Collective memory

THE National Gallery of Victoria, founded in 1861, celebrated its sesquicentenary on Tuesday.

THE National Gallery of Victoria, founded in 1861, celebrated its sesquicentenary on Tuesday. This is remarkable enough in view of the relatively short history of Australia, but far more so when we consider the city of Melbourne was established long after Sydney and Victoria had existed as a separate colony only since 1851, with responsible government from 1855.

Even more interesting is that the immediate model for the new collection, the National Gallery in London, had opened only in 1824 and the original building by William Wilkins, in what was then the new Trafalgar Square, was completed in 1838. At the time of the NGV's foundation, the London gallery, far too small and constrained by a cramped site, was already being modified. In the 1870s, after the acquisition of a neighbouring site, it was considerably extended by architect Charles Barry.

London had been in the forefront of modern museology with the opening of the British Museum in 1759, but it was something of a laggard with regard to picture galleries. Royal and princely collections had long been open to interested and qualified visitors, if not to the general public. Visits to such collections became an integral part of the grand tour. In the latter part of the century, royal collections in several countries were turned into public galleries, including what are now the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Uffizi in Florence and, after the French Revolution, the Louvre in Paris.

In a historical perspective, therefore, the London gallery was rather late and the Melbourne one surprisingly early. The alacrity with which Melbourne took its cue from London can be partly explained by the immense wealth generated in the gold rush that coincided with separation from NSW and the explosion of immigration, which had stalled after the cessation of convict transportation in the 1840s. But it is also a symptom of the ambition of the new colonies to grow into nations -- hence the appellation national gallery -- and the energy with which they embraced the importance of educational and cultural improvement.

The power of education to form individuals, and consequently a society, was an important Enlightenment theme that persisted into the 19th century. Empiricist thinkers were inclined to deny all innate qualities and consider the mind at birth a tabula rasa, or blank surface waiting to be inscribed by experience and training. The theme had particular importance for a country such as Australia, which had not been populated by idealists and utopians but initially by criminals and their jailers, then by the poor and the adventurous, with a relatively parsimonious but still significant sprinkling of distinguished minds.

Australia became a living laboratory for a long-duration, nature-nurture experiment. Would a poor initial population stock always remain in a degraded state or could ignorance be transformed through education and brutality through the humanising influence of culture?

This is why the history of education in Australia is so important and perhaps why it still provokes emotional reactions. It is also why Australia has always attached such importance to sporting success -- evidence that convict and cockney runts have been transformed into athletic supermen -- particularly against the home country.

Ambitious educational projects were conceived early in our history. The University of Melbourne had been established in 1853, shortly after the University of Sydney. Almost more importantly, working men's institutes or schools of arts sprang up all across the country, once again very rapidly replicating the phenomenon that had begun in Britain and provided much-needed adult education in fields from literacy and numeracy to art and design.

The importance of such schools in Britain reminds us that there, too, education had become an important priority. The Industrial Revolution had created a demand for more skilled workers -- the kind who would study at the working men's institutes -- but had also produced an unskilled proletarian underclass living in slum conditions that could breed crime, vice, disease and political disturbance. Church, state, philanthropists and social thinkers were all concerned with the material and moral betterment of this new urban mass.

It is under these circumstances that museums and art galleries came to be thought of as playing an important role in the improvement of society.

Critics and writers such as John Ruskin, William Arnold and William Morris believed -- as indeed Karl Marx did -- that cultural refinement was a necessity of life for all, rather than merely a luxury of the wealthy.

The National Gallery in London was thus deliberately situated near Charing Cross to be accessible to the poor as well as the rich, and it is still a place where the greatest masterpieces are available to be enjoyed by all and free of charge, where an office clerk can drop in for a half hour in his lunchbreak to admire a Piero della Francesca or a Titian.

The NGV was founded in this general perspective, but it was soon joined by an associated art school, which gave it a second purpose as a study collection for practising artists. The gallery began collecting contemporary works, mainly through Britain, which understandably remained our window on to the world of art, although unfortunately it was not the window with the best view of what was going on at the time.

Australian works were also collected from the outset, and in 1865 the first acquisitive prize was awarded, somewhat reluctantly -- it was considered the best of a bad lot -- to Nicholas Chevalier's The Buffalo Ranges, 1864. This and Abram Louis Buvelot's Waterpool near Coleraine (sunset), 1869, were illustrated in the first series of photographic reproductions of important works in the gallery (1874), accompanied by important critical notes written by Marcus Clarke. He evidently disliked Chevalier's composition: the artist, he wrote, "lent himself readily to satisfy popular taste".

In the early years, the NGV was allocated some money by the government of Victoria, but the institution was transformed from the beginning of the 20th century by the considerable bequest left by Alfred Felton (1831-1904), whose revenue gave the NGV a greater acquisition fund than any gallery in Britain and allowed it to embark on a sustained program of expansion, purchasing about 15,000 works during the ensuing century and building by far the most extensive and representative collection of art in Australia.

The collection has grown through the years under a series of generally capable directors and with the aid of further generous grants and bequests, although inevitably there have been missed opportunities. The most famous of these was when the NGV, in common with other museums, refused to purchase important European modernist works from the 1939 Herald exhibition, which were stranded in Australia during the war and often available at bargain prices. The director at the time, J.S. Macdonald, famously described the pictures as the work of "degenerates and perverts".

There were also, as with most museums, opportunities that should have been missed; cases when hindsight makes it clear too much was spent on what was once fashionable work. The lesson to be drawn is that mistakes almost always involve buying the wrong kind of contemporary art, or what comes to be considered the wrong kind.

