NGV, QAGOMA blockbuster exhibitions bring masterpieces to Australia

Australia’s flagship galleries in Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne have a dazzling array of international artworks.

If Australia’s big art galleries weren’t so determined to dose us up on medicine for the soul, they’d have told van Gogh, Matisse, Rembrandt and the rest of them to stay at home until Covid-19 was over.

Instead, our flagship galleries in Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne have forged ahead with a dazzling array of international blockbusters that have been years in the making and will bring some of the world’s truly great masterpieces to our very doorstep at a time when international travel is severely restricted.

It is a feast of art and Chris Saines, the director of Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), believes the public, jaded by virtual culture, has an appetite for it.

“People are hungry for these experiences because they’ve been effectively starved of them for the last 18 months,” he says.

QAGOMA’s exhibition of masterworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opens in Brisbane on June 12 and runs until October 17.

“No one’s going to Provence for their holidays, popping into the Louvre on the way,” Saines says.

The Met show at QAGOMA: Fra Angelico The Crucifixion c.1420–23 Tempera on wood, gold ground 63.8 x 48.3cm Maitland F Griggs Collection, Bequest of Maitland F Griggs 1943.

The Met show at QAGOMA: Jean Honoré Fragonard The Two Sisters c.1769–70 Oil on canvas.

“So the fact we have such extraordinary things coming to us from across the globe is something Australians will value even more than they might in a non-Covid year.”

Chris Saines with image of Titian's 'Venus and Adonis' at 'European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York'. Picture: NIGEL HALLETT

Saines’s team in Brisbane has worked for three years on European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The 65 works were selected by curators at The Met, and their Brisbane display puts a major emphasis on enticing visitors to go beyond merely appreciating their beauty to explore deeper meanings and understandings.

Head of QAGOMA public engagement Michaela Chin says there’ll be interpretative displays, QR codes linking works to an exhibition micro site, “immersive theatrical experiences”, live music and Instagram opportunities.

The Met show at QAGOMA: Jean-Léon Gérôme Pygmalion and Galatea c.1890.

The Met show at QAGOMA: Giovanni di Paolo Paradise 1445 Tempera and gold on canvas.

“We want to stop people being spectators and start them being participants,” Saines says.

QAGOMA’s display of 500 years of European art spans the spirituality of Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi through to Post Impressionist blasts of colour with van Gogh and Cezanne. In between, still life master Jean Simeon Chardin’s soap bubble has trembled on the brink of bursting since c.1733-34, Marie-Denise Villers’ beautiful young art student has gazed back at her admirers since 1801, Edgar Degas’s ballerinas have stretched and primped backstage since c.1890, and there are scores more moments to savour when the show opens next week.

In Canberra, Covid forced director Nick Mitzevich to delay the opening of Botticelli to van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London.

The Met show at QAGOMA: Claude Monet Water Lilies 1916–19 Oil on canvas.

But when it opened on March 5, queues immediately formed – even within the exhibition space, where everyone wanted to linger in front of Vincent van Gogh’s solar-powered painting, Sunflowers, 1888.

Botticelli to van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London closes on June 14. The catalogue is already sold out.

The National Gallery of Victoria is closed as part of Melbourne’s snap Covid-19 lockdown, but hopes remain that restrictions will lift soon for French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which was due to open tomorrow.

Vincent van Gogh The Flowering Orchard 1888 Oil on canvas as part of the Met show at QAGOMA.

It’s a joyous show that comes bearing armfuls of Monet’s poppies, metres of Renoir’s swishing fabrics and hectares of Pissarro’s snowy landscapes.

In Sydney, the Art Gallery of NSW will open two big international shows. Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings explores the somewhat hallucinatory paintings of the Swedish painter (from June 12), and Matisse: Life & Spirit, Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, Paris (from November 20) will be popular.

All these exhibitions add up to “one of the richest art museum offerings that we’ve presented in this country in a long time”, Saines says.

It’s an opportunity for all Australians, and New Zealanders in our travel bubble, he says.

“For this institution there’s no question that European Masterpieces is once in a lifetime,” he says. “We’ve never presented an exhibition of this calibre in this institution before.”

The author travelled to Brisbane courtesy of Art Exhibitions Australia.