing added to the NGA, opened in 1996. This was also one of the key drivers for the huge redevelopment project for the NGV, undertaken in the years 1999–2003. The provision of such spaces has been a key element of all museological planning in Australian galleries ever since, tied as it is to cultural tourism, and therefore to broader income generation for a city or state extending well beyond income from ticket sales, and these arguments have been central to all subsequent discussions with government and bureaucracy about arts infrastructure funding. The high costs of importing large, complex exhibitions into Australia (an issue shared with major