Portrait of a collector's life

James Wallace (left) is delighted with Pah Homestead, which has survived more than a century of hard use and at times outright neglect. Picture / Dean Purcell

James Wallace paces round Pah Homestead, overseeing the installation of some of the gems in his collection for the first show in the new home for the James Wallace Arts Trust. He sidesteps a Frances Hodgkins and stops to right a Lois White oil which is leaning upside down against a wall.

Next to it is a dense grid. "That's a Richard Killeen. It was the cover of the very first issue of Art New Zealand, he says. "That's extremely rude if you look it at closely, he says of a Rohan Wealleans canvas being carried up the stairs.

He points to a large blank space on the wall in the entry foyer. "I've commissioned a major work from Gretchen Albrecht for here.

Wallace has been collecting New Zealand art since he bought his first Toss Woollaston watercolour soon after graduating from Otago University in the early 1960s. He also runs an award for emerging artists, funds residencies, and for several years has been looking for a permanent home for the trust and its 5000-plus artworks.

The Italianate style homestead, restored by the Auckland City Council at a cost of $10 million and fitted out as a gallery with $500,000 of Wallace's money, is that home for at least the next 30 years.

The house was built between 1877 and 1879 for another James, businessman James Williamson. After Williamson's death in 1888 it was taken over by the Bank of New Zealand and leased to the Anglican Church, which used it to house St John's School. The Sisters of Mercy and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Auckland, Henry William Cleary, bought it in 1913 and used it in turn as an orphanage, novitiate house, boarding school and emergency housing.

The council bought the homestead in 2002 as part of its plans for Monte Cecilia Park, which is more than 14 hectares in size and growing.

Wallace is delighted with the building, proudly showing off the original joinery and the quality of the construction which has survived more than a century of hard use and at times outright neglect.

The lease requires the TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre to be open to the public six days a week including weekends and public holidays.

The trust can't charge for entry, though it can charge for special exhibitions, so income needs to come from the bookshop, restaurant and cafe sales and functions such as weddings and fundraisers.

Wallace says much of his collection will continue to be loaned out to universities, hospitals and other galleries. "This will be the epicentre and here we will curate the shows, and we will take exhibitions from here to provincial and city galleries and in turn take exhibitions they have curated, he says.

That could challenge Auckland Art Gallery, which has pursued an extraordinarily parochial course, turning down shows put together by other galleries such as Christchurch City's huge Bill Hammond survey.

Wallace chooses more diplomatic language. "We will fill a gap, in parallel with the City Galley, not in competition, but it gives the city and the country another destination.

He has already formed a partnership with Otago University through its vice-chancellor, Sir David Skegg. "We have various things in common: King's [College], Knox, Otago, he says with an apologetic laugh. "We will not only have their fellows up for residencies at the homestead, they are keen for us to curate exhibitions from the Hocken Library which has huge collections of McCahon, Woollaston, etc, which they are keen to have seen in Auckland."

Wallace credits Auckland Mayor John Banks for the Pah Homestead lease, calling him "a changed man in his second term in regard to support for arts and culture.

Mayor Banks says the idea of using the property came to him as a "2am epiphany after the pair had looked at about two dozen other possible sites to house the collection. He says without the arts trust, the council would have struggled to put the property to good use.

"I called James Wallace to the site and said, 'What do you reckon?' I could see from the look on his face that he couldn't believe his luck, and when he said 'yes', nor could I on behalf of the city.

Banks says it's an extraordinarily valuable collection to have as the centrepiece for Monte Cecilia Park, which he calls Auckland's best kept secret. "This must be one of the most beautiful open spaces in any city on earth. It's magnificent in shape and form. This is the best project I have been involved in public life. What we are doing is creating a legacy that has history and will survive for future generations.

He says the homestead will be an arts centre in a wider sense, and it will also be a focus for fundraising for charities' worthy causes, much as Wallace now uses his Epsom home, Rannoch. "There is going to be a huge amount of cash generated for so many causes around Auckland, Banks says.

Wallace is a familiar figure around Auckland's galleries. John Gow from John Leech Gallery says Wallace has been a regular visitor to his galleries for the 30 years he has been in the art business.

