The Collector

David Walsh is on a mission: to change the way Australians view contemporary art with a planned $55 million private museum, writes Gabriella Coslovich.

The Age, 14 April, 2007

Despite his desire to remain anonymous, Walsh has been revealed as the mystery man who snapped up John Brack's The Bar at a Sotheby's auction last April, paying a record $3.17 million for the highly sought work. In what has become art world folklore, Walsh scooped The Bar from the grasp of the National Gallery of Victoria, which had desperately wanted to buy the painting, to hang alongside its companion piece, Collins St, 5pm. Walsh put an end to the NGV's dream - he had an exceptional one of his own. The Bar was not a vanity buy, not a status symbol to stash away in one of his blue-chip residences. Walsh's motives run deeper than the need to impress establishment types.

In fact, it's fair to say they run counter to that impulse. Walsh bought The Bar with the clear intention of hanging it in the $55 million, three-level, cliff-face museum he is building near his Moorilla Estate winery, in Berriedale, on the banks of the Derwent River. Dubbed the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), it was designed by leading Melbourne architecture firm Fender Katsalidis, will open in 2009, house a collection worth more than $100 million, and become Australia's biggest private museum. Not that Walsh has much competition - in Australia, it is rare for private collectors to build not-for-profit galleries to show their collections to the public, especially a collection as daring as his own.

What Walsh has in mind for MONA will easily upstage his coup at Sotheby's last year. For a start, the museum's overarching themes will be sex and death. The pursuit of sex and the avoidance of death are, according to Walsh, the two most fundamental human motives. All ancient art expresses the need for one or fear of the other, he says, and these themes remain common in contemporary Western art. Walsh's collection, which spans from antiquities to the present, contains some potent examples, among them some of the most provocative contemporary art of recent years, including pieces by Young British Artists such as Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jenny Saville and Chris Ofili. Read full story...