An interview with Barry Pearce,
Head curator Australian art

by Jo Foster
November 2000

JF: How did you come to be a curator and how do you see that role?

BP: If you want to talk about my professional beginnings I began as an Education Officer or Public Programmes kind of person in my very earliest years in Adelaide but if you want to go back to the real interest that was seeded with me about what museums were and what you could get out of them, you almost have to go back to childhood experience. When I was growing up in Adelaide with a fairly dreary working class family life the art museum was an interesting and exciting place for me where the imagination could be released although in those days, and I'm talking the 1950s which is not long after the Second World War, art museums in Australia were pretty moribund places and not very exciting to the general public. I used to walk into the art gallery in Adelaide and had entire rooms almost to myself. They weren't places where people would particularly want to work. They were thought to be stagnant institutions with pictures around the walls for decoration, or to tell some kind of a story. They were memorials I suppose, memorial institutions.

My interest began because my mother used to take me into town quite often and would let me go to the gallery, which was right in the middle of the city in North Terrace. She would go shopping and I would walk around the galleries and she would ask me on her return to tell her about what I looked at and what I liked, so I got used to, as a child, talking about pictures hanging in a museum. Another early experience with museums was a result of reading Sir William Orpan's The Outline of Art, which was the book that every artist and every budding historian ever read to find out about the history of art and in it I saw a reproduction of a fantastic painting by Albert Durer, a self-portrait as a young man with this long, curly hair. It's very famous, and I went along to The Art Gallery of South Australia and I asked the attendant if I could look at it. It took them minutes to stop laughing. Can you imagine? This little kid going in and saying: "I want to see your Dürer..." and then: "Well what about your Leonardo's or your Raphael's?" and the mirth continued. It was a very large lesson.

I was to learn as years went on, of course, that art museums are incomplete things - they only have what they have - they're like people. They have certain biases and taste factors behind their collections. They don't tell you everything, they don't tell you the whole story and later on I found there were only very few museums that do: the Louvre maybe, the Metropolitan in New York. But most museums have a certain character or shape and one has got to learn to love them and appreciate them for what they are. I think that is a lesson about curatorship that I've never forgotten: that you work with the material you have. You do your best to improve it but really your job is the propaganda of communicating your interest and your knowledge about the things that you work with. And I work like that to this day, and Australian Icons in a sense is just that, it's a declaration of the character of a collection. It's full of flaws and biases and prejudices and inadequacies but it's a very interesting collection nevertheless.

JF: So before you came to work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1978 what was your perception of the collection?

BP: Well I came here knowing that I was actually filling the shoes of one of the greatest Australian curators, that was Daniel Thomas. He had a huge reputation and I was a very young man then, 22 years ago, and he'd done a lot of fantastic things for Australian art - prising neglected artists out of the woodwork and written so much - that I was a bit in awe of trying to fill those shoes but at the same time expecting that the collection would reflect his richness of knowledge. I was actually quite shocked at the inadequacies of the collection and again that was a very good lesson: that no matter how passionate and knowledgeable you are as a curator you're still working within the constraints of the institution. You can only do what you can limited by the opinions of trustees, whether you get on with the director or not, whether you have the funding, whether you can steer your way through conflicts of taste, trying to champion the cause of maybe contemporary artists who you can't even get in the door because I know that's what Daniel had to go through in his twenty years here, and I was shocked to find that even people he'd championed very strongly were not that well represented - Tony Tuckson for instance is very poorly represented, and yet Daniel had mounted a major retrospective of his work at this Gallery...

JF: And Tony was Assistant Director for some time...

BP: And he was an Assistant Director here and there were other people like David Strachan too. Talking to Daniel later about this he said: "Yes, it's sometimes very difficult to materialise your passions and your tastes and your championships in terms of acquisitions" and he often found it very difficult. So that was the feeling - a sense of disappointment. I also noticed, of course, the first thing that struck me about the Australian collection was its very strong, over strong bias towards Sydney art. A lot of Melbourne artists were poorly represented here like Albert Tucker, for instance. Arthur Boyd wasn't even that well represented here so I set as my very first task to put down on paper a kind of policy about correcting some of the inadequacies. I've been able to do quite a lot of it, but still one strikes the same problems.

It's very difficult to make it perfect, impossible to make an ideal collection that represents everything that's ever been done.

JF: So to realise a curatorial vision in a more perfect form is it necessary to work outside the constraints of a particular collection, to be able to draw on private and public collections from other places as well, in order to realise a more complete story?

BP: I think the vision gets rounded out by the projects, the exhibition activities and the publications, and you try to disseminate knowledge and information about a wider phenomenon than is actually represented by the collection. So yes, you're doing two things, you're working in a theoretical way, developing a knowledge and sympathy for things that you don't have, but at the same time you also want to celebrate what you do have. We do try and celebrate our Sydney strength. Why not?

