Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

CONTRIBUTION TO THE AUSTRALIAN BICENTENARY CELEBRATIONS AND EXPO 88 IN BRISBANE. IT ALSO TRAVELLED TO THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES AND THE ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA. It is my pleasant duty this evening to propose a vote of thanks to the distinguished speakers who have preceded me and to all those others associated with this exhibition. This is the second occasion on which I have had the privilege of thanking Mr Idemitsu for making some of the treasures from the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo available to us here in Australia. 1 The first was back in 1982 when 'Japan: Masterpieces from the Idemitsu Collection' was shown in Melbourne. At that time I was a Trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria and the President, Sir Andrew Grimwade, somehow prevailed upon me to say my piece in Japanese. Looking back I suspect that this was not a very good idea. The Australians in the audience quite obviously did not understand a word and the Japanese may well have thought that I was addressing them in some strangely accented form of antipodean English. I shall not repeat that performance this evening except to say to Mr Idemitsu, 'kokoro kara kansha itashimasu~ This is really just a rather more elaborate way of saying arigato, a word which I am glad to see is fast entering the vocabulary of many Australians. This is clearly a good thing as the frequent saying of 'thank you' is one of the principal indices distinguishing civilisation from barbarism. To say it in more than one language is better still. And so, on behalf of the Gallery Trustees and staff, I want to thank Mr Idemitsu most sincerely for making this third exhibition-there was a second one in 1985- available to us. As I said in my introduction to the exhibition catalogue, on my frequent visits to Tokyo I was lucky enough to work from an office in the same building as the Idemitsu Museum, and I have spent many enchanted hours viewing the treasures housed there. Mr Idemitsu once told me how the collection began. As a young man, his father, working far from home on the mainland of Asia, was often assailed by the pangs of expatriate loneliness. One day he went out and bought a Ming vase and when he took it back to his empty room, the room was no longer empty, because it was suddenly filled with beauty. Thus was loneliness assuaged and a great collection born. It is a story that deeply moved me when I heard it-and, indeed, it still does. As you know, this exhibition is confined to ceramics, an art form which, in many ways, is a mirror ofJapanese art as a whole. One of the greatest authorities on oriental ceramics, W.B. Honey, has written: Japanese ceramics show the character of Japanese art in general. That is to say, they show a highly developed sensibility, not only to certain aspects of nature but to the same elements in works of art. There is the same sense of position and the use of unfulfilled spaces, the same command of asymmetric balance in design, the same vitality of brushwork and tactile sensibility in appreciating the material of a pot. If, to these gifts are added an astonishing cleverness of hand and great technical skill, it will be evident that the Japanese potter must be the master of almost every ceramic quality. 2 19