Every art museum has a secret (or two)

Eliezer Levi Montefiore is one of the most fascinating, but also most overlooked, figures in the early history of the Gallery. He was inaugural director for only two years, but without his involvement from the first meeting of the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1871, very little would have been achieved. He came to Sydney with previous experience as a trustee at the National Gallery of Victoria and the establishment of a public gallery in Sydney became his consuming passion for the last 23 years of his life.

View the lecture slides for this talk as a PDF.

Image: Freeman Brothers, Eliezer Levi Montefiore from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Institutional Archive circa 1893 , National Art Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photo: AGNSW

The ‘Crumner relics’ were donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1907. They included various mementos of the battle of Waterloo and – most interestingly – a Victoria Cross. This had been awarded to Private Timothy O’Hea in 1866 for single-handedly putting out a fire on a train loaded with gunpowder that was travelling between Quebec and Montreal.

O’Hea moved to Sydney in June 1874, just three years after the Gallery was founded. He became involved in an expedition to find the alleged survivor from Ludwig Leichhardt’s fatal expedition across the Simpson Desert. Major Crumner, father-in-law of Eccleston Du Faur, the Gallery’s longest serving president of the trustees, financed the expedition. The expedition was as ill-fated as Leichhardt’s original one and O’Hea perished on it. Was he murdered, as some thought? Was Timothy O’Hea even the person he said he was? Come and hear the fascinating tale of the ‘Gallery’s VC’.

View the lecture slides for this talk as a PDF.

The last decade of the 19th century was a particularly turbulent period for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, as it negotiated its increasingly established role in public life. Questions concerning its accountability and relevance were raised by the public, as well as by government and artists. Many of the Gallery’s now iconic works entered the collection at this time, amidst lively debates about what the Gallery should collect. European purchases still dominated acquisitions, but in 1894 the scandalous Dreyfus affair divided loyalties and curtailed the work of the Gallery’s art advisers in Paris.

Steven Miller speaks about the debates, scandals and tensions that characterised this period which trustee Eccleston Du Faur characterised as the Gallery’s ‘coming of age’.

View the lecture slides for this talk as a PDF.

Image: Freeman Brothers, Frederick Eccleston Du Faur FRGS from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Institutional Archive circa 1893 , National Art Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photo: AGNSW

Recent Australian art has become one of the legendary exhibitions of Australian art history. Curated by Daniel Thomas and Frances McCarthy (Lindsay) in 1973, the exhibition included painting, sculpture, drawing, conceptual, earth and time-based art by 46 Australian artists presented in the recently opened new wing of the Art Gallery.

The exhibition eclipsed the Biennale for the diversity and contemporaneity of work included, as well as the notoriety the exhibition achieved on account of artist Tim Burns and his work A change of plan. Two nude people were to spend all day in an enclosed box within the exhibition space, seen by the public through a two-way closed-circuit TV. Find out how this led to a citizen’s arrest at the Gallery in this tantalising and final lecture of the series.

View the lecture slides for this talk as a PDF.

Image: Louis Priou Satyr's family circa 1876, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Gift of Messrs. Wallis and Sons, the French Gallery, London 1893?