The beauty beyond the blockbuster

IT'S time to rethink how we present the big-name artists.

Anish Kapoor's Memory at t...

QUITE often, the best exhibitions of the year are the least breathlessly promoted.

The most memorable aesthetic experiences this year include the ukiyo-e prints at the Shepparton Art Museum and the Rick Amor drawings and studies at Castlemaine Art Gallery in Victoria, but also the beautiful survey of Jessie Traill's etchings at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Other outstanding things came in smaller shows at larger venues, such as the Thomas Demand photographs at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra shed new light on a poorly known painter with its Hilda Rix Nicholas retrospective, and the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide did particularly well: after the important Jeffrey Smart survey last year, it presented two fine exhibitions this year, the first on Laurie Anderson and the second on Daniel Crooks. Other notable retrospectives were Peter Rushforth at the SH Ervin Gallery and Anish Kapoor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

The blockbusters, of course, open only after a preliminary bombardment of publicity. The problem with all this spin is that a blockbuster in Australia almost never can be better than it has been trumpeted to be: in most cases, the only real question is how far short of the promises it can fall.

Exceptions, in the sense that the exhibitions have come up to expectations, have included Glorious Days at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, which vividly evoked the Australia of 1913, and Sydney Moderns at the Art Gallery of NSW, a substantial contribution to Australian art history, in sharp contrast to the present lacklustre and unfocused America: Painting a Nation.

The NGA's Toulouse-Lautrec show was an effective exhibition, mainly because the gallery cleverly exploited its extensive holdings of Lautrec prints and posters, and had to borrow only a small number of paintings and drawings to put together a reasonable introduction to the artist. It thus largely avoided the usual difficulty we have in this country of being unable to secure enough loans of real quality for the most famous artists.

It is easier to get around this problem with works on paper, especially prints, which exist in multiple copies, particularly when the exhibition is put together by an institution with vast holdings and corresponding scholarship.

Thus the AGNSW's Renaissance to Goya came from the British Museum, where it originally had been mounted, and represented the highest standards of art historical research in the field, rather than being cobbled together for an antipodean audience, as was last year's Prado show at the Queensland Art Gallery.

Van Gogh, Dali and Beyond, the latest - and, as it turns out, final - of a series of exhibitions sent to Perth by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, included fine work but was a bit patchier and less logically conceived than last year's Picasso to Warhol, which covered the same ground in the form of mini-monographic sequences. The subsequent three exhibitions have been cancelled because they haven't made enough money.

Two blockbusters that fell well short of the expectations generated were Turner at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide and the NGA, and Monet's Garden at the NGV. Each was worth seeing for some fine pictures but also included far too many things of uneven quality.

Apart from being simply too big, there was a specific lesson to be learned - namely, to be wary of exhibitions drawn from the contents of a deceased artist's studio. These - as was also the case with the AGNSW's Picasso retrospective in 2011-12 - inevitably are presented as works the artist kept for himself but in reality are just as likely to be unfinished or unsuccessful things he would rather not have had displayed.

The result is, all too often, great artists are shown in an undeservedly poor light. You can see and often hear visitors to these exhibitions trying to be impressed by works they are invited to admire, but the experience is different from being in the presence of real masterpieces, where the value of the work is self-evident.

We need to rethink the model of a blockbuster filled with big names at any cost - that is, at the cost of the quality of the works - then packed out to some arbitrary number, such as 100.

Smaller exhibitions with more tightly defined themes could allow us to make the most of a limited number of very good loans, and well-chosen lesser works could serve as thematic support rather than mere padding or, worse, distraction.