The fine print at AGNSW

SOMEONE said to me the other day: “The Art Gallery of NSW used to be such a happy place.” Not any more.

Detail from Claude Mellan’s engraving The veil of Saint Veronica (1649). Courtesy: Art Gallery of New South Wales

SOMEONE said to me the other day: “The Art Gallery of NSW used to be such a happy place.” Not any more. A few weeks ago people inside and outside the institution were shocked and dismayed by the summary sacking of both of its well-respected and experienced publicists, who had excellent relations with the press. The equally capable head of public programs was also shown the door. Even some of the trustees were reported to be appalled.

The sackings, and the dismay, follow the appointment of several highly paid bureaucrats to help share the directorial burden.

The latest was a director of development, presumably to see if anyone is willing to put up the cash for the ambitious, although still questionable, plan to double the size of the gallery. The new appointment has had extensive experience in football.

Another senior appointment that seems to have caused disquiet is the so-called director of public engagement. This person, we were told, has “over 25 years of leadership experience in media, communications, marketing, brand development, innovation and content creation”. She used to be in charge of marketing at Barangaroo.

It has, of course, seemed odd to appoint ­people with so little experience of art and running a gallery.

In another disturbing change, the director of public engagement has renamed public programs the department of activation. This new appellation has met with richly deserved ridicule, but also has an uncomfortably Orwellian ring when one considers that the AGNSW, since the disappointing exhibition America: Painting a Nation earlier this year, has suffered from a distinct lack of traction.

And as if all that weren’t enough, the gallery recently announced volunteer ticket sellers would be replaced with professionals. Naturally this too will involve a considerable additional cost, but it also means the loss of the friendly personal touch volunteers bring. It seems that the new management model is one of rigid authoritarian control.

But whatever reasons dictated this latest decision, it was handled — like the previous sackings — with an almost incredible degree of insensitivity.

People within and associated with the gallery are anxious and unhappy, professionals in the art world are angry and incredulous, and the publicity for the institution has been atrocious. Is this brand development? It looks more like Brand destruction.

On a more positive note, we can look forward to Pop to Popism next month. This should be a significant show, though it has been described by a colleague of mine as a make-or-break exhibition for the gallery. And there have been a couple of good loan exhibitions recently, including one on Japanese Noh theatre and most notably Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul.

The present survey of the gallery’s holdings in prints and drawings from the early modern period to the 19th century is the most substantial exhibition produced from its own resources for more than a year, yet it wasn’t even given an opening, which again raises concerns about the priorities of the current management.

This exhibition actually epitomises the core mission of an institution like the AGNSW, which is to collect works of high quality and significance, take care of them, undertake research to elucidate their meaning and make them available to the public.

We have seen too many exhibitions of an indifferent standard around Australia in the past few years, typically padded out with inferior work to reach what is considered the necessary scale of a blockbuster. Blockbusters are popular because they can be publicised in ways that the mass market understands and consequently bring in large numbers of visitors.

But this ­emphasis on raw numbers is unfortunate, and we have seen how it can be abused with populist gimmicks to inflate visitor statistics. Large numbers please bureaucrats and help politicians justify the funding of the arts, but they are meaningless when the number of feet that trudge past bear no relation to the quality of intellectual or imaginative engagement the work may have stimulated in the minds of those who looked at them. Quality is always more important than quantity, but it is constantly undervalued because it cannot be measured or counted.

European Prints and Drawings 1500-1900 is unlikely to break records for attendance numbers, but it is rich, beautifully installed and the sort of show that will reward not only hours of exploration but even repeated visits. The accompanying scholarly catalogue by Peter Raissis is an outstanding resource.

This core collection has been augmented by gifts and bequests through the years and cura­tor­ial pur­chases, most conspicuously this year Albrecht Durer’s Melencolia I, among the most famous and enigmatic prints made.

The art of printmaking, like that of printing, arose in the late 15th century, and these prints offer a picture of the unfolding history of Eur­ope — from the horrors of the religious wars chronicled in Jacques Callot’s etchings to the modern abuses of political repression in 19th-century Paris in a lithograph by Honore Daumier.

But at the same time the exhibition leads us through 400 years of changing ways of seeing and imagining the world, a time during which the reference points of the modern mind were continually evolving: religion, above all, still had a powerful hold over the thinking of the 16th and 17th centuries, but it was being undermined by the fracturing of Christendom as well as by the rise of modern science.

New techniques for representing visual experience, from perspective to chiaroscuro, were, in the long run, making the sensory and material world seem more real than the spiritual or transcendent dimension, yet, at the same time, they are used to make religious stories more vividly present to the viewer.

And then the pendulum swings back to inner life and brooding romantic reveries, and new subjects appear to speak of the new sensibility. But prints, perhaps more than any other medium, draw attention to the artifice of their own making, and for that reason an understanding of the difference between relief and intaglio prints, and within the latter category, between engraving, etching, aquatint and drypoint, adds immeasurably to our appreciation of their aesthetic qualities.

To give only one example, in Durer’s woodblock Joachim and the Angel the image is first drawn on the block and the spaces between the lines are cut away; the result is that the block is in touch with the paper only at the point where the lines are printed, and the white spaces between are completely blank.

Woodblocks thus have a crisp black-and-white aesthetic, as well as a characteristic linear pattern that may embrace organic forms but does not lend itself to hatching.

In intaglio prints, on the other hand, it is the lines scratched into the copper plate that hold the ink and make the image, and in the printing process the whole plate is in contact with the paper; even after wiping, a degree of plate tone unifies the surface of the image and disting­uishes it from the white paper beyond the plate mark.

There are other variations on these media, such as the chiaroscuro woodcuts that are well represented in the collection. Look at Golt­zius’s Pluto and Proserpine, for example, and you can see how the blocks used for the light tone have to cover the whole area of the figures except for the highlights, which are left as the white of the paper. Again the particular effects of Claude Mellan’s hypnotic face of Christ and Rembrandt’s sensitive and introspective portrait of Jan Lutma are inseparable from the engraving technique of the former and the etching of the latter.

There are fewer drawings but some very fine ones, from Watteau and Fragonard to Ingres and Cezanne.

In appreciating drawings, too, it is important to be sensitive to the different expressive qualities of the media chosen by the artist, for drawings are the most intimate and personal of artistic expressions, generally recording the artist’s own response to experience, projects and planning, and rarely intended for exhibition.

Both prints and drawings, however, illustrate the way that an artist’s thinking is not disembodied but intimately invested in his practice, so that we cannot imagine quite the same aesthetic idea being expressed in any other material form.

These are not the loud and spectacular or merely gimmicky art products that lend themselves to the great march past of the mass spectator.

They demand time and attention and — something often invoked but seldom understood — the participation of the viewer in the realisation of their meaning.

European Prints and Drawings 1500-1900, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until November 2