Remembering James Mollison: A flair for collection-building

James Mollison AO and former prime minister Gough Whitlam with Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles (1952); © Pollock-Krasner Foundation, ARS/Copyright Agency

It’s been almost 40 years since Her Majesty the Queen opened what was then the Australian National Gallery in October 1982, with a remit ‘to present art from anywhere in the world, from an Australian viewpoint, to the people of Australia’, under the diligent leadership of the late James Mollison, who passed away in January this year. Daniel Thomas, one of Mollison’s early hires and a highly influential Australian art-world figure in his own right, fondly remembers his former mentor in the current issue of Art Monthly Australasia, looking back over the details of Mollison’s long life and his enduring presence at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), where he is best remembered for a flair for ‘collection-building [that] remains unmatched, in both excellence and diversity’.

Mollison’s untimely death deprived him of the opportunity to celebrate the fourth successful decade of the institution to which he dedicated a large portion of his life. It also cut short his experience of a global crisis that, in January, seemed confined to one city in China but now, just three months later, has become one of the gravest threats to our current world order that many of us are likely to witness in our lifetimes. 

Although the doors of the gallery may be closed for the foreseeable future, the range of online resources available on their website offers unprecedented access to their collections and public programming, from virtual tours to lecture recordings, scholarly articles to learning resources for students of the arts. Mollison began his career as an educator, training at Melbourne Teachers’ College and working in a succession of schools throughout the 1950s, and Thomas recalls that ‘he remained an enthusiastic and occasionally cruel mentor to swarms of junior staff’ during his tenure at the NGA. He would undoubtedly have been proud of the leadership and innovation that the current custodians of his beloved gallery have shown in these unstable and uncertain times.

Dr Alex Burchmore, Publication Manager