"It's an extraordinary feat of patronage, fiscal and physical, which has enabled him to accumulate a vast collection that references the history of New Zealand contemporary art over the past half century,"4 says Gow. "He's got his own taste, which a lot of buyers don't - they follow others."

Wellington dealer Peter McLeavey, who has been selling works to Wallace for more than 40 years, says in its focus on the work of younger artists, the collection is unique. "Looking into the collection is an aperture into the culture at any particular time - 1977, 1997, 2007. Through that aperture you can see a great set of works from people who have gone on to be famous, or people you never hear from again, he says.

"It is a unique take on the culture. He is not buying art, he is buying cultural memory. In a sense, he is also collecting a portrait of a life.

Another dealer, Ivan Anthony, says Wallace displays a genuine impulse to cultivate the society, rather than just accumulate trophies. "He is committed. He sees every show so he is very well informed, and that is a rarity."

Wallace says it's the only way to keep his eye in.

"Whatever academic background you have, it's simply exposure, so that's why I go out here and overseas every year to see vast numbers of works. I mean on a Saturday morning I do up to 20 galleries.

"When I am in other cities here I go and see what is going on and I spend a lot of time overseas each year going to see what's happening in contemporary art, so I see thousands of works a year."

Wallace's wealth comes from Wallace Corporation, a family business he inherited with a boiling-down works near Morrinsville for dead cows.

"It is now a major rendering plant servicing a number of other meat plants including our own, as well as the unwanted bits of 250,000 chickens a day. We added meat plants, then we added a tannery, and I had to keep buying the farms around us for sewage disposal so we became quite big dairy farmers," Wallace says.

The Wallace Art Trust owns convertible notes in Wallace Corporation which yield about $1.5 million a year to spread across the arts in New Zealand.

"We make grants. The Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra gets $50,000 a year, opera, theatre, acquisitions take a bit, staff takes a bit, though we try to be as lean as possible there - I hate arts organisations that often got to the point where they are spending a disproportionate amount on administration compared to what they are meant to be doing - and then the art awards which are worth $160,000 or so a year depending on exchange rates."

Wallace collects emerging artists when their work is affordable.

"I have the help of a lot of dealers around the country, a lot of tertiary institutions, and then the art awards net people no one has heard of so we start with emerging artists, and then if they emerge, and of course some don't, we try to keep up with them.

"There have been gaps when I haven't had the income or have been setting up the company or whatever, and they have been filled in retrospect, sometimes by the artists."

Before Toss Woollaston died, Wallace did a deal with the Nelson-based artist and his dealer Peter McLeavey for a bulk purchase to fill a lot of the gaps.

"I have had a deal with [Christchurch painter] Philip Trusttum for a couple of decades where I pay him so much a month and reconcile it once a year, go down and look at what he has been producing. That's why we have so many hundreds of Trusttums.

"I don't buy really expensive works except occasionally when there is a big hole in the collection because the artist's price has always been too far ahead for me.

"On the whole we don't spend a huge amount on any one painting, but it's amazing how many good works you can get at the auctions, they have just fallen through the cracks and I keep going to the auctions to fill in where I have missed out."

Wallace doesn't ever "clean out" the collection, unlike some other prominent New Zealand collectors.

"You can make mistakes, like the Tate which de-acquisitioned a lot of its Pre-Raphaelites and then discovered they came back into fashion.

"So it's a diary collection, warts and all, but it's all catalogued, so if a gallery round the country is putting together a show on a subject or an artist, they go to our website and ask to borrow things."

Wallace is happy to talk about the mechanics of the collection, but becomes a bit more guarded about his personal details. He says his interest in the arts was sparked early. "On the music side I had a very good grounding at King's, because Lin Saunders inspired us all there, but at 16 I went to prep school in Boston and was exposed over the next year to a lot of opera, theatre, and galleries in Boston and New York.

"Then I hitchhiked around Europe in 1955 visiting galleries, and all sorts of things, got back here at 17.

"I don't know why my parents allowed it. I don't think they had any idea what it was like because at that point people weren't doing those sorts of things."

Wallace says he decided early on to focus the collection on New Zealand. "If the scene had not expanded the way it had I probably would have broadened it to other countries, but it's been extraordinary how much has happened and how good most of it is, or challenging at least.

"I almost always come back from seeing what's happening in Britain or New York and think we have a disproportionately strong art scene here, quite out of line with our population."