Art: At Last, the Canberra Collection

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With its purchase of Blue Poles, the gallery secured one of the masterpieces of modernism, a category which also includes its only Russian suprematist painting, Kasimir Malevich's House Under Construction, 1914. This cannot be said of all its more expensive purchases. Its Matisse, Europa and the Bull, is an obviously unfinished work. The gallery's huge Leger mural, which cost Australia more than $1 million, was certainly designed by Leger. But its execution in 1954, when Leger was 73, feeble, and had only a year to live, is thought in some quarters to have been carried out by his studio assistant. The gallery has no cubist painting of any significance or any great surrealist painting, nothing by the futurists, no Fauve pictures, very little constructivism and only two impressionist works, both by Claude Monet. In general, the gallery's collection of works from the modernist period, 1880 to 1960, is like a quarter-finished jigsaw puzzle. In American abstract expressionism, it is nearly complete, with major works by Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Hofmann, Still and the insufficiently appreciated Lee Krasner.

One could draw up a very long list of the major names of modern art, starting with Picasso, that are either absent or represented only by drawings and prints. Still, Mollison over the years has found some things for which any museum director would kill, notably the sublime pair of Brancusi Birds in Space, one in white and the other in black marble, that came to Canberra from an Indian collection. He has put together a voluminous study assemblage of international art from 1960 onward, and the gallery's print department, particularly in the field of lithography, is among the best in the world.

By concentrating on previously ignored areas and relationships hi Australian art, the gallery has also provided the vital material for a rewriting of its history, particularly in the years from 1910 to 1950. Never before, for instance, has the importance of Melbourne figurative expressionist painting of the '40s—the early work of Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan, among others—been shown so brilliantly or collected so thoroughly by a museum. Nor has any Australian museum tried with such success to show relationships between painting, sculpture and the decorative arts as has the gallery. The big white machine by Lake Burley Griffin has its bugs and quirks, but it runs. And from now on, its energies will help transform Australia's sense of itself.

—By Robert Hughes