Eric Westbrook


Dr Eric Westbrook was a British-born Australian artist, curator and gallery director of Auckland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Early life and education

Eric Westbrook was born in Peckham, south-east London on 29 September 1915. In childhood, he accompanied is father, a businessman in the textile industry, on his travels in Europe and waiting for him in museums, an experience which made a lasting impression on his love of art and of galleries.
He was taught by Walter Sickert and Mark Gertler in painting courses at art schools including Battersea, Clapham and Westminster School of Art, and supported his studies by working as a telephone operator. Despite being scholarship winner, he decided he could make a better contribution as a connoisseur than as a painter, and went to Paris in 1934, at age nineteen, to tour its galleries and to see contemporary art.
During World War II, and after graduating from art school, he was rejected for service in the infantry on the grounds of 'puniness' and instead worked in intelligence liaison and army education. In 1944 he met his first wife, domestic science teacher Ingrid Nystrom, in an air-raid shelter. He took up art teaching after the war for the London County Council before being appointed art master at Ardingly College, Sussex. This led to work for the Arts Council of Great Britain as one of four guide lecturers touring Britain with art exhibitions, and in another role he set up art education for the army and advised the YMCA Youth Clubs in Britain.

Curatorship

Westbrook was approached by the retiring director of the Wakefield Art Gallery in West Yorkshire in 1946 to apply for the position. Successful, he became Britain’s youngest gallery director. During his tenure he organised a retrospective of the work of Henry Moore who was born 60 km from Wakefield. The exhibition attracted controversial attention when president of the Royal Academy of Arts Alfred Munnings in his 1949 radio-broadcast valedictory speech in 1949 attacked Modernism, identifying Moore as an offending artist. The material Westbrook generated for the show was taken up for a British Council European tour of Moore's work. This led three years later to Westbrook being invited to join the Fine Arts Department of the British Council as chief exhibitions officer, arranging traveling exhibitions on British to most European countries, and twice in charge of the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. While in Greece during one of these tours, he was informed that Auckland City Art Gallery was seeking a new director. In 1952 he successfully applied and flew back to England through America to visit galleries there.
For the next four and a half years as director at Auckland he was innovative in exhibitions and expanding activities of the gallery in other arts by inaugurating poetry readings, concerts and summer schools, lecturing and broadcaster. In recognition, the Art Galleries and Museums Association of New Zealand appointed him an honorary life member in 1959.
Westbrook oversaw an 'unusual exhibition' in July 1952, where drawings for the top 16 entrants in the Sea Spray magazine 20' LWL fast cruising yacht design international competition were displayed in the gallery.

Late career

Westbrook retired from the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975 and until 1980 he headed the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, moving then with his second wife non-objective painter Dawn Sime to Castlemaine. There he resumed his practice as an artist and supported the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Museum for which he had formerly provided advice on buildings collections while in his role of Director at the NGV.

Awards

*