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Why put together a big show on Grace Cossington Smith today? Has recent research brought to light new material, or prompted an about-turn in the artist’s reputation as an important Australian modernist? Not entirely, judging from the exhibition ‘Grace Cossington Smith’, shown at the National Gallery of Australia and touring to several state galleries. A guaranteed school syllabus fixture and cross-generational crowd-pleaser like Cossington Smith would seem a natural choice for a gallery management overly-sensitive to criticism on the national flagship’s exhibition record, and fixated by audience attendance figures. The show itself is well packaged and highly popular, and yet is aesthetically and intellectually under-whelming. Has audience development become a curatorial rule-of-thumb? Or should curatorial staff have more independence and resources when it comes to exhibition programs and research time?
It is nearly forty years since Daniel Thomas’s retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales created Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984) as a cultural talisman by unearthing major works like The Lacquer Room (1935-36) and The Bridge in-Curve (1930) in the artist’s studio, thus ensuring the first significant entry of her work into our public collections. The incoming National Gallery Director, Ron Radford, pays homage to the pioneering curatorial research that wrote Cossington Smith into the canon of Australian modernism—one of the first women artists to earn a coveted spot. Perhaps Radford’s just praise of independent curatorial nous indicates a welcome reinvestment of resources into the National Gallery’s core business. Unfortunately, apart from fine catalogue essays by two old hands, Daniel Thomas himself and the author of Cossington Smith’s 1990 biography, Bruce James, along with one or two interesting in-focus pieces on specific artworks and a few gems... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline