Mollison’s Creation

Robert Hughes, bemoaning the contents of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1959, cast an eye over its sandstone façade decorated in bronze letters with such august names as Rubens, Titian and Raphael, and quipped: ‘Never has so large a nut housed so inadequate a kernel.’ The National Gallery of Australia was in every respect the opposite story: its collection was a fat kernel in search of a shell. Until 1968 this collection, thought to comprise some 3000 works, was strung around Canberra offices and Australian embassies like so much washing on a line. The Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, which would soon be dismantled, had been buying energetically, if conservatively, for years. However, there was no catalogue, no conservator to care for them and no established policy for the collection.

Enter James Mollison, who arrived in Canberra that year as an exhibitions officer, and left it as a highly respected, if controversial, director in 1989. Mollison found himself with a surprisingly generous budget and a brief to travel. The art world tom-toms beat furiously. ‘I’m not the man with all the money,’ Elwyn Lynn, another peripatetic curator, was obliged to disabuse the hopeful New York dealers.