Auckland Art Gallery - The Collection

The Collection

The Auckland Gallery collection was initially dominated by European old master paintings following the standard taste of the 19th century. Today the collection has expanded to include a wider variety of periods, styles and media, and numbers over 15,000 artworks. Many New Zealand and Pacific artists are represented, as well as Europe and material from the Middle Ages to the present day. Notable New Zealand artists with extensive representation include Gretchen Albrecht, Marti Friedlander, C.F. Goldie, Alfred Henry O'Keeffe, Frances Hodgkins, Gottfried Lindauer and Colin McCahon. Some of these works were donated by the artists themselves.

In 1915 a collection of paintings of Mäori by Gottfried Lindauer was donated to the Gallery by Henry Partridge, an Auckland businessman. He made the gift on the proviso that the people of Auckland raise 10,000 pounds for the Belgium Relief Fund. The money was raised within a few weeks.

Another major benefactor was Lucy Carrington Wertheim. Miss Wertheim was an art gallery owner in London and through her support of expatriate artist Frances Hodgkins bestowed on the Auckland Art Gallery a representative collection of British paintings from the interwar period. Her gifts in 1948 and 1950 totalled 154 works by modern British artists, including Christopher Wood, Frances Hodgkins, Phelan Gibb, R. O. Dunlop and Alfred Wallis. The Wertheim collection was initially displayed in a separate room opened by the Mayor J. A. C. Allum on December 2, 1948.

In 1953 Rex Nan Kivell donated an important collection of prints, including work by George French Angas, Sydney Parkinson, Nicholas Chevalier, and Augustus Earle. The 1960s saw the arrival of the Watson Bequest, a collection of European medieval art. In 1967 the Spencer collection of early English and New Zealand watercolours was donated, this included early New Zealand views by John Gully, John Hoyt, and John Kinder. In 1982 on the death of Dr Walter Auburn, print collector and valued adviser to the Gallery's prints and drawings department, the Mackelvie Trust received his magnificent collection of over one and a half thousand prints, including work by Callot, Piranesi, della Bella and Hollar.

In 1952 Eric Westbrook was appointed as the first full-time director of the Art Gallery (previously the Head Librarian was formally in charge of both the Gallery and Library). He was succeeded in 1955 by Peter Tomory who stayed until 1965. Both men sought to revitalise the Gallery and introduce modern art to a largely conservative public in the face of resistance from a largely hostile City Council. The 1956 Spring Exhibition 'Object and Image' showed works by modern artists such as John Weeks, Louise Henderson, Milan Mrkusich, Colin McCahon, Kase Jackson and Ross Fraser. Other controversial exhibitions, including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, resulted in serious confrontation between the Council and Tomory, resulting in his resignation.

Tomory's intended purchase of Hepworth's Torso II in 1963 (likened by one councillor to 'the buttock of a dead cow') changed the climate of art and culture in New Zealand. Even the conservative NZ Herald pointed out to its readers, "It is no function of an Art Gallery to be stuffed with exhibits which everyone can comprehend." The bronze statue was privately bought by local businessman George Wooler and anonymously donated to the Gallery.