Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

MBER 15, 1968 ,n Rein - Bastin, ed Wil- all Town Art Prize. Civic rite (Fri- eter Mc- ch, New - Lynn. Gallery, ,Ly Kok Canberra: Mednes- OP "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. Good-but is it good enough? THE art collections in the National Gallery by far the best in Australia. Nowhere else can we learn about most of the great schools and periods in the history of art and about some of the great names. But would a foreigner feel he had to see Mel- bourne before he Knew all about art in the way that the large art museums of Paris. Leningrad, Florence, Madrid. Dresden or Boston are necessary? Well, prob- ably not. Or does Mel- bourne have large holdings of some limited field that might tempt a specialist? Well, perhaps. Melbourne does own masterpieces, but often they are not unique; an- other one just as good can be seen in a dozen other places. Like the brilliant Rembrandt etchings or Durer engravings in the Department ofPrints, which surely has the great- est number of Melbourne's masterpieces. Some sculptures are re- peatable in the same way as etchings and one of them is perhaps the only masterpiece of sculpture, Rodin's bronze Balzac. Although this means that foreigners will have seen other casts already, It in no way diminishes its excellence, and this is one of Melbourne's most stun- ning purchases ever. (Some critics would claim that it is Rodin's only suc- cessful large-scale sculp- ture, that otherwise Rodin is best when small). The splendid new Gaston Lachaise is also a bronze from an edition, hence not unique. What, then, about paint- ings and drawings, which are unique? Even though there are a few supremely lovely draw- ings, Andrea del Sarto's for example, similar ones are to be found elsewhere. And much the same ap- plies to the paintings. In- deed, a Melbourne news- paper recently quoted a returned expatriate artist as saying it was "a first- rate collection of second- rate paintings." This was not really fair and may have been pro- voked by the unadjusted and unflattering lighting which at present shows more cracks, seams, patches, scars and blem- ishes than one ever knew were there in the gloom of the old building. Such blemishes are not unusual. Nearly all old paintings have suffered a little and need some flat- tery. However, it is true that, sadly, many one-time stars of the painting collection went into disgrace when Dr. Hoff's catalogue was published several years ago. Saddest was the downgrading of the V an a.ftvelc, not to mention the ictur as b Jan much -worn Greco frag- ment. This again is a normal hazard for an art museum - if Sir Kenneth Clark once bought Melbourne a of Victoria, ART with - Daniel Thomas non-Claude, then another Director of the London National Gallery, Sir Philip Bendy, bought Syd- ney a non-Gainsborough only two years ago. One only wishes more American museums would be as honest as Melbourne about their old paintings. The great Tiepolo is their most internationally celebrated painting, the Poussin is a major work by a great artist, and what museum would say no to the Memling, the Domeni- co di Bartolo, the Pittoni - and about a dozen others including no less than three Rembrandts. Indeed, the Dutch 17th century paintings are gen- erally higher in quality and in better condition than any other group. The Rembrandt self-portrait is probably the only painting that ambitious young pres- ent-day artists thirst to look at and dream of com- peting with. Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael are ex- cellently represented, while Salomon van Ruysdael's must be about the best thing he ever did. Nineteenth c entury France comes off well, though in smallish works: Courbet's wave, Manet's landscape, a Pissarro which 1 pr sionista. The 20th century fares worse: cubism and surrealism are hardly evid- ent, though there is a Paul Klee to covet: abstraction is better, with Tapies. Soto of course, are and Albers the likely can- didates for survival. What I have not yet mentioned is British art. Inevitably there is more of it than of anything else, and when I said there was one limited field that might be essential for 1. specialist this was what I meant. Gainsborough, Reynolds (why on earth isn't "Frances Finch" on view?), Ramsay, Romney are shown at their best, so is the honorary English por- traitist, Batoni. So is Con- stable. And watercolors by Turner and, above all, Blake are of supreme world quality. But it Is the English paintings of the Victorian period that Melbourne could make into a unique exhibit, or at least one of the best in the world. And e xc ept for the Pre- Raphaelites, they are not on view. Nor does there seem to be any place where this most special feature of the collection could be exhibi- ted. No doubt most visitors prefer to find standard, conventional collections; but I enjoy most those collections which are unique to one museum and not to be found virtually repeated all over again m the next city. The space which might have been given to those Victorian paintings has, I suppose, gone to Decorative Arts, a department that was scandalously cramped in Melbourne's old build- ing The European porcelain, glass and silver seem pretty good, though I wouldn't know if they were World. shaking. The furniture surely suffers (like the modern painting) from be= ing almost entirely Brit ish; wasn't French furnS ture important in the 18th century, what about art veau, what about Batt - ern? American mode. Th. gentiles. 9,,wigh.sgs. mime:cue, are eeth,._ lighteul. There are fragments,fragments, Balks" things, bits of lace, Georgian coats.