Design and Art Australia Online

John Stringer’s creative intelligence was the guiding spirit behind The Field of 1968. In the 1970s and 80s he created innovative exhibitions in New York, before moving to Perth where his creative intelligence was responsible for the new directions of the Kerry Stokes collection.

John Norris Stringer was born in Melbourne on 2 October 1937, the son of Walter Stringer, a banker, and his wife Eva. His father was an an enthusiastic photographer and his interest in the arts was encouraged. After leaving school he first enrolled in Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, and later completed a Diploma in Art at RMIT.
His passion for art led to his first appointment in 1957 as Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria, under the formidable Dr Ursula Hoff. Although he enjoyed drilling down into the possible layers of meaning in individual works of art, Stringer’s talent was always towards display, and in time a staff restructure saw him appointed Exhibitions Officer.
In 1968 he collaborated with Brian Finemore to curate The Field, the innovative exhibition of contemporary Australian art that opened the new National Gallery of Victoria building in St Kilda Road. The year before MoMA had brought the travelling exhibition Two Decades of American Painting to Australia. Waldo Rasmussen, MoMA’s International program director had been so impressed by the young Stringer that he arranged for him to go to New York as assistant program director.Here he arranged for exhibitions to travel to Europe, Latin America and Australasia. In 1975, Stringer oversaw MoMA’s blockbuster _Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse _ when it travelled to Sydney and Melbourne.
In 1976 he returned to Australia to head the Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation, which brought a blockbuster exhibition of Chinese art, and his own initiative– El Dorado: Colombian Gold. This was less financially successful than China, although the cognoscenti enjoyed the pun of the exhibition’s title and the beauty of the finely crafted gold sculptures. Stringer returned to New York in 1978 as an independent curator. His marriage to June Webb was over, but he remained close to his children – his daughter Chloe and the twins Phoebe and Simon. He curated Latin American exhibitions for a gallery in Brooklyn,often working closely with his lover, the Columbian art critic Eduardo Serrano. He also showed Melbourne minimalist Robert Hunter and Sydney funk jeweller Peter Tully. For almost a decade he also ran visual arts at David Rockefeller’s project of Centre for Inter-American Relations.
In 1988, when Betty Churcher offered him the position of curator at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, he was concerned both about how to keep close to his children, but also Serrano. Daniel Thomas later wrote that 'the long-distance relationship inevitably ran its course.’ In 1992 Betty Churcher moved to the National Gallery of Australia, and his curatorial role became more bound by administrative duties, which took Stringer away from art. He was saved when Kerry Stokes asked him if he would like to be curator of his personal collection. This new position gave him unprecedented freedon to promote West Australian art in both an international and national context.
As well as great European and American work, Stringer was responsible for many innovative Australian and new Zealand works entering the Stokes collection. These included Howard Taylor, Juan Davila’s Stupid as a Painter John Brack,Michael Parekowhai, and Stuart Elliott.
His last exhibition, Cross Currents, curated for Stokes and Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, was still on view when he died.
Daniel Thomas, in his obituary of Stringer wrote that as he approached his 70th birthday Stringer was 'whippet-thin and fit, cool and wonderfully considerate, and engaged with the wonders of the natural world as well as new international art’. His daughter Chloe was to be married, and when he failed to turn up for wedding photographs, his former wife went to look for him and found him dead from a sudden heart attack, dressed for the occasion in Versace.

Writers:

Date written:

2011

Last updated:

2011