Tom Roberts: 'End to a career - an old scrub-cutter'

Abstract

Art history and exhibition making cannot escape time. It is a professional convention that every generation adjusts the canon, with individual artists reinterpreted in accordance with succeeding tastes and preoccupations. When I curated John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2003, it was almost thirty years after John McPhee’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery exhibition of 1974, and the show re-framed the artist’s work through an extended focus on his British career and a postcolonial emphasis on his imperial landscape template. When Ruth Pullin curated Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 2011, it was more than thirty years after Candice Bruce’s Australian Gallery Directors’ Council exhibition of 1980, and the show downplayed the previous exhibition’s stress on German Romanticism, highlighting instead the twin environmental-scientific influences of the Düsseldorf Academy and Humboldtian ecology