A regional romance of the storming of the art museum: Cultural contradictions of The Lionel Lindsay Art Gallery and Library

Abstract

Abstract This article examines cultural contradictions of a regional Australiana collection, namely The Lionel Lindsay Art Gallery and Library (Lindsay Collection). This collection was established in Toowoomba by W. R. F. Bolton (1905–73), opened by Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1959 and rehoused at Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery in the mid-1990s. Sir Lionel Lindsay (1874–1961) was, among many other identities, an artist, critic and tastemaker who condemned ‘the mob invasion of Art’ and disseminated a catastrophist cultural politics. For Lindsay, the collection named in his honour was a microcosm of ‘old traditional Australia’, before the nation and the art museum were stormed by ‘mass’ culture. The vanguard of that storming was modernism, which he viewed as a manifestation of mass-cultural fashion and sensationalism. Lindsay himself, however, had been a sensationalist newspaper illustrator and fashionable commercial artist from the 1890s to the 1920s; examples of his work for mass cultural forms are held in the collection. Drawing on museological lemmas by Quiccheberg and Bataille, and on Frankfurt School theses, this article presents a critical overview of contradictory cultural drives and vectors integral to the Lindsay Collection’s formation in the 1950s. Cultural contradictions of the collection are analysed not as idiosyncrasies of Lindsay and Bolton’s collecting praxes, but as symptomatic of the condition of cultural heritage in commodity society.