User:Jamesmcardle/Eric Westbrook

Eric Westbrook (1915 – 5 November 2005)

Westbrook was born in Peckham, south-east London, his father a prosperous textile merchant who supported his son’s his artistic talent by sending him to Alleyn's, a private school attached to the prestigious Dulwich College and Picture Gallery. Subsequently he enrolled at the Westminster School of Art, supporting his studies by working in a telephone exchange.

He traveled to Paris in 1934, aged 19, to study the city’s modernist art.

Though Westbrook was rejected for active war service, he was co-opted into army education and met his first wife, Ingrid Nystrom, a domestic science teacher.

In 1946 he became director of Yorkshire's Wakefield Gallery. He was 31 and Britain's youngest art gallery director.

In 1948 Sir Kenneth Clark appointed him the chief curator for the British Council, displaying and promoting British art throughout Europe.

In 1952 he accepted the position of Director of the Auckland Art Gallery and in four years significantly increased attendances with exhibitions from around the world.

The National Gallery of Victoria which was then housed with the Melbourne public library and museum had lately become the beneficiary of the generous Felton Bequest. Thus was the Gallery entering a period of prosperity and opportunity when in 1956 Westbrook took up the directorship and quickly secured the Everard Studley Miller Bequest which funded the collection of portraits. Westbrook, then 41 announced his intention of establishing "the greatest art gallery in the southern hemisphere".

In 1967 he staged the last major exhibition to be held in the Swanston Street building. ‘Two Decades of American Art’ controversially shifted Melbourne’s devotion to the artworlds of London and Paris to focus on the New York School. Eric Westbrook encouraged chair of the NGV Women’s Association, Elisabeth Summons, to raise donations to keep one of the works, Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘Cape (Provincetown)’ 1964, in Melbourne. He worked ceaselessly through the 1960’s to bring to fruition the project for a new building in St Kilda Rd, collaborating with architect Sir Roy Grounds.

Though his English origins made artists suspicious that he might be reactionary, Establishment figures, including the previous NGV director (1945-56), conservative Sir Daryl Lindsay, on the other hand, were shocked when he mounted a large retrospective of the oeuvre of the social realist painter Noel Counihan in 1973. Staff and trustees protested that Counihan’s work was insufficiently `modern’ (he was then a mature artist whose work had been ignored for the collection throughout his career) or that its socialist politics might damage the reputation of the Gallery. Westbrook asked Professor (Sir) Joseph Burke, whose opinion carried weight with most trustees, to open the exhibition. "They thought of me as a communist.", he is reported to have said. Professor Bernard Smith and his anti-abstractionist ‘Antipodeans group’ followers were equally horrified when Westbrook held a major exhibition of the work of his exhibitions officer, Len French.

When in 1959 Victorian Premier Sir Henry Bolte approved the construction of the new gallery on St Kilda Road, Westbrook worked tirelessly, visiting 122 art institutions across the world with the architect Sir Roy Grounds. He and Ingrid divorced.

In 1964, he married the abstract painter Dawn Sime. In 1966 they were both awarded Carnegie fellowships to study and lecture in the US.

Sir Roy Grounds vision for the building, an Italian Renaissance-inspired palazzo type with geometric plan and enfiladed salons, even in its planning stage, polarized opinion. Grounds’ architectural partnership with Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd ended in 1962 due to their differences about the building and Westbrook fell out with the art patron John Reed of Heide, who condemned the building. Architecture in Australia’s NGV coverage after its completion in 1968 included two critiques that gave it a very mixed reception, but popular opinion was overwhelmingly supportive. On the opening day 60,000 people crammed into the new building - more than 2000 people in the first hour, and in 1972 Westbrook boasted of gallery visitors of 1 million every year since.

Westbrook retired from the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975 and was appointed by Premier Rupert Hamer to lead his newly established Victorian Ministry for the Arts until 1980 when he retired. In this influential position he conceived and supported a one-year arts festival in 1975 which became the basis for the continuing Melbourne Arts Festival, he established the Victorian Tapestry Workshop (1976), and brought art to the streets of Melbourne in 1979 by commissioning artists to paint sixteen trams.

Westbrook and Sime retired to historic Houghton Park house on a hill overlooking Castlemaine. Out of their common passion for art, in the late 80s they established the Dawn and Eric Westbrook Drawing Prize, then in 1990 they held a joint exhibition at the Castlemaine Gallery.

Sime died in 2001. Westbrook broke his hip in March 2005 and since then had been in Castlemaine Hospital, where he died, in November 2005, of pneumonia.

He is survived by his daughter Charlotte and grandchildren Sophie and Henry.

Melbourne's legacy from Eric Westbrook is the Arts Centre theatres and concert halls, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Victorian College of the Arts housed in its grounds. In 2006 the incumbent NGV director Gerard Vaughan praised Westbrook's directorship: "In so many ways we look upon Eric as having established the basis for the modern face of the NGV ... The NGV's standing in the community and the affection it evokes was further enhanced during that time."