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"We need to get the message across that there are so many splendid works of art on display at the National Gallery in Canberra, including many new works, that every person, regardless of where they live in Australia, will feel impelled to visit their national collection regularly."
 
Ron Radford
 
Since Her Majesty the Queen officially opened the Canberra gallery in 1982 there have been three earlier directors - James Mollison, Betty Churcher and Brian Kennedy - each of whom, coincidently, headed the institution for exactly seven years each.  Ron Radford was appointed as Director in late 2004, and nearly four years later it seems timely to look at the gallery under his stewardship and his plans for the future, focusing the discussion primarily on three areas: the collection, the building and ongoing policies ...
 
Sasha Grishin: Would you like to comment on the acquisitions made under your stewardship and the ways in which you are trying to mould the collection?
 
Ron Radford: I have tried to direct the collection away from the European Old Masters, which are represented better in the states, and towards our core collecting areas of Australian art, twentieth-century international art, the art of our immediate neighbours, especially India and South-East Asia, and the art of the Pacific. I have quite deliberately set out to strengthen our nineteenth and early twentieth-century Australian painting collection, which despite some outstanding strengths, has serious gaps.
 
The art of Australian states and regions outside of Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart has not been well represented and we are in the process of acquiring significant works to address these omissions.  We have recently added the enormous Agapitos/Wilson collection of Australian surrealism. We have also recently added major colonial prints to our outstanding collection of largely twentieth- century Australian printmaking.
 
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In Indigenous Australian art we have been buying extremely rare and fine nineteenth- century works, including masks and shields, as well as hundreds of contemporary works.  From the end of 2009, in our new galleries of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, we will be able to show a balanced and full story of Indigenous art, particularly from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The international collection is the most costly area and hence the most difficult to continue to develop, yet in the past few years we have still managed to add to it with the help of donors' funds.  We have acquired major works by Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst and in our American collection, which is probably the finest outside of America, we have managed to fill surprising gaps by purchasing a sculpture by Cy Twombly and through gifts of works by Frank Stella and Larry Poons. We still require major works by Barnett Newman and James Turrell.  Although prices are prohibitive, with a Warhol selling recently for $90 million, for example, we are not giving up collecting in this area, even though it has become so difficult.  We are filling important gaps in our brilliant collection of international nineteenth and twentieth-century printmaking with monotypes by Degas, iconic works by Andy Warhol - his soup cans and Marilyn series - and prints by Damian Hirst, supplemented by generous donations from printmaker Kenneth Tyler.  It is important to complete our twentieth-century international collection because it is the only major collection in the country.
 
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In South-East Asian art we have continued to add to our very fine textile collection, which is the largest that exists. We have begun collecting in the neglected area of Asian animist art with the acquisition of twenty-five objects, including the superb Bronze weaver, the most important and remarkable animist bronze extant.  We have also been acquiring South-East Asian Islamic, Christian and Buddhist pieces.  Now that the Indian gallery and South-East Asian gallery are completed we would eventually like to develop a gallery devoted to Indonesian art.
 
We have the biggest collection of Australian, European and American photography in the country, with a focus on centres like London, Paris and New York. In addition, over the past three years we have been aggressively developing a major collection of Asia-Pacific photography, the only one in the country, and indeed the world.
 
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SG: Colin Madigan's building may be an excellent example of brutalist architecture in the style of the 1950s and 1960s, but it makes for a difficult architectural space in which to display art. Each of your predecessors fought and were to some extent defeated by the building. Most memorably, Betty Churcher, with the building of the mezzanine floors and the cladding of the walls and Brian Kennedy's ultimately futile attempt to reorientate the entrance with a large glass cube. You have devised an ambitious building program for the gallery and have received federal government funding for the first stage which is now under construction. Would you like to discuss your vision for the physical building of the gallery?
 
RR: The building has always been a challenge for the collection, but it was largely designed in 1969 in the abstract, before we had a collection, so to some extent Mr Madigan cannot be blamed for that. There was also was a problem with the brief: the building was designed to display a thousand works and we now hold 150,000. While many galleries have most of their collections in storage, few have such a disproportionate number in storage. My aim is to have a building which fits the collection. To this end we have recently extensively refurbished the ground-floor galleries. They have been acclaimed as a huge success.
 
Stage one of the new building redevelopment, which is now underway at a cost of $73 million, will give us a new more accessible entrance and for the first time adds to the permanent collection display space. We will have ten new galleries dedicated to the display of Australian Indigenous art - in the original gallery there was no permanent designated space for Indigenous art. Stage one should be completed in December 2009.
 
Stage two, which has not yet been fully developed or funded, will be an extension of stage one, adding the Centre for Australian Art and new galleries for Pacific Arts. There will be sky-lit galleries for capacious and beautiful chronological displays of Australian art. Light-sensitive prints, photographs and drawings will be displayed under artificial light in parallel side galleries. This will bring Australian art down from the attic corridor to the main cultural displays, as a continuation of Australian Indigenous art.
 
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SG: Historically the NGA has been a relative newcomer to the Australian and international art gallery network.  All of the state galleries have nineteenth-century colonial foundations, while the NGA opened its doors to the public slightly over 25 years ago.  Keeping in mind these historical circumstances, what role would you like the NGA to play on the Australian and international art stage?
 
RR: The state and regional galleries are rightly biased towards the art of their immediate regions.  Our role is to show a balanced national picture of Australian art, without bias to any state, and including all regions and media (Sydney for instance does not show the Australian decorative arts).
 
We have also focused on those areas of Australian art which have traditionally had smaller collections in other galleries, such as printmaking, photography, twentieth-century drawing and Indigenous art.
 
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We also want to stage significant pioneering exhibitions of Australian art and major international exhibitions and we will extend our gallery publications to reflect this.  Blockbuster exhibitions are less viable today than they were a decade ago - loans are more difficult to secure, costs are almost prohibitive and the public have lost some of their lust for them, although more than 150,000 people came to see our 'Egyptian Antiquities from the Louvre' exhibition in 2006-2007.
 
I'm glad that our obsession with blockbusters is now waning. We need to promote our own brilliant collections. We need to get the message across that there are so many splendid works of art on display at the National Gallery in Canberra, including many new works, that every person, regardless of where they live in Australia, will feel impelled to visit their national collection regularly.
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2008 issue.