Never mind the gap: Edmund Capon on curating showcase of Australia's modernist masters at TarraWarra Museum of Art

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Never mind the gap: Edmund Capon on curating showcase of Australia's modernist masters at TarraWarra Museum of Art

From Arkley to Boyd and Brack, all the way through to Whiteley and Williams, former Art Gallery of NSW director Edmund Capon selects his 50 favourite works by modernist Australian painters.

By Debbie Cuthbertson

"Sod that!"

Edmund Capon doesn't miss the practice of public galleries and museums selecting works simply to "fill a gap" in their collection. Not a jot.

Edmund Capon, seen with a work by Brett Whiteley, curated <i>The Triumph of Modernism</i> for the Hazelhurst Gallery and TarraWarra Museum of Art.

Edmund Capon, seen with a work by Brett Whiteley, curated The Triumph of Modernism for the Hazelhurst Gallery and TarraWarra Museum of Art.Credit: Chris Lane

It's early morning in London but the former Art Gallery of NSW director – speaking by phone ahead of the opening of Triumph of Modernism, a show he has curated for TarraWarra Museum of Art – is as animated, and cheeky, as ever.

<i>The Bay Window</i>, 1988, by Howard Arkley.

The Bay Window, 1988, by Howard Arkley.

The couple's collection takes in some of the biggest names in Australian art – from Howard Arkley to Arthur Boyd and John Brack, all the way through to Jeffrey Smart, Brett Whiteley and Fred Williams.

"It was really mainstream core stuff," Capon said of the collection. "It's really a very good history of modern Australian art."

"The wonderful thing about it is that it retains, it's got ... it doesn't have quite that quality of objectivity.

"Putting together public collections, curators talk about that thing that fills a gap. Sod that! Honestly! When I heard that sort of phrasing it would make me wilt."

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Jeffrey Smart's <i>The dome</i>, 1977.

Jeffrey Smart's The dome, 1977.

(Funnily enough, the National Gallery of Victoria just last week announced a fundraising drive for a distinctive Howard Arkley "house" painting, quoting that very need – to fill a gap in its collection).

Yet with this show he could choose what he liked, without having to consider the "imposed logic" of how each work fits into a public collection.

<i>Salute to Cerberus</i>, 1965, by John Olsen, a gift of Eva and Marc Besen to the TarraWarra Museum of Art collection.

Salute to Cerberus, 1965, by John Olsen, a gift of Eva and Marc Besen to the TarraWarra Museum of Art collection. Credit: TarraWarra Museum of Art collect

"All those works had been loved by two individuals," he said of the Besens' collection. "It gives it a personality. When I ask people around the world which are their favourite museums, it's interesting, what comes up are the great collections of art don't have that sort of objectivity and imposed logic of the institutional collections

"TarraWarra has the same thing as it's built on the interest and passions of two collectors."

The exhibition showcases 60 works by 26 Australian artists who helped forge a new cultural identity after World War II. It first showed at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery south of Sydney from March to May, and became the second-most popular exhibition in its 15-year history, before travelling back to TarraWarra.

It included many "predictable" names, Capon said – including Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Russell Drysdale, John Perceval and Charles Blackman – but also a few surprises, with some less obvious inclusions, including contemporary works by artists such as Imants Tillers, Howard Arkley and Aida Tomescu.

Yet it's not intended as an encyclopaedic history of Australian modernism. "It's not the complete story," Capon said. "It's selected. The great thing is, here are the artists that the Besens collected in depth and in so many cases they were artists that you would like as people as well.

"It's got that nuance of personality to it. Instead of having one Fred Williams, and one Olsen, we'd have four or five of those artists and give it real form.

"Then [there are] people you didn't expect like Joanna Lamb for example. If you were doing it in the institutional way, [her work] wouldn't be there."

Capon said he wanted the exhibition to tell a personal story of the Besens' collection.

"I think they were fairly on the ball all the time. In many cases they were amongst the early collectors who identified these people. What they liked is what they liked. Because they were driven by their own instincts, they were not necessarily following the perceived opinion.

"I have actually no idea how big the collection is, I went around it for a few days. That's when I decided that the way to do it, a framework for the story, [was] the journey of modern art since the Second World War, and to tell it in not a kind of academic way, but tell it in a personal way, through the works as collected by the Besens, to give it that distinctive quality.

You'd say, "Here are the artists clearly they like because they bought a lot of their works. Some were absolutely predictable and some artists were less predictable.

"Perhaps people like Tim Storrier, [who] tends to be largely ignored by institutions. You can tell the story in a very different way ...

"In order to make that point, when we displayed this at Hazelhurst ... I tried to group all the artists together.

"Brack was another predictable figure, [and] Williams and Olsen. They've got a great collection of Olsen.

"Whiteley was another artist they collected widely, [which is] odd, [because] he was seen as very much as a Sydney artist, a bit like Brack was seen as a Melbourne artist ...

"The great thing about the Besen collection is that it is nicely framed and strongly framed by its own dimensions. It does tell a 50-60 year story beautifully."

Capon will visit TarraWarra next month to speak about the exhibition, but in the interim is working on a number of projects.

"I'm doing some things on contemporary Chinese art at the moment. I'm helping 4A [Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] in Sydney, [with] Australian-Asian artists which is terrific. I'm doing something for the Institute of Architects Foundation.

"I'm helping with Barangaroo," he says almost nonchalantly of the $1 billion-plus project by James Packer's Crown Limited to build a casino, hotel and entertainment complex in the inner-Sydney suburb, south of the Harbour Bridge, that used to be the city's shipping and stevedoring precinct.

"One or two commissions," he says of what he's working on, then qualifies its scale. "That's a huge undertaking. There's two or three groups looking after certain aspects of the art to be installed. Corporate sections, residential sections, public sections."

Those commissions would include a mix of Australian and overseas artists, he said. "Quite rightly. It's not a parochial city and needs to represent the global interest in its cultural image as well.

"In many ways it just wants great works of art."

Edmund Capon will speak at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, on July 18 from 2pm. Triumph of Modernism runs from June 20 to August 16.

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