At Last, the Canberra Collection

By ROBERT HUGHES

After nine years in building, Australia's National Gallery opens

Fireworks banged and twinkled in the night skies over Canberra last month: amid pomp, ceremony, black ties, tiaras and champagne, Queen Elizabeth II declared Australia's new National Gallery open to the public. Nine years in building, almost 20 in planning, the gallery, for the time being at least, eclipsed every other cultural institution in Australia. "The establishment of a national collection," remarked the Queen in her speech, "is also the establishment of a national identity." The A.N.G.'s Australian director, James Mollison, 50, promised more to come. "Eventually," he declared, "this gallery will be so full of so much great art that people will walk inside and howl."

The building was designed by Colin Madigan, of the North Sydney firm of Edwards Madigan Torzillo Briggs Pty. Ltd., in a high-speech version of the idiom that used to be called New Brutalism 20 years ago--aggressive concrete planes and deep slots of shadow, directly descended from late Le Corbusier. To this is added some invocation of palace and fortress architecture. The plan has a very strong sense of procession, and is designed to allow a large flow of visitors, estimated at about 1 million a year, to stream through its halls. Three of its sides look like an irresolute jumble of sheds. The fourth, facing the High Court building, is impressively coherent.

The interior has two great faults. The main galleries, with their rhetorically high ceilings and towering walls of bushhammered concrete ("soaring" is the requisite adjective here), completely dwarf the paintings, turning Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles into a little silvery postage stamp. Worse, no role is played by Canberra's one architectural asset, natural daylight. Without it, the paintings look embalmed. This accords with the programmatic opinions of one of the gallery's early advisers, the former American museum director James Johnson Sweeney, but it is a grave mistake.

Apart from this, the gallery works well in terms of its stated functions; in particular, the behind-the-scenes facilities (storage, conservation, restoration, research, administration) are designed with a care and expertise unknown before in the Southern Hemisphere. And well it might: from groundbreaking to opening, the building cost $53.2 million, not counting the budget for art purchases, which already totals about $40 million and has been boosted an additional $25.65 million by a special government grant over the five years left before Australia's bicentennial in 1988.

No museum built in the past half-century has become so potent a source of local controversy. The gallery is entirely government-run on taxpayers' money. When Mollison bought Blue Poles from the American collector Ben Heller for the unprecedented sum of $2 million at 1973 exchange rates, the figure had to be made public. The issue was immediately seized on by the Australian press, whose management was bitterly opposed to Gough Whitlam's Labor government, as a prime emblem of artsy socialist mismanagement. The propaganda value squeezed from this episode certainly helped many Australians accept the virtual coup d'etat by which Whitlam's government was dismissed in 1975.

With its purchase of Blue Poles, the gallery secured one of the masterpieces of modernism, a category which also includes its only Russian suprematist painting, Kasimir Malevich's House Under Construction, 1914. This cannot be said of all its more expensive purchases. Its Matisse, Europa and the Bull, is an obviously unfinished work. The gallery's huge Leger mural, which cost Australia more than $1 million, was certainly designed by Leger. But its execution in 1954, when Leger was 73, feeble, and had only a year to live, is thought in some quarters to have been carried out by his studio assistant. The gallery has no cubist painting of any significance or any great surrealist painting, nothing by the futurists, no Fauve pictures, very little constructivism and only two impressionist works, both by Claude Monet. In general, the gallery's collection of works from the modernist period, 1880 to 1960, is like a quarter-finished jigsaw puzzle. In American abstract expressionism, it is nearly complete, with major works by Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Hofmann, Still and the insufficiently appreciated Lee Krasner.

One could draw up a very long list of the major names of modern art, starting with Picasso, that are either absent or represented only by drawings and prints. Still, Mollison over the years has found some things for which any museum director would kill, notably the sublime pair of Brancusi Birds in Space, one in white and the other in black marble, that came to Canberra from an Indian collection. He has put together a voluminous study assemblage of international art from 1960 onward, and the gallery's print department, particularly in the field of lithography, is among the best in the world.

By concentrating on previously ignored areas and relationships hi Australian art, the gallery has also provided the vital material for a rewriting of its history, particularly in the years from 1910 to 1950. Never before, for instance, has the importance of Melbourne figurative expressionist painting of the '40s--the early work of Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan, among others--been shown so brilliantly or collected so thoroughly by a museum. Nor has any Australian museum tried with such success to show relationships between painting, sculpture and the decorative arts as has the gallery. The big white machine by Lake Burley Griffin has its bugs and quirks, but it runs. And from now on, its energies will help transform Australia's sense of itself.

--By Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.