The Lithuanian, Bronius “Bob” Sredarsas (1910-1982) gave the City of Wollongong over 100 Australian and New Guinean art works which led to the foundation of the town’s art gallery. Knox D'Arcy does not appear to have pursued a career as an arts philanthropist while the other successful lease pegger, McCulloch, gave a few paintings to the Broken Hill Art Gallery while his substantial art collection was otherwise distributed to all and sundry by auction.
Sredersas, who insisted that everyone call him Bob, was a steelworker at BHP’s Wollongong works who graduated from labourer to crane driver. The lease peggers became known as the Broken Hillionaires because of their wealth. When D'Arcy lost his fortune he moved into oil and was one of the leading concession administrators via Burmah Oil, an associate of BP.
Bob was well paid like most of the steelworkers. But while he devoted himself entirely to his project of providing the substance of a collection which would be house in a hoped-for art gallery, the sums involved were a pittance compared to those available to Bob.
But Bob’s focus was on Australian art, especially coastal NSW views which were more relevant to a gallery in Wollongong than the Pre-Raphaelites favoured by the Hillionaires, although far more relevant to the story of world art.
D'Arcy and McCulloch seemed to inhabit the world of Camelot, both having tapestries devoted to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. McCulloch had one and D’ Arcey followed suite.
The interactive exhibition The Gift Remembering Bob Sredersas, that opens at the gallery on May 19 run for 12 weeks to September 9. It commemorates, details and analyses the crane driver’s contribution to the region’s cultural growth. The gallery has many of the invoices for the art purchased by “Bob” and identified by that name upon them as the buyer. In becoming Bob, maybe he wanted to spare the spittle and the spelling problems that could have eventuated, by reducing it to something more easily mouthed or written. The gallery has always given a little space to Bob but the project is curated by Anne-Louise Rentell, a freelance producer and theatre director who brought the project to the gallery and received its excited support.
Although there is a long tradition of bequeathing paintings to Australian galleries and other unwanted works were randomly given, Bob’s gift was exceptional for the day, in that he made the choice of which works to buy. By later years in his long life, his house became crammed with his purchases. Nowadays galleries are known to channel donor funds through acquisitions they wish to make but there is now one big incentive for giving that almost automatically comes into play - a tax deduction for the average of two approved valuations, often at a far higher price than was paid for the work.
Purchases are now made with the idea of having an effective personal memorial in a public building, their public spirit acknowledged in the plaque on the art work showing the world how it came to be there. The gift usually adds the words “given under the Cultural Gifts Program” to show that taxpayers have also contributed to its presence through the donor’s tax donation.
Bob’s transformation of the south coast’s holdings was all done without any hint of obtaining a tax advantage or immortality that seems to grip donors nowadays – but different donor tax advantages had already begun to be exploited. In 1959 the eccentric collector and pastoralist Major Harold de Vahl Rubin, gave the Queensland Art Gallery money to buy a Picasso and three other early 20th century European masterworks that he had consigned to a Sotheby’s art auction in London.
There was no formula at the time for gifts in kind at “full” valuation. Saleroom observers in London expressed their great surprise at the high prices achieved for the Major’s paintings. He may not have had or needed bidding friends at the auction as he merely needed to set the reserves high to benefit to the maximum from the sale. The Picasso, La Belle Hollandaise which was acquired among the works, is an outstanding Rose Period Picasso.
Like other low-wealth individuals Sredersas would never have been able to benefit as much as the wealthy who give works under this and the Cultural Gifts Program benefits high taxpayers far more than pensioners and others on low incomes.
A gift such as was made by Sredersas would be unlikely nowadays. There are, of course, very few steel workers left in Australia. Prices of art have also gone through the roof and the kind of art purchased does not excite curators any more.
Curators have also joined the trophy hunt. Most of the purchases who were primary tier in their day, like Fred Leist, have become secondary or may even have gone into the Culture Bin which, however, does not mean they will never come out again.
Smaller or other seemingly financial works may also be more pleasing and indicative of an artist’s methods and development than full chef d’oeuvres.
Sredersas is not quite entirely the working class hero he appeared, because the archival collection of his papers recently enhanced by a gift from his executor appears to include affirmation of his accession to the small nobility class in Lithuania. The exhibition is being held to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Lithuania’s Independence as well as the gallery’s 40th birthdate.
When he arrived in Australia to be housed at Bringabella Migrant Camp, the Australian Government was close to exhausting the numbers of white immigrants from traditional countries, especially Britain and looked to the Baltic states to renew the supply. Bob said in an interview that he liked Australia because it had a good name in his birth country. His first 39 years had been spent moving around in Europe – he had a background in sea faring – and he said his life started when, after years in Germany and West Russia, he settled in Australia.
Photographs suggest Sredersas possessed an underlying suavity further hinted at by photographs of him with his mother who appears to have been a member of the Lithuanian elite. Many artists from that country and from Latvia and Estonia came to Australia, as Australia looked for other sources to continue the policy of a white Australia. They exhibited at the Bissietta Gallery which functioned in Sydney in the 1960s but it was Australian art with which Bronius mostly identified.
Support from Australia’s Lithuanian community is enabling some of the letters and documents to be translated and hopefully will reveal further and more precise details of his life and background. It has not yet been ascertained for instance what he did during the war except that he had a history of connection with shipping. Interviews done at the time of the opening of the gallery reveal his deep satisfaction of his choice to live in Australia. “My life began when I came to Australia” he told journalist Karen Lasteo in 1976.
One disappointment, however, was the theft of several paintings from his home in 1976. He put a padlock on his gate and never took it off thereafter, even though this meant he had to climb over the gate to enter his property.
Bob put the collection together largely by attending Sydney auctions. He regularly took the train to Sydney to attend them, and the many auction houses which had mostly congregated in Bathurst and Park