JACKSON POLLOCK, THE BLUE POLES CONTROVERSY AND THE WHITLAM LABOR GOVERNMENT – TOM McILROY

It is now more than half a century since the Whitlam Government purchased the famous Jackson Pollock painting Blue Poles for what was considered a huge sum of money at the time causing much criticism of the Whitlam Government for wasting money at a time of high inflation and unemployment. The purchase, however, would stand the test of time for both Australia and the National Gallery. Tom McIlroy, a journalist with The Australian Financial Review, is the author of the newly released Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting That Changed a Nation and on Wednesday 5 March, Tom addressed The Sydney Institute to shed some light on the controversy and the men who stood behind it.

JACKSON POLLOCK, THE BLUE POLES CONTROVERSY AND THE WHITLAM LABOR GOVERNMENT

TOM McILROY

Thank you for the invitation to speak to the Sydney Institute. I was delighted to be asked by Gerard to join you tonight. I have read Gerard’s column every week for my entire career as a journalist, and commend to you his books, including on Cardinal Pell and his biography of my grandfather, B.A. Santamaria. His column must be one of the longest running in Australian newspapers.

I was on summer holidays at Mornington when we first spoke about an address to institute members, and Gerard remembered grandad writing at Mills Beach, something I can clearly picture from my childhood during long summer days in the beach box. More on Santamaria later – surprisingly enough for a speech about Blue Poles. Of course, Anne Henderson is a vital part of the Institute’s work and her writing, including her excellent biography of Joseph Lyons, represent important and compelling scholarship. Thank you for having me.

In an indirect way, the story of Blue Poles, the Jackson Pollock masterpiece purchased by the Whitlam government for Australia for $1.4 million in 1973, has its origins in the Coalition government led for a generation by Robert Menzies. While he was prime minister, Menzies moved to accelerate the relocation of public servants and government departments to Canberra. Despite the Griffin plan and decades of development, the city was still aspiring to be a true national capital and the Canberra project could have easily run out of political steam. Depression and war had stifled spending, but Robert Menzies was determined to finish the job. He established a National Capital Development Commission in 1957, and soon thereafter major departments including Defence, were relocated to Canberra.

Menzies also overcame some internal opposition over the cost of completing important elements of the original plan for the national capital, including demanding the construction of Lake Burley Griffin be funded. It was eventually completed in 1964 and ties the city’s central area together today. Under Menzies in 1955, the Department of the Interior had started to consider sites for a gallery to be built somewhere in Canberra’s central triangle. A public appeal was considered in the 1960s and later a gallery was included in a proposal for a national cultural centre for Capital Hill, as envisaged in the original Griffin plan but the site was later chosen for the new Parliament House.

Finally, the cabinet signed on to a formal plan for a gallery in May 1965. Sir Daryl Lindsay was chosen to lead a public inquiry about its design and scope, reporting to prime minister Harold Holt in March 1966. His report called for the creation of an institution to be known as the Australian National Gallery and for its contents to be called “The National Collection”. It was only in the 1990s, under director Betty Churcher, that the name was changed to the National Gallery of Australia, to bring the style in line with similar institutions overseas. The Lindsay report imagined a gallery a lot like the institution that exists today. Calling for a “broadly based” collection, it recommended historic works by two Australian painters of all schools be included, along with Indigenous art “of aesthetic merit” and art representing the high cultural achievements of Australia’s neighbours in Asia and the Pacific.

In April 1970, while Sir John Gorton was prime minister, the federal government approved a two-hectare site next to the lake for construction of a new national gallery. Gorton and his ministers were aware that the capital needed cultural institutions and other attractions if it was to shake off its reputation as a remote and sometimes lifeless place. The following year, Gorton’s successor as prime minister, William McMahon, used a speech in parliament to name the 40-year-old James Mollison as the acting director of what would become the Australian National Gallery.

The appointment was recognition of the fact that Mollison was already performing much of the role unofficially, working from within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. It was clear to many observers, even from a young age, that Mollison was quite brilliant. As I recount in the book, McMahon said years later that he picked Mollison on the advice of his wife, Lady Sonia McMahon, who raved about the Melbourne born Mollison’s vast knowledge of the art world and his personal charm. Sir William went further, saying publicly that he wanted Mollison to have the job permanently because of his unmatched ability and international outlook. “He’s very good looking, he dresses well,” McMahon said. “He never gets excited and starts to shriek. He’s not an extrovert, but he’s perfectly normal.” Imagine a prime minister speaking about a government appointee like that today.

