KEY POINTS:
Brisbane has Picasso and the touring Sidney Nolan show. Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales will host a major Monet exhibition, in tandem with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in October.
The Monet show will travel on to Te Papa in Wellington next February. And Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria opens its lavish Art Deco 1910-39 next week, an exhibition organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
How enviable. How lucky. In Auckland, we will not see a major international art exhibition until 2012. As Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines puts it, we are in "a little bit of a drought".
The reason, of course, is that the gallery is closed for renovations, which won't be completed until late 2010 or early 2011. But if you noticed that there has been a slowing of international blockbuster shows at the gallery since the beginning of the new millennium, you are right. The last international show was Tate Britain's Art of the 60s, which closed in July 2006.
To get the works into the gallery, staff had to unpack 16 huge crates in the loading bay because the goods lift was too small to get them upstairs. On previous occasions, crates and large objects, like one of the horses for the 2003 Two Emperors show, had to be loaded by crane over the first-level deck and brought in through the cafe.
Aside from the inadequacies of the gallery's infrastructure, Saines points out that the costs of freighting, shipping and insurance have risen "astronomically" since the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Touring shows which might previously have gone to three centres in Australia, then on to New Zealand, are now more likely to go to Australia only, because the budget won't stretch to a fourth staging.
The Australian galleries are also in the fortunate position of receiving financial support from their state and federal governments, as well as corporations such as Queensland Events and Melbourne Events, which assisted the Great Impressionists exhibition at the new National Gallery of Victoria when it opened four years ago.
Shows of that scale cost $4-6 million to stage. Auckland Art Gallery's annual operating grant is $6.5 million.
When the AAG reopens, Saines and his team will reinstate the gallery's collection "in a very significant manner" for the first six months. Then the drought will end with the first of three major international projects the team is working on at present.
As well, the AAG Foundation, presently engaged in a capital campaign to help fund the renovations, will move in a new direction - the development of an endowment fund to bankroll and underwrite "much more significant projects than we could otherwise do", says Saines.
In the meantime, small projects at the 360sq m New Gallery over the road will just have to keep us going.
