More Director than Writer

This article began its life as a book review—but a chapter towards the end of Edmund Capon’s book (titled I Blame Duchamp) about the vicissitudes of art museums blew it off course, and prompted some musings on Capon’s staggering thirty-year tenure at the Art Gallery of New South Wales—nearly seven of which I was able to observe at first hand.

Capon arrived in Sydney in November 1978 to take up the director’s reins at the AGNSW, yet Sydney was always intended as a launching pad for his career, not a final splashdown. Ten years later, when he narrowly missed being appointed to the directorship of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, his unassailable perch at the Art Gallery of New South Wales was re-fashioned into a gilded cage, from which there was less and less inclination to fly free. So closely does Capon identify with his domain that he is not only reluctant to step away at the age of sixty-nine, but has shown some reluctance to envisage who might assume his mantle.

When he arrived at the gallery he had a clear picture of what he wanted to achieve as a director, and discussed it with considerable candour in early interviews with journalists:

A director’s job is threefold … The first is that he must be a scholar in a field because that is his professional credibility; the second is that he should be an administrator; and the third he should be an impresario, because it is the director’s job to sell the contents of his institution to the public.

He has succeeded at the latter, but at the expense of his scholarly life, which has languished—if his recently published book I Blame Duchamp is any indication.

As he had only recently been swimming in a larger pond (as Assistant Keeper in the Oriental department of the Victoria & Albert Museum), he recognised the New South Wales state government funding for gallery acquisitions as the tiddler it was, and intended from the outset to woo wealthy patrons and, increasingly, corporations. He was entirely successful. Another achievement was his giving the finger to the grey suits in the glass towers, and keeping the gallery entry free. For this alone he will be remembered with gratitude. More ominously, he suggested, “I think a gallery’s acquisition policy should be a reflection of the director’s taste.”

He is characterised as a charming, fast-talking, bureaucracy-dismissing whirling dervish, who with a wave of the wand makes things happen. The reality is more mundane and more complex. A museum is made up of many parts, and its character grows by accretions thanks to all those who have contributed their curatorial, conservational and managerial expertise over the decades—not to mention the benefactors and the army of volunteers. But because Capon has so assiduously courted the press and enlarged the public relations and marketing wing of the museum, the casual reader of the glossy magazines and Sunday tabloids might come to the conclusion that everything that occurs within its walls has been accomplished by him alone.

It is particularly irritating when, for example, a former president of the Art Gallery’s trustees, David Gonksi, says, “Capon has brought light into the once dark, dusty gallery with his naturally lit extensions and his forceful personality.” In fact the gallery received a dramatic extension in 1972, which more than doubled its size, courtesy of the then Government Architect Andrew Andersons, and light flowed in everywhere. The gallery was transformed and the joy of the art world was palpable.

Labouring in the hive around the queen bee is a seething army of worker bees who are rarely on show, but their handiwork is everywhere: freshly patched and painted walls in colours sympathetic to the next blockbuster, rooms of precious works assembled with precision, labels researched, printed and attached, finger marks sponged from lift interiors, volunteers who endure armies of shuffling tiny-tots, and the various equivalents of lamington and lemonade stands whose hard-won dollars are cast into the pot to contribute to the next ambitious purchase.

Differences of opinion about what ought to be acquired by a state gallery simmer away quietly, and occasionally bubble over, when an overly extravagant purchase—usually an European or American work—finds its way to the southern hemisphere. The great public collections of the world are, almost to a room, the fruits of political and economic muscle. Napoleon’s activities spring to mind, and Catherine the Great’s. In the nineteenth century the British empire was in an enviable position to forage far and wide, and when the big money concentrated itself in America, the last massive spending spree on antiquities, old masters and early moderns from Europe took place from the 1880s to the 1920s.

