Alan McLeod McCulloch

Alan McLeod McCulloch AO (5 August 1907 – 21 December 1992) was one of Australia's foremost art critics for more than 60 years, and painter.

Early life Drawing by Alan McCulloch of himself and his future wife c.1938. Reproduced in McCulloch’s Trial by Tandem, 1950. Alan McLeod McCulloch was born to Annie (née Mcleod) and Alexander on 5 August 1907 in St Kilda in Melbourne, and brought up in Mosman, Sydney. His father encouraged a sense that "the arts were the most important thing in life," so Alan developed keen interest in art as a child. The family returned to Melbourne after his father died and when McCulloch was ten, living at 341 Malvern Rd. Malvern East. He attended Scotch College from 1920 to 1922 then went to work to support the family. Living at was employed in a clerical position at BHP in Melbourne, then worked as a teller with the Commonwealth Bank for eighteen years. Inspired in 1925 by hearing cartoonist Will Dyson speak on political satire and visiting his studio, and after the Second World War during which his artist brother Wilfred was killed fighting in the fall of Singapore, Alan became art editor under George Johnston of a new Argus weekly national magazine, Picture Post, to which he was also appointed as a cartoonist. Aspiring to the quality and status of the German cosmopolitan magazine Simplissimuss they published major Australian writers and commissioned illustrations from the 'Dunera boys' Frederick Schonbach, and Klaus Friedeberger, and other artists including Albert Tucker and Noel Counihan., but after three years were laid off for their even-handedness in ignoring directives requiring a bias against left-wing artists, when it became the Australasian Post with a very different ethos. He recalled; Suddenly I was on top of the world. I started writing about all the people I thought were going to be good in the future. I published a lot of such as Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker's drawings. It lasted three years. The Argus hated the things I wrote, regarding them as far too left-wing. I was regarded as a dangerous character.

Johnstone departed for Greece, and McCulloch to the United States from Sydney on the SS Marine Phoenix, accompanied by his mother Annie and a friend Gavin Casey. Having arrived in San Francisco on 2 May 1947 with only £1,000, he walked to Los Angeles. There, in 1948, he married Ellen Bromley Moscovitz (1908–1991) an Australian-born actress, businesswoman and US citizen. They remained together until her death in 1991.

Until 1949 he and his wife toured America, meeting Marcel Duchamp and other Surrealists, and McCullloch recorded their travels in Highway Forty while also writing magazine articles. The couple cycled on a tandem through Europe from Paris to Positano in Italy, and in Paris visited Georges Braque and developed a taste for the School of Paris artists, They sailed from England for Australia on the RMS Strathmore on 26 October 1949.

Back in Australia in 1951 he became an associate editor for Meanjin (until 1963), and was invited by Keith Murdoch to be art critic on the Melbourne Herald, 1952–1982. During the 1960s he was appointed Australian correspondent for the European magazine Art Internatlonal, and established the annual Georges Invitation Art Prize.

As an artist, McCulloch held several solo exhibitions of his paintings and drawings in London and Melbourne.

As a curator, in 1965, he assembled an exhibition of Aboriginal bark paintings from the Chaseling and Cahill collections from the Museum of Victoria to tour to the USA (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas).

Living a maritime lifestyle at Shoreham on Western Port Bay, McCulloch became the inaugural director (1970–1992) of the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, established in 1969 by the Mornington Shire Council, and it was under his leadership that the MPRG began developing a specialist collection of Australian prints and drawings. He was curator of The Heroic Years of Australian Art 1977–78 touring exhibition. In 1981, having retired from art criticism he worked in 1980 to raise funds for a new art centre building at Mornington which was opened by premier John Cain on 17 November 1991, shortly before McCulloch's retirement as director. which started as a scrapbook of cuttings kept since the 1940s, and which became the main reference for connoisseurs, collectors, dealers, critics and historians of Australian art.

His daughter Susan and his granddaughter Emily McCulloch Childs, specialists in Australian indigenous art, continued work on the Encyclopedia into the third generation, using the criteria established by Alan McCulloch in 1968; artists are chosen for inclusion if their work is represented by major purchases in a national, state, or regional gallery or if they have won a significant prize. The Encyclopedia is now in its 4th edition (2006).

Legacy After the death of Ellen his wife for 45 years, McCulloch, after recovering from an operation and suffering from Parkinson's disease, moved in March 1991 to a retirement home in Kew,

McCulloch died in the aged accommodation on 21 December 1992, and was remembered as a stalwart champion of modernism for his Encyclopedia, and for his newspaper and magazine reviews defending and promoting work of Charles Blackman, John Brack. Leonard French, Julius Kane, Roger Kemp, Inge King, Clifford Last, Clement Meadmore, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh and Fred Williams. Though sceptical of color field abstraction, he nevertheless supported its individual proponents Sidney Ball, Janet Dawson, Robert Jacks and Jan Senbergs. In his obituary art critic Christopher Heathcote paid tribute to Alan McCulloch as... ...one of the great supporters of Modern Australian art. For more than 30 years he attempted to foster advanced painting and sculpture... The contemporary art scene as we know it today would not have developed without his resolute dedication to contemporary Australian culture... His writing may not have been concerned with complex ideas but this quiet and gentle man was arguably the most influential art critic to have practised in this country.

Arthur Boyd was a 15 year-old artist when McCulloch, and his brother Wilfred, also a painter, had encouraged him to pursue a career in art,

Exhibitions 1953: Melbourne Painters Exhibition, McCulloch with Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Leonard French, Roger Kemp, Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski. Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, NSW

Collections holding works by Alan McCulloch

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia

Publications

McCulloch, Alan; & McCulloch, Susan. Encyclopedia of Australian art. 1994 St Leonards, NSW : Allen & Unwin (3rd revised edition)

McCulloch, Alan. Aboriginal bark paintings from the Cahill and Chaseling collections, National Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. (catalogue of an exhibition, 17 December 1965 – 30 January 1966)

Illustrated and written by McCulloch McCulloch, Alan. So This Was The Spot (Melbourne, 1934)

Notes and references