EXHIB'TION OF AUSTRALIAN iRT
ADELAIDE ART GALLEJ D L. l " I ACH 12
SPEECH BY THE P. RME IN Sp THE R N. . G MENZIE,
Sir Lloyd, ladies and gentlemen:
I must say at once that Sir Lloyd( Dumas) does me far too
much honour, but I certainly plead guilty to the charge that I had
a little to do with the origins of this collection. But before I
tell you about that I would like to say that I think I am right
am I not? in telling you that this is the first ixhibition to be
put on in this new wing. This is a new and wonderful wing in a
Gallery which has always been a distinguished gallery.
I know that many of you when you look at politicians
like me, and recall some of the things you've said ( Laughter) or
that you've heard, and repeated ( Laughter) seldom give us any
credit for having any of the more civilised characteristics. But
I want to tell you that for years, whenever I came to Adelaide, I
used to walk along the terrace, come in, sit down opposite John
Longstaff's portrait of his wife the greatest portrait I venture
to say that he ever painted remain there for a quarter of an
hour and go out again if not wisor, better, and if not better,
wiser than when I 7. en in.
This Gallery has formed a real part of the life of
Adelaide, intimately placed as it is here, with the city,
presided over, as it is, by people of distinction in this State.
Putting size on one side, I think this Gallery has a special
quality and a special position in the life of this State.
Of course, on this occasion, thoro is another reason why
it is appropriate that this collection should be here. No man has
had more to do with getting it together, arranging it, than Mr.
Robert Campbell the distinguished director of this Gallery,
( Applause) And getting this collection together, I want to warn
you, has been almost as difficult as winning an election;
( Laughter) and much more difficult than picking a Senate team,
( Laughter) From the very beginning it was designed to be
arranged historically beginning with some of the fine artists,
the fine wolkers of the very early colonial history of the
country, one or two of whom had fallen foul of the law, but
continued to have their own qualities, running right up to the
present time when you get into that period of semi-abstract
painting which, I confess, as a miserablo philistine, I have never
yet understood. ( Laughter) So the xhibition had to run on a
line, a theme the historic development of Australian painting.
Therefore as you go around you will see many pictures with which
you are familiar; you will miss others' tht you might have
expected to seo. It is one of my minor griovances tahat the
modesty of Sir William Ashton, who is one of the selectors of this
collection, has prohibited him from having one of his own
distinguished landscapes. But still that is very charactoristic
of him. The matter began in this fashion. I had some taks,
initiated by Sir Colin Andurson, the well-known shipping man, who
is the Chairman of the Tate Gallery in London, Now Colin is a
great exponent of the very very modern; and I, as everybody knows,
am a reactionary and a traditionalist. fnd so we very happily
met we're old friends. But we were able to meet at opposite
polls and gradually make an accommodation in the middle somewhere.
He took this matter up; he thought that it would be a splendid
thing to have at the Tate a really first-class collection of
Australian work. He was prepared to concode to me my oldfashioned
ideas in favour of impressionism; and I was able to
concede to him his rather boyish outlook, as I thought, on other
things.
I took it up with our own Art Advisory Board which, a
little known body though it may be, has done splendid work for art
and artists in Australia, That Board is presided over, of course,
by '! ill Ashton and it contains other people of whom you know, like
Mr. Dargie and Sir Daryl Lindsay, Mr. Pratt, Robert Campbell and,
now IPm happy to say, the newly appointed member, a very very
famous artist of a more recent vintage, Mr. Russell Drysdale,
( Applause) That Board got to work. It laid its predatory hands
on the collections of the Galleries; and if you've had anything
to do w. ith Gallery Trustees, or Gallery Directors, you will know
that to get anything out of them is as hard as getting avery
very difficult cork out of a difficult bottle. ( Laughter) But ; we
wore rather aided on this occasion, of course, by the fact that
Robert Campbell, himself, was a Director and accustomed to holding
trustees in the palm of his hand; while Daryl Lindsay has been a
Director and is equally skilled in this technique. Behind it all
there was the frowning look of the Prime Ministor who, at that
time, had a majority of 32. ( Laughter)
,. ell I want to say that we are deeply indebted to the
Galleries for having made this collection possible. You won't
have a chance this morning of seeing it as you would like to but
even at a quick glance coming through it's plain to me that this
is a most exciting collection of work and that it will make a
tremendous impact upon viewers of all sorts of schools of thought
. ihen it is put on at the Tate in London, And so it is a happy
event. But in addition to rifling the Gt'lleries it was decided,
quite early, after a little discussion, that private owners ought
to be put under duress in order to produce some of their treasures.,
I must say that although there was a divided opinion on this
matter I, being accustomed to plundering people, was all in favour
of plundering private owners. Therefore I want to say that we are
very, very indebted to the owners of some of the pictures in this
collection who have generously made them available. In that
tribute of thanks, of course, I include myself. ( Laughter) I see
one of mine not far away from me. One of mine, I say, in terms of
ownership not in terms of croation.
Now the only other thing that I want to say to you
ladies and gentlemen, is that it has really been a colossally
difficult task to make a choice, because to select is to reject;
to offer a prfeorence to one painting of a great painter over
another is pOrihaps to engage yourself in controversy about
artistic judgment. Long ago in my sketchy studios of the Latin
tongue I learned, and learned thor-) ughly that " do gustibus non est
disputandun" so I'll provoke no arguments on these matters. All
I know is that anybody in London of the hundreds of thousands who
undoubtedly will come to see these pictures, anybody, looking at
them, w'ill look beyond them to the fact that these are not
definitive, they are a selection: they illustrate the kind of
work that has been dcJne, and that exists. So to the perceptive
eye behind every one of these masterly paintings will be a dozen
oth. ers, a hundred oth. ers. They will regard-this as givin, then a
sort of appetiser for a wider knowledge of the work that has gone
on in Australia. And I venture to say without any classification
at all as between one school of th-ught and another, that what ha
been done in depictive art in Australia in our time, in the last
years, in the time of this nation will si. ancd comp: -is,. n wit'
what has been done in any . th; her country in the world,
People don't always realise that it takes a considerable
force of genius to establish some new technique, or now approach
in the world of art. I noticed in the programme that I was given
that Louis Buvelot was classified as an impressionist. I have
always thought of him as just a little bit before that time. But
his paintings had this lovely, mollow, quiet charm that we all
know. But when the other boys as I'll call them for this
purpose like Roberts, that groat master, not as yet fully
recognised, and Streeton and the others, came back full of the
ideas of the impressionists people were, within a few years being
made to understand that the great diaracteristic of the Australian
scone, the Australian landscape, is not darkness, or solidity, or
mass, but light, and the play of light, on whatever it falls.
This revolutionised the painting that was going on in Australia.
It is now of course permissible for people to say, "' Iell that's
rather old-fashioned". But it never will be old-fashioned. Ideas
will change, of course, but not to such a degree that these
magnificent contributors to a new vision of Australia will over be
regarded as so much folly. Of course not. They stand in their
historic period. That is the beauty of this dxhibition: it puts
everything into its historic period. So that yju may linger over
the ones that you like best, or you may, with the eye of history,
pass right around and see how something has developed in a new
and, in some ways, harsh and hard country, and what beauty has
been achieved in the process.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a singular feeling of
privilege in declaring this Exhibition open. ( Applause)