Gone are the massive James Turrell lightscapes and naked art tours that grabbed headlines for the National Gallery of Australia earlier this year. Canberra’s next headline summer show, opening in December, will focus on a homegrown heritage artist: Tom Roberts.
Variously known as an Australian expressionist, one of the four founders of the Heidelberg school of painting, and “Bulldog” by his friends and family, Roberts’ unpretentious landscapes and portraits will be a familiar sight to Australian art lovers and school children.
This major exhibition will gather 133 of the artist’s best and lesser known works painted between 1883 and 1931, and will be “as close to definitive as any exhibition can be”, according to NGA director Gerard Vaughan.
“Traditionally, our main summer slot is given to shows imported from overseas,” said Vaughan. “But we also feel that, from time to time, Australia’s national gallery needs to give blockbuster status to our own heroes and our own visual culture.”
Vaughan called Roberts a “cultural warrior” who promoted his modern approach to painting against the harshest of art critics, writing spirited letters to the Melbourne and Sydney newspapers who attacked his work.
Roberts, who was born in Dorset, England, but immigrated to Australia at the age of 13, described his subject as “the familiar beauty of our own country, its warmth and sunshine”. Despite struggling to sell work during his lifetime, his influence was marked.
“All Australian paintings are in some way an homage to Tom Roberts,” said artist Arthur Boyd in the 60s, while Anna Gray, curator of the NGV show, said: “Roberts strongly believed that a great painting of one time and place could be an expression for all time and of all places.”
As well as his famous Melbourne and Adelaide landscapes, Shearing the rams and A break away!, visitors will finally get to see Roberts’ largest painting, dubbed “the big picture”, which depicts the opening of Australia’s first federal parliament in 1901.
The commission, which includes 265 recognisable political faces of the time, encapsulates two Roberts trademarks, said Vaughan: “superb portraiture and his wish to record national themes and subjects”.
Speaking at Wednesday’s launch, arts minister George Brandis expressed pleasure at its inclusion, revealing it had been hanging “a little obscurely” in a corner of Parliament House that “didn’t do it justice”.
The Roberts show will be the “centrepiece” of a major re-organisation of the NGA collection, jointly announced by Vaughan and Brandis, which will bring together the gallery’s Australian art in a re-hang that sidesteps chronology for a more thematic approach.
“Bringing Australian art into the large ground floor galleries will give visitors the chance to immerse themselves in our own Indigenous and non-Indigenous visual culture as soon as they enter,” said Vaughan, who hopes to fundraise for a permanent new wing for the gallery over the next few years.
