National Art Gallery and Museum for New Zealand

Abstract

AT the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone of a National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum for New Zealand, at Wellington, on April 14, Lord Bledisloe, Governor-General of New Zealand, gave an inspiring address on the proper functions of such an institution. This has just been published in pamphlet form with the title “The Proper Function and Scope of a National Art Gallery and Museum”. “A public museum … should not be a mausoleum of dead specimens, the resort only of monastic specialists or interested collectors, but a vitalising power-house radiating currents of intellectual energy and calling forth latent genius in all classes of the community”. The difficulty is to know how best to do it. Lord Bledisloe suggests many possibilities: popular exhibits, the encouragement of school children, travelling collections to country districts, special exhibits relating to sanitation, hygiene, child-welfare or town-planning, a comprehensive department illustrative of British seafaring life from the earliest times, and so on. He summarises with insight the values of an orderly ethnographic collectionâ the scientific study of early civilisations, the promotion of a more sympathetic understanding of subject races, the provision of useful equipment to prospective Colonial administrators and pioneers, and the stimulation of trade by suggesting new ideas both to importers and exporters. On the museum side and on the art gallery side he warns curators and administrators over and over again against the danger of accepting gifts too readily, and of accepting gifts with conditions. He sees in the foundation of the new institute a landmark in the definite and vigorous intellectual and spiritual progress of all classes and both races of people in the Dominion.