Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

INTRODUCTION Josephine Muntz- Adams Australia 1862-1949 Care c.1893 Oil on canvas on composition board 83x69.3cm Purchased 1898 Queensland Art Gallery Julie Ewington When you walk into an art museum as a visitor and wander through its galleries, you are perhaps struck by its grace or grandeur, by the plethora of sensations it stimulates, by the sense of imaginative plenty it evokes. At the end of the twentieth century many Australian towns have become accustomed to their own art gallery, and take the ambitious scope of the state art museums in the capital cities more or less for granted. It comes as a surprise, then, to realise that the Queensland Art Gallery was only brought into being through the unremitting efforts of several generations of artists and citizens, and that the Collections belonging to the people of Queensland were made in fits and starts of community and organisational energy. Every cultural institution bears the traces of the society that formed it, and as Queensland has changed and developed over the last century, so the Gallery and its Collections have mirrored this growth, in a series of choices which have responded to surrounding social changes and prevailing attitudes. The creation of the Queensland Art Gallery was in large part due to the foresight of artists living in Brisbane in the 1880s and 1890s. Oscar Fristrom, Isaac Walter Jenner and Godfrey Rivers, in particular, campaigned ceaselessly for the establishment of the art gallery, until the State Government agreed in 1895 and temporary premises were allotted in the Brisbane Town Hall. Each artist promised a major work for the infant art museum, and all three were as good as their word.1Support by artists continued to be crucial throughout the subsequent history of the Gallery. Whether Australian-born or immigrant, Brisbane artists were determined that the young city would enjoy the same civic cultural facilities other Australian states already boasted, and that they envied in the distant cities of Europe. From the very beginning the Queensland Art Gallery collected works by Australian artists, and today the largest display in the Gallery is of Australian art. The Gallery has always focused on the artistic energies of the moment, and its Collections are based principally on the art of its own lifetime, the twentieth century. However, over the course of a century these purchases have revealed very different attitudes towards art. The first purchase of work by an Australian-born artist was in 1898, when the new Gallery acquired Josephine Muntz-Adams s Care c.1893, a painting of an elderly work-worn woman, possibly the artists mother. It remains on display today and is still a well-loved work. The enduring popularity of Care is revealing. It shows that visitors look to works of art to explore and explain their own experiences; that art from distant periods and styles — the painting is clearly sentimental and the old womans costume archaic — holds enduring interest for successive generations; and, most importantly, that visitors are prepared to make the leap of imagination required to enter into the life of another person, 12 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965