So, it was the Coalition who put in the place the man who did more than anyone to secure the monumental painting for Australia. He had been the boss of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, but in Canberra wanted a gallery that he believed people would flock to see. Mollison was soon dubbed “the man with the golden wallet” and bragged that some days the morning mail contained offers for as much as $50 million worth of potential purchases.

Between 1964 and 1966 Mollison was a director of Gallery A, the celebrated commercial collection of non-figurative art and industrial design founded by Max Hutchinson, a trailblazer for avant-garde art in Australia. After he became a well-established figure in the public-arts world, friends quietly conceded that Mollison was “too good for the work” of trying to convince collectors to part with large sums of money at Gallery A. “He actively prevented customers from buying flashy paintings they really wanted,” one contact admitted to the Australian Magazine in 1976. “He would have lost his self respect and he knew the paintings would be unloaded anyway after a year of empty boredom.”

Once appointed to the gallery in Canberra, Mollison started a worldwide search for great art, promising a collection that would educate and entertain new audiences from across the country. He nominated Michelangelo as his favourite sculptor and Titian as his favourite painter, telling an American reporter that his favourite painting was the Renaissance great’s The Rape of Europa, in the collection of Boston’s famed Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He said he liked Brahms, the Rolling Stones and the TV soap opera Number 96. After four years working under Liberal prime ministers, Mollison, along with the rest of the country, rode the cultural wave that was the 1972 election.

Labor’s Gough Whitlam came to power in December. In the “It’s Time” election campaign, which would end nearly a quarter of a century of conservative governments in Australia and prompt a new kind of cultural maturity, Labor had committed to promoting excellence in the arts, to widen access and understanding of culture across the community, and to help develop and promote Australia’s cultural identity at home and abroad. By the time of Labor’s first federal budget, Mollison’s annual allocation for new acquisitions increased from $1.77 million to $4 million, giving the gallery wide scope to buy landmark works for the national collection. His policy for the early purchases was that they should “set the standard for future acquisitions for the modern period”.

In Canberra in 1972, the Liberal-Country Party Coalition government was badly unsettled under McMahon. In the six years since Sir Robert Menzies had retired, the government had lost one prime minister in a tragic drowning, then cycled through a caretaker leader and months of bitter leadership struggles, culminating in a party-room challenge that resulted in John Gorton being ousted and McMahon becoming Australia’s twentieth PM. Labor knew the December 1972 election was its best chance at ending twenty-three years of conservative government. McMahon was unpopular, propped up by unreliable partners and appeared out of step with the times on a near-daily basis.

Spectrum, a research firm that helped pioneer the use of focus group studies in Australian politics, had conducted detailed analysis of voter sentiment in the two years leading up to the poll. They found that whatever issue punters were asked to weigh in on, regardless of demographics, the overall sentiment was “it’s time for change”. After advice from executives at an advertising firm and detailed testing with more than 1100 people, Labor embraced the message as its slogan and rallying cry. “It’s Time” – a mobilising phrase designed to tap into underlying frustration and spur a drive for change – captured the moment so well it even appealed to Liberal voters. Whitlam himself said the slogan reflected the prevailing mood of the country with “rare accuracy”.

In a modern and exciting campaign pitch supported by newspaper proprietors, business figures, journalists and celebrities, Whitlam and Labor set the standard for Australian federal election campaigns for decades to come. On 2 December 1972, as the country looked to return a swing of 2.5 per cent to Labor, Whitlam turned to Freudenberg and said, “I think we’re in.” Labor won office with 52.7 per cent of the two-party preferred vote and 67 seats in the 125-member House of Representatives. It would be the first time since the Great Depression that Labor had formed a new government as the result of an electoral victory, and the first time Australians had seen the transfer of power between the two major parties since 1949.

The new government would prove to be a boon for the arts in Australia. Whitlam believed it was an area sorely in need of attention and stimulus, lamenting that many of the country’s best artists were living and working overseas. The national cultural institutions were “embryonic or non-existent” and nowhere was this clearer than in the country’s capital. Perhaps more than any other prime minister, Whitlam had a keen understanding of Canberra’s strengths and limitations as a national capital city. His father, Fred Whitlam, had been appointed assistant crown solicitor in 1927, signing his wife, Martha, the eleven-year-old Edward Gough Whitlam and his younger sister, Freda, up to a public-service migration to the newly established city.

