NGV curator who celebrated our art and heritage

TERENCE LANE September 14, 1946-June 15, 2024

It is with great sadness that the Australian art world marked the death of one of its most eminent curators, Terence Lane OAM, in June. During his long career at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Lane was instrumental in shaping the collection and culture of that notable institution through his remarkable record of art acquisitions and pioneering exhibitions and publications.

Terence Francis Lane was born in 1946 in Melbourne, the son of Catherine and James Lane. He grew up within a large family in the leafy eastern suburb of Ivanhoe, where his early interest in art was recognised and encouraged by his parents. A pivotal moment in Lane’s life occurred when his father, an electrical engineer, introduced his 13-year-old son to one of his clients, Mervyn Napier Waller (1893-1972), Australia’s leading artist in mosaic, mural painting and stained-glass who lived locally.

At Waller’s house and studio, the young Lane experienced first-hand the arts and crafts ideal of a unified decorative interior and witnessed the creation of various art objects. An enduring friendship emerged with Waller and his second wife, Lorna, that would last half a century and continued well after their deaths with Lane’s efforts to ensure the future of Waller House and its collection as a house museum.

This early immersion in art and design inspired Lane who, on leaving school in 1964, successfully applied for an administrative position at the NGV, then part of a larger cultural complex encompassing the State Library and Museum Victoria. While working full-time, he also enrolled in a fine-arts degree at the University of Melbourne, ensuring he was well positioned to secure a curatorial role in the decorative arts department when the gallery expanded its staff before relocating to the new site in St Kilda Road in 1968.

Terence Lane

Lane would later reflect on the excitement of those years when the NGV emerged as an independent entity in its imposing Modernist building with its collections showcased as never before.

One of his earliest exhibitions, One Hundred Modern Chairs in 1974, exemplified the gallery’s new spirit of ambition, innovation, and style. This exhibition was also noteworthy as the first Lane curated following a life-threatening car crash in 1972, which left him in a hospital burns unit for three months. He endured this traumatic event with great courage and never mentioned the scars he carried for the rest of his life.

A further milestone in Lane’s career was in 1975 when he undertook professional development in Britain. A placement at the Victoria and Albert Museum proved particularly influential as its curators were then at the forefront of the scholarly revival of interest in Victorian art and design.

The experience and networks gained from this period of study – and from a later British Council fellowship in 1978 – laid the foundations of many of Lane’s curatorial achievements over the following decades, ranging from pioneering exhibitions and articles on 19th-century decorative art, especially the aesthetic movement in Australia, to exceptional acquisitions such as Morris & Company’s embroidery, Poesis, (c1880) designed by E. Burne-Jones, and one of E.W. Godwin’s celebrated Anglo-Japanese sideboards (c1886-87).

Lane also began his important work in heritage conservation in the mid-1970s, when he was invited to join a sub-committee overseeing the restoration of Werribee Park, the magnificent Chirnside property west of Melbourne, which had been recently acquired by the Hamer government. Historian Jessie Serle was also on this sub-committee, and together they researched and recreated the mansion’s original interiors in a result that established new benchmarks for historic house restoration in Australia.

Their professional and personal relationship would last more than 45 years in collaborations on various heritage projects, including the Villa Alba preservation committee, and more significantly, their joint authorship of the magisterial book, Australians at home: a documentary history of Australian domestic interiors from 1788 to 1914, published in 1990. Twelve years in the writing, this lavishly illustrated tour de force of scholarship examined virtually all the surviving evidence of domestic interiors in Australia until 1914 and remains today the authoritative reference work on the subject. Lane’s expertise led to invitations to consult on historic house restorations, including Lanyon in Canberra and Raheen in Melbourne.

The most famous historic interior associated with Lane’s name – the five richly decorated rooms designed by the great Austrian architect-designer, Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), for the Gallia family – was acquired for the NGV in 1976. Hoffmann was a founding member of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, and the furnishings of the Gallia apartment represented one of the most intact compilations of Hoffmann’s design work.

Lane had a long-standing interest in European modernism – one of his earliest exhibitions had examined the furniture of the Austro-Hungarian emigre designer Schulim Krimper (1893-1971) – and so was swift to appreciate and purchase this unique collection from the Gallia family, who had settled in Sydney after fleeing the Nazis (bringing with them all their household belongings).

Lane’s landmark exhibition, Vienna 1913: Josef Hoffmann’s Gallia apartment, in 1984, recreated the apartment’s interiors and presented new research on the commission. The Gallia apartment ensured that Viennese modernism became one of the great strengths of the NGV’s collection and Lane continued to acquire more examples of the movement, such as Adolf Loos’ designs for the Langer apartment in Vienna, purchased in 1994-95 from descendants of the Langer family who had immigrated to Melbourne.

In 1994, Lane left the decorative arts department to take up the position of senior curator of Australian art to 1900. It was a tribute to his encyclopaedic knowledge of 19th-century Australian art, which had just been displayed in his major survey of the German-Australian wood carver Robert Prenzel (1866-1941), a leading exponent of “gum nut art nouveau”. In his new role, Lane sought to diversify the Australian collection, filling in gaps caused by earlier de-accessioning of unfashionable art forms, like marble portrait busts, and expanding the gallery’s representation of colonial arts and crafts.

The most significant achievement of this stage in his career was the memorable blockbuster exhibition Australian Impressionism in 2007, which broke all records for attendance at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. Lane was both curator and commissioning editor of the scholarly catalogue that explored Australia’s impressionist movement from various angles. This outstanding exhibition was also Lane’s “swan song” – he retired from the NGV at the end of the year, bringing to a close an eminent career of 40 years.

Lane’s retirement was enlivened by research and writing and by his own personal project: the refurbishment of his distinctive Victorian house in Carlton, which he undertook with his usual imagination and flair.

A man of great elegance, urbanity and charm, Lane was universally esteemed for his remarkable knowledge of art and design, and his connoisseur’s eye. He embodied the idea of the scholar-curator and played a major role in enhancing the NGV’s international reputation as one of the world’s great art museums. Lane received a Centenary Medal in 2001 for services to Australian society and Australian art and was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2014 for service to the arts, particularly the fine and decorative arts. His recent death after a short illness was deeply mourned by his family – his two sons, Hugh and Edmund, and partner Gwendoline Errington Bray, his wife Dominica Nelson having pre-deceased him – as well as his legion of friends and admirers.

Alison Inglis AM is honorary fellow, art history, University of Melbourne and emeritus trustee, NGV. With assistance from Terence Lane’s family and former colleagues.