Updated April 01, 2015 12:29:08
The art community is in grief for Betty Churcher, who died yesterday at 84, a visionary teacher who took our hand, laughed away our nerves and showed us the sheer delight that comes from spending time with beautiful, moving, challenging things. Virginia Trioli writes.
Betty Churcher once said that the genius and virtuosity of the great artist was in knowing when they should stop: knowing when just one mark would be sufficient to communicate all that needs to be said to the amazed viewer standing before the work. Betty Churcher the artist, teacher, gallery director, author and passionate advocate for a life lived with art made it her life's work to relay the messages of the greatest artists of our times to her fellow Australians, but with one difference: one mark would never be quite enough for her - not when there was an entire country to enthuse.
Betty Churcher, who died yesterday at 84, was an educator. For all of her life she taught art - first at secondary schools, and then at art schools, and then she taught the people of Australia - and she saw no higher calling than that.
As the first and so far only woman director of the National Galley of Australia, Churcher unapologetically regarded the marquee-title exhibitions that earned her the part derisive, part affectionate moniker "Betty Blockbuster" as mass classes in art education. Growing up in Brisbane in the 30s and 40s, she once told me, there was "just nothing", and in the excitement of the large-scale exhibition that came to town with all the thrill of the circus she saw an opportunity to provide for the public a portal into another world that was denied her as a young woman.
The fact that these blockbusters earned money was a bonus; that they have became an adopted feature on the calendar of every art institution around the country - and remain so - only shows her enduring fearlessness as an administrator.
She was the polar opposite of the fearsome man she replaced as director of the NGA. The James Mollison era was an enormously impressive one, establishing with great authority a national collection of personality and regard, and while he was greatly respected, Betty was deeply loved. She not only wanted a formidable collection and institution but she wanted to make as many people as possible fall in love with the works as she had.
There was initially great resistance to her vision at the NGA - it wasn't Mollison enough, and it was too populist - but she knew exactly what she was doing: "If there's a little Betty Churcher out there," she said "an 11 year-old Betty Churcher, it's worth doing."
She just loved art, and as deceptively simple as that sounds, for many it's a vanishing trait.
She made astute purchases: "Golden Summer Eaglemont" - the last great Heidelberg School painting in private hands - was a celebrated moment, but as the painter and long time friend of Betty Churcher Jan Senbergs wisely reminds me, that was an easier choice. A better example of her judgment and connoisseurship is the modern masterpiece by Rene Magritte, "The Lovers": the wrapped and masked faces of the enigmatic couple an emblem of the unknowable nature of love. Once seen, it remains uncomfortably lodged in the memory forever: the mind's eye keeps seeing it, a tribute to her great eye.
But the art community will remember her as someone who genuinely, deeply loved what they did. She just loved art, and as deceptively simple as that sounds, for many it's a vanishing trait. All the artists to whom I spoke yesterday were grieving for a woman who trained as an artist, married an artist, had a son who was an artist and, in the words of painter Stieg Persson, gave over an enduring sensitivity to people who make things. That's just not the case with all arts administrators.
As Betty Churcher's eyesight began to fade so too did her hope that age and infirmity would not rob her of her most important sense of all. She had such a great eye - a keen understanding of a good picture that was born of both instinct and training, and her judgment was unerring - but the shadows were closing in. She described it to me in 2007 as "midnight sitting on my shoulder" and in that compelling image I could feel her despair at the curtains being drawn. She nonetheless went on to make more television and produce more books, including her marvellous final publication "Australian Notebooks", an educational textbook masquerading as a beautiful, hand-drawn journal: the teacher simply couldn't help herself.
Australia will always need great art teachers: our sometimes awkward, often defensive relationship with art requires that kindly and visionary educator to take our hand, laugh away our nerves and show us the sheer delight that comes from spending time with beautiful, moving, challenging things. I think the reason we love and revere those national art teachers so much - our Robert Hughes and Clive James and Betty Churchers - is that we know how deeply we need them, and how well they have served us. Betty Churcher may well always be our most loved, most favourite teacher of all.
Virginia Trioli presents ABC News Breakfast.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, contemporary-art, visual-art, library-museum-and-gallery
First posted April 01, 2015 09:29:23
Long live the Museums Fine Art curators secret Tribal Games.Every object who once in a time was art became contemporary commodities again, in the circles of Australian academics and dealers. The"classical art lovers" has been held with an iron fist in the auction rooms, and in the introvert glossy news media.The Visual Art history may have ended as well as the contemporary "development" of art.Time will tell us in our pathetic back mirrors that a new technology have made the term "exhibition" completely obsolete' and should rather be replaced with the word; Inhibition.Out doors electronic billboards gigantic electronic screensand the factor of distribution will swallow this timorous hand painting "fine art tribes".Who said: "the 60's never arrived in Australia until late 70.s" ?The 20th Century art has just began...in the Australian Cultural Landscape.Vote for Archibald as a new PM!
Ture Sjolander flickr:
01 Apr 2015 4:53:45pm
Commodity as Oil.Sardines in oil on canvas and the art lovers lick it up it from the museum walls and the art mafia and the academic curators laff their lips off at the auction tabernacles.What a bloody business: Buy One and get Hundred for Free from the signed printed edition.Buy a Android and get a billion pictures as an extra bonus to no cost.It is not about "pictures" at all? I may be word blind after all.
02 Apr 2015 11:11:05am
"The biggest thing you can write is "elephant" - Sir Charles Chaplin.Great silent light paintings on a canvas on the wall. I really adore the greatest painter of all in the history of visual art: Albert Einstein.With a simple charcoal pen he painted beautiful abstract figures on a black board, and hardly no one at the time understood the meaning of the lines.Behind and beyond human eyes there is space. Plenty.