Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

The Trustees and the staff of the Gallery all have a strong commitment to continue that relationship, and two great exhibitions are already in the pipeline--'Renoir' in the middle of this year and 'Matisse' in 1995. My task this evening is not to talk about the exhibition, but to introduce the Minister for the Arts, the Hon. Dean Wells, who also bears on his broad shoulders the additional-but, of course, comparatively minor--portfolios of Justice and Attorney-General. I am delighted that the Minister is able to attend this evening's dinner, as he has been a good friend of the Gallery ever since he took over the Arts portfolio from the Premier after the last election, and he has been a frequent visitor and opener of exhibitions there. I am going to take advantage of his presence to say a few words about the Gallery itself. When, in 1992, we celebrated the tenth anniversary of the move to South Bank, history was made by the convening of a Cabinet meeting in our boardroom before the celebratory reception in the sculpture courtyard. The choice of venue for this historic meeting was testimony to the importance that the Premier and his Ministers placed on the arts, and the speeches that followed and the coverage of the occasion by the local press were likewise testimony to the fact that, in those ten years, the Gallery had developed into a major force in the sphere of Australian culture. This development has continued to this day and the press is more than ever aware of it. In an editorial a week or so ago, the Sunday Mail took advantage of this Van Gogh exhibition to make another very significant and helpful statement: The triumph of the Queensland Art Gallery is that it has increasingly drawn the community through its portals. It has made it clear that art is not only for the eggheads and cultural snobs, but for ordinary people. The Van Gogh exhibition is merely the first of a series of major shows for 1994. A Renoir exhibition opens in July and the late Ian Fairweather, one of Queensland and Australia's most important artists, is the subject of an exhibition opening in October. The Matisse exhibition will open in March 1995. All this estimable activity emphasises the need for the Gallery to be expanded so that more works from the permanent collection can be seen. Proposals have been put to the State Government. It should act before the Gallery becomes bottle-necked. I hope the Minister will not think it presumptuous of me if I underline the last few sentences of that editorial. Sooner or later, most galleries find that they do not have enough space to display their own collections properly and have to take steps to set things right. The National Gallery in London has added a new building in Trafalgar Square and the Tate has extended itself into the English countryside. Sydney has added a new wing, Melbourne has put a roof over one of its courtyards, and Canberra has made two levels out of one space. But in recent months the eyes of the civilised world have been on the Louvre in Paris and its new Richelieu wing. There, at a cost of 6.3 billion French francs ($1.6 billion), President Fran~ois Mitterand has had the courage to put art over finance and culture above capital-he even expelled the Ministry of Finance from offices it had been occupying for decades in the expectation that five million visitors a year would pass through what once had been its portals. From all this, there is, I think, a lesson worth learning and an example worth following by us here at the other end of the world. 89