JF: And there was a policy early on in the Gallery's history I believe to acquire work by local artists which is perhaps where that Sydney bias began - so that initial core is built on and that becomes the strength or flavour of the collection - it's what the Gallery becomes known for, it has a fantastic collection of Sydney art works...

BP: Well one of the critics Sasha Grishin of the Canberra Times was very critical of Australian Icons and one of his most damning comments was: "One would get the impression that the major Australian art was made by people based in Sydney". I think it is unfortunate to criticise Icons as if it was a loan exhibition, as if we had borrowed from wherever we wanted to present a balanced picture. I guess it was my decision mainly, but it was agreed to by others, that we weren't going to do a loan exhibition because the loans were very difficult at this particular time from other institutions for various reasons and we didn't really know whether we were going to get a large enough audience to justify the additional cost. Audiences for Olympic arts programmes in other cities had not been that fantastic really.

Another factor in the decision to draw solely on the collection was our relationship over some years with a very generous sponsor, ABN AMRO Rothschild. They are very collection oriented sponsors and were keen to support something that had an inheritance value that would have long term benefits for future generations as opposed to committing funds to a one-off exhibition. This meant conservation and research work could be carried out on the collection. So Icons immediately declared its limitations by being a collection show and of course, as a result, very vulnerable to criticism. This exhibition is not representative of the entirety of Australian art - I guess it was a rather brazen thing to do really to announce this as an Australian Icons show.

JF: Its interesting that you mention the titling of the show - Icons is rather a loaded term and has certainly been latched onto by the press and by reviewers and not always in a positive way. So a two part question: firstly, what does that word 'icon' mean to you, and secondly, what makes an artwork iconic?

BP: The word 'icon' in the most simplistic language I can use is it just means something special - these people are special - they are talents above the ordinary, that's all it means to me. You can use it in the same way when we talk about athletes or musicians. An 'icon' is someone who has almost gone everyone else's as well as their own limitations. At the same time, by and large, they have spoken to a broad audience. To me that is a really special achievement and that's what the 'icon' is to me. These artists have captured something and so well they've now become part of our mythology or national ethos. We could have just said 'Twenty Artists from the Collection' I suppose, but we're a bit in the marketing game. 'Icons' just had that ring about it and in the end I didn't give a stuff about potential criticism over semantics. I mean someone said "Why are you telling us that these are 'icons'? Why can't we make up our own minds?"; Blair French or someone was on Radio National saying this on ABC arts television but I don't have any regrets.

JF: I heard something similar. Joanna Mendelssohn said an 'icon' for her was an image that you came to and worshipped uncritically and she wondered if that was what the viewer was being expected to do.

BP: I think the vernacular has changed the meaning of the word. The dictionary says something about "tends to be beyond criticism, saintly..." but it's in such common use now for people who are clearly not saints: flawed people. But we still call them icons because we love what joy and exhilaration they've brought to us through thier achievements, so I don't agree with that puritanical definition. For every one of those twenty artists you can take a negative critical stance if you want to. You can slash away at Roberts for his failure of nerve after his Federation picture in 1901. You can slash away at Lambert if you want - say he's just a facile, clever, pompous kind of grandee. Dobell's full of faults; Drysdale... every one of them can be criticised. You can say you wouldn't call any of them 'icons' because non are beyond criticism. But and I think really that's an arbitrary stance. My stance is that they are very special artists, they have enriched us, and that in my opinion they deserve to be called 'icons'. It's really not that complicated.

JF: So what about the second part of the question. What makes a work a significant work for you?  I know that's an incredibly broad question, but if you could do it in twenty-five words or less! What is it that makes a work 'iconic' in your estimation?

BP: If you'd asked me that question twenty years ago I might have given you a more precise and probably foolhardy analytical answer, but the older I've got the less able I feel to analyse it because I respond to works of art more instinctively now than ever before. I guess I have gained a confidence over the years so I can trust myself because I've got runs on the board. I tend now to look at a painting and feel that it's gathered something into itself; it feeds out something. It's like some works of art are powered by batteries, but the greater works are powered by a kind of endless radioactivity, in other words a longer give out you can sense. It's to do with the resolution of the intention of the artist that you can recognise, that you know you can go on accessing for a long time. It has durability. It's not a piece of fashion. It's not just seducing you for a moment. I'm very suspicious of being instantly seduced by any work of art because I have a feeling that it's peaked too soon, that I'll become bored with it in a very short time. So I tend to gravitate towards works of art that are slightly difficult and that I have to work on a little bit and to meet halfway. Then it will start giving more and more, and in twelve months time or two years time I won't be bored by it. Good works of art tend to have a multi-layered kind of quality. If you work hard and look at a lot of works, and paintings are my special passion, if you look at a lot of paintings over a long period of time, over many years you just get used to picking up the vibes and you know which ones are going to be stayers.

