VALE IAN NORTH AM (1945-2024)

Ian North AM, a widely esteemed artist, curator, academic and writer, sadly passed away on 14 May 2024 after a long illness. Ian had a special relationship with AAANZ. He was an inaugural member of the Art Association of Australia (1974) and as President (1997-99) and New Zealander, he reached across the ditch to bring his fellow New Zealanders into the fold. He rewrote the constitution and thus a rebranded Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) was born in 2000.

Ian North touched many as Curator of Paintings at the Art Gallery of South Australia (1971-1980) and Founding Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia (then the ANG) (1980-84); as an academic, Head of the South Australian School of Art and Professor of Visual Art (1984-2001), as Adjunct Professor of Art History at the University of Adelaide (2002-2024); as a photo-artist whose work is held in collections around the nation; and as a writer of many adventurous and scholarly texts, most notably his foray into neuro aesthetics, Visual Animals: Crossovers, Evolution and New Aesthetics which won the AAANZ book prize in 2008. He was awarded an Order of Australia (AM) in 2014. AAANZ members reflect below on Ian North’s many contributions.

Daniel Thomas: He was my best friend, by which I mean best at the art of friendship.  I loved his wit, his precision, and his sneakiness in a good way.  (One of his colleagues in management at the Art Gallery in Adelaide considered him ‘very good at plotting’.)  In his works of art I loved the multiple meanings, an aesthetics of inside out and upside down.

For his painting Daniel Thomas at Home in Northern Tasmania, 2004 (Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston) I posed on a G’Day Chair in a koala-print shirt to assert an Australian difference from what I felt was his New Zealand-ness. But strange ghostly shadows cast on the deck assert his belief that I appreciated disorderly otherness.

For his photograph Daniel Thomas, Henley Beach, Adelaide, 1987, I was wearing standard museum-director Italian and Japanese fashion but, relaxing after a formal engagement, he captured a look of mutual understanding and amusement. It had to become the frontispiece to my Recent Past: Writing Australian Art, 2020, selected by Hannah Fink & Steven Miller (Art Gallery of NSW / Thames & Hudson).

A huge panoramic two-image painted photograph by Ian fills a wall inside the Tasmanian home of mine that was built for old age near my birthplace.  His title Home and Away leads to ideas of England or Antarctica, Mont Saint Michel or icebergs, and faces a fireplace on my opposite wall.  Its general colour is yellow, a conscious echo of my fondness for paintings by Grace Cossington Smith, whose favourite colour was yellow.

I first encountered Ian when, as Curator of Paintings at the Art Gallery of South Australia, he escaped the limits of the job description to acquire photographs by Gilbert & George and to initiate a programme of contemporary projects that included a gallery room filled with a floor of uneasily navigated stones.

His home then was in Adelaide’s leafy Medindie, where first wife Therese O’Brien tended productive apricots and other garden pleasures. His final home, with wife Mirna Heruc, was in city-fringe Kent Town, where he converted an industrial building into a stylish modernist home with an enormous studio attached.

Ian knew the wider world, especially the United States, but also took care to know Australia well. We often went driving together. Though he described the Adelaide Hills as ‘sickeningly pretty’, he nevertheless appreciated local hero Hans Heysen’s landscapes, and provided them with fine scholarship in his publications.

Extended outback explorations included the 3,000 km from Darwin to Adelaide, which reinforced his feeling for endlessness and undistinguished plains, over which clouds were crucial.  Another, to Coopers Creek, of course took note of Burke & Wills’s 1860-61 attempt to traverse Australia and to perish.  However, we were more interested in the geography of the Innamincka Choke which is where permanent water from inland Queensland flood plains is gathered, and where we encountered dense fields of stones engraved with Aboriginal symbols.

I, and others, appreciated the excellence of Ian’s aesthetic judgement, the most important skill in an art museum curator. Fred Williams’s widow Lyn admired his insights, and a hot shot American curator stated that Ian’s selection of international works for the AGSA collection could not be bettered.

(This contribution is an edited version of a piece composed for Ian North’s funeral).

Joanna Mendelssohn: I met Ian on my first visit to Adelaide back in the early 1970s when I was researching Sydney Long’s art for what ended up being my first book. After showing me The Valley, still one of my favourite paintings, he took me to storage to see the works held there. What I remember from that time was his kindness towards a very junior colleague, and how he went out of his way to help me. Later, when my book The Life and Work of Sydney Long  was published he wrote a generous review for Art and Australia, but took an elegant swipe at the poor editing and shoddy production, noting that after deciding the scale of the book, the publishers ‘seem to have gone out to lunch’, an accurate description.

Ian had come from New Zealand to be a Curator of Paintings at the Art Gallery of South Australia. It was there that he devised the Link program, small exhibitions of contemporary art devised for South Australian audiences. But he also looked to the past. He was the first curator to fully examine Dorrit Black, collecting and exhibiting her art as well as writing the first monograph on her work.

Later he become the first Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia. He laid the foundations for their collection as well as mentoring the next generation of specialist curators.

