On November 1 we were discussing some recent articles and news items about art. Among the usual stuff, we noted Steve Meacham‘s interview with the indefatigable Edmund Capon in The Sydney Magazine and noted that aside from the fact the article had very little to say about Capon, the director of the Art Gallery of NSW mentioned a wish list of five artworks he would like to buy regardless of the cost. Being the trendy, shallow and fashionable types that we are, we zeroed in on Capon’s mention of a video work by Bill Viola and didn’t even bother to note the name of the triptych by Cy Twombly he mentioned. We just thought, “yeah, that’ll be the day.”
Two weeks later on the 13th of November, we were perusing the letters page of the Sydney Morning Herald. It was a slow post-election Saturday and when things get dull, the newspaper’s thoughts turn to art. Under the heading For Art’s Sake, finding the funds to buy pieces by internationally renowned artists.
”As if to drive home the point, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its most expensive purchase -paying an estimated $US45 million ($59 million) for Duccio di Buoninsegna‘s Madonna and Child – on the same day this week that the next director of the National Gallery of Australia lamented that prices were pushing masterpieces beyond the reach of public galleries here. The Met price, of course, is untouchable for any Australian gallery but it illustrates the difficulty of public institutions here competing for art treasures”
The main thrust of the piece was that Ron Radford, the newly appointed head of the National Gallery of Australia, was arguing that Australian museum galleries should club together to buy art treasures for Australian galleries. The SMH pointed out a few problems:
”Trouble is, the strategy has flopped before. Galleries are notoriously individualistic, reflecting the influences of their directors. And how would artworks bought collectively be equitably shared, particularly given their fragility and the costs of transport and insurance?
A few case studies are instructive. The National Gallery and the Art Gallery of South Australia teamed up to buy an Australian painting a few years ago but were still outbid by a private investor. Twenty years ago, the Art Gallery of NSW failed to persuade me National Gallery of Victoria to jointly buy Tintoretto‘s Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet. When the Victorian gallery subsequently suggested joint purchase of a pair of Canalettos, it was snubbed by Sydney. Australia’s only apparent joint acquisition – a John Glover in 2001 -prompted a price-fixing investigation, although the probe was inconclusive.”
Imagine if the AGNSW and the National Gallery of Victoria did jointly buy a work of art. How would they share it? The AGNSW could have the piece on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, the NGV, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, swapping every second week?
It all seemed rather strange that when the AGNSW last week triumphantly announced the purchase of Twombly’s Three studies from the Temeraire for a rumoured $4.6 million, all of this was forgotten. A suspicious person might wonder if by just happening to mention Twombly in the Meacham interview, Capon wasn’t cannily setting up the next news story for the gallery?
Announcing the news via a press release, the AGNSW would be forgiven for wondering (and not for the first time) just who they were dealing with at the Sydney Morning Herald. First out of the gate was Lauren Martin on November 16:
A Modern Gem or A Load of Pollocks.
Nobody say Blue Poles. Sure, Three studies from the Temeraire (1998-99) is probably the most expensive picture the Art Gallery of NSW has ever bought. And without doubt one of the most significant. But the gallery’s director, Edmund Capon, conceded that the painting’s artist, Cy Twombly, is “perhaps more than any other living artist, [one] about whom people will say, ‘My six-year-old could have done that’ “.
To which he sniffed: “Try it.”
Mr. Capon flew to Italy to negotiate directly with the artist for the picture, and while he’s keeping the price secret, sources say he pruned it down from $6 million to $4.5 million, well below its market value.
The gallery’s publicist, Jan Batten, suggested that the triptych was the most notable cultural acquisition since the National Gallery in Canberra controversially bought Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles in 1973.
Mr. Capon demurred from such comparisons. “All I do know is that in 50 years’ time people will be coming in here and looking at this in wonderment,” he said.”
Although Capon had secured the painting at a knockdown bargain price after negotiating with the artist directly for $4.6 million (or $6 million or $4.5 million depending on who you believed), the gallery had to tiresomely justify the works’ credentials to a disbelieving public.
“Twombly has built a career on what Mr Capon describes as “scribbles, doodles and moments of existence on a profound and richly emanating light”, and Three studies from the Temeraire 1998-99 is his first to enter an Australian collection.
“Buying a picture like this, that doesn’t so clearly and so obviously fit into a specific collecting pattern, absolutely needs to have that quality of conviction,” Mr. Capon said.
As to the public’s reaction, Mr. Capon said: “I’m sure it will have its critics … and its fervent admirers. But every now and then, what we need to do is to get a great, empowered, individual work of art that owes nothing to anybody – which this doesn’t.”
The next day, the SMH had changed its tune slightly with another story by Martin called Twombly Earns High Praise.
