Through Olley’s eyes: what appeals to the artist

Margaret Olley’s legacy as a champion of her peers and generous benefactor is something to be celebrated.

David Strachan’s The old wall Bricherasio (1959). Margaet Hannah Olley Art Trust 1997, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

There is much to be said for leaving the primary purchasing of contemporary art to private collectors and corporations. The fundamental problem is that the field is dominated by fashion and subject to aggressive market manipulation, and public galleries, their curators and boards often make mistakes. The fact that they all huddle together for safety and buy from the same shopping list just means that they all make the same mistakes.

There are two advantages of leaving the ­acquisition of new art to private buyers. The first is that it allows for a variety of tastes and judgment, instead of the dreary conformity we get with the public service curators of state galleries. One collector may follow a certain movement; another a different one. They can be as eccentric, as visionary, as right or as wrong as they like.

Jeffrey Smart, Labyrinth (2011). National Gallery of Australia

And the second advantage is precisely the reason they can be as right or wrong as they like: it’s their money and they can spend it as they see fit. Some will make spectacular mistakes but others may see things that the public service curators and the shopping-list collectors miss entirely. The important thing, though, is that we let private individuals and corporations risk their own money backing their hunches, rather than spend the always limited funds that institutions obtain from government grants, foundation capital or the benefactions of members.

Leaving purchases to the private buyer does not mean contemporary work will not end up in public galleries: much will be eventually ­bequeathed or gifted, either as pure philanthropy or under tax-deductible cultural ­donation programs. Tax-deductible schemes do ultimately cost the state something in lost revenue, but by the time the gift is made, institutions will only accept works that have outlived the tide of fashion, and thus the process provides some filter for enduring quality.

Nicholas Harding, River figures (paddle and hat) (2009). Gift of Margaret Olley 2009, Maitland Regional Art Gallery.

Public galleries are in a better position to buy works that are at least a couple of generations old, so the inebriation of fashion has largely ceased to distort critical judgment. And in fact the collecting of historical work is best left to ­expert curators, who have a deep understanding of their period, of the quality of the work proposed for purchase and of the ­contribution it will make to enhancing the ­collection.

Even here, though, we should not discount the role of the passionate amateur, whose love of a particular period or subject can lead to profound knowledge and expertise. Sir Denis Mahon began as a wealthy student of art history but anticipated and helped to foster a new ­appreciation of baroque art, which had been out of favour since the strictures of John Ruskin. I remember reading Mahon’s Studies in Seicento Art and Theory many years ago and realising with a shock he actually owned the great Guercino painting that he was analysing in the text.

Later he became a trustee of the National Gallery in London, giving many important works to the collection, including the Guercino masterpiece that I had been reading about, Elijah Fed by Ravens. When the Heath and Major governments tried to ­introduce entry fees to British public galleries and museums, he stood up for free access and threatened to revoke his gift of 58 pictures to institutions around the country.

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in front of a mirror (1931). Gift of the Margaret Hannah Olley Art Trust 2012. Art Gallery of New South Wales.

More recently Louis-Antoine Prat was a modestly well-off young man who developed a love for French drawings and spent his money collecting these. As his expertise grew, he sold many of his early pictures and bought better ones, until by the end of last century he was recognised as one of the two or three finest connoisseurs of the subject, and his collection, part of which was seen at the AGNSW in 2010, was considered the best in private hands.

On a smaller scale, Margaret Olley is another example of the private collector and benefactor, although unlike the others she was also a successful artist. Earlier in her life, like her friend Jeffrey Smart, she acquired several properties that provided her with rental income and some financial independence. Later, when her pictures sold for much higher prices, she would spend much of the proceeds buying art and sending works to galleries that she supported — in this case following the example of the Australian collector Howard Hinton (1867-1948), who famously lived in a boarding house and spent ­almost all his money collecting and giving art.

Detail from Edouard Vuillard’s Femme dans le studio (Woman in the studio) (c.1920). Gift of the Margaret Olley Art Trust through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012. Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art.

Over the years, Olley formed close relationships with several curators and gallery directors, notably Barry Pearce, the former head of Australian art at the AGNSW, who has contributed a warm and occasionally wry chapter to the catalogue of this exhibition, and perhaps especi­ally the late Edmund Capon (1940-2019), ­remembered as the gallery’s most significant ­director of the past century. Olley ­famously wrote a cheque for $1m as her contribution to Capon’s purchase of Cezanne’s Bords de la Marne (Banks of the Marne) in 2008. And it was Capon’s suggestion, before his death last year, that an exhibition be organised to commemorate and survey Olley’s activity as a collector.