Australian museums, with the exception of the National Gallery of Victoria, have arrived rather late at the party, to find the choicest morsels long ago picked over. It seems a forlorn exercise to pursue the less than excellent. When a gem does become available it is usually well beyond the means of Australian galleries—or places a strain on the finances should it be pursued. It is reasonable to ask if the Art Gallery of New South Wales really needed a large Picasso, a large Kirchner and a Braque (which now appears on the Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933–1945). It is also fair to ask if the gallery needed a late-in-the-day and mannered de Chirico, let alone a Twombly. The latter purchase may be the result of Capon showing his critics that he is sympathetic to contemporary art. Yet when one considers Twombly’s rich oeuvre, Three Studies from the Temeraire may not have been bold enough: a choice which anticipates the public impulse to salvage something recognisable from abstract meanderings. The nonchalance and sparseness are there, but Twombly’s way of extending the trajectory of his gestures way beyond the compositional limits of the canvas is less in evidence. There are far better Twomblys.

It is also reasonable to suggest that experienced museum visitors to these shores are not going to be knocked out by the excellent and costly Cézanne recently acquired. But they are going to be wonderfully exercised by European-influenced Australian art, Aboriginal art, South-East Asian art, and art of the greater South Pacific region—something that Ron Radford understood when he arrived at the helm of Australia’s national gallery.

And this brings us to who should be doing the buying. Traditionally, acquisitions by museums are the domain of those with expertise in their fields, the curators. But often since his arrival it has been Capon who has independently scoured the money pot with choices—both judicious and injudicious—of his own. Purchases of European art with large price tags occasionally cause disgruntled local artists to suggest that the money could be better spent on Australian art. A painter of the stature of Sam Fullbrook has been deemed too expensive for the AGNSW, while the decidedly second-rate de Chirico sailed in.

It has been commented on ad nauseam that the gallery receives no government funds for acquisition. This was not always the case. The AGNSW Annual Report from 1981 makes it clear that there was government support for purchases, but perhaps the purse strings were tightened, then the purse removed altogether, when Capon spent lavishly—and with little curatorial consultation—on international works that took his fancy in the first few years of his directorship.

If the state government has proved tight-fisted in comparison to the National Gallery of Australia or the National Gallery of Victoria, private donors must be sought and eulogised. The best example is Margaret Olley, an intelligent, sharp-edged, professional curmudgeon whose taste rarely moves past Degas, and whose own illustrative works are to the art world what Barbara Cartland’s were to the literary world. She is second only to Capon in her ability to create a media scrum wherever she wields her walking frame. Her largesse (from wise real estate investments and the sale of her own still-life paintings) is undeniable, but disinterested money is of more use to the curators than a benefactor determined to have a say in how the money is spent.

Over time, and with fresh batches of interviewers exposed to Capon’s irresistible manner, the once delightful, trotted-out idiosyncrasies—the fondness for giraffes, the cavalcade of women, the unmatched socks (now sold in the gallery’s bookshop, itself a revealing vignette on the exigencies of marketing), the beloved soccer team, the Buddhas, the fragrant cigars and the fast cars—have calcified into tiresome clichés.

In his chapter “Big Brother is Watching: The Growth of the Art Institution”, Capon regrets the publicity and bureaucratic apparatus which champions image before substance, yet he himself has played an active part in this phenomenon. He has burnished his image with the tenacity and single-mindedness of a schoolboy polishing an apple for a favourite teacher, and his efflorescence is buttressed at every turn by inexperienced PR lasses whose folk memory doesn’t extend much further back than breakfast.

The determination to secure Cézanne’s Bords de la Marne (Capon had reportedly been dreaming of acquiring a Cézanne ever since he set foot in Australia), which was passed in at a Christie’s auction in 2000 for $5.5 million, was Capon’s most extravagant and attention-getting gesture to date. Its purchase was entirely dependent on the largesse of benefactors, large and small.

Increasingly those who give—or sponsor—today do so with strings attached. Many want maximum publicity for their generosity, and there is invariably a tax concession somewhere in the mix. In the past, benefactors were more inclined to remain in the background, and required no more than a small acknowledgment on the label of the work. One who springs to mind is the collector—and giver—of Chinese ceramics, Mr Hepburn Myrtle. Were he still alive he would be bemused to hear it said that the Asian collection did not exist before Capon arrived (although the new Asian wing, and the momentum of local interest in Chinese art, is undoubtedly Capon’s single greatest achievement in his thirty years of directorship, along with the establishment of the Foundation for acquisitions).

