Roslyn Oxley’s 40 years as the First Lady of Australian art
The eight-metre-long painting featured an image of Marilyn Monroe and made front page news. ‘All hell broke loose’, Roslyn Oxley recalls. Her gallery had been open a month.
Sitting in the stately front rooms of Carthona, the towering neo-Gothic home of art dealers Roslyn and Tony Oxley, it’s easy to imagine I’ve been invited to tea at Brideshead or, to reach for a more a modern reference, Saltburn.
It’s a hot and windy day when I visit, and Sydney harbour, peeking through the half-drawn blinds of the soaring, cathedral-stye windows, is a busy, choppy mess. All the windows are closed “to keep the room cool” so I can’t hear the murmur of the waves — the Gaelic translation of Carthona.
“It’s such a good house, though,” Roslyn says, like she’s describing a semi-detached place in Maroubra. The sandstone pile on the north-eastern promontory of Darling Point resembles a mediaeval castle, complete with battlement parapets and with the carved stone heads of knights and kings. It has been in the Oxley family for three generations. Tony’s grandfather, Philip Bushell, bought the house in 1940 and passed it down to Amber Oxley, Tony’s mother and heiress of the family’s tea fortune. It has been Roslyn’s and Tony’s family home – they have two daughters, Leyla and Omha – for the past 25 years.
While the furniture looks like it was transplanted from Downton Abbey, the walls and ceilings are covered in a tessellated Florence Broadhurst wallpaper that makes the interior feel like a tiled Spanish cathedral.
“Isn’t it fabulous?” Roslyn says. It’s something of a trademark line. In the new book Roslyn Oxley9: The First 40 Years, Bill Henson, who has been represented by RO9 since the late 1980s, calls that phrase “her distinctive, genuinely felt key to collectors’ hearts”.
The book is an enormous tome, with over 600 pages of social history covering the 40 years since the Oxleys opened their contemporary art gallery in 1982.
Peppered throughout are testimonials from artists whose careers were launched at RO9 – Tracey Moffatt, David Noonan, Fiona Hall, Patricia Piccinini, Bill Henson and Dale Frank. All pen accounts of being part of the gallery’s stable. Over 350 artists have exhibited at RO9, and many have taken their place on the international stage at some of the world’s leading art fairs.
The Oxleys have invited me to Carthona to talk about the book, which was written by curator and academic Felicity Fenner. Tony excuses himself and reappears carrying an antique tray piled with lamingtons and plunger coffee. His manners, and hospitality, are impeccable and smack of the old world. If I were to cast an actor to play him it would be Richard E Grant. He’s softly spoken – “Speak up!” Roslyn directs, not unkindly, more than once.
The couple have a well-rehearsed routine; they’ve been married for 54 years and have worked in the gallery together for 40. She tells meandering tales, and he waits, politely, until she’s finished, to insert his edits. “You followed [Yayoi] Kusama to Tokyo, not Italy; Ohma was 14 when she sat for Bill, not eight.”
Henson tells me that he’ll often answer Roslyn’s calls to hear her say, “Tony…” (he does her well-educated drawl staggeringly well), “...Why am I calling Bill?”
Roslyn has the air of someone who is used to wealth and unfazed by the presence, or absence, of it. At the age of 82, she is positively sprightly, and has an air of girlish mischief. When we meet she’s dressed in a black T-shirt, skinny black jeans and trainers; her signature shock of white hair rests on her shoulders. Her eyes light up when people curse or drop a juicy bit of gossip. Tilda Swinton could play her. She is at the gallery, on Soudan Lane in Paddington, every day. Her team, who are all much younger than she is, speak reverentially of her work ethic. When we meet, she has just returned from Art Cologne, where she worked for seven days without a break.
“She is the First Lady of Australian art,” says philanthropist and art collector John Kaldor. “And Tony, he may not be in the limelight, but he is very much her partner in all things.”
