Chris Saines Foreword

Chartwell Trust website

The collection development and philanthropic programmes of the Chartwell Trust must now constitute one of the most determined and ambitious programmes of any private charitable trust anywhere in the world.  Over almost 30 years of unswerving commitment to the visual arts - in particular that of New Zealand and Australia - Chartwell has staked out a unique piece of ground that simultaneously nourishes and shelters the contemporary art practice of this region.  While many countries might enjoy the support of cultural funding agencies and have generous individuals to endow the national patrimony, few can lay claim to a trust that works so widely and passionately in the cause of its culture.

More critically, at least for the New Zealand community in which the Chartwell Trust and its collection live, it is not a private enterprise but a public one that somehow gainfully occupies the space between.  Since its foundation in 1974 its growth has been almost entirely the responsibility of one person, trustee Rob Gardiner, who has relished a freedom from almost every condition that large collection based art institutions impose.  This has created a collection that positively crackles with points of difference from every other institutional and major private collection in New Zealand - Chartwell is simply not and never has been more of the same. 

Of course this makes the collection an even more effective diagnostic of art's prevailing condition.  And this is particularly so when it also draws on a major institutional collection like Auckland's.  Since management responsibility for the Chartwell collection transferred to this gallery in 1997, former curators William McAloon and Allan Smith helped stage six exhibitions from its holdings.  The seventh and most recent in this series is newly appointed curator Robert Leonard's Nine Lives, a show that elucidates and amplifies the Chartwell project through the work of nine contemporary New Zealand artists.  For all that, however, it gets no easier to discern a dominant aesthetic or a binding programmatic structure within Chartwell.

Perhaps this is because Chartwell, in its collecting and in its project support, has always pursued an open and lateral system.  There is a generosity and an idiosyncrasy of spirit here that is unconstrained by publicly funded outcomes and acquittals, and it will be nowhere more apparent than within these virtual walls.  I say that because it might be difficult for many outside New Zealand to fully comprehend the courage of building and maintaining this sort of project for this length of time in this country.  This is not the kind of gilt-edged arts based philanthropy that thrives on tax relief - of a kind which doesn't exist here - it is a remarkably intentioned challenge to think more about how contemporary visual art works.

The Chartwell Trust has developed this site in a way that I know is planned to evolve in some exciting directions, to make us engage more with the artists and the ideas that have driven its own work.  It will be more a base from which to explore ideas than a virtual map to the trust's collection.  To navigate through the full extent of the Chartwell collection you will need to link to the Auckland Art Gallery's website www.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz through the section on this site titled Cruise the Collection and execute a quick or detailed search on "Chartwell Collection".  What you will find there is an extraordinary account of more than 700 works of recent New Zealand and Australian art - the majority of them illustrated.  It is part of the close and hugely productive partnership that we continue to enjoy with the Chartwell Trust.

Chris Saines
Director
Auckland Art Gallery

September 2003