ART GALLERY FOUNDATION NSW Art Gallery Road The Domain Sydney NSW 2000 Telephone: (02) 9225 1700 Information Line: (02) 9925 1790 Email (general): [email protected] For information on current exhibitions and events, visit the Gallery’s website www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2003 ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2003 For further information about the Art Galley of New South Wales Foundation please contact: Ms Jane Wynter Foundation Co-ordinator Art Gallery of New South Wales Art Gallery Road The Domain Sydney NSW 2000 Tel: (02) 9225 1818 Cover image: Russell Drysdale Group of Aborigines 1953 oil on canvas 50.8 x 61cm Purchase by the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation 2003 © Russell Drysdale Estate ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES FOUNDATION TRUSTEES THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES REPRESENTATIVES • Mrs Rowena Danziger (Chairman) • Ms Jillian Broadbent (Deputy Chairman) PATRON • Ms Prue Allen Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir AC, • Ms Denyse Spice Governor of the State of New South Wales • Ms Diana Walder OAM (resigned 28th April 2003) PRESIDENT NSW STATE GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES The Honourable Bob Carr MP • Mr Barry Murphy Premier of New South Wales • Dr Mark Nelson DONOR REPRESENTATIVES FOUNDING CHAIRMAN FOUNDER BENEFACTORS Mr Rupert Murdoch AC • Mr Isaac Wakil • Mr Peter Weiss AM CHAIRMAN Mrs Rowena Danziger GOVERNORS • IBM Australia Ltd – represented by Ms Louise Davis (resigned 11th November 2002) • Mrs Catriona Mordant (appointed 11th November 2002) DEPUTY CHAIRMAN • Mr Geoffrey Ainsworth Ms Jillian Broadbent FELLOWS • Mr Brian France AM • Mrs Susan Rothwell MEMBERS • Mr Reg Richardson • Mr James Agapitos OAM 2 3 AGNSW FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2003 AGNSW FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2003 Grace Cossington Smith's DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT Centre of a city c.1925 is a still recognisable image of the City of This year the Foundation has not been in the position to fund an acquisition for the Gallery which, of course, Sydney, showing a view of Martin highlights the urgent need for us to generate further contributions and to foster the growth of its capital base. As Place looking towards George Street you may well imagine a year without an acquisition is not a situation which we will permit to continue and, happily, with the Post Office tower at left with income now accruing we are already pondering the Foundation’s next great addition to the collections. At this against a sky of exploding radiance. It stage such speculation may be premature but there is never any shortage of great works of art for which we is the perfect complement to the yearn with unrestrained optimism. And like all the Foundation’s acquisitions any one of them would become an artist’s masterpiece The Curve of the indelible and invaluable addition. For example, at the moment initial consideration is being given to works from the Bridge 1928–29, which the Gallery 17th century and the late 20th century. There is a shortage of neither opportunity nor diversity in enriching the acquired in 1991. These two works Gallery’s collections as the history of the Foundation’s acquisitions have so amply demonstrated. form an iconic pairing of Sydney Whilst the Foundation may not have directly or exclusively acquired a work this year it has been associated imagery that can now be kept together and closely involved with two outstanding acquisitions for the Australian collections: Grace Cossington Smith’s for posterity. Centre of a city and Russell Drysdale’s Group of Aborigines. Two paintings which evoke in their polarities the very Centre of a city remained in different realities of urban and outback Australia but both are without doubt icons in the annals of 20th century Grace Cossington Smith's possession Australian art. most of her life and only came to the In the year 2000, the Olympic year, we displayed the Australian collections in a critically edited way under foreground as a major work when her the title Australian Icons. The Head Curator of Australian Art, Barry Pearce, looked at the history of Australian art career was 'resurrected' by a and the resources of our Australian collections and selected twenty artists as representative of that story. It was a retrospective at the Gallery in 1973. Grace Cossington Smith Centre of a city c.1925 oil on canvas on hardboard 82.3 x 70cm fascinating and revealing exercise. The great strengths of our outstanding Australian collection were there for all It had been shown at the Macquarie Purchased with funds provided by Susan Rothwell, 2002 © Estate of Grace Cossington Smith to see: Streeton, Roberts, Lambert, Dobell, Rees, Whiteley et.al. But this exercise also demonstrated that what we Galleries the previous year, where it was had probably always assumed to be strengths were not necessarily so. Our Nolan and Williams collections were, unsold, however after the retrospective highlighted the gifted