Artefacts need new home, says expert

THE University of Tasmania’s Tyler Collection and Fine Arts Collection are in a part of the Hobart campus that has been subject to sewage overflows, and which has a leaky roof, inadequate security and poor climate control, says Professor Jeff Malpas.

Prof Malpas says the University Centre, where the artworks reside, is inappropriate for display of such valuable and significant works.

The 600-piece Tyler Collection is the flagship of a trove of hidden treasures at the university that Prof Malpas tried to document during the past few years in his former role as director of university collections. It was collected by the late Geoffrey Tyler, who graduated from the Hobart university in 1949.

Mr Tyler went on to be an economist of international standing. While posted in London for the Australian Treasury, he began collecting art.

In 1960, he bought etchings by English Romantic poet and painter William Blake and followed that with purchases of Australian art, including celebrated works by Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman.

He also bought paintings, sculptures and ceramics from American and European artists. Romania, however, became his focus after frequent visits to the struggling communist country between 1973 and 1987 while working with the International Monetary Fund.

“Collecting art was my late husband’s passion,” explains Frances Tyler, who lives in Washington DC.

Ms Tyler said that in the years before her husband died in 2012 he thought carefully about where to donate his collection, having to decide between UTAS and his other alma mater, the University of Melbourne.

“He decided on UTAS, be- cause he felt it would be better appreciated there,” she said.

“He also left an endowment and proposed that UTAS create an arts planning board with me serving on it. Happily, this brings me back to Hobart every year.”

She explained that the Tyler Collection focuses on art created by Romanian artists during “an especially dark period in that country’s history”.

Many of the artworks were produced during the brutal reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, who ruled Romania through the 1960s to the 1980s before his communist government was overthrown in a violent uprising in 1989.

“It would be hard to overstate the harsh oppressiveness of Ceausescu’s communist regime,” she said.

“Yet miraculously, the art from this time is not the propagandist work that one expects.

“Certainly not restful, it is articulate and strong, and highly individualistic from each artist. They were sealed off from the rest of the world, and their names will not be recognised by many, another reason for the value of discovering this body of work.”

Prof Malpas said the Tyler Collection was of international significance and deserved better treatment. This was true, he said, of a vast majority of the other treasures in storage at the university.