Then he returned to Adelaide, to teach, and to photography. In their range of both subject matter and technical virtuosity, Ian’s photographs remind me of the man himself. At first sight they appear disarmingly placid, but on closer examination there are layers of complexity. In the 1990s, when I was the art critic for The Bulletin I would sometimes receive postcards from Ian, thanking me for writing on particular topics. This was appreciated as they were inevitably in response to articles that had received vocal criticism from other quarters. When Catherine Speck, Alison Inglis, Catherine De Lorenzo and I were researching our book Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening Our Eyes, we became aware of how much our profession, and Australian art as a whole, owes to Ian North.

Helen Ennis: As the inaugural Senior Curator of Photography at the Australian National Gallery, Ian developed a vision for the Photography Collection that had the full support of the Director James Mollison and enthusiastic endorsement of the Gallery Council. The aim, as articulated by Ian in policy documents and public statements during these halcyon days, was to build a comprehensive Australian collection and a representative international collection. An extremely generous budget enabled Ian to proceed with major acquisitions, especially in the areas of European modernist photography, contemporary American art photography, and Australian photography across the board. The role of Daniel Thomas, Head of Australian Art, in developing the collection and related activities must also be acknowledged – Daniel and Ian were very close friends and worked together exceptionally well as colleagues. Ian was intense, disciplined, thorough and dedicated to ensuring the highest professional standards were upheld at the Gallery. His five years heading the Department of Photography, with his junior staff Isobel Crombie, Martyn Jolly and Helen Ennis, saw rapid progress in building an outstanding photography collection, curating ambitious exhibitions that were displayed in the specialist photography galleries, and publishing a range of books, catalogues and room brochures. The dedication he brought to his public role as Senior Curator was replicated in his own private practice as a photographer; his tenure at the Gallery also saw the development of his much-admired Canberra suite.

Julie Ewington: Over the 50 years of our friendship, the one constant was Ian North’s curiosity: his insatiable interest in art and how to think about it. When we met in 1974, he was one of this country’s most innovative curators, challenging audiences by presenting experimental contemporary art within the elegant collection galleries of the Art Gallery of South Australia. (Aleks Danko had counselled me to seek Ian out in Adelaide.) In 2022, when he was already bedridden, Ian wanted to hear what was happening in art, beyond the confines of his room; he listened avidly to my account of Hetti Perkins’s wonderful Ceremony, the 4^th National Indigenous Art Triennial. The bright flame of that passionate love for art, and what it meant, and how it was travelling at that minute, accompanied Ian throughout his long productive life. And Ian was a great friend, asking about current projects, always up for ‘a natter’, as he called those long conversations, whether in person or over the ‘phone.

The source of that lifelong wonder was Ian’s practice as an artist, the drive to look, and through looking to see, and understand. Ian North came to museum work in the late 1960s at a time when in Aotearoa New Zealand, and in Australia, curators, critics, even directors, were for the most part shaped as artists, rather than as historians or commentators. The necessary self-direction of that formation, held to for the rest of his life, sustained all Ian’s work: as an artist, of course, but also in making museum collections and exhibitions, as head of the South Australian School of Art, on boards and associations, as a writer, as a mentor, indeed wherever he turned that unremitting attentiveness. This is a valuable imperative, this willingness to follow one’s own ideas and impulses; in the right hands, like Ian’s, it will cut through disciplinary constraint and bureaucratic resistance. Because he started life as an artist, Ian North’s work is indelibly marked with an artist’s idiosyncrasy, even wilfulness. The applied purposefulness of that sense of joyful exploration is his enduring legacy.

Maria Zagala: At the age of twelve Ian North discovered the work of J.M.W. Turner at his local library in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. This encounter had a profound impact on him, opening what he described as a ‘portal’ that altered his perception of art, nature and the quality of light. He pursed painting and drawing in his teenage years, and at seventeen began to photograph the local streets, using his small snaps as an aid, hoping to integrate more detail into his paintings. These early experiments were a blueprint for his late investigations, which explored the complexity of the relationship between photography and painting – distinct mediums with their own histories.

In his mid-twenties, just as he began to gain national recognition for his paintings, North was appointed Director of the Palmerston North Art Gallery. Concerned about the perception of conflict of interest, he stopped exhibiting over the next fifteen years while he pursed a museum career in Adelaide and Canberra. North continued, however, to make work in private, initially 35 mm black-and-white photographs of streetscapes of Adelaide suburbia and the sparsely populated towns on the Fleurieu Peninsula – then in 1979 switching to colour photography. He took over two thousand photographs of Canberra, selecting twenty-four to form the Canberra Suite, 1980-83. These photographs confounded the few people he shared them with at the time, and were not exhibited until 2005, when a younger generation of curators responded to North’s project.

