Former publisher of the New Zealand Herald Michael Horton, 85, and his wife, the late philanthropist Dame Rosie Horton, collected the artwork for more than 20 years.
A multimillion-dollar collection of Aboriginal art and objects once offered to the Auckland Art Gallery by a local couple has been officially donated to a Sydney art gallery.
Former publisher of the New Zealand Herald Michael Horton, 85, and his wife, the late philanthropist Dame Rosie Horton, collected the artwork for more than 20 years and were determined to keep it together. They wanted the artworks to be kept in the public domain rather than broken up and sold to private collections. Horton said he videoed the ever-growing collection about 15 years ago, and offered it to the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. He was not sure why the gallery declined the offer.
“There was no communication,” he said.
Instead, the Hortons offered the collection of 193 paintings, ceramics, weavings, sculptures and objects to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The collection was officially handed over last month and 35 of the works are now on view in the gallery’s new building, Naala Badu, in the Yiribana Gallery which features Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.
The Auckland Art Gallery has no official record of the Hortons’ bequest offer – the gallery’s director, Kirsten Lacy, took over in 2019 – and said there are no current staff who can remember the details.
Lacy said the gallery greatly appreciated the offer of gifts and bequests from generous donors.
“We do not have a record of (Michael) Horton offering his collection to the gallery in our corporate files, nor do we have current staff who recollect the collection being offered in years past.”
Horton has recently offered the Auckland gallery a valuable painting by Aboriginal artist Bob Gibson Tjungurrayi, whose work is exhibited in galleries and museums in Australia. Lacy said the offer was currently under consideration.
Last year the gallery staged a major exhibition, Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia, featuring 150 Aboriginal artworks borrowed from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Horton said many of the artists in that exhibition are also in the Horton collection.
The couple, who divided their time between their home in Remuera, Auckland, and their house in Sanctuary Cove on the Gold Coast, travelled extensively to Aboriginal communities across northern Australia to meet artists and buy work from Aboriginal-owned and run art centres, and commercial galleries with longstanding Aboriginal connections. They often travelled on tours organised by the New South Wales gallery and came to know many of the artists.
The New South Wales gallery has yet to have the Horton bequest valued but described it as “significant”. The gallery’s deputy director and director of collections, Maud Page, said the collection would be of “incredible monetary value”.
“They [the Hortons] were getting a lot of advice and had a lot of interaction with [indigenous] communities. They were active listeners and became knowledgeable, so what they picked was the best. We’ve got some really exceptional works in this collection.”
In Horton’s view the collection is worth well over $30 million based on the value of other private collections he’s aware of.
As they travelled and visited indigenous artists, gradually the walls, furniture and floors in the Hortons’ Queensland home filled with Aboriginal artwork, including paintings by the late Sally Gabori. One of her paintings, Big River at Thundi, sold for $315,000 through Sotheby’s in New York last year. In 2022 The Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art hosted a retrospective exhibition of Gabori’s work. Other prominent artists represented in the collection are Angelina George and the Joshua sisters.
Cara Pinchbeck, the gallery’s curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, praised the way the art had been catalogued, displayed and cared for. Michael Horton prepared a 60-page PowerPoint presentation of all the artworks, and the artists and stories behind them, to show the gallery when he offered the bequest.
The collection was now in the right place, he said. The gallery ran tours, had a deep understanding of Aboriginal art and brought people from remote communities to Sydney. The artwork would be there for the descendants of the artists and their communities to see in future years.
“To see it broken up would appal me. In 50 years’ time this collection will be beyond value,” Horton said.
Pinchbeck, too, is pleased the collection has remained in Australia.
“We believe it is the responsibility of Australian visual arts institutions to support Aboriginal art and artists by collecting, preserving, documenting, interpreting and displaying Aboriginal art.”
Horton, whose family were significant shareholders in Wilson & Horton, which owned the Herald for 120 years before the shareholding was sold in 1996, remembers the start of the collection more than 20 years ago. He and Dame Rosie visited a gallery of indigenous art in Darwin where Dame Rosie fell in love with a beautiful painting. Only the red sticker already on the painting stopped her from buying it.
“A year later we went back to the same gallery and did buy a painting, and that was the start of it.”
One morning Dame Rosie read an item in a newspaper about a community in the coastal town of Cardwell in northern Queensland. Artists had been given a small grant towards a kiln to make bagu, a ceramic version of an old-fashioned fire stick. With two holes and a mouth, the bagu look like masks, all with different expressions.
As Horton tells it, his wife set out to own the largest collection of bagu in the world. He thinks she probably achieved that, buying many over two decades of collecting.
Children who visit the New South Wales gallery in Sydney’s Hyde Park were fascinated by the bagu, he said, because of the different expressions.
“Some are ugly and some are lovely, some are smiling or frowning.”
The Hortons took advice from indigenous specialist art galleries around Australia, and befriended prominent indigenous art collectors Dr Colin and Elizabeth Laverty in Sydney, who became mentors.
Horton describes the indigenous people they met as “gorgeous” and says the artists and their communities became especially fond of Dame Rosie.
“She was always dressed to the nines and they loved her for it.”
Dame Rosie had learned some words in the Aboriginal language so she could greet people she met.
Now, with about 35 artworks left at home, Horton says his collecting days are over. However, he will continue to buy one painting a year for the Queensland Children’s Hospital in Brisbane.
“There are lots of Aboriginal children there. They all love the Aboriginal paintings.”
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
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