Design and Art Australia Online

Brian Finemore, the first curator of Australian art, was born on 8 October 1925 in South Yarra. His old friend, Stephen Murray-Smith, wrote that his birthplace “was about as far from the centre of Melbourne as he ever cared to wander”. He lived his entire life either in the city or close to it. In his later years when he moved to a flat at East Melbourne he proclaimed: “Imagine a man of my age and position being forced to live in the suburbs!”
He attended school at St Patrick’s College in East Melbourne, and in 1948 became one of the first undergraduate students to enrol in Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. His initial years at university saw him more engaged with social life and the performing arts than study and he did not graduate until 1959. His final results were however sufficiently distinguished to gain him an appointment to the National Gallery of Victoria. He was initially appointed Assistant Curator of Australian Art, but the position was soon changed to a full curatorship as he easily extended his role to collecting, exhibiting and advocating for Australian art. By the time of his death Finemore had been personally responsible for the acquisition of over a third of the works in the Australian collection of the Gallery. He took an essentially provincial Victorian collection and gave it a national focus. On occasion he would pay for his own research travel to Sydney so that he could gain a national perspective. When the gallery was not prepared to pay exhibiting artists a stipend, he did on occasion pay them out of his own salary. Finemore also focussed attention on the quality of Australia’s colonial art, especially the work of Eugene von Guerard and S. T. Gill. He was also very involved in the art of his own time. Two of his later exhibitions, The Field (1968) and Object and Idea (1973, effectively defined the art of their time. His other great contribution was as a mentor, as he happily shared his knowledge and his insights with younger colleagues.
Finemore was however very much a man of his generation, and shared the “progressive” distaste for the art of Albert Namatjira, perhaps because those who most intensely championed Namatjira’s work came from the suburbs, and he loathed the suburbs.
His friend and colleague, Gordon Thomson, called Brian Finemore “the last of the boulevardiers”, and he relished the cosmopolitan style.
Brian Finemore was murdered at his flat on 23 October 1975. Two years after his death the National Gallery of Victoria published a collection of his writing on art, under the title Freedom from Prejudice.

Writers:

Joanna Mendelssohn

Date written:

2012

Last updated:

2012