Vale Renée Free

Renée Free (1936–2023), formerly senior curator of European art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, has passed away in Sydney.

Free joined the Art Gallery in 1966, initially employed as an assistant to Tony Tuckson, then acting director. In 1971 she was redesignated as the curator of European and American art. She became senior curator when colleague Daniel Thomas left in 1978 and later senior curator of European art, a position she held until she retired in 1996.

Free trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in the 1960s, a period the institution itself remembers as a golden age under the brilliant and controversial Anthony Blunt. Courtauld alumni went on to hold key museum posts throughout the world. Along with Ursula Hoff, Free became one of the first curators in Australia formally trained in art history. Both shared a European Jewish heritage. Returning to Australia from her studies in England, Free remembered being stung by an anti-Semitic press article that lamented Australian museum jobs being taken by refugees.

Free’s curatorial work was characterised by the highest standards of research. Her 1987 catalogue of the Art Gallery’s core collection of British paintings set a new national standard for collection documentation, improving upon Bernard Smith’s 1953 Australian catalogue by providing extensive provenance, exhibition and bibliographic details. Free used original archival records ‘to illuminate the works, to show the history of taste, to show contemporary scholarship, or sometimes to amuse’.

Free curated over 20 exhibitions at the Art Gallery, showcasing the strengths of the collection and providing opportunities for further research into it. Two of her most important exhibitions were Victorian Olympians in 1975 and Victorian Social Conscience in the following year. She borrowed Lord Frederic Leighton’s Cymon and Iphigenia 1884 for Victorian Olympians and was later successful in acquiring it for the collection. Dr Gregory Hedberg, director of Hirschl and Adler Galleries in New York. said in 1995 that her ‘purchase of Lord Leighton’s Cymon and Iphigenia for under 10,000 pounds in 1976 is legend’.

Further important acquisitions, acquired with the assistance of Art Gallery of New South Wales director Edmund Capon, included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Three bathers 1913, purchased 1984; Max Beckmann’s Mother and daughter 1946, purchased 1987; and Agnolo Bronzino’s Cosimo I de’ Medici in armour, c1545, acquired in 1996, a final purchase before she retired.

Extending and deepening the core collection always remained a focus. The colour study for Leighton’s Cymon and Iphigenia, for instance, was purchased in 1986. Art historian and gallery director Ron Radford believes her rigorous curating helped the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquire the ‘world’s best high Victorian paintings outside of London’.

Free’s commitment to living artists was just as strong as her interest in historical art and artists valued her curatorial expertise as well as her friendship. Although designated a curator of European art, she published monographs and curated exhibitions on Australians Lloyd Rees, Frank and Margel Hinder, James Gleeson and Tony Tuckson. Tuckson interviewed her when she first joined the Art Gallery and a deep friendship developed between them. When he died suddenly in 1973, she took upon herself the curatorial management of the Gallery’s collection of Aboriginal art to ensure that the work done over the previous 20 years by First Nations artists working with the Gallery would remain a priority.

The Art Gallery extends our condolences to her family, particularly to Keith Free, Renée’s husband, and her two children, Stella and Adam.