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The founding director of the National Gallery of Australia, James Mollison, has died aged 88.
Mollison was most renowned as the person who coordinated the then-controversial purchase of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist painting Blue Poles in 1973. The NGA paid $1.3m for the work – now worth about $350m – a sum that required approval from the prime minister at the time, Gough Whitlam.
Mollison died of a heart attack on Sunday morning.
Mollison took the position of director at the NGA in 1977. After a 23-year stint in the role, he moved to the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), where he remained until 1995.
Mollison’s legacy in the Australian art world was “monumental”, Nick Mitzevich, the current director of the NGA, told Guardian Australia. “James was part of an era in Australia when big minds asked us to think about culture in a new way. He was informed by the past but never limited by it.
“It’s quite a unique job to build a national collection from scratch, and do it without a building. He had 10 years to build the foundations of the collection before the gallery opened in 1982. It’s a very unique situation, totally unprecedented in Australia and very rare even around the world.”
In a short “personal reflection” written in 1988 but published by the NGV in 2014, Mollison said he learnt his first “real lesson” about art while looking at Rembrandt etchings at the NGV during an unofficial internship in the late 1940s.
Art, Mollison said, “is more enjoyable if you look at it hard and long, than if you look at it idly or in passing”.
Mitzevich said Mollison was a curator who “really elevated how we saw art and culture” and “obliterated any notions of provincialism”.
“He saw Australian art on the same footing as the rest of the world and he showed and acquired works of art with an openness to celebrating the best of Australia and the world in tandem.”
Mitzevich described a conversation with Mollison in which Mollison explained his philosophy about the role of the national gallery. “He said to me, there are three things that should drive what the national collection should acquire: it must be a moment of absolute resolution in the artist’s practice, or a moment of absolute breakthrough, or a moment of innovation, and I leave all the rest to other galleries.”
The NGA announced Mollison’s death in a Facebook post on Sunday.
“During 20 years at the helm, he showed us how bold risk-taking could build an unrivalled world-class art collection,” the statement said. “In bringing together so many influential and extraordinary works, he wanted visitors to experience art history and leave knowing much more about art than when they first arrived.”
Mitzevich paid tribute to his predecessor in an Instagram post on Sunday night, calling Mollison “one of Australia’s greatest museum directors”.
“By inspiring and provoking Australians with everything from Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series to Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, he invited us to think and talk about art,” he said. “This pioneering spirit, together with his courage, is what we carry into the future.
“When I step into the gallery tomorrow, I will feel his absence. But his courage and pioneering spirit is what I hope to carry into the future.”
Members of the Australian arts and culture community have been paying tribute to Mollison on social media.
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