Arts and music British exhibition may strain gallery

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32633, 15 June 1971, Page 11

Arts and music British exhibition may strain gallery

A huge exhibition of British painting, covering most of the major developments there over the last couple of decades, may be shown in the Robert McDougall Art Gallery early next year. The exhibition, comprising 90 paintings, is owned by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, and is being brought to New Zealand by the foundation and the Queen Elizabeth Arts Council. It is due to open in the Auckland City Art Gallery in August. It had been offered to the McDougall Gallery, but because of the problems caused by the size of the exhibition a decision had been delayed, the director (Mr B. D. Muir) said yesterday. Apart from the space problem which would be generated by such a big collection some of the 90 paintings are very large —there was the sheer physical problem of handling the exhibition, Mr Muir said. The whole collection, when packed and crated for shipment, weighs about 12} tons. One possibility which is being investigated is the division of the exhibition into

two sections, only one of w’hich would be shown here. But Mr Muir emphasised that no decision had been made, and that he hoped to show the whole collection; and he added that tentative dates of April 15 to May 15, 1972, had been set for it. Two' other international exhibitions which are to be shown in Auckland later this year will definitely not be shown in Christchurch. These are the collection of “100 Master Drawings” from the New York Museum of Modem Art and the exhibition of Morris Louis paint'ings which has been arranged by the Auckland gallery in association with the National Gallery of Victoria, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Arts, California. Louis, who died in 1962, is regarded as a major American “post-abstract expressionist” painter. Mr Muir said these exhibitions had been arranged independently by the Auckland gallery as a result of its recent reconstruction and expansion. The Auckland gallery was now working on a very much bigger scale than any other New Zealand gallery, and was able to handle exhibitions which would impose severe strain on other galleries. Some of the exhibitions to be shown in Auckland would be well beyond the financial resources of other galleries. MAJOR SURVEY The Stuyvesant collection is a major survey of British painting, and includes works by Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, David Hockney, Ben Nicholson, Bridget Riley, Alan Jones and Victor Pasmore. The collection was formed on behalf of the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation by

three people: Mrs Lilian Somerville, director of the fine arts department of the British Council; Alan Bowness, reader in the history of art at the Courtauld Institute, University of London; and Norman Reid, director of the Tate Gallery, London. In their preface to the catalogue, the selectors make the following remarks: “We had to make certain limitations to give point to the collection. Our first step was to make a list of artists essential for inclusion. The list ranges from those British painters like Nicholson, Sutherland ’and Bacon with well-established international reputations to the new generation whose work made such an impact in the first Peter Stuyvesant Foundation exhibition at Whitechapel in 1964. “Aware of the cultural activities of the Peter Stuyvesant companies abroad, we had decided to purchase only British artists, and those long resident here and very much a part of the English artistic scene. Any selection of this kind involves difficult problems of inclusion and exclusion; if many excellent artists do not appear in the collection this is partly because they do not quite fit

into the general pfcture that we wanted the collection to present. No artist younger than those in the 1964 New Generation exhibition has been included.

“It was our original intention to have three works by each of the painters represented in the collection, but this aim has been reached with only the minority. With some artists one needs to show a group of related works, but others make their mark well with a single canvas.

“In certain cases we have tried to follow an artist’s career over the years during which the collection has been built up, charting major changes of. style inside a formative period. As a result the collection displays very clearly what we feel are the main tendencies in British painting since the late 19505: no work dates before 1951, and there is often a concentration on those moments in an artist’s development when his work takes on a particular importance. We have looked for crucial pictures, wherever possible, and have been able to buy some very large paintings without having to worry about finding gallery space for them.”