Best known as Australia’s most influential art critic, Alan McLeod McCulloch (1907-1992) was an extraordinary man, and it’s really quite surprising that it has taken 30 years since his death for a biography to appear.
This is the book description from the publisher:
Described as ‘arguably the most influential Australian art critic of the last half of the twentieth century’, Alan McCulloch’s work — as illustrator, critic, gallery director and author — reflected on and documented much of this era of visual art in Australia.
As critic for the Melbourne Herald from 1951 to 1982 McCulloch was fundamental in the nascent careers of those who were to become some of Australia’s most famous artists. His monumental Encyclopedia of Australia Art, first published in 1968 and still in print today, has been acknowledged as the ‘single most important reference work on Australian art ever published’.
InLetters to a Critic curator and author Rodney James has mined the rich archival treasure of the McCulloch Papers to create a lively combination of biography and illustrated book of letters. Witty, irreverent, profound and heartfelt, these previously unpublished letters, critical essays, illustrations and works of art provide a unique insight into the art and lives of Australia’s most famed art personalities as they simultaneously reveal McCulloch’s role as critic, gallery director and mentor.
Anyone in Australia who loves art owes McCulloch an enormous debt. It was not just that as a critic and a mentor he was pivotal in the careers of iconic Australian artists. His career as an arts administrator in a breathtakingly diverse range of roles leaves a legacy that is rare in any field of creative endeavour. I had not realised, for example, that the wealth of regional galleries that we have here in Victoria (and beyond) are due in no small part to McCulloch’s vision. In chapter 9, ‘The Australian Public Gallery Movement, James credits McCulloch as an advocate, mediator, critic and adviserwhose belief inthe valuable role played by regional galleries was underpinned by a strong philosophical basis.In 1978, on behalf of sixteen public galleries spread across Victoria, he declared that ‘they represent a general, nationwide movement towards the decentralisation of culture through the healthy growth of locally established bodies.’
It hadn’t always been so.
When he first entered the art world as a critic in the 1940s and then again in the 1950s, Victoria’s public galleries were in a parlous state. Low attendances, shoestring budgets, lack of professional staff, poor remuneration, deteriorating buildings and an inability to conserve or preserve collections adequately (as well as scant support across all levels of government) meant that four long-established provincial galleries at Ballarat (1884), Bendigo (1887), Geelong (1896) and Castlemaine (1913) were struggling to survive, let alone maintain appropriate museum standards. The fifth, Warrnambool (1886) was effectively no longer operating. (p.245)
A visit to the (revived) Warrnambool Gallery’s website tells the story:
Despite its enthusiastic start the economic downturn of the 1890s brought the Collection to a halt. In 1910 the Council took control of the Mechanics Institute and ran the Gallery there until 1963 when the building was allocated for municipal offices.
The Collection was dispersed on loan to galleries in Shepparton and Hamilton and not reunited until 1971. In 1986 the Gallery’s Centenary year, a permanent home was built next to the ‘Civic Green’ and named in memory of one its champions Sir Fletcher Jones O.B.E. [of Fletcher Jones clothing company fame].
Well, here are those galleries today:
Ballarat Art Gallery
Bendigo Art Gallery
Castlemaine Art Gallery
Geelong Art Gallery
Warrnambool Art Gallery
This chapter also reveals just one of the many controversies of McCulloch’s career. We are regular visitors toThe McLelland Gallery and Mornington Peninsula Art Gallery because they’re close to home. Perhaps because The Spouse knew McCulloch personally (and indeed we have an autographed copy of his Golden Age of Australian Painting (1969) which sells secondhand for breathtaking amounts!) we knew that the MPAG was McCulloch’s initiative. But if you visit the McClelland Gallery there’s no sign of the ‘thankless’ role he played inthe formation of a vision and design for what would become the McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery at Langwarren.
His work in the gallery’s early development constitutes a regrettable episode in mismanagement and led to bitter acrimony on both sides. (p.251)
The short story appears to be that McClelland was co-opted onto the planning committee that was to transform the bequest of Annie May McClelland into reality, in which role he worked as a volunteer but…
Despite promising beginnings and McCulloch being armed with a wealth of knowledge and ideas, things soon turned sour. (p.254)
Despite expectations, he was not appointed as director, and what’s more the delay in making and communicating this decision impacted on the final edits of the Encyclopedia of Australian Art. McCulloch had been working on it for seven years, prompted by his realisation that though there had not been an art book published in Australia between 1945 and 1960, there were rivals in the pipeline. He wanted to include the McClelland Gallery in the book but could not get the information he needed to do it. His exasperation escalated into an exchange of solicitors’ letters, and McCulloch resigned from all connection with the McClelland Gallery.