At the height of his museum career North surprised many by deciding to become an artist – travelling in 1985 on a Fullbright scholarship to undertake a studio-based Masters at the University of New Mexico. His thesis addressed the issue of representation of landscape in a settler society, in the United States, and on his return to Australia, in his local context. Over the next three decades North created a rich and diverse body of work including paintings and drawings: his most well-known works that grappled with his engagement with the Australian landscape as a white settler Pseudo Panorama series, 1985-88 and Home & Away, 1992. In his last decade he made work that responded to his voyage to Antarctica in 2006, a series of photographs overdrawn with charcoal East Antarctica 1915. North’s final, magisterial works returned to his beginnings. The Fleurieu series, 2008-15. North’s works are held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Charles Green: Ian was a magnificent travel companion, even if he was often late because he obdurately paid close and prolonged attention to his surroundings along the way. We shared two separate, deeply memorable journeys with him, fieldwork expeditions to take photographs: the first, exploring the western side of the Grampians in western Victoria, visiting rock art sites, constantly stopping beside unmade roads to scout for the best angles and light conditions for photographs; the second to the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia, an intense regime of photographing, drawing on Ian’s encyclopaedic, generous and deeply informed knowledge of White artists’ early twentieth century visits to paint and photograph the Flinders.

By 2001, Ian North had arrived at the elements that we associate with his mature art. First, he was making photographs with obdurately pre-digital specialist cameras – a Plaubel Makina 67 and a Hasselblad XPAN, both of which use film big enough to permit enlargements with great detail and delicate colour. Second, whether in photographs or paintings or prints he created panoramic views within which illusions nestled in great detail and deep focus. Third, these illusions – historical, spatial, metaphoric – were neither uncanny nor disjunctive, and therefore neither modern nor postmodern, although decidedly contemporary. Fourth, they were the revelation of something that he perceived as already there and immanent, which is to say that through the artifice of pictorial realism in photography he convinced us that immanence is true and present. And fifth, North’s combination of methods and pictorial desires (most often manifested in painterly colour photographs and sometimes in paint) inevitably suggested the passage of time and the pressure of memory on valleys, earth, sky and inner-city suburbs. North pinpointed the elaborate interaction between nature and culture, combining and constructing effects of light and nested arrangements of forms so that they precisely slotted together and then meandered deep into his views.

Two public dimensions underpinned North’s essays. First, his writing was part of the landscape of ecological and political consciousness surrounding the issue of care for the environment. Second, he was deeply respectful of Aboriginal people’s prior occupation of the land, although he was neither a naïve primitivist nor a cross-cultural sophist, and he was one of a tiny group of Australian artists who understood that if contemporary artists of his generation were to see nature as an extension of culture – as art theory pushed them to do – then it followed that these White artists would seek to explain in words, as well as through art, the complex ethical relationship they had to now negotiate with both the natural world and Aboriginal people, both experiences grounded in and betrayed by White settler history.

Claire Roberts: It was after my move to Adelaide in 2012 that I really had a chance to get to know Ian North. We became good friends through our intersecting interests in art, photography and curatorship. Ian generously launched my book Photography and China (2012) as part of the program of Cultural talks organised by Mirna Heruc, then Manager of the Art & Heritage Collections unit at the University of Adelaide, and Ian’s wife. Ian’s deep knowledge of photography and image making made a seemingly arcane subject immediately interesting and accessible.

Ian was one of those rare people who, in treading the earth lightly, make a tremendous difference to the world around them. His intellect, vision and generosity of spirit were remarkable. I hold Ian in the highest regard as an artist, photographer, curator and writer. His legacy is profound and will endure. I cherish our conversations and the memory of the sparkle in his eyes when conversation was no longer possible. Ian was a softly spoken, gentle man with a wry sense of humour. The art world, especially here in Australia and in Aotearoa New Zealand, has lost one of its best. Ian is one step ahead of us, as he always was. He had a photograph of a red flowering pōhutukawa tree hanging on the wall at home. That red flowering tree, a bridge to the spirit world, will always remind me of him.

Pedro de Almeida: Ian was the first person who subtly and so generously conferred a kind of mentorship on me as a young(er) curator and writer. More than anything, I had an immense affection for his dry wit and expansive intellect that went far beyond this thing called art — I think we conversed more about poetry than pictures. As a pre-eminent Professor Emeritus, he was also expressly supportive of my allergy to conforming to tertiary straitjackets as a two-time post-grad drop-out. Ian offered me sage counsel when I was particularly low after my divorce and gave me hope for the future. Unlike myself, he demonstrated a specific kind of reserve and diplomacy common to some Kiwis of his generation, but one that was paradoxically more revealing by his judicious choice of words. One only has to read his back catalogue of seminal writing to understand that. I will treasure the road trip we once embarked on — just two blokes in a 4WD — down the Fleurieu Peninsula to experience the country on which Ian created some of his early works, still majestic and alien to his senses after four decades, and especially so to mine as an immigrant to this country raised in Sydney. I’m grateful for his friendship.

 

Catherine Speck; Daniel Thomas; Joanna Mendelssohn;  Helen Ennis, Julie Ewington, Maria Zagala, Charles Green, Claire Roberts and Pedro de Almeida