vision of the artist for the first time to all but a few for example, arguably less representative and complete as they should be and in the years since much has intimates, Centre of a city was immediately purchased by Fairfax when shown again at her Macquarie Galleries already been achieved to redress that situation. exhibition in 1976. This painting has been on loan to the Gallery since 1996 and has already become a highly That Olympic year display also re-affirmed the great depth and quality of our Gallery’s Australian art popular part of the display of the early modern Australian collection. collection and its rollcall of indisputable icons. It is imperative and indeed our responsibility to sustain and to In his monograph on Cossington Smith published in 1990 Bruce James wrote of this image as enhance that outstanding representation and to thus add any icon of Australian art that becomes available. Thus '... a great painting; a self-aware masterpiece … Like no work of hers before it, yet paraphrasing the when we heard of two great and signal experiments of her first decade as a painter, Centre of a city is Cossington Smith's affirmation of Australian paintings becoming available we of personal worth in impersonal circumstances … It is an image, as well, of reconciliation with the course made every effort to acquire them. That modern world, no longer reviled but understood, confronted and embraced … She represents an we have done so is due to the great generosity Australian city, or rather, represents Australia by a city, not a pastoral panorama'. of Susan Rothwell, a member of the Foundation In her sketchbook (now in the National Gallery of Australia) she made ten pencil studies for the composition, board of Trustees, who provided the funds to exploring ways of expressing her deep love of the architectonic shapes and energy of the modern city; her city. purchase the Cossington Smith, and to a group Russell Drysdale’s Group of Aborigines 1953 is a profoundly compassionate portrait of humanity set against of benefactors which has raised the funds to an archetypal Australian landscape and it must be considered among Drysdale’s greatest works. It epitomises purchase the Drysdale. In this endeavour we Drysdale’s pioneering approach in portraying the indigenous people of Australia by investing his subjects with an owe a great debt of appreciation to Peter Weiss entirely new sense of dignity. It will take its place in posterity with Drysdale’s Sofala, as one of the Gallery’s most and his colleagues from the Foundation board, treasured Australian icons. especially Geoff Ainsworth and Mark Nelson, The Gallery has a reasonable group of paintings by Russell Drysdale, one of Australia's most important for their successful efforts in both contributing artists who lived most of his life in New South Wales, and who with Sidney Nolan occupies a quintessential place to and raising the necessary funds. in the identity of Australian visual culture in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Nolan, he defined the idea of a continent – its landscape, peoples and mythologies – far beyond its city fringes. Susan Rothwell Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation Trustee 4 5 AGNSW FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2003 AGNSW FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2003 However, unlike Nolan whose output was vast, Drysdale produced comparatively few paintings, the most beautiful of which were a result of slow, deliberate meditation. CHAIRMAN’S REPORT His imagery has been such an embedded part of the collective Australian psyche, it is easy to forget how pioneering Drysdale was in certain aspects of his subject matter. One of the most important of these was his It has been another successful year for the Foundation and a good year to commence as Chairman of this depiction of Aboriginal people from Cape York Peninsula which the artist began painting as a small series in 1952- venerable organization. 53 shortly after retuning from London where he had enjoyed recognition through a successful exhibition at the Leicester Galleries. 20TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION Stripped of all rhetoric and any trace of false sentiment, Group of Aborigines is without doubt the greatest The Foundation was established in 1983, by a of the Cape York series; a profoundly compassionate portrait of humanity set against an uncluttered, archetypical small group of benefactors and some initial Australian landscape. There are no props, and no compositional tricks in this picture. In pure painterly terms, with support from the NSW government. Since then, it its unforced arrangement of figures, and brushwork caressing the surface into a mysterious whole, it rates among has grown to be a solid organisation with a net Drysdale's very best. worth of over $18 million. It has contributed over Two wonderful additions to our collections and next year we may look forward to reporting on yet another $17 million of artworks to the Art Gallery of New great work of art entering the collections through the auspices of the Foundation.