New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts“Where is the national art gallery and your national art collection?” This has been the question asked by three in every four visitors to the Academy Galleries over this summer. Bemused and frustrated, they searched in vain for a national art gallery in our capital city. Long a source of annoyance for locals, this situation is now damaging our appeal as a destination for tourists who expect to see foundational art collections.
This absence of a gallery displaying our national collection is particularly galling for the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts (the Academy) because this year marks the centenary of the agreement between the Academy and Prime Minister Massey for its construction. In 1924 the Academy offered to donate its funds and the proceeds from the sale of its central Wellington gallery towards creating a National Art Gallery, in return for which it was to receive space in that new gallery in perpetuity.
A century ago the Academy housed both the national art collection and its own collection. In 1928 it proposed that both collections be transferred to a new gallery to form the nucleus of a national collection. This prompted construction of the National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum building. In 1936 the Academy paid £10,369 13s to the Trustees of the National Art Gallery from the sale of its gallery and also offered its permanent collection, valued at £13,619 12s, to the nation.
The government had changed in 1935, however, and the new Labour government chose not to accept or reject this gift, but instead stole it. An amendment to the National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum Act directed the Academy to transfer its private property into the government collection, and specified that all further donations to the Academy for the purchase of art were to be only for that collection.
This placed the Academy in the absurd position of having paid over £10,000 to build a new home for a permanent collection that it no longer possessed. The art works seized by the government in 1936 included 179 works by artists who were the foundation of the arts in colonial New Zealand and in Wellington in particular, including Charles Goldie, John Gully, Gottfried Lindauer, Charles Barraud, Petrus Van der Velden, Archibald Nicoll, Frances Hodgkins, James Nairn, Sydney Lough Thompson, Nugent Welch, Rhona Haszard, Margaret Stoddart and Raymond McIntyre.
As well, 120 works by European and British artists, including Veronese, John Constable, Dame Laura Knight, Sir William Orpen, John Flaxman and Frank Brangwyn, became state property without compensation. A further 229 art works primarily by New Zealand and Wellington-based artists bought by the Academy between 1936 and 1962 also entered the national art collection.
While it is irksome for the Academy that 528 works in the national collection bought by it with public funds for public exhibition are not being seen, these works represent only a fraction of the publicly owned art not being displayed for public benefit in the capital now. As well as 4,614 paintings alone held by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, we have a national portrait collection, too, also in storage.
Our predecessors would be shocked to find that Wellington and the nation are worse off today than when the agreement to build the National Art Gallery was made a century ago. Especially so, given the sacrifices made to build it. The people of Wellington matched the government subsidy pound for pound to build the National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum in the depths of the Great Depression.
Art does not belong in a museum; it belongs in an art gallery. A national art collection belongs in a national art gallery. We had one. We need one again.
Read more on our history and the National Art Gallery.
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