She also formed close relationships with several artists, from contemporaries like Dobell, Smart and David Strachan, who had an important effect on her own development, as I mentioned in reviewing her recent retrospective in Brisbane, to younger artists later when she had become established in her own right. Many of these artist friends also painted or drew her, for Dobell’s portrait of her in a white dress and hat, which won the Archibald Prize in 1948, had made her the most famous sitter in Australia.

Olley supported and collected several of her contemporaries, older and younger, and the ­exhibition includes an impressive landscape by Strachan, best known for small and often whimsical flower pieces and still lifes. She also contributed to the NGA’s purchase of Jeffrey Smart’s Labyrinth, the enigmatic last picture he completed before ceasing to paint in 2011: in the centre of a sunlit maze under a dark sky, the figure of HG Wells glances back at us, perhaps recalling one of Smart’s favourite lines from TS Eliot: “In my end is my beginning.”

Among other contemporaries represented here is a small but suggestive picture by Lloyd Rees, recalling the simplicity of Spanish still life of the 17th century, a fine neoclassical group by Jean Bellette and a haunting early portrait by Justin O’Brien, painted while he and the sitter were German prisoners in a stalag in Poland. As the Art Gallery of NSW website notes, the picture reflects the influence of post-impressionist artists whose work O’Brien was able to study in the camp library, and whose lessons he taught in the art class he had set up for fellow prisoners.

Two younger artists who were closely associated with Olley were Cressida Campbell, represented here by two beautiful coloured wood­blocks — all her work is produced in double form, the coloured woodblock and the unique print taken from it — and Nicholas Harding, with an intimate portrait of his wife and an ­impressive large drawing of a figure walking along the bank of a river carrying a paddle.

Among older artists, Olley was particularly drawn to French modernists from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, and the collection ­includes prints from Toulouse-Lautrec to ­Matisse and Picasso. Her favourites were perhaps the intimist Nabi painters, Bonnard and Vuillard, whose concern with interiors matched her own. There are some works by Australian artists with a similar sensibility, including Ethel Carrick Fox; and Pearce nudged her towards ­acquiring a fine little work by John Russell, a picture of Sisley’s wife in a garden, which they came upon in very poor condition.

One of Olley’s more important contributions was no doubt in encouraging the acquisition of works by Morandi for Australian collections. She was not alone in her enthusiasm for the Italian master of quiet and meditative still life — so minimalist compared with her own pictures, filled with flowers and fruit and colours — but she acquired some outstanding etchings and helped to purchase important still life paintings.

Not all of the pieces Olley bought were great works in their own right. Pearce interestingly comments on the way she bought a cut-out section of a Bonnard painting and several minor drawings torn from sketchbooks; but as he notes, “to her mind the works were reasonably inexpensive and contained the essential DNA if not a bare connotation of genius”.

There is no doubt that a couple of these drawings in particular are slight in themselves. But Olley had the right instinct. She was attracted to the autograph quality of the sketch and the direct insight it gave into the mind and hand of the artist. This special interest of preparatory, tentative or unfinished work was recognised as early as Pliny, who almost 2000 years ago mentioned several unfinished works, including an Aphrodite by Apelles, that were more admired than finished ones because in them the very thinking of the artists was to be seen: ipsae cogitationes artificum spectantur.

Two little drawings by Bonnard and a tiny landscape sketch by Lucien Pissarro have this kind of interest. The Pissarro consists only of a few lines but we can feel the artist thinking about the landscape and trying to assimilate the lessons of Cezanne. The houses, with their little cubic forms set at odd angles to each other, give structure and rhythm to an otherwise non­descript patch of hillside.

Of the Bonnard drawings, one is the merest suggestion of a woman, from behind, walking towards her carriage, of the same year as the four-panel lithographic screen Promenade des nourrices (1895), which she also bought for the Art Gallery of NSW, although it is not included in this exhibition. The other drawing is from his later period, a Nude in front of a mirror (1931), one of those works that show Bonnard characteristically trying to capture his subjects at ­moments when they are unselfconscious, ­unaware of being drawn.

One of the best of these little sketches is a Woman in the studio by Edouard Vuillard (c. 1920). Perhaps she is a model who has just ­arrived and is taking off her shoes. Her face is mostly hidden by the hat she is still wearing. The charm of the piece is in the spontaneous way it captures an automatic, habitual action, the sort of thing that also fascinated Degas. The line is quick and rough, trying to seize the whole before it vanishes. And curiously, the figure makes one think of Olley herself, surely something that must have occurred, even if subconsciously, to a collector whose response to art was both aesthetic and intuitive.

Margaret’s Gift

SH Ervin Gallery, until March 22