ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Interesting More In Touring Art

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31029, 7 April 1966, Page 10

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Interesting More In Touring Art

(Bu PETER WILSON) Most of the money spent on the visual arts by the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council is used to sponsor touring art exhibitions. The amount is small compared with the sum lavished on opera, but it is important because art in New Zealand is e field with wide interest and great activity if not necessarily with a large degree of understanding. These touring exhibitions can acquaint New Zealanders with great or excellent works of art fill the big gaps in | their knowledge and enrich their artistic experience. That there is a need is shown by civic and academic 1 discussions on what should be routine art purchases and by: the baulking of Cabinet ministers at the experts’ recommendation on coin design (the one before the leaked rehashes). WIDENING INTEREST The exhibitions usually have a big impact on a small section of the community. It could be conceded that art is an esoteric business and the matter left at that, but the Arts Council has a wider brief

Because of this brief It is time the Arts Council considered improving the presentation of these exhibitions so that the public can derive greater benefit from them.

The aim would be to avoid anything like the indifferent

and unsympathetic handling of the Lipchitz bronzes in the National Art Gallery, an exhibition opened by the Arts Council chairman himself. “Great art entombed” was how one South Islander described it. And the fact that Peter Tomory had decided the sculptures would not go any further south made the treatment seem worse. It was probably the most important sculpture exhibition brought to New Zealand. Where others have represented many artists or have shown several works of a single man, this showed 158 i works by a giant of twentiethcentury art and gave an unprecedented opportunity of following progress in a sculpj tor's artistic development. CHALLENGING ; But it was strong fare for i New Zealanders, whether subscribers to “Studio International” or accustomed mainly to colonial and patriotic statues. Inevitably, many visitors I in the latter category wandered in, boggled at the sight, and rushed to the next hall to the comparative comfort and mediocrity of the National Bank of New Zealand’s far more accessible and far less challenging mural and water-colour competition. How much better it would have been if the Lipchitz miniatures had been arranged at a more practical viewing level instead of on low tables as if they were pots, and if there had been a chronological order. How much better if more

pieces had been named so i that they could be readily I identified when the catalogues I

11 ran Out, and if there had (been some pictures or photoI murals to hint of the scale

and differences of the finished works. How much better if there had been someone there to explain what it was all about to those whose imaginations needed a push in the right direction. The Arts Council could well do with a man to tour with its exhibitions, a sort of supervisor and education officer in one, with a flair for just about everything. He would take over what gallery directors says is a time-consuming business. His tasks would range from getting generous newspaper and television publicity, seeing that the work was attractively displayed and properly lit in the galleries, to arranging lectures and, if necessary, giving them. Besides having an inexhaustible supply of catalogues, he would be expected to have supplementary material for sale—books, prints, photographs and slides. Though these sidelines have hardly been considered here the Royal Academy found that people who paid 10s to see its recent Bonnard exhibition also spent about £1 apiece on prints and booklets. With this supervisor in charge the aim would be to achieve for exhibition the display standard of the Contemporary Italian Sculpture in Christchurch, and the public attention of the decimal coinage. From a little more “packaging” of exhibitions there might come a lot more life to our galleries.