It's good to see more of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's permanent collection on show again. It's presented on the ground floor in an exhibition Belonging.
I understand it was curated by Aaron Kreisler and Lauren Gutsell, curator and assistant curator respectively at the gallery.
That information isn't available from the wall panels and was elicited by inquiry from the attending staff. It isn't on the gallery's website either, or not anywhere your columnist could find it. In fact, unless I'm mistaken, the website doesn't mention any staff at all.
By contrast, the Christchurch Art Gallery's site has names, pictures and details of many staff and volunteers. One appreciates providing these things takes time but even a simple list of names and functions would be useful and for exhibitions, statements about who curated what.
This isn't intended as a beat up but the hanging is a bit sparse and some would say the choices are eclectic. The website has the curators' explanation.
Essentially, their aim was to use the works to explore how people's identity is determined by their membership of various groups, places of residence and even their homes with their personal effects.
I suppose that's fair enough, although it seems a little abstruse to be likely to appeal to many people. It is true many people like to see the gallery's familiar and frequently excellent works which are part of their experience of Dunedin.
It gives them both pleasure and pride in the city. The show will partly do that, but a bit thinly and with some curious juxtapositions that really only demonstrate the immense variety of what we call ''art''.
Nor is there a lot of what may be called art history. The works chiefly have identification labels only, although there are wall panels in each room explaining the theme for that space. The one in the Lady Marie Skeggs gallery is called ''grounded''.
It's based on the notion we don't know who we are unless we know where we are. We are informed the where doesn't have to be a geographical location but perhaps a psychological or ideological ''space''. This true but there's not much to explain how the selected works are doing these things.
No matter, Monet's La Debacle and Claude Lorrain's Landscape with Hagar and the Angel are both here and that's a large reward in itself.
Both were given to the gallery in 1982 by Mary, Dora and Esmond de Beer and were highlights of its most remarkable ever gift of works.
They will still be its most valuable works in money terms and both are substantial essays by artists of the first rank. It still seems remarkable we have them.
With his fellow countryman the French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Claude Lorrain (1604/5-1682) has been considered the inventor of landscape painting in the European tradition.
Landscape had appeared as background in many earlier paintings but was not really the principal subject, as it is here.
The work's title and its figures at right are a reference to the story in Chapter 16 of Genesis in the Bible about a meeting between an angel and Hagar, who was a maid to Sarah, the wife of Abraham.
Hagar had a child by Abraham and fled into the desert, where the angel appeared. But the landscape we see is not a desert and the reference to Hagar and the angel is just a nod to tradition.
There is lush grassy land in the foreground, a stately classical ruin at right, a rustic with a herd of animals and a castle on a hill at mid-left. In the distance there is a sunlit lake with a palace and distant hills, all under billowing clouds magnificently tinged with blue and gold.
This is probably not any particular place in the real world, though it is like the Campagna, near Rome, where Claude spent most of his career. It is an ideal setting for a better life than any probably realisable on earth.
It was painted in 1654 when the artist was in his maturity. He kept a book of drawings, the Liber Veritatis, as a record of his production and as proof against imitations.
This corresponds to drawing 133. There is another Claude with the same title in the National Gallery in London. It has a different format and the corresponding drawing in the Liber is 109.
The Dunedin painting was commissioned by Agostino Bagiano (or Baggiano) and much of its ownership history is known. It belonged in 1935 to an Ernest Innes, whose attempts to sell it were blocked by a ring of London dealers.
Kenneth Clark recognised its authenticity and bought it for Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, from whom the de Beers acquired it. We are lucky they did and decided to give it to the gallery.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