The family lived close to Parliament House. Whitlam had accompanied his father to the Australian War Memorial site to see Governor-General Lord Stonehaven lay the foundation stone on Anzac Day, 1929. Some 40 years later, the historic memorial would be among the collections found to be in need of urgent attention and funding from the new Whitlam government. Whitlam would name Canberra as one of the three great influences on his life, along with the 1944 campaign for the so-called “14 powers” referendum and his war service in the Pacific.

Such was his commitment to the arts, Whitlam nominated widening access across the community and boosting the country’s cultural credentials as priorities in his It’s Time campaign speech. While the establishment of a national gallery had long been expected, Whitlam said his government would help establish an Australian identity through the arts. He received a rockstar reception at the Blacktown Civic Centre that night.

Once in power, Labor faced a deteriorating economy and the threat of rising inflation, a trend that had been underway since before McMahon’s election loss. Households were contending with rising prices and increased job insecurity, and the ability of the government to stem the inflation tide was limited. Oil-price shocks hit economies around the world, just as the unemployment rate in Australia started to rise. Averaging less than two per cent between 1966, when Holt replaced Menzies as prime minister, and Labor’s arrival in office in 1972, sustained increases saw the jobless rate reach six per cent in the period between 1973 and 1981. The number of long-term unemployed Australians went from about 4000 to 80,000 in the same period. Unemployment eventually peaked at six per cent, while inflation rose to eighteen per cent in 1975.

Among the bold economic moves of the new government’s first year was Whitlam’s decision to institute a 25 per cent cut to tariffs across the economy, in a bid to boost imports from overseas. The Australian Financial Review called the move “undeniably one of the most forthright and courageous economic decisions taken by any Australian government”. The recommendation of a specially established advisory committee, the tariff cut frustrated Treasury officials and angered manufacturers and farmers around the country. Author and academic Clem Lloyd described Whitlam’s parliamentary performance as having an “aura of borrowed time and consequent haste”.

It was in this environment that news comes in June 1973 that Max Hutchinson, James Mollison’s mate in New York, had found a Jackson Pollock painting for sale. “Blue Poles available at two million U.S. dollars with painting retained in U.S.A. for one year,” the master scout wrote in a cable to Canberra. “Painting is magnificent, condition same.” For months Hutchinson had tracked negotiations between Ben Heller and an unnamed museum for a possible sale. Mollison was determined to buy it.

A special meeting of the gallery acquisitions committee was called for the following week. Mollison told the group that no work of contemporary art of such importance had ever been offered to an Australian institution, that Blue Poles was Pollock’s magnum opus and that the sale would be on par with the arrival of the Henri Matisse masterpiece The Dance in Russia. Expert appraisals were commissioned, and a Metropolitan Museum of Art curator backed the purchase. “I think it could be said that Blue Poles is the most important postwar American painting still in private hands,” he wrote. “Its addition to your collection would make a trip to Australia mandatory for anyone interested in the total achievement of the art of the past thirty years.” A briefing paper was promptly drafted by Brendon Kelson, the secretary-manager of the gallery staff. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was told the committee believed there was little question that the government had a chance to buy one of the great paintings of the twentieth century, a work that was both monumental in conception and proportion.

Amid careful bureaucratic language, Kelson’s advice suddenly struck on something much larger than just a decision about the expenditure of public money. Whitlam was told his choice represented “a moment in Australian art history” and “the first chapter in the story of the Australian National Gallery”. Whether or not they decided to buy Blue Poles, “the fact that it was offered to Australia will be recorded in the literature of the art of the mid-twentieth century”. The committee acknowledged that the cost was high, but they told Whitlam that the dollars and cents should be secondary to the likely effect the decision to buy would have on art in Australia.

Mollison suggested any specific reference to the price should be kept secret. Revealing how much they had paid would risk making the gallery “a pacesetter” and could attach premium prices to any works considered for the national collection in future. Presciently, Mollison also warned that the revelation of the monumental price risked affecting the public’s view of Blue Poles before any consideration of the painting’s artistic importance. Another issue was that highly publicised and expensive works of art around the world had the bad habit of attracting “militant minorities or persons who are mentally disturbed”. The committee’s advice was for a speedy purchase of the painting, using budget rules known as the treasurer’s advance, and for a ministerial announcement to be withheld until the painting arrived in Australia.

