The Sydney couple who gifted the city a rock and polished metal sculpture

3 weeks ago 3

When James Brownlow and partner Doug Small gifted their estate to the Art Gallery of NSW they did so on the condition that their intentions not be publicised until after their deaths.

Small died in 2012, followed by Brownlow in 2021, with their friend and neighbour, Joy Wennerbom, subsequently working with Brownlow and Small’s executor and the gallery to find a work that would speak to their love of architecture, landscape design and minimalist Asian art.

They settled on a mirror polished metal and rock sculpture commissioned from Korean artist Lee Ufan, craned in last week to sit in the garden between the sandstone Walter Liberty Vernon building and the new contemporary art campus.

Joy Wennerbom with the Lee Urfan installation in its new home between the old and new art gallery buildings.

“They were very low-key people,” Wennerbom, 90, remembers of the couple who lived two doors away.

Brownlow was an architect, and very much like a brother to her, inviting her and husband John to dinner parties, and then taking her to performances of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Small was the nephew of Sir William McKell, a former Labor Premier who became Governor General, and was a director of Grace Bros department stores. They died without children.

“Part of the fun of being with them, was it was all about today, the present,” Wennerbom remembers.

Lee’s Relatum – dialogue will be the couple’s lasting legacy, the first work by Lee to enter the gallery’s collection of minimalist art, along with Lee’s painting Response 2023. Ufan mapped the new commission with timber and chalk on the floor of the Art Gallery of NSW’s loading dock while in Sydney last year for his solo exhibition.

Two granite boulders have been placed either side of two double-sided polished steel plates which on one side reflects the new building and on the other the historic sandstone building. The arrangement is intended to be a conversation connecting nature with industrial society.

Brownlow and Small were themselves veteran travellers to Asia who shared an appreciation of fine design and were collectors of Asian art.

“Mr Lee has also this very refined minimalist, understated aesthetic that’s really sensitive to the environment,” says Melanie Eastburn, senior curator of Asian art at the Art Gallery.

“He is an incredibly important artist, I would say, one of the most important living artists anywhere in the world. For a collection like the gallery’s, which has this great emphasis on minimalism and also Asian art, the one thing that was really missing was Mr Lee. Without the bequest, we would not have been able to commission this sculpture.”

As the art gallery cuts jobs to address a $7.5 million budget shortfall, bequests are taking on larger importance for the institution to add to its collections, and expand its programs, particularly as it receives no government funding for acquisitions. New Zealand philanthropist Michael Horton and his late wife, Dame Rosie Horton, recently donated the largest-ever gift of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artworks – 193 pieces collected over 23 years.

The Wendy and Arkie Whiteley Bequest will one day see the gallery receive nearly 2,000 Brett Whiteley artworks valued at over $100 million. It’s regarded as one of the most significant cultural gifts in the Art Gallery of NSW’s 154-year history.

The gallery says it has recorded a significant increase in pledges, either to the foundation’s Major Acquisition Fund, the Art Gallery Trust, or through gifts of artwork, with some  $40 million bequests disclosed.

The average bequest is about $100,000, but several pledges involve substantial portions or entire estates.

As gallery patron for more than two decades, Wennerbom said she was more than pleased to learn that the proceeds of her friends’ estate were to come to the gallery.

“If I had lots of money, I would too,” she says. “I have grandchildren and other things at the moment, but I think it is a good thing to do.”

Asked what the couple would have made of their legacy, she said: “Jim wouldn’t have said much. Doug would have been wholeheartedly pleased.”

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