Art: At Last, the Canberra Collection

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After nine years in building, Australia's National Gallery opens

Fireworks banged and twinkled in the night skies over Canberra last month: amid pomp, ceremony, black ties, tiaras and champagne, Queen Elizabeth II declared Australia's new National Gallery open to the public. Nine years in building, almost 20 in planning, the gallery, for the time being at least, eclipsed every other cultural institution in Australia. "The establishment of a national collection," remarked the Queen in her speech, "is also the establishment of a national identity." The A.N.G.'s Australian director, James Mollison, 50, promised more to come. "Eventually," he declared, "this gallery will be so full of so much great art that people will walk inside and howl."

The building was designed by Colin Madigan, of the North Sydney firm of Edwards Madigan Torzillo Briggs Pty. Ltd., in a high-speech version of the idiom that used to be called New Brutalism 20 years ago—aggressive concrete planes and deep slots of shadow, directly descended from late Le Corbusier. To this is added some invocation of palace and fortress architecture. The plan has a very strong sense of procession, and is designed to allow a large flow of visitors, estimated at about 1 million a year, to stream through its halls. Three of its sides look like an irresolute jumble of sheds. The fourth, facing the High Court building, is impressively coherent.

The interior has two great faults. The main galleries, with their rhetorically high ceilings and towering walls of bushhammered concrete ("soaring" is the requisite adjective here), completely dwarf the paintings, turning Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles into a little silvery postage stamp. Worse, no role is played by Canberra's one architectural asset, natural daylight. Without it, the paintings look embalmed. This accords with the programmatic opinions of one of the gallery's early advisers, the former American museum director James Johnson Sweeney, but it is a grave mistake.

Apart from this, the gallery works well in terms of its stated functions; in particular, the behind-the-scenes facilities (storage, conservation, restoration, research, administration) are designed with a care and expertise unknown before in the Southern Hemisphere. And well it might: from groundbreaking to opening, the building cost $53.2 million, not counting the budget for art purchases, which already totals about $40 million and has been boosted an additional $25.65 million by a special government grant over the five years left before Australia's bicentennial in 1988.

No museum built in the past half-century has become so potent a source of local controversy. The gallery is entirely government-run on taxpayers' money. When Mollison bought Blue Poles from the American collector Ben Heller for the unprecedented sum of $2 million at 1973 exchange rates, the figure had to be made public. The issue was immediately seized on by the Australian press, whose management was bitterly opposed to Gough Whitlam's Labor government, as a prime emblem of artsy socialist mismanagement. The propaganda value squeezed from this episode certainly helped many Australians accept the virtual coup d'etat by which Whitlam's government was dismissed in 1975.