Print collections ‘spotty’

Press, 22 October 1986, Page 22

Print collections ‘spotty’

Pat Gilmour knows how to make prints and has taught printmaking but she is not a printmaker. She is a curator of international prints at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra. Ms Gilmour says it takes a special kind of person to be an artist and she is not one. She enjoys working with prints and art history so she is a curator. As curator of the international prints — excluding Australian and New Zealand prints — she is responsible for the documenting of the Canberra nailery’s collection, its care and for buying new

prints. A specialist curator looks after the Australasian prints. Ms Gilmour, a recognised authority on prints as the author of several books, did an art history degree and studied prints as a columnist for an arts magazine in London. She was the founder curator of the prints collection at the Tate Gallery in London. That position involved establishing the system for curating the collection. “It was a case of building up the routine so that it would continue and all prints would be catalogued,” she said.

to give a slide lecture on contemporary international prints. The Australian gallery concentrates on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its collection as other galleries hold earlier works. Pat Gilmour says print collections generality are “spotty.” There are good holdings of some periods and some techniques; others are scarce. Lithographs, for instance, are plentiful and the gallery has many. Intaglio prints are rarer and she has concentrated on building up this part of the Canberra collection. She says she is always

looking for prints, contemporary or older. She has written among her books “Modern Prints” (1970), “Artists at Curwen” (1977), and “The Mechanised Image” (1978). She has also lectured on prints, organised exhibitions and served on competition juries and committees. Her visit last week to Christchurch gave her an opportunity for a brief look at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery’s collection. She was in New Zealand to open the “Face to Face” exhibition of prints in Wellington and came to Christchurch