JF: So a combination of intuition and intellectual experience?

BP: Describing it in museum terms, you want people in fifty years to say: "That was a great acquisition and that work presents its milieu, its time, it wasn't just a false lead or a fashionable response."  I would like to think that acquisitions would please people in subsequent generations, not just the current generation, not just reflect a kind of hip taste.

JF: It's tricky though because surley those hip tastes and those fashionable side glances are somehow part of the story too, part of a complete history...

BP: Of course they are. If I was buying for someone's house, if I was a consultant for people to decorate their houses, I'd have a completely different attitude because there's a transient possession and there are works of art which are very valid for a period. They may not speak so eloquently to the next generation but they have their place too, and who knows, there may be a rediscovery of that. It's a very complicated question to answer, but these are just some of the ideas about exercising one's judgement. I think I've got the luxury to have been more of a historical curator than a contemporary curator although I do go to current shows and I'm interested in a lot of living artists. I'm in the position here of standing back and trying to fix up gaps in the past, correcting the poor representation in the collection with some artists so I can be a bit more reflective I guess than a curator of contemporary art.

JF: So what audience were you thinking about when you put the show on - international or local?

BP: Australian. I knew that the Australian audience would like it, although I didn't expect the level of popularity. I thought it would be a fairly tame but loyal kind of audience. . Our usual Gallery visitors love the old things that they've always loved, but it's been far more popular than I ever imagined.

JF: The general public are certainly enjoying the show. What do you think the interest is?

BP: I think that people like to see something familiar but in a new light so I think that's a key. There's something else too. I think it's the sense of biography. People are always fascinated by a biography, and what we're dealing with here are twenty biographies, twenty careers. We read something about these human beings who are like us but a bit more extraordinary, talented people in whom you can see something of their lives, how they've grown through their art, where they lived, who their families were, who influenced them. No matter how hip we become about conceptual presentation, the biographical basis is always fascinating to the general public.

JF: Yes it is nice to see a number of works from each artist and get a sense of their career. Which ones are you particularly pleased with?

BP: Some of them are better than others, I suppose, but one of my favourites is the Lloyd Rees room where you see the illustrator in his beginnings. Those tight little drawings of Sydney and the south coast remind us that Lloyd Rees came to Sydney from Brisbane to work for Smith & Julius to be an illustrator but was intelligent enough to know that to be an illustrator was a trap for an artist, a facility he had to fight against. Then you see his late paintings on the opposite wall where he threw a tin of turps on that Tasmanian waterfall picture, to kill the facility. So you would see it as a shimmering dream, a real painting, rather than an illustrator's work. You've got the Sydney from McMahons Point 1950 that won the Wynne Prize about which he said to me when I came to this Gallery twenty years ago: "Oh, I like it. I'm very fond of it, of course, but I see it as a draughtsman's painting, not a painter's painting". That was a telling remark which sheds light on the way he painted later on. He was fighting against detail and tightness, fighting his way out of his own skill. So that's just example of how beneficial it is to put a lot of works out and see this happening...

JF: Yes and you start to draw connections between the different artists...

BP: Well a number of artists in Australian Icons had illustrator beginnings - Lambert's another case in point - look at those early Bulletin type drawings in the show and later you can see he's trying to become an artist somehow through his talent and who else, John Passmore, Whiteley...

JF: Just one final question, what did you think of the Olympic opening ceremony?

BP: I thought it was absolutely wonderful and yet I was one of the biggest cynics. I saw all this funding being channelled towards a sporting event and felt quite cynical, but I must admit when a society pulls itself together and behaves well and there's this camaraderie in the air that's so tangible you could almost touch and smell it, which happened during the Olympics, I was a 100% convert. I thought the opening ceremony and then the atmosphere over the following two weeks was one of the great experiences of one's life.

JF: It was interesting to see Sid Nolan's Ned Kelly running around and to think that public collections and exhibitions like Icons might have some impact on a broader sense of imaging national identity.

BP: Well I think the Gallery presented a very balanced programme, from Papunya Tula through to Dead Sea Scrolls as well as Icons. There was such a wonderful sense of teamwork from everybody involved. The wall painters looked at the works saying "Now that colour will make it sing" and the architectural designers said "Let's put this wall opposite that one so that people will get a real buzz when they turn around and have a sightline to the important work in the middle of that wall...". Everything was in synch, everyone worked hard to make it eloquent, elegant, challenging, exciting and thoughtful.

JF: And now you can get your walls at home matched to the colours in the Icons exhibition!