But his legacy is the elegantly designed modernist building situated in a bush setting.
Acknowledging that there was little departure from the plans drawn up before McClulloch’s departure, the architect Colin Munro and his partner Philip Sargeant had no doubt of the significance of his role. (They went on to also design the award-winning Benalla Art Gallery, completed in 1975.)
Letters to a Critic is no hagiography. Clearly McCulloch was a man of strong opinions, forcefully expressed, and those opinions were not without controversy.
Readers may remember my review of Trial by Tandem, 1950, McCulloch’s travel memoir of his first trip to Europe. In his early days as an art critic, his support for radical modernist artists likeAlbert Tucker had offended conservative tastes at the (now defunct) Melbourne Argus, and this was the trigger for him to leave Australia. He took off for the US, where he met and married his wife Ellen, and together they journeyed through post-war France and Italy by tandem.
He recovered from this setback to his career as a critic. After exhibiting his work in the UK with some success, he returned to Melbourne to become the associate editor for Meanjin (1951-1963) and then in the 1952 the art critic for the Melbourne Herald, a position he held for 30 years. But he ruffled feathers with his art criticism because he believed (as I do) that independent robust criticism should stick to a few fundamental ideas.
‘…in art above all things there is no ultimate cruelty like that of a misguided critical kindness. And apart from that a critic cannot afford to consider anything but his allegiance to art itself. [The] contention that constructive criticism is that which praises, destructive the reverse, is a popular fallacy; criticism of any value at all aims at accurate analysis.’
What was at stake was not just reward for effort, but the need for informed and passionate criticism in Australia. (p.64)
McCulloch (a-hem) had tense relations with the NGV over the loan of works for an international exhibition; was scathing about the ‘precocious’ young art critic Robert Hughes; and squabbled with the art patrons John and Sunday Reed at Heide over the similarity between the name MOMAD and New York’s MOMA. These disputes arose out of frustration and from his passion for Australian art, but he did become more conciliatory in his older years.
He had an heroic attitude to his work. For the Encyclopedia — decades before the internet transformed the work of a researcher — he was using index cards to manage his notes on the constantly moving Australian art scene and earning little or no money during this time because no patron or grant was forthcoming. We have a good collection of major art history books — Canberra Times art critic Sasha Grishin’s Australian Art — A History (2014); The Art of Australia (2008) by SMH art critic John McDonald and Robert Hughes The Shock of the New (1980) and — thanks to this biography — I now have enlightened respect for the authorship of these massive contributions to art history in Australia.
And as you can see at Wikipedia, the list of McCulloch publications is long.
McCulloch also championed Aboriginal art when nobody else did. He thought that it represented our only great national art treasure and he was among the first modernist critics to advocate for it. That squabble with the NGV was over the loan of bark paintings for a groundbreaking exhibition in Houston, USA. He annoyed the NGV further by demanding gallery space and professional curators for artefacts in The (Baldwin) Spencer Collection that were lying neglected in storage at the NGV. He advocated for a standalone gallery for Aboriginal Art too.
Letters to a Critic would make a splendid gift for the art lover in your life, or for anyone who enjoys a lively biography. The MUP website offers shipping in 1-3 days… so if Australia Post isn’t too overwhelmed with festive parcels, you might still get it in time for Christmas.
Author: Rodney James
Title: Letters to a Critic, Alan McCulloch’s World of Art
Publisher: Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University Press, 2023
Cover design by Pfisterer + Freeman
Cover art ‘Alan McCulloch, 1980’ by Andrew Sibley, National Portrait Gallery
ISBN: 9780522879872, hbk., 353 pages including Notes, a Bibliography, suggestions for Further Reading, a List of Illustrations, Acknowledgements, an Index and two inset sections of photos and artwork reproductions.
Review copy courtesy of Melbourne University Press
Image credits:
(An interesting sidenote: the Public Galleries Association website features photos of all 21 regional galleries in Victoria. But photos of the ones housed in buildings with classical facades are interiors. Almost without exception, the website has disowned the architecture of the past.)
- Ballarat Art Gallery: https://pgav.org.au/Art-Gallery-of-Ballarat~92
- Bendigo Art Gallery: https://pgav.org.au/Bendigo-Art-Gallery~632
- Castlemaine Art Gallery: https://castlemaineartmuseum.org.au/
- Geelong Art Gallery: https://www.geelonggallery.org.au/about
- Warrnambool Art Gallery: https://pgav.org.au/Warrnambool-Art-Gallery~580
