The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) ~ Collecting Great Australian and International Masterpieces For Over 150 Years

Written by Oscar Townsend Monday, 30 April 2012 22:30

This year (2011) the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) is celebrating its 150th anniversary year, a major milestone in the history of Australia’s first public art gallery. Founded in 1861, it is the oldest and the largest public art gallery in Australia. When the gallery first opened in 1861, Victoria had been an independent colony for just ten years, but in the wake of the Victorian gold rush, it was easily the richest part of Australia, and Melbourne the largest city. Generous gifts from wealthy citizens, notably industrialist Alfred Felton, made it possible for the National Gallery to start purchasing large collections of overseas works from both old and modern masters. It currently holds over 67,000 prime works of art. The National Gallery of Victoria Art School, associated with the gallery, was founded in 1867. It was the leading centre for academic art training in Australia until about 1910. The School’s graduates went on to become some of Australia’s most significant artists. In 1959, the commission to design a new gallery and cultural centre was awarded to the architectural firm Grounds Romberg Boyd. In 1962, Roy Grounds split from his partners Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd, retained the commission, and designed the gallery at 180 St Kilda Road (now known as NGV International). The building was completed in December 1967 and opened on 20 August 1968. One of the features of the gallery buildings are famous for is the Leonard French ceiling, one of the world's largest pieces of suspended stained glass. Grounds subsequently designed the adjacent Victorian Arts Centre with its iconic spire. A new gallery space, The Ian Potter Centre, in Federation Square opened in 2003 and houses the Australian art collection. Grounds' building just south of the Yarra River now houses the international collection. It reopened in December 2003 after four years of renovations by architect Mario Bellini. The gallery's name has caused some confusion over the years, as Victoria is not, and never has been a nation, but a state of Australia, and there is also the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. However, the NGV was founded some 40 years before the founding of the Commonwealth of Australia, when Victoria was a self-governing British colony and the name alludes to that period, when Victoria was a discrete political entity. It was also established more than a century before the National Gallery in Canberra. According to former Victorian Premier Steve Bracks, "We won't be renaming the National Gallery of Victoria. It has a great tradition. It is the biggest and best gallery in the country and it's one of the biggest and best in the world." A famous event in the history of the gallery was the theft of Pablo Picasso's painting "The Weeping Woman" in 1986 by a person or group who identified themselves as the "Australian Cultural Terrorists". The group took the painting to protest the perceived poor treatment of the arts by the state government of the time and sought as a ransom the establishment of an art prize for young artists. The painting was returned in a railway locker a week later. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Victoria, which is a short walk north up St Kilda Road from the gallery, houses an extensive collection comprising more than 23,000 Australian works. Australian Art from 1900 is represented by many important works from the colonial period and iconic Australian Masters from artists of the Heidelberg School and the pre-Federation era. Works from 1900 to 1950 include representation of the divergent streams of art practice in the first half of the 20th century and singular works produced at the time of Federation and during First and Second World Wars. It includes examples of the significant role women played in the development of post-Impressionism and Modernism in Australia. Works from the 1950s explore the topical social issues and notions of identity, whilst the 1960’s collection maps the various forms of abstraction across a range of media, and documents the trend to re-examine Australia's myth, legends and urban life. Contemporary Australian art is focused on young or emerging Australian artists. It embraces key developments in Australian art of the past 30 years, with a particular emphasis on the practices of Melbourne artists of national and international importance. Post-colonialism, social identify, hybrid art practices and artists' engagement with the natural and built worlds feature in this collection. The collection also includes fashions and textiles, with a particular focus on Melbourne, which has been a major fashion centre since the 19th century. There are important holdings of printed and painted textiles, and the representation of ATSI designs in considered the most comprehensive in the country. The collection of Australian prints and drawings features works by most of the major figures of Australian art from the time of European settlement to the present day. In addition to prints and drawings in various media, the collection includes watercolors, collages, miniatures, artists' books and sketches. The NGV was the first Australian public gallery to establish a separate curatorial area to collect photography as a creative medium. The collection aims to comprehensively represent the development of creative photography in Australia and it includes many outstanding and rare items from the beginning of the medium to the present day. NGV seeks to represent the best practice of contemporary Victorian-based photographers and to selectively acquire the work of photographers working in other parts of Australia. Since 1984-85, when funds were first allocated for purchase of Aboriginal art, the NGV has built a diverse and comprehensive collection of over 2300 Indigenous Australian works, in a wide range of media, that is representative of most of the art producing communities of Aboriginal Australia. The NGV collection is unique in its focus on communities of artists rather than individuals, and in its strong contemporary emphasis. The benefits of this energetic, communal collection policy are evident in the number of special exhibitions, large and small which have been mounted solely from the NGV's holdings.

