National Gallery of Australia

Australian artist Tom Roberts was one of the first Australians to lobby among Australian prime ministers for the creation of a national art gallery. In 1910, Prime Minister Andrew Fisher agreed to this proposal, and already in 1911, the Australian Parliament established the Historical Memorial Council , a bipartisan committee of six political leaders. The committee decided that the government should collect portraits of Australian governors-general , parliamentary leaders and the main “fathers” of the Australian Federation, painted by Australian artists. This led to the creation of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board , which until 1973 was responsible for acquiring various works of art (although it was also the responsibility of the Parliamentary Library Committee, which acquired various landscapes for the national collection). Before the opening of the National Gallery building, the collection was exhibited in the Australian Parliament, diplomatic missions abroad and galleries of other states.

Since 1912, the construction of the National Gallery building has been one of the priorities of the Commonwealth Arts Advisory Council. But because of the Great Depression and World Wars, the solution to this problem was constantly delayed, because, according to the government, it was much more important to create other infrastructure in the state capital, Canberra , including the construction of the Parliament building, artificial Lake Burley Griffin and the National Library Australia Only in 1965 did the Advisory Council succeed in convincing Prime Minister Robert Menzies of the need to begin the construction of the National Gallery of Australia ^[1] . On November 1, 1967, Prime Minister Harold Hold officially announced that the government would organize the construction.

Location

The design and construction of the gallery was complicated by the fact that they could not start until a place was chosen for the new building of the Parliament of Australia. According to the 1912 project, created by Canberra's chief architect Walter Burley Griffin , it was to be located on Camp Hill, between Capital Hill and the old Parliament building. According to the projects of the “parliamentary triangle” of 1958 and 1964 , prepared by British architect William Holford , in the early 1960s, the National Capital Development Commission proposed moving the construction of Parliament to Lake Burley Griffin, and the National Gallery and other cultural institutions to build on Capital Hill ^[2] .

In 1968, Colin Madigan won the contest for the best design of the future gallery, although its development could not be completed, since the final location of the building was a big question. Prime Minister John Gorton said that

The purpose of the competition was not to determine the final version of the building design, but to select energetic and imaginative architects who would be tasked with developing the actual gallery design ^[3] .

In 1968, Gorton turned to the country's Parliament to transfer the land on the lake, as Holford intended, to the construction of a new Parliament building, but the legislature rejected the project, proposing land on Capital Hill and Camp Hill. Subsequently, it was decided that the gallery could not be built on Capital Hill ^[4] . In 1971, the government allocated a 17-hectare site for the future parliament building, which was to be surrounded by national and government institutions, including the National Gallery, the High Court and a special fenced area connected to the National Place in the center of parliamentary triangle ” ^[5] .

Design Development

Madigan’s final design project is based on instructions prepared by the National Capital Development Commission and the ideas of James Johnson Sweeney and James Mollison. Sweeney ( 1900 - 1986 ), former director of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art from 1952 to 1960 and director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts , was appointed consultant for the display and storage of works of art.

The construction of the National Gallery of Australia was started in 1973 and officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1982 . Construction cost $ 82 million.

The National Gallery is built in the style of brutalism . Distinctive features of the building, surrounded by a sculptural garden with native Australian trees and plants, are the angular shapes and rough texture of concrete .

A triangle was taken as the basis of the gallery’s geometry, which is clearly manifested in the special form of the ceiling and floor of the main floor, as well as staircases, columns and individual elements of the building, made in the form of this geometric figure.

The gallery is built of rough concrete, which is not finished with plaster, or cladding, or painting. Until recently, the internal walls were also not finished, only after some time they were covered with painted boards, so as to ensure the universality of the exhibits.

The area of ​​the building is 23 thousand m²: some are used for exhibition halls, the other - for places of storage of works of art. Three levels of the gallery stand out. On the main floor, the exhibition halls are extensive and are used to display collections dedicated to Australian Aborigines , as well as international collections (that is, European and American). On the ground floor there are also large galleries that were originally intended for sculptural exhibitions, but subsequently for displaying Asian collections. At the highest level is a series of small rooms that are intended for collections of Australian art.

There are projects to expand the National Gallery of Australia.

The gallery has a rich collection of works of art created by Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander people. It is based on the so-called “Aboriginal Memorial” , consisting of 200 painted logs with which the aborigines marked the graves, and dedicated to all the indigenous people who died from 1788 to 1988 , protecting their lands from strangers.

The collection of Australian art in the National Gallery includes works of art and various objects created in Australia from the time of the European settlement of the continent to the 20th century and closely related to the country's history: paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, decorative art objects, sketchbooks, posters ^[7] . The collection also includes objects of indigenous art.

The gallery contains a large number of paintings by masters of the Heidelberg school : Tom Roberts , Charles Conder , Frederick McCabin and Arthur Streeton . An important part of the collection consists of works by Sydney Nolan , Arthur Boyd , Margaret Preston , Albert Tucker . Also quite extensively represented are photographs and sculptures ( Bertram Mackenal , Robert Klippel ) ^[7] .

The gallery has exhibits dedicated to Asian art ( Iran , Japan , Thailand and China ) from the Neolithic to the present: numerous sculptures, miniatures, a rare collection of Chinese woodcuts, ceramics, textiles ^[8] ; as well as exhibits dedicated to other countries (mainly works of art dating from the late XIX - early XX centuries ). Among them stand out paintings by Paul Cezanne , Claude Monet , Fernand Leger , Jackson Pollock , Willem de Kooning , Andy Warhol .