Despite the political challenges he was facing and likely myriad other decisions he had to make that very day, Whitlam wrote it would see him dubbed “the Medici of the Monaro”. In a single line of instruction jotted at the bottom of the page, he was resolute. “Buy it, … and disclose the price.”

In August 1973, Australian Financial Review journalist Terry Ingram got wind of the Blue Poles purchase and worked hard to break the news on page one. He called the gallery press office on a Sunday afternoon, hoping his call would go unanswered until the next day’s newspaper was already being read on breakfast tables. Half a century later, Ingram, who went on to become a longtime Saleroom columnist for our paper, still refused to reveal his source. I tried a few different ways to get him to tell me, but like a true journalist he was only prepared to say that they were “not connected to the world of fine arts”. One colleague speculated to me this week that the transfer of money to New York would have required permission of the Reserve Bank of Australia, and this could have reached the Fin Review.

Whitlam was asked about Blue Poles at a press conference in the following weeks. “Pollock is one of the great figures in modern American art and this is regarded as his masterpiece,” he said, confirming he had known of the proposal to buy the artwork and signed off on the final decision. The prime minister insisted it was not his place to overrule the expert acquisitions committee’s recommendation, noting that once the long-delayed legislation establishing the gallery as a standalone government entity had passed parliament, it would have full authority to spend its budget independently and without ministerial approval. Whitlam ended his answer with a joke. “I know this is quite a contribution in overseas aid to redress the American adverse balance of payments,” he said. In question time, Country Party MPs asked about the purchase. “If Australian galleries were limited by the comprehension of the right honourable gentleman, they would be very bare and archaic indeed,” Whitlam said.

Historian Jenny Hocking says Whitlam enjoyed “the aggressive denunciations” that followed the Blue Poles purchase, which he viewed as  “welcome distraction from the anguish of the stymied program and the animosities he and his ministers were facing”. It is clear, looking back at the historical record, that Whitlam had a fluency and understanding of art that easily outstripped that of some of the critics of the purchase. More, he enjoyed the fight. He and Margaret famously put an image of Blue Poles on their Christmas card in 1973, a space usually reserved for a religious image. Margaret continued the tradition long after the couple left The Lodge.

Of course, history shows Whitlam lost control of the politics of the era and was sensationally booted from office in November 1975. As a quick aside, please let me tell you that this afternoon I had the call that any author dreads. Our host told me he had found a problem with the book. I am sure everyone here knows Gerard’s forensic knowledge of history has tripped up more than a few hacks over the years. Writing about the loans affair and the general deterioration of the government’s political standing, I write in the book that a Treasury official had been in regular contact with Malcolm Fraser about the behind-the-scenes drama playing out in the department in relation to the budget supply bills. The man used the code name “Mr Williams”. What I didn’t know until today was that Mr Williams was in fact a certain B A Santamaria.

I had wondered what my grandfather’s views of Blue Poles might have been. The Australian art critic Robert Hughes was among those who believed the purchase of Blue Poles helped contribute to the political chaos that led to the end of the Whitlam government. Hughes believed that claims the painting had been bought for a steal never washed with voters or the press, describing “the resulting hullabaloo” over the expenditure of public money as part of the broader view that Labor was reckless and irresponsible, with bold moves like the Loans affair too much of a departure from the political norms of Canberra to be allowed to continue. Jenny Hocking says debate about the price “fed into a sense of economic responsibility and waste expenditure”.

I have tried to focus on the politics of the era for this address today, but there is plenty of art history in the book as well. It covers defence of the purchase by Patrick White, the tabloid scandal after it was reported that Pollock had painted Blue Poles with two mates during a drunken binge, and many of the cultural products that find their foundation in the work. But I will end where the book starts. A couple of weeks before Blue Poles was due to be winched out the window of a 10th floor Manhattan apartment to begin a long journey to Australia, a journalist asked the emeritus director of Yale University’s art gallery, Andrew C Ritchie, how he would react to the news a Pollock painting had been sold for $2 million US. “I’d drop dead,” he said. Thank you for giving me the pleasure of addressing you tonight. It has been a real thrill for me, just as it was learning about this incredible period in Australian history.