Australian art emphasised in major shake-up at National Gallery

The story of Australian art has been given greater priority at the NGA.

NGA rehang

It was always rather anomalous to relegate Australian art to the ­upstairs galleries of our national collection while the ground floor was dominated by a selection of colossal ­American abstractions of the mid-20th- century.

These works had once seemed, to some at least, like the culmination of modern painting, if not of the art of painting itself. With the passage of years and the dissipation of the miasma of fashion, many of them have come to look increasingly vacuous. What did an earlier generation see in the huge stained canvases of Morris Louis, for example?

It clearly makes more sense for the National Gallery of Australia to give greater prominence to the story of Australian art, though the new display is not quite right yet.

For one thing, the large open space where international modern art used to begin with the ­impressionists and post-impressionists is now occupied by the most recent and weakest part of the Australian collections. The entrance to the roughly chronological presentation of the collection is less conspicuous and farther away, past the room dedicated to the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly series, which is thus also taken out of historical sequence.

The main display starts with high colonial works by Eugene von Guerard and others. While this is not strictly chronological, there is some justification in opening with the period in which our forebears first began to think seriously about the problem of making this remote and strange land their permanent home.

The main problem that strikes visitors at first glance is that the walls are too white, producing a sense of clinical detachment instead of sympathetic engagement — compare the much warmer stone colour on the walls outside — while the ambient brightness makes it physically hard to see into the paintings, with their more subdued and complex tonalities.

Next is a generally well-conceived room that covers earlier colonial work. On the inside left wall are two important pictures by Augustus Earle, and on the inside right a painting by Alexander Schramm — all of them concerned with the relations between early explorers and settlers and the Aborigines. On the long far wall are four paintings by John Glover, two of which are depictions of Aborigines and two im­ages of ­European settlement, one a view of his own property, Patterdale, and the other of the house of his friend George Augustus Robinson, who negotiated an end to the Tasmanian conflict with the ­native peoples.

On the left wall there is a collection of colonial portraits, and on the right early representations of Aborigines, including several memorable images. It is clear that the hanging invites us to ponder the human and moral dimensions of settlement and cultural contact between the populations. Unfortunately, two tendentious and grossly unsubtle contemporary works are inserted into the hang, as though viewers cannot be trusted to think for themselves, in effect short-circuiting the deeper process of moral reflection that the paintings themselves may have encouraged.

Subsequent rooms cover the Heidelberg School — without Tom Roberts for the time being because his works are being shown in the adjacent monographic ­exhibition — then the Federation period, which corresponded with a wave of expatriation. There are rooms devoted to the Angry Penguins and surrealism, called Living in the Machine Age — which sets Grace Cossington Smith and Margaret Preston beside the ­industrial photographs of Wolfgang Sievers — and Isolation and Loss, more or less corresponding to the war years but moving beyond the chronological limits of that time.

Three of the most important figures of the postwar years are brought together in a room rather oddly titled Collection Highlights — Fred Williams, Ian Fairweather and John Brack — then a mixed bag of others is assembled in another large space under the heading of Pop, Beach, Sex and Sun, a rubric that includes Brett Whiteley as well as ­Richard Larter, Vivienne Binns, political screen-prints and even Max Dupain.

More satisfactory, on the whole, is the rehanging of the modern art collection upstairs, where the historical sequence of artistic movements is easier to ­follow, even if the order of rooms is not always strictly chronological. Nor is it even desirable to ­enforce a rigorously linear historical narrative when different movements can flourish at the same time, and when artists may continue to work in a particular style well past what are meant to be its art-historical dates.

One of the main problems any gallery faces in telling the story of a style or period is the limitation of its own collection, which is immediately apparent in the NGA’s holdings of impressionist, neo-impressionist and post-impres­sionist paintings.

In each case the gallery has some very fine works, but they tended to look isolated, with little sense of context, in the old hanging downstairs. It is here that the new hanging is most successful, for in the first important room we encounter, these paintings are supplemented, on the oppo­site wall, by prints from the gallery’s extensive collection of works on paper. By drawing on a field in which the NGA has a vastly greater historical coverage, the new hanging is able to present a much more comprehensive art-historical and sociocultural ­account of the period.

The same approach is followed in the subsequent rooms. The next one is focused on expressionism and fauvism as well as Matisse, who had also appeared in the previous display, and the room after that is devoted to dada and surrealism while also including some relevant items of tribal art. Here the collection is much more developed and the varieties of the styles better represented.

The surrealist display flows into the next space, bringing ­together works of geometric ­abstraction, including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. This is followed by the return of the human figure in a strong grouping of Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. We turn a corner and find ourselves surrounded by the works of David Hockney, then images from the big names of the pop movement.

The following room departs most markedly from chronological order in bringing together Colin McCahon, Constantin Brancusi, Giovanni Anselmo and Agnes Martin, yet certain affinities of sensibility and a common concern for religious or spiritual experience justify the conjunction. This room also makes a deliberate contrast with the final room in the narrative, which evokes the bleak and disabused world view of the postwar period: Christian Boltanski, Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz all gain in resonance from their juxtaposition with one of Anselm Kiefer’s most powerful works, Abendland, the land of ­twilight.

And what of the American ­dinosaurs that once ruled the vast empty halls of the ground floor?

Interestingly, they are presented in a pair of rooms that run parallel to those devoted to dada, surrealism and subsequent movements. The smaller of these two rooms holds the Louis paintings, while the larger includes Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman and culminates in the picture that has held up better than any of the others of this period, Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles.

The hanging of a collection is always an art-historical statement, and this one tells us that American abstraction today looks less like the consummation of the Western tradition of painting than a local movement in the art of the 20th century.