Save the McDougall Campaign - Press Release

The Christchurch City Council is finally expected soon to consider the future of the city’s old public art gallery – the beautiful neo classical Robert McDougall Art Gallery in the Botanic Gardens.

It was closed in 2002 when the city’s new Christchurch Art Gallery opened the following year and it was decided at the time to lease it to the Canterbury Museum for 50 years to be used by them as a museum. However no lease was ever signed and it was only used by them intermittently on a few occasions for temporary visiting exhibitions until it was closed in 2011 after the earthquakes. It has not been used since despite not being damaged in the earthquakes because it now has to be earthquake strengthened to meet the new building code before it can be re-opened to the public. But the strengthening work has been put down the bottom of the list and is not scheduled in the Long Term Plan to be completed until 2024 at an estimated cost of $ 12.7 M by which time it would have been virtually unused for 22 years!

The McDougall was gifted to the citizens of Christchurch in 1928 by Robert Ewing McDougall. It was the largest gift ever given to the city and his grandson Tim Seay is disgusted at the way successive councils since 2002 have treated this category one heritage building. He is campaigning to break the impasse over its future and persuade the present Council to retain it for its own city art collection in accordance with the terms of his grandfather’s gift. He wants it run for this purpose as an adjunct gallery to the new Christchurch Art Gallery which is what he says every other city in the world has done with their old art galleries with the exception of Wellington.

But unlike every other city in the world the staff at the Christchurch Art Gallery don’t want anything to do with the McDougall while Canterbury Museum want to use it for anything from their extensive collections. And Tim Seay says this has created an absolutely crazy situation.

He says the first thing the present Council should decide is to honour the terms of his grandfather’s gift which was for a public art gallery for the city’s art collection which was itself established when the gallery opened in 1932 by gifts of works from the Canterbury Society of Arts, the Jamieson family, Canterbury College and some other private donors. The second thing they should decide is that the gallery should be used for the purposes for which it was designed – namely as a two dimensional art gallery and not as a museum. He says if only they can accept these two conditions for its future use everything will fall into place. After all, this is what the gallery’s Conservation Plan recommends for its future use and the Council should comply with this.

How the Long South Gallery of the McDougall looked on opening day in 1932. Tim Seay says it is obviously an art gallery not a museum.

The issue then becomes what paintings should be displayed in the gallery. Being a neo classical gallery it is obviously most suited to display traditional art - historical paintings and being a public art gallery these must be of a public art gallery standard.

The McDougall can display at any one time around 150 paintings and has the capacity in its underground storage rooms to store a further 800 paintings so on opening almost 1000 paintings and works on paper could be transferred to it. So where can these paintings come from?

It is only the city’s collection at the Christchurch Art Gallery that is big enough to supply these works. It has 691 oil paintings, 382 watercolours, 230 drawings and 30 sculptural works in its historical pre 1970 collection. Of the 691 oil paintings no more than 150 are any longer displayed at all on an intermittent basis with only 50 displayed at any one time. The remaining 550 with an estimated value of $ 15 M remain in permanent storage. They have not been seen by the public for years and will never be seen again unless the McDougall is retained by the Council for this purpose. And yet around half of these works were donated to the city by people on the understanding they would be regularly displayed and the other half purchased by ratepayers and from other bequests.

This situation has come about because the Christchurch Art Gallery was only built to half the size required for the needs of the city’s collection over the 50 year life of the building. And as a result it can now only display 3.7% of the collection at any one time compared with the national average for all local authority owned galleries of 7%. It simply hasn’t the space to adequately display the collection as well as all its temporary exhibitions of modern art. And it is already short of storage space for paintings so the removal of a large number of the historical paintings to the McDougall will solve its storage problems for a long time.

Canterbury Museum also has a large art collection of 500 oil paintings and 5000 other works on paper that have been left to them over the years but the problem with their collection is that it has not been purposely collected over the last 120 years based on its artistic merit and as a result there are only around 50 oil paintings and another 250 works on paper that are of a public art gallery standard.

So because the vast majority of the works which are suitable to be displayed in the McDougall will have to come from the city’s collection it will have to be run by the Christchurch Art Gallery as an adjunct gallery like every other city in the world has done with their old galleries.

But the McDougall also has a beautiful centre court where the 30 traditional sculptural works from the city’s collection and any suitable works from the Museum can also be displayed as they were before it was closed in 2002.

© Scoop Media