Every generation makes the same mistakes, although they don't recognise those mistakes at the time because they look superficially different. When the fog of fashion has dissipated, acquisitions can be made in a more rational spirit.

All things considered, the gallery has done well during the past 100 years, building up impressive holdings in fields including classical antiquity, pre-Columbian, Renaissance, baroque and 18th century, as well as European and Australian 19th and 20th-century and indigenous work. The gallery moved to its new home on St Kilda Road in 1967 but eventually needed more space. Since 2003 the Australian collection has been housed in the Ian Potter building at Federation Square, while the St Kilda Road building is occupied by NGV International.

Other galleries followed the example. Those of Sydney, Adelaide and, much later, Canberra developed good collections, but only the NGV offers contemporary artists a more or less continuous picture of the evolution of visual thinking that leads up to the questions they face; for Australian art, of course, is not a new beginning but a new branch on a very old tree.

In addition to permanent displays, important galleries have programs of temporary exhibitions, whether initiated within the institution itself (with domestic or international loans) or touring from other museums. Significant international shows are expensive to organise and it is notoriously difficult to convince overseas lenders to part with works that are central parts of their own permanent displays. We have to be realistic about Australia's isolation, too, even in the age of the internet; we are seldom or never going to attract the kind of art-history making exhibitions that offer a comprehensive and perhaps unexpected view of a great artist, such as the Lorenzo Lotto in Rome that was reviewed here recently, or the Musee d'Orsay's Manet: The Man Who Invented Modern Art.

One solution in recent years has been to borrow a large group of works while their home institution is renovating the wing or building they usually occupy. The result is not always completely satisfying. Last year's exhibition from the Staedel in Frankfurt was too diverse to have shape or continuity. The best way to approach this kind of show is not to expect a consciously crafted exhibition but to imagine you are walking around a selection of possibly disparate rooms in a permanent collection, and enjoy the opportunity to discover things you haven't seen.

The NGV has, however, done at least as well as any other big Australian gallery, taking opportunities to show large and ambitious groups of work -- such as Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire in 2009 and this year's Winter Masterpieces show devoted to Vienna a century ago -- but also mounting smaller monographic exhibitions such as the recent Gustave Moreau and the Eternal Feminine, where collaboration with a specialist museum and the fact the artist is not a mass brand make it possible to present a very respectable and representative survey.

The gallery has also presented important shows drawing on the holdings of other Australian museums, such as the survey of modern British art in 2007-08, and has taken an important role in producing monographic exhibitions on Australian artists, whether contemporary (Ricky Swallow, 2009), modern (John Brack, 2009) or historical (the outstanding Von Guerard: Nature Revealed, which combines Australian works and foreign loans).

A particular strength is NGV's ability to mount significant exhibitions from its extensive holdings. The recent self-portrait show The Naked Face was a missed opportunity. But there have been many fine small or medium ones drawn from the rich store of materials that cannot be on permanent display, especially prints, drawings and photographs. The key to success in these cases is the sympathetic selection of works that speak to each other and lead the viewer to understand something new about a period, a cluster of artists or the development of a theme through time. Recent examples including Chinoiserie (2009), Stick it!, Love, Loss and Intimacy, Timelines and Tea and Zen (2010), as well as Endless Present and Luminous Cities (2011), give an idea of the range of media and genres covered -- from collage to oriental ceramics -- and the depth of curatorial expertise that allows works to be effectively selected and sensitively presented, with informative and readable supporting catalogues or room brochures.

Areas of art that are subject to fashion and marketing or other kinds of manipulation, particularly contemporary or indigenous art, can be pitfalls for a serious gallery. The new Aboriginal art wing at the National Gallery of Australia, for instance, is introduced by an overtly ideological piece that casts an unfortunate shadow of resentment and tendentiousness over what is otherwise a well-conceived suite of rooms. It's never appealing to be told what to think before you've had a chance to see for yourself.

As already noted, directors also have to treat the field of the contemporary with care. No matter how much one may wish to support the most deserving artists working in our own day, fashions can be misleading, and too many of the people working in the field are fans and even spruikers; contemporary curators seldom have the disinterested and critical eye of their colleagues in the other departments of a gallery.

The tail of the contemporary should not end up wagging the dog; but there are yet other pitfalls for a publicly funded museum, the first of which is populism. When the NGV's present director, Gerard Vaughan, was interviewed by George Negus in 2004, visitor numbers were a prominent concern, and the next question was whether those who came were mostly middle-class. Governments are inclined to attach too much importance to attendance statistics and to have a simplistic idea of what constitutes access. More is not necessarily better, and numbers artificially inflated by gimmickry cannot be compared with those for serious exhibitions.

Quality and integrity are paramount in any cultural activity, and they should not be compromised to attract any particular class or age group. Governments need to be patient. As individuals grow up and as social classes become more educated, they are drawn to more sophisticated interests. If politicians want to accelerate that process, they should think about improving the teaching of art, music and other cultural activities in school.

Vaughan was for many years the Felton adviser in London -- in fact the last one, as the position has since been abolished -- and thus came here in 1999 already possessing an intimate knowledge of the collection. Vaughan is a cultivated man who has a sound but pragmatic grasp of the complex task of managing a vast collection, two main buildings and a constant cycle of exhibitions big and small. He has made a few concessions to populism by allowing shows of fashion, which attract a certain audience that may not otherwise have much interest in art, but he has been careful to support and develop the high standards of an institution that remains not only the most important repository of cultural memory in Australia but also the most active in making its collections, in the truest sense, accessible.