“The Art Gallery of NSW’s purchase of Cy Twombly’s Three studies from the Temeraire (1998-99) was praised yesterday by the rival gallery in Melbourne, which revealed it is aiming for similar works after an internal review into its collection strategy.
“Well done Sydney, from Melbourne,” the director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Gerard Vaughan, said of the acquisition, reported in yesterday’s Herald. In a deal with the AGNSW director, Edmund Capon, who negotiated at the artist’s Italian studio, the expatriate American Twombly is believed to have sold the triptych for just under $4.5 million.
“It’s great for Australia to have a work of such significance,” Vaughan said, calling the purchase “very ambitious”.
“The state galleries, unlike the National Gallery of Australia, do not receive money from their state governments for acquisitions. So to take on a multimillion-dollar purchase … using the resources of the Art Gallery of NSW and with special gifts made by people in Sydney – I think it says a lot about Sydney in particular, but Australia’s commitment to contemporary art.”
The purchase must have really stuck in the collective craw of the NGV, as the money for the Twombly came from private donations by the AGNSW cashed up benefactors. Well done indeed.
Meanwhile, the peanut gallery protested. Over at ABC 702, which is sort of like the SMH’s radio arm, the station’s day time DJs got stuck in. Sally Loane, that doyen of Volvo driving soccer mums, interviewed Capon about the purchase beginning her interview with “anyone could do it, couldn’t they? not really, but you know what I mean.” The air down the telephone line from Capon’s office was freezing. James Valentine, 702’s resident cynic and former saxophone player with Oz rock band The Models (how’s that for a CV!), used his entire afternoon shift to mock the “avant garde” playing music that was little more than static, sound poetry. You see, it’s all the same. Ha ha ha.
Our favourite dunderhead reaction to the works was from Greg Graham, an outraged letter writer to the SMH, which we reprint here in its entirety:
Money spent on artwork an elephant could draw
Edmund Capon and his ilk, our so-called art elite, should not be allowed to purchase laughable rubbish such as Cy Twombly’s Three Studies from the Temeraire regardless of who pays for it.
The NSW Art Gallery is a taxpayer-funded amenity and as such taxpayers are entitled to have art purchased on their behalf that they actually like.
The fact that a demand exists among a small clique of individuals and corporations, thus making it a potentially good financial investment, is irrelevant. What matters is what normal people think, and I suspect they’d think their six-year-old or a gifted elephant could produce a better work of art than Twombly, and they’d be right.
It’s high time the likes of Capon were compelled through legislation to do away with this nonsensical and cynical view that one must appreciate a pile of potatoes dumped in the centre of a gallery as art, and demand instead that art must impress on a purely visual level before it is considered worthy. Greg Graham, Artarmon, November 16″?
We think that Mr. Graham might have a point – when we see a bunch of potatoes in a gallery we immediately think ‘chips!’- but hey buster, leave the elephants alone!
Speaking of elephants, The Australian wasn’t to be left out of the fun and excitement and called in Sebastian Smee, a man who knows quality when he sees it. Under the scintillating title $4.5m fair price for elegiac work, Smee got straight down to work:
“Cy Twombly is one of the world’s great living artists, and it is terrific news that one of his works has finally entered a public collection in Australia. But of the new paintings by Twombly I have seen over the past few years, it is not the one I would have bought.
These things are intensely subjective. My view is that any of the paintings in the recent Gagosian Gallery show in London – vertical works in pale blue and brown that derive from Japanese calligraphy – might have been more exciting, and better complemented the Art Gallery of NSW’s superb new Asian galleries. Nonetheless, it is a beautiful, elegiac work of art, at once powerfully iconic and subdued.”
We’ve missed Sebastian Smee and its so good to have him back. Giving a little background to the painting, he explained:
“The title of the new acquisition refers to a painting by JMW Turner in the collection of London’s National Gallery. The Temeraire was a 98-gun warship that played a distinguished part in Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. However, Turner chose to paint the ship three decades later, being tugged out to its last berth, about to be broken up. The painting symbolised the winding down of Britain’s naval supremacy, the end of an era.
Twombly will have been attracted to these connotations, but just as stirred by Turner’s paintwork, his evocation of sweeping vastness set in tension with intimate observation.”
Ninety eight guns, Battle of Trafalgar, 1805. Gotcha. The English satirical magazine Private Eye has a writer who does stuff like this and his byline is Phil Space. But is the painting any good? Smee turned to Roland Barthes:
”Barthes, who wrote at length about Twombly, likened his work to a pair of trousers -not the ideal pair hanging neatly on a rack, but a pair that has been discarded and left on the floor after wearing.
“The essence of an object,” he wrote, “has something to do with the way it turns into trash.”
How good is the Twombly purchased by the Art Gallery of NSW?”
We have a suspicion that Smee just called Twombly’s work a pair of pants. Pants!
