Centuries on canvas arriving in Auckland

By PAT BASKETT

What can $10 buy these days? A momentary distraction in the form of a magazine? Fast food?

At the Auckland City Art Gallery, $10 gives you much more - the first-hand experience of standing in front of four exquisite paintings from the 15th century, as well as 36 other works by painters whose names have a sure place in the annals of Western art history.

The exhibition, The Master's Eye: Five Centuries of European Art opens on Saturday, and runs for three months. It includes works by Tintoretto, El Greco, and Rembrandt as well as major English landscape painters, important French impressionist and post-impressionist works and a smidgeon of the 20th century - Francis Bacon, Magritte and Modigliani.

Their provenance is the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, where a project to refurbish the gallery meant alternative storage for their collections was necessary. Melbourne's loss is our gain with the selection of a touring exhibition.

The 40 works, part of a much larger collection acquired through the bequest of Alfred Felton who made a fortune from goldmines, were selected by Mary Kisler, the Auckland gallery's Mackelvie collection curator.

"The fee to show the whole collection was astronomical - we couldn't have afforded it. But when I proposed selecting 40 paintings, they went for it," she says.

So did Kisler. Her selection is an art historian's dream, reflecting her deep knowledge of many centuries of painting, and organised according to eight broad categories: religion, portraiture, landscape, classicism, symbolism, the body, space and impressionism.

"There were not many works from the 20th century and, for me, the real treasures are the very early works which haven't been seen in New Zealand before." These include works by the Flemish painters Memling, Marmion, a work believed to be from the studio of van Eyck, and a portrait of a woman done by an unknown artist in Florence probably in the 1470s.

That work manifests the contemporary custom of plucking back a woman's hairline to reveal more of her forehead. Such information is part of the dossier on each painting prepared by Kisler for use by the gallery docents.

The exhibition has given Kisler the chance to release little-seen treasures from the gallery's collection, to produce a series of smaller displays with the aim of putting the more famous works in context.

Satire and Romanticism, accompanying the painting of Farinelli, allows Kisler to produce Hogarth engravings as well as works by his contemporaries Fuselli, Rowlandson and Gillray.

The Grandeur that was Rome features the etchings of Piranesi who combined fantastical reconstructions of ancient Rome in an 18th-century setting, and whose works are held in considerable number in Auckland.

Focus on Classicism places early bronzes alongside 19th-century works. Look especially for the wonderful Minerva by William Theed which has had 40 years of dust cleaned off it.

Period furniture loaned by the Auckland Museum further enriches the context of the paintings. An 18th-century precursor to the viola, the viola d'amore, and a beautiful inlaid table made in Florence accompany the Amigoni work.

"We've also got the most remarkable bust of Beethoven made by Bourdelle who was at one time Rodin's assistant," Kisler says.

Two vitrines contain books borrowed from the Auckland Public Library's rare books collection. The links are sometimes subtle but rewarding: Kisler is proud to have found a book of English "pomona" (the word means fruit trees, or a treatise on them) as soul-mate for a 1912 painting by the English artist Mark Gertler, called The Apple Woman and her Husband.

Workshops will be set up within the gallery for Kirsten Slatter to display the skills she learned in Florence doing traditional framing and gilding, and for Emma Paton to demonstrate the art of painting icons. The apse, at the far end of the upper Wellesley gallery, becomes an 18th-century gentleman's study.

The gallery will be enlivened throughout the exhibition by a programme of public lectures and evening events which include a performance by the Auckland Dance Company, selections from opera by William Winiata, and a staged drama event called Renaissance, Roccoco and all that Jazz with costumes, makeup, lighting and hair design by The Cut Above.

Young visitors will be able to dress up and have their photographs taken in costume.

Kisler is breathless. When asked how much it cost to bring these 40 gems here (given the gift of a $10 entrance fee and a comprehensive catalogue for $19.95), she is unable to divulge the amount, nor can she say what sum the Government agreed to indemnify it for.

"Count my grey hairs," she says, laughing.