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. This continues 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