The NGV International at 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne contains a whole world of international art, and displays the NGV’s collections of European, Asian, Oceanic and American Art. Since the NGV opened in St Kilda Road in 1968, the total collection has doubled in size to more than 70,000 works of art, one of the most impressive collections in the Southern Hemisphere. International painting and sculpture from 1300 to 1800 is represented by major collections of Italian, Dutch and Flemish artists including works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Marco Palmezzano, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Paolo Uccello, Paolo Veronese and August Friedrich. The NGV's painting galleries also include fine examples of eighteenth-century French portraiture and pastoral paintings and sculptures and the great masters of British 18th century portraiture are represented by major examples along with landscape paintings and allegorical and narrative works, by artists including John Constable. The 19th century collection includes iconic works by renowned British landscape and marine painters as well as Pre-Raphaelites works enabling the gallery to present the development of British art in the nineteenth century in extraordinary depth. The NGV has the most comprehensive collection of French pre-Impressionist and Impressionist paintings in Australia. The Gallery's holdings of nineteenth and twentieth-century British and French sculpture are also significant. French painting of the first half of the twentieth century is represented with spectacular paintings. There are also outstanding examples of twentieth-century British painting. The international contemporary art collection includes excellent works by some of the most influential artists of the past two decades, and represents works in all media including decorative arts. The most recent major acquisitions encompass painting and sculptural installation practices, and represent internationally acclaimed artists working in Australia, Great Britain, Korea and the United States of America. The NGV also includes major collections of international fashion & textiles, prints and drawings, decorative arts and photography as well as Asian, Oceanic and Pre Columbian collections.

Amongst a number of temporary exhibitions, “Gustave Moreau and the Eternal Feminine” features powerful and beautiful women like the legendary Cleopatra and the vampiric Messalina, the deadly but fascinating Salomé and Lady Macbeth, and luscious, hapless victims of male lust such as Helen of Troy – beauties whose names are the stuff of legend. Moreau brings them alive for us, as well as men like Oedipus whose lives were bound by tragic destiny. Gustave Moreau is one of the radical artists of the nineteenth century whose imagination seems to anticipate the cinematic. His art is one of spectacle and alive with fabulous stories. Unique in his own time, especially for painting the great mythological and exotic stories of the ancient world, erotic and often violent, Moreau’s painterly bravura is vivid, his colour dazzling and jewel-like. At times he applies paint and uses mixed media with a freedom verging on the abstract - so that he seems to possess a modern sensibility. His is an intriguing tale in itself – alternately ignored and fêted in his own time he remains an enigmatic figure whose relationships with the female sex are elusive. Visitors will be seduced by this exhibition of 117 ravishing paintings drawings and watercolours, which explores the artist’s obsession with the “Eternal Feminine” and provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these works in Australia, direct from the acclaimed Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris. “Gustave Moreau and the Eternal Feminine” is on view until April 10th 2011. “Stormy Weather: Contemporary Landscape Photography” on view through 20th March 2011 charts some contemporary approaches to the landscape through the work of eleven Australian photographers including Rosemary Laing, Harry Nankin, David Stephenson, Richard Woldendorp, Nici Cumpston, Anne Ferran and Jill Orr. Photographers’ interest in the landscape has increased in the last few years. Perhaps as a result of heightened environmental awareness, or an evolution in engagement with Australian history, practitioners are again turning to the natural world as a site for critical practice and inspiration. Drawn from the permanent collection the National Gallery of Victoria, the selected photographers in this exhibition have a particular focus that comes from their active relationship to various environments. The artists displayed reveal history in a landscape, provoke ecological concerns, use the landscape as a site of performance, or reveal the distinctive beauty of a place.