Roslyn’s parents, Sir John and Lady Walton, founded the department store chain Waltons in the 1950s. She was educated at Ascham and describes her childhood as full of travel and art. As a result of dyslexia she was “better at art than at spelling”, she says, adding: “I had a very bright brother who topped everything. As not a super student, and understanding quite clearly my brother’s talents, art became my thing.”
The passion for art led to study at East Sydney Technical College, now the National Art School. After graduating, Roslyn worked as an interior designer for architectural firms Peddle Thorp & Walker, and Yuncken Freeman. In the late 1960s she met Anthony Oxley when they both crashed the same party. Roslyn, freshly single after emerging from a first marriage she describes as “disastrous”, spied Tony across the room. “I said to my friend, ‘He looks like a pretty cute guy. I think I’ll go over and say hi.’”
In 1970, the couple relocated to New York, where they married four days later at the progressive Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue. Tony was enrolled in an MBA at Columbia, and Roslyn had taken a job with industrial design firm Raymond Loewy. It was in New York that the couple met Leo Castelli, the revered Italian-American art dealer, whom Roslyn cites as among her greatest influences.
“He was so nice and so generous. We looked like shabby students, but he welcomed us into the art world in America.”
Back in Australia, after a few years travelling with their two young daughters, the couple found themselves immersed in the Sydney art scene, where only a small number of contemporary art galleries were in operation. Curator Ace Bourke, who had become close with the Oxleys, suggested they open a gallery.
“I said, “Right on!” And that’s what we did.”
“We were lucky that we didn’t get involved in the art business until we had a certain amount of financial strength behind us,” Tony adds. Tony had worked as a director of Bushells for several years and was instrumental in the 1979 selling of the family business to their British partners. With money under their belt, the Oxleys were in a position to start something of their own. “Running an art gallery is a perilous business on a financial level,” he says. “Little did we know how much time it would take us to make the gallery function on a business level.”
The gallery launched in 1982, in an old tobacco factory on the border of Paddington and Darlinghurst, with a stable of young, fresh talent. Roslyn, to this day, is drawn to unrepresented artists at the beginning of their careers.
Their first exhibition was by Melbourne painter Gareth Sansom, who is still represented by RO9 today. Soon after, the gallery showed Stupid as a Painter by Melbourne-based artist Juan Davila. The eight-metre-long painting, which Tony recalls was “very explicit”, featured an image of Marilyn Monroe masturbating and a crucifix placed precariously in front of a vagina dentata.
“All hell broke loose,” Roslyn says.
The police arrived, seized the work, and threw it into the back of a truck. It made front page news. “Art has nothing to do with the Vice Squad,” said Neville Wran, who was NSW Premier at the time. The gallery had been open for one month.
When I ask the couple how the police found out about the work – Davila was a relatively unknown painter – Roslyn’s eyes light up. “We think Juan tipped them off,” she says, and she and Tony erupt into laughter, like parents fondly remembering something funny their toddler did. “Juan is a bit naughty.”
“A bit naughty” is how people describe Roslyn, too.
“She has a wicked sense of humour,” says Victoria Scott, director of sales at RO9. She tells me about the opening of a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective in 2017, soon after she joined the gallery. The event was attended by collectors, government ministers and representatives from the late photographer’s estate. Approaching the bar for drinks, Roslyn redirected Scott’s attention to her Prada handbag, which was lined with tiny bottles of Absolut vodka. “She rocks the boat and is fiercely who she is,” Scott says. “She doesn’t waver or try to impress anybody. To me it sums up her ‘I don’t give a shit’ attitude. I mean she hardly needs to sneak in alcohol… She’s Roslyn Oxley!”
The Oxleys are famous for their parties, where all are welcome. Artists and their coterie mix with collectors and curators over steaming bowls of the green chicken curry Roslyn has been serving at her back-to-mine dinners for decades. “She is not what you expect,” Scott continues. “She is revered and feared by people who don’t know her well. But she is the least snobby or judgmental person. They are not exclusive at all.”
