Fine guide to museum's riches

Art at Te Papa edited by William McAloon. Photo / Supplied

Art museum guides, in which reproductions of selected works from an institution's collections are accompanied by brief descriptive essays, are a familiar publishing genre practised around the world from the Uffizi in Florence to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. What makes Art at Te Papa distinctive, at least in the New Zealand context, is the sheer scale of the undertaking.

This handsome, large-format book runs to 432 pages and includes images of and essays about more than 400 artworks, ranging from a 15th-century etching by Andrea Mantegna (Battle of the Sea Gods) to the more than 7000 (not a misprint!) tiny canvases that make up John Reynolds' Cloud (2006).

By comparison, Auckland Art Gallery's modest The Guide (2001), in the international Scala series, is half the size and less than half the length, including only 160 works.

Even so, despite its bulk, Art at Te Papa represents only a tiny portion (less than 3 per cent) of the more than 15,000 works in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa's collections. Art museums are a bit like icebergs, most of whose bulk is under the surface of the ocean. What is displayed in a museum's galleries at any one time is inevitably a minute fraction of its total collection, especially in a museum such as Te Papa where art has to share space with historical, ethnographic and natural history displays.

Since it opened a decade ago, Te Papa has been most controversial for how little of its art collection is on display; not only because the space had to be shared with other items but also because of its radical interdisciplinary and narrative approach to exhibitions - the so-called "theme-park" approach, notoriously epitomised in the opening art exhibition Parade by the juxtaposition of Colin McCahon's Northland Panels with a Kelvinator refrigerator as different instances of the modern.

Te Papa's exhibition practices have since undergone major changes (including changes to the building to provide more exhibition space for art).

Perhaps one reason for the scale of the book is an attempt to address the criticism that Te Papa sells art short. Be that as it may, so long as you don't attempt to read it in bed, in which case physical injury is likely to occur if you doze off, it is a book to be welcomed. The revelation of what considerable riches the national museum holds in its collections is surprising, especially to non-Wellingtonians who visit only rarely.

The approach to the text is admirably unparochial. While some of the short essays - most are around 350 words, a few twice that length - are written by Te Papa's curatorial staff, many others are by freelance art historians or staff from other museums and universities, including, for example, such Aucklanders as Joanna Drayton, Mary Kisler, Michael Dunn and Ron Brownson. It is pleasing to see Te Papa acting as a truly national institution in this way.

The book is divided into eight chronologically arranged sections, three devoted to international art, five to New Zealand art. An unfortunate error on the contents page lists the second New Zealand section as 1890-1900, instead of 1890-1945, but this is one of the few mistakes I noted in what is generally a well-edited and designed book (though some reproductions are darkish or muddy).

Within the international sections are some surprising discoveries. Thanks to major donors, such as Bishop Monrad in the 19th and Sir John Ilott in the 20th century, Te Papa's holdings in graphic media are impressive, including etchings, engravings and woodcuts by major figures such as Mantegna, Durer, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Goya, Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse and Roy Lichtenstein.

In other media, major international works are rarer though exceptions are works by John Singleton Copley, Andre Derain, Marcel Duchamp and Natalia Goncharova; representation of British artists from Constable and Samuel Palmer to Stanley Spencer and Ben Nicholson is exceptionally strong.

Because of entrenched colonial attitudes, works by New Zealand artists were slower to accumulate; it was the late 60s, for instance, before the National Gallery (Te Papa's predecessor) acquired its first works by Angus, Woollaston and McCahon (a decade later than Christchurch and Auckland). Enlightened directors such as Luit Bieringa (also responsible for initiating Te Papa's fine collections of photography) and Cheryll Sotheran, plus generous funding support from government (especially under Helen Clark) have made up for lost time. In 2004, to cite a spectacular instance, $2.6 million was paid for McCahon's 11-panel Walk, a New Zealand record.

William McAloon's well-researched historical introduction reveals that the controversy surrounding Te Papa was far from the first in the history of the national collection. It took generations for the institution to outgrow its addiction to what Frances Hodgkins called "derelict [British] artists of a bygone time and taste" and a reputation for being "a dumping ground for second and third-rate pictures and statuary" (W. H. Allen).

Not until the deadly stranglehold of the pretentiously named New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts (the Wellington Society of Arts) was broken in the 1970s could it begin to live up to its nominal status as a national collection, a role further enhanced since Te Papa was established, at least so far as the collection is concerned.

In the 1950s Charles Brasch wrote: "As a National Gallery it is laughable." Fortunately, as this fine book comprehensively shows, that is no longer the case.

Art at Te Papa
Edited by William McAloon (Te Papa Press $130)

* Peter Simpson is an Auckland reviewer and director of the Holloway Press.