European and North American Art

From its establishment in 1881, the Art Gallery of South Australia acquired expensive examples of contemporary British painting by famous living artists such as Frederic Leighton, George Watts, Edward Poynter, Edward Burne-Jones, J.W. Waterhouse, Benjamin Leader, Vicat Cole and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Fine Pre-Raphaelite pictures by Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti followed later, producing in Adelaide a comprehensive repository of High Victorian Art.

Throughout its history the Gallery has continued to buy in the area of contemporary British art, and today the collection includes among the finest concentrations of paintings and works on paper by members of the Camden Town Group and the Bloomsbury Group outside England, including works by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Robert Bevan, Malcolm Drummond and, of course, Walter Sickert.

Of the few continental European paintings bought in the early decades the most notable are by William Bouguereau, Giovanni Segantini, and Henri Fantin-Latour. Much later, paintings by Camille Corot, Charles Daubigny, Théodore Géricault, Eugène Boudin, Auguste Renoir and a group of twenty bronze casts of sculptures by Auguste Rodin were added, forming a solid group of nineteenth-century French paintings and sculptures.

By 1910 media other than painting and sculpture, cultures other than British and earlier art-historical periods were being sought by the Gallery, including important examples of English Arts & Crafts and Morris & Co. decorative arts for which there was a ready market among several wealthy South Australian pioneer families.

The Gallery's excellent collection of works on paper was established in 1907 by a substantial bequest by David Murray of German, Netherlandish, French and Italian Old Master prints, a few drawings and a substantial fund for further acquisitions. Augmented by the famous connoisseur Harold Wright, this area of the Gallery's collection has since become one of the richest, containing examples of the work of a number of the greatest masters of European art: Andrea Mantegna, Albrecht Dürer, Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet and many major modern artists. The Gallery owns drawings by Jacopo Tintoretto, Taddeo Zuccaro, Frederico Barocci, Luca Cambiaso, Anthony van Dyck, Guercino and Giambattista Tiepolo.

The Gallery began to acquire Old Master paintings and sculpture in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and a number of the Gallery's most distinguished European masterpieces have entered the collection in the past two decades. The collection includes major paintings by Claude Lorrain, Salomon van Ruysdael and Jacob van Ruisdael, Gaspard Dughet, Salvator Rosa, Willem van de Velde the younger, Jan Both, Luca Giordano & Giuseppe Recco, Anthony van Dyck, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, J.M.W. Turner and Theodore Géricault. The two strengths of this part of the Gallery's collection are the European landscape tradition from the seventeenth century and the history of British portraiture since the sixteenth century.

Since the 1970s, the Gallery has broadened its collection of international contemporary art. To the works by such prominent British artists as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Richard Long, have been added American paintings by Andy Warhol and Kenneth Noland and sculptures by Donald Judd and Duane Hanson. The greatest strength of the Gallery's collection, however, is German -- incorporating works by Georg Baselitz, Rainer Fetting, Ulrich Rückriem, A.R. Penck and Nikolaus Lang, who has worked in and around Adelaide using local slate and granite.

source:
http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au /content-collections.html

Australian Art

The Art Gallery of South Australia's display of Australian art offers visitors an in-depth chronological view of the development of our nation's visual culture and includes paintings, sculptures and decorative arts. A particular strength lies in the 19th century collection, which is the most balanced and comprehensive anywhere. In the heritage Elder Wing of Australian art the Colonial art of New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia is followed by the art of the later 19th century, including works by the famous Australian impressionists Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder and Frederick McCubbin.

Moving into the 20th century the Gallery holds a fine collection of Edwardian art. The collection of Australian modernism of the 1930s and 1940s, dominated by women artists, is exceptional.

Beyond the Elder Wing in Gallery 6 the art of the 1960s through to the 1980s shows the development of Australian art towards the 1990s through expressive and lyrical abstraction, hard-edge painting, landscapes and figurative art.
The Gallery owns what is probably the most important survey collection of dot paintings of the Western Desert. The Gallery owns a significant collection of Australian Aboriginal art and this is displayed in the Atrium of the West Wing. Here visitors are able to view dot paintings from the Central Desert, sculptures and bark paintings from Arnhem Land and work from the Kimberley region. Aboriginal art is also shown among the chronological displays, including the most contemporary art. Galleries 8 to 11 also house the permanent collection of Australian art of the 1990s. This includes paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, prints, videos and decorative arts by Australia's leading contemporary artists.

Australian Prints, Drawings and Photographs

The Gallery also has an extensive collection of Australian prints, drawings and photographs with special emphasis on South Australian works, including a collection of 2000 Hans Heysen drawings which were bequeathed to the Gallery by the artist. The Gallery’s Australian prints and drawings reflect the strength of the paintings collection with strong holdings of colonial and modernist works as well as some fine examples of contemporary printmaking. Also to be found among the Australian works on paper are over 200 of Lionel Lindsay’s prints and drawings and a similar number of prints by Adelaide artist Barbara Hanrahan.

n 1922 the Gallery was the first in Australia to begin collecting photographs as fine art with acquisitions being made throughout the 1920s and 30s. Since the 1970s the photography collection has been continuously strengthened, with an emphasis on South Australian photography as well as excellent examples of contemporary photographic media. In 2004 the Gallery acquired the R.J. Noye collection of early South Australian photography comprising some several thousand items. This collection is of immense significance to South Australia with highlights such as extensive holdings of photographs and glass plate negatives by H.H. Tilbrook (1848-1937) and Paul Foelsche (1831-1914). The collection also includes R.J. Noye’s trial website, Photohistory SA, which has been archived by the Gallery and can be accessed from the link below.

source:
http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au /content-collections.html