The art collection held at Carthona is a roll call of the artists RO9 has represented over the past 40 years. Artworks by Rosalie Gascoigne, David Noonan, Linda Marrinon, Jenny Watson and Dale Frank populate the front rooms. Tracey Moffatt’s Pet Thang – a six-panel portrait of the artist and a sheep – hangs in the traditional, wood-panelled dining room. The blurry, surrealist photographs give the narrow, stately room a dissociative air, like a nightclub after the lights are turned on. The placement is more than anachronistic, it’s punk rock.
Then there are the Warhols – Chairman Mao, some flower prints – and Lichtensteins, which the Oxleys bought during their years living in New York. “The artists were such stars, but you’d see them in the street,” Roslyn says. “I used to see Andy Warhol just walking around. It was a good time.”
To the right of a grand fireplace, behind a thick pane of glass, is a painting by Japanese dot queen Yayoi Kusama, whom RO9 represented from 2002 to 2012.
“In around 1982 I saw this mind-blowing exhibition,” Roslyn says. “It just stayed with me. I wanted to meet this Kusama woman.” Twenty years on, Roslyn found out that Kusama was not represented outside Japan. “I found out where she was and went to see her.” Roslyn travelled to Tokyo where Kusama has lived at the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill since 1977. The artist was particularly taken by Roslyn’s white hair, and stroked it when they met.
“We took Kusama to Art Basel. We were the only people showing her contemporary work anywhere in the world.” Tony recalls the 2012 large-scale public art commission for the Brisbane Law Court as a particular source of pride. According to Roslyn, the relationship ended when British art dealer Victoria Miro insisted on exclusive representation outside Japan and America. “They said she could never show with me again. It took me ages to get over that.”
Beside the Kusama, above a grand fireplace, is a photograph from Henson’s Paris Opera series (pictured, previous page). The model is Ohma Oxley, one of the couple’s two daughters, who lives on a farm in the Scottish Highlands with her husband and two children. Diamonds drip from her earlobes, and nestle in her collarbone. Her young lips (the photograph was taken when she was 14, not eight) are ruby red, and her eyes downcast and to the side. When Henson’s exhibition at RO9 was famously raided in 2008, Roslyn was asked if she would allow her own children to sit for Henson. All she had to do was point.
The Oxleys first met Henson in the elevator of a hotel in New York. Legend has it that she had the photographer pinned against the oak-panelled wall by the fifth floor. “‘Why won’t you show with me, Bill?” Henson tells me, in another imitation of Oxley. “That was our first encounter. I did make her wait a few years, and she’s not very patient.”
RO9 had been representing Henson for nearly ten years when police received complaints that the gallery was preparing to show “obscene” works. Unlike Davila, Henson was a towering figure in the Australian art world, and the themes inherent in his work were widely known. The Art Gallery of NSW had held a wildly successful retrospective of his works only three years earlier. But police raided the gallery and the exhibition was shut down. Everyone from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (the work was “revolting”) to Malcolm Turnbull, who owns two of Henson’s works (”I don’t believe that we should have policemen invading art galleries”) weighed in.
The image that sparked the controversy was the one Henson had selected for the invitation – a naked 13-year-old girl appears bathed in moonlight against a backdrop of darkness. The classification board would eventually give it a rating of PG. When Roslyn first saw the image, did she have any sense that it would cause such a brouhaha? “Maybe,” she says, frankly. “I did ask my mother what she thought… And she said it was a very nice image.”
Looking back, would she still agree to use the image for the invitation? “It’s hard to change things. If you are prepared to show the artist, you have to go along with it or there is no point in showing them. You don’t show Bill if you don’t want to show his images.”
“Hopefully it won’t happen again!” Tony chimes in. “But we do have a strong belief that there shouldn’t be censorship.”
So is there anything the couple wouldn’t show? “Maybe,” she says, again. This time with that famous twinkle. “But I haven’t come across it yet.”
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery: The First 40 Years ($110, Formist Editions) is available for purchase from February 14