Another area of burgeoning interest, which took Capon completely by surprise, and which he had no hand in fostering, was traditional and contemporary Aboriginal art. I can personally attest to this, being the first on the gallery staff to produce, in 1981, a modest twenty-four-page pamphlet on the stories in the gallery’s collection of bark paintings from North-East Arnhem Land (Maningrida, Milingimbi and Yirrkala) which was despatched by the higher-ups to the government printer with the greatest reluctance. Capon, whose greatest wish is to make his presence felt internationally, missed the boat. Contemporary Aboriginal art is the only art of Australia, with the possible exception of Sidney Nolan’s, to be internationally admired and sought.

While Capon has presided over significant extensions to the gallery, he has done so at a time when museums around the world have expanded and multiplied. This is in keeping with the bread-and-circuses atmosphere of the last quarter of the twentieth century, where art came to be seen as some kind of balm or therapy—something to keep the middle classes distracted and engaged. This development was accompanied by an army of tiresome strategists, graph-makers and explainers, who trounced every opportunity for independent reflection on art works and ended the pleasure of making your own discoveries.

And so to return to I Blame Duchamp. Penguin has made a strategic calculation by taking a minor local celebrity and giving him the opportunity to write about anything that takes his fancy. Thus we have a series of essays which interleave his observations on specific art works from the Renaissance period to the modern, aspects of Chinese art, some favoured Australian artists (but only those who have engaged the spotlight as relentlessly as Capon himself—such as Bill Henson, Sidney Nolan and Jeffrey Smart), and some autobiographical odds and sods.

The result has prompted Patrick McCaughey to call his review of the book, in November’s Australian Book Review, “Capon’s Gallimaufry”, which required me to turn to the dictionary. The word means “a stew, a ragout, a jumble or hodge-podge, a hash made of meat scraps”, which does sound a bit mischievous, but then McCaughey has also been a gallery director and is no slouch in the publications department himself.

The book is handsome, the reproductions excellent (though predictable), the paper non-reflective (a blessing) and the pages not over-designed. Both John McDonald (in the Sydney Morning Herald) and Sebastian Smee (in the Monthly) arrive at the same conclusion about a number of the essays. McDonald suggests that Capon’s “off-the-cuff comments … would be more at home in a lecture”, while Smee notes the likelihood that “some of these essays have been published in catalogues, while others have been delivered as lectures”. In fact, as one of Capon’s staff mentioned recently, most of them are his public lectures—printed more or less verbatim.

In other words, Capon is coasting, buoyed by the torrent of flourishes that sustain momentum in a lecture hall, but which flounder on the printed page. As Smee noted: “Something about the way ‘voice’ works in prose … means that false notes, loose logic and lazy in-fill are never quite so apparent as they are in writing.” Both writers mention Capon’s shallow interpretation of Duchamp’s effect on the world of modern art, while McCaughey takes him to task over his similarly lacking interpretation of Caravaggio’s work.

Being a Victorian, McCaughey can’t resist taking a swing at the supposed state of the Sydney gallery before Capon swept in: “Before he arrived, you could have swapped the contents of the Sydney Gallery with Ballarat’s and nobody would have noticed the difference.” Not so. It is true that the Felton Bequest to the National Gallery of Victoria provided funds which, during the 1930s and 1940s, exceeded the wildest dreams of even the largest international museums, but that did not prevent them turning up their noses in 1934 at Picasso’s Supper Party for £400, a Leger for £60, or a Braque Still Life for £180 when the Chester H. Johnson gallery in Chicago liquidated its stock that year. While Sydney had its share of early oversights, it quietly put together, thanks to the curator of British and European art, Renée Free, a sterling collection of English and European works which include the memorable Pierre Bonnard Self-Portrait.

The most focused and assured essays in the book spring from Capon’s first discipline, Chinese art. He knows the arena too well, and respects it too highly, to disfigure it with the verbal pyrotechnics he uses elsewhere. Indeed one wonders if the editor was napping while the carousel of adverbs and adjectives went round and round in a spiral of forced exuberance. Capon may nurse hopes of being a writer, but perhaps he should keep his day job a little longer.