Bright and dogmatic, Michael Brand leaves just as Art Gallery of NSW hits its straps

Michael Brand had big shoes to fill when he replaced the ebullient Edmund Capon at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2012. The men were opposites in style and substance.

Capon was the darling of the political classes, a showman who could spin a yarn and charm artists and the media alike. He was credited with shaking up a moribund Art Gallery of NSW and putting it on the cultural map.

Art Gallery of NSW director Michael Brand (right) with his deputy Maud Page (left) and head of development John Richardson.Credit: Nic Walker

Brand was the earnest scholar in a stylish chequered jacket – bright and dogmatic, but not as slick at managing one-to-one relationships with the state’s movers and shakers.

He was not the type to smoke a cigar with a former prime minister as Capon once reportedly did.

Brand has now called an end to his 13-year tenure.

When he departs in July next year, he will leave behind one of the most visited contemporary art museums in Australia, a gallery that has creatively started to hit its straps in the past 12 months with a series of world-class exhibitions, and a solid public program the envy of most galleries.

Brand has been especially fortunate to have businessman David Gonski as president of the gallery’s board of trustees helping to land its $344 million contemporary art building, Sydney Modern, which opened in December 2022.

It was this ambitious project, the largest since the Sydney Opera House, that drew Brand to the Art Gallery of NSW. Its completion triggered a rethink.

“As we are now building on the success of the Sydney Modern transformation, it feels like the right time to transition to a new generation of leadership for the next exciting chapter in the history of our 153-year-old art museum,” he announced to senior staff.

Brand’s reign has had its difficulties: a landmark commission by Jonathan Jones in the grounds of the new building is still not open to the public. The gallery has denied a falling-out between the two men.

Brand struggled to convince his political masters to double the operating spending for a gallery now with twice the number of exhibition spaces.

The gallery was forced to cut the equivalent of 30 full-time positions to patch an $8 million shortfall in forecast commercial revenues. The budget for the state’s arts sector is not expected to improve anytime soon.

Inside the gallery, Brand and deputy director Maud Page have given agency to talented curators such as Justin Paton, Nicholas Chambers, Wayne Tunnicliffe and Denise Mimmochi.

Through such energy, the gallery scored a major coup, bringing Magritte to Sydney in the centenary year of the art movement surrealism, as a groundbreaking show on that very subject is packing out the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Nicholas Chambers curated the timely Magritte exhibition. Credit: Edwina Pickles

Much-lauded retrospectives of Lesley Dumbrell, Louise Bourgeois and Hilma af Klint have positioned the gallery at the forefront of a worldwide reappraisal of women’s contemporary art.

But the gallery has been criticised for failing to champion and showcase mid-to-late career Sydney artists, including the likes of Cressida Campbell, whose overdue retrospective in 2022 brought bumper crowds to the National Gallery of Australia.

Brand’s first curatorial intervention in 2013, America: Painting a Nation, was met with a lukewarm reception from some critics and in the early days of his tenure, he got off-side with some staff and volunteers.

Popular, high-profile managers were made redundant under a painful restructure described in Judith White’s book Culture Heist. White, the former head of the volunteer group Art Gallery Society, left that organisation in 2015.

More recently, tabloids picked over Brand’s expense claims for restaurants and alcohol which the art gallery insists was the legitimate cost of private fund-raising.

Pundits have been predicting Brand would quit almost from the beginning, but speculation increased recently as he spent time overseas building connections with other world-leading institutions.

In Brand’s absence, the popular and impressive Page runs the gallery, and that experience makes her an early favourite to take the helm.

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