Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Collection in the 1940s and are now displayed in both the Indigenous Australian and Australian Art galleries. In the intervening years these exquisite works have not lost their popular appeal. However, these acquisitions — whether responding to established or radical taste — were the bright moments in several quite dull decades for the Gallery. Then in the 1950s and 1960s the Gallery's profile, activities and Collection were markedly improved by the successive employment of two of the finest of the new group of professional art gallery directors, Robert Haines and Laurie Thomas. Both men were formidable advocates for a reinvigorated Australian Collection, using energy and foresight to build up the Collection with a series of excellent projects and purchases. In 1958, when the art historian Bernard Smith described the artistic life of Brisbane as 'weedy and malnourished', such advocacy received formidable support from expert opinion. Bernard Smith's barb prompted the establishment of a working group to agitate for permanent premises, which were finally opened in 1982. Today the Gallery and its Collections are housed in the fine, purpose-built gallery Haines and Thomas had worked towards. The chequered history of the Gallery has left its mark on the Australian Art Collection. Brisbane was younger, smaller and less prosperous than its southern counterparts, and did not follow their collecting patterns. For instance the more cautious taste in Brisbane delayed the acquisition of works from the Heidelberg School until the 1950s, when some small paintings began to be received into the Collection. Today the Gallery owns a number of Heidelberg School works which reveal the contemporary enthusiasm for the intimate domestic scale and the fresh sketchy quality of the 'impressions' In hindsight, the collection of these deliberately modest works was not a calamity but a consequence of the history of taste. Virtues may be made out of necessities — one hundred years later the nationalist claims once made for the Heidelberg School are being challenged by different views about Australian art and identity in the nineteenth century and beyond and by the emergence of successive waves of new forms of Australian art. Margaret Preston Australia 1875-1963 Aboriginal still life 1940 Oil on canvas 43.6 X 48cm Gift of the Godfrey Rivers Trust 1940 Queensland Art Gallery J.J. Hilder Australia 1881-1916 Kedron (Brisbane) 1910 Watercolour on paper 19.5X23.3cm Purchased 1989 from the estate of Lady Trout with a special allocation from the Queensland Government Queensland Art Gallery It is now clear that each period, region, social group and generation manifests its particularity in different ways, including in its preferences for divergent forms of imaginative life. The Gallery's Australian Art Collection, therefore, is a record of the social and intellectual life of Brisbane, of Queensland, and of Australia over more than one hundred years. I NT RODUC T I ON 15