One day last year I encountered Goldie Sternberg in her second home, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, wearing the biggest grin I'd seen in years. What, I had to ask, are you so pleased about? Brimming with sheer delight, and a certain hint of pride, she revealed that she had just been stopped by the police for speeding.
At the age of 80 Sternberg could still relish a moment of naughtiness and being stopped for speeding in her new car cheered her up no end. Her life was quite a journey: from Broken Hill, to Adelaide, to Chicago and ultimately to Sydney, but in many ways more important than her destinations was her discovery of Chinese art. For Sternberg there were two loves: her family and the arts and people of China.
There was no particular logic to her discovery of Chinese art. It happened in the 1950s when, on a visit to London, she was taken to the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art which is attached to the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University.
The David Foundation is a fairly small and discreet institution but it is crammed with the finest Chinese ceramics and here Sternberg, perhaps surprisingly but with the absolute honesty of the instinctive response, found a harmony that was to remain with and sustain her for the rest of her life.
She once declared that she loved everything Chinese and above all the arts: "This passion began when I was quite young. I loved it for its grace and beauty."
Ceramics are invariably the starting point for so many interested in the arts of China but Sternberg, with that wonderful sensibility for things Chinese, moved on to the more esoteric disciplines of painting, calligraphy and Buddhist arts, interests which reflected a genuine affection for China's most profound cultural values and traditions.
With such a genuine interest in and feeling for the arts of Asia and the aspirations of the gallery, it was natural for Ed and Goldie Sternberg to become significant benefactors. It was, after all, a world in which they both believed and they were both, characteristically, of a philanthropic bent, helping not only the gallery but also the opera and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Following Ed's death in early 1995, Goldie Sternberg continued that tradition of philanthropy and patronage with undiminished belief. Their support for the gallery is manifest in some of the finest works of Chinese and Asian art to have entered the collections in recent years, which include an extraordinary 2000-year-old and unusually large ceramic tomb model of a watchtower, classic literati Chinese landscape scrolls and calligraphies of the Ming and Qing dynasties (16-18th centuries) to Sternberg's most recent acquisition for the gallery, a rare 12th-to-13th-century Cambodian Khmer period bronze figure of a Buddhist Hevajra mandala.
A tour around the Asian galleries when they reopen later this year will quickly reveal both the quality and the extent of the Sternbergs' benefaction. The Asian gallery was Goldie Sternberg's domain and almost every day she could be found there looking at a work of art that she loved, placing a flower in the Japanese tea room or a petal in the lap of a Buddha.
This was the quiet, contemplative almost reticent Sternberg we all knew so well, but she could certainly, if suitably moved, say her piece and make her feelings known. She could also emerge from that natural passivity into a person of dash and panache.
On returning with Ed to Sydney in 1958 from living in Chicago she came, not with an American accent, but with a pink Cadillac that was to become a familiar if unexpected sight in Sydney. Such indulgences were, however, rare for she was a person to whom modesty came easily and that latent taste for momentary flamboyance was perhaps more truthfully expressed in an appreciation of the gesture of the calligraphy brush.
Words and gestures can deceive but eyes cannot and Sternberg had eyes that simply lit up when she spied an Asian work of art of special appeal or beauty, just as they did for her children and grandchildren.
Towards the end of the 5th century the Chinese writer and critic Xie He wrote his Treatise on Painting(Gu hua pin lu) in which he enumerated his six canons or principles of painting. Heading the list of prerequisites, as far more crucial than likeness, colours, design, was the paramount requirement: that mysterious but pervasive quality known as qiyun best described as "spirit resonance". Goldie Sternberg had just that quality.
Edmund Capon
Edmund Capon is director of the Art Gallery of NSW and a Chinese art expert.