A CHAPTER IN PRINT Retiring Senior Curator Roger Butler reflects on helping founding Director James Mollison form the print collection

A CHAPTER IN PRINT

After four decades, Senior Curator of Australian Prints and Drawings, Roger Butler AM will retire this month. Here, he reflects on helping founding Director James Mollison form the print collection.

I was curating an exhibition of linocuts in Melbourne in 1981 when I was asked to fly to Canberra to interview for the position of Curator of Australian Prints at the yet to be opened National Gallery.

I was collected at the airport by a Commonwealth car and driven to Fyshwick where the Gallery had its store in the Molonglo Mall. I was ushered into an informal office area where Director James Mollison and Senior Curator of Australian Art, Daniel Thomas, were poring over plans for the new Gallery building. The first thing James asked me was: ‘Can you read plans?’. He then indicated where the Australian art displays would be and explained how prints would be an integral part of the hang which would incorporate all media.

What struck me most about James was his ambition for the National Gallery to become one of the great institutions of the world. The Australian collection was central to this vision and he was determined that the Gallery would become the centre for the display, interpretation and study of Australian art. He envisaged the collection as authoritative, representing Aboriginal artists and artists working in all states and territories. He wanted senior curatorial staff with wide-ranging knowledge and specialisations. The Gallery was to be the leader in all aspects of museology: curatorial, registration, education or conservation.

James and I discussed the women artists who had been such a prominent force in the Australian modernist art movement of the early twentieth century, and the Director wanted to know which artists I thought the Gallery should represent in depth. I suggested Margaret Preston and Jessie Traill. Each in their own way had a distinctive view of the landscape and vegetation, especially gum trees and native flowers.

James was in a hurry to put ideas into action. He asked: ‘Can you start next week?’. I was taken aback, but replied: ‘What about the week after?’

My interview took place 18 months before the Gallery was scheduled to open and I joined a small group of curatorial staff who were all involved in cataloguing the collection and selecting works for the opening exhibitions. I threw myself into reviewing the collection which had been assembled to date: I looked at every work and updated and corrected the existing records, which were all handwritten.

I was pleased to see the Gallery already owned works by both Preston and Traill. I knew the Traill prints well as they had been exhibited in Melbourne by Jim Alexander at his Important Women Artists gallery in 1977. Among the works the National Gallery acquired was one of her most significant prints, Good night in the gully where the white gums grow, 1922. It is an audacious work; made at a time when etchings were usually small and dark, Traill’s print is large scale and has great luminosity. She demonstrated complete control of the aquatint process, a technique she had learned with Frank Brangwyn in Bruges, Belgium and in London.

It is the poetic nature of the image that attracts me. Three slender, light-toned eucalypts dominate the composition, their trunks extend beyond the top and bottom of the image, creating strong vertical accents on a sloping hillside; behind them the darker scrub is silhouetted against the fading light. The title may be a line from a poem.

Fred Williams was a member of the Gallery’s Council at the time this work was acquired, and one can recognise its relationship to his own etchings of the Australian landscape. I can imagine him applying his test for whether or not a work was resolved, which was to ask: “How does it look upside down?”.

An early purchase after the Gallery opened was a rare and exceptional colour stencil print produced by Margaret Preston when she was 78. At the time she was synthesizing the significant influences on her life

and art. Shoalhaven Gorge, NSW, 1953 is a timeless depiction of the dramatic landscape with its steep cliffs, and the Shoalhaven River cutting through the hills. The image brings together her profound interest in Japanese art, Chinese art and Aboriginal art and unifies them.

Establishing authoritative collections of works by such artists takes a great deal of time but the results are invaluable. Retrospective exhibitions of the work of Preston and Traill were accompanied by major publications, the catalogue raisonne The Prints of Margaret Preston in 1987, and Stars in the river: the prints of Jessie Traill in 2013. The three volumes that outline the history of printmaking in Australia, Printed, are the culmination of nearly four decades of extensive research and draw their illustrations from the Gallery’s extraordinary collection.

For me, being able to put together a collection which now numbers over 37,000 prints and which will forever help define, explain and

Left: Margaret Preston, Shoalhaven Gorge, NSW 1953, stencil, purchased 1983 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra *© Margaret Preston; Roger Butler and Andrew Sayers preparing for a Gallery Council meeting in 1985 Above: Jessie Traill, Good night in the gully where the white gums grow 1922, etching and aquatint, purchased 1997, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra *© Jessie Traill

illuminate Australian culture, has been an extraordinary opportunity.

As I prepare to bid farewell to the National Gallery during this strange period when we have been temporarily closed, I think back to when I first saw the building nearly 40 years ago, and it was empty and quiet. The voids and concrete structural walls were magnificent in their unhung state and it was obvious the architect saw the building as a work of art in its own right.

I have seen many things over the past four decades, but what I have loved most of all is seeing the galleries hung with amazing works and filled with crowds captivated by what we have presented to them.

The Australian print collection has been the beneficiary of longstanding and generous support of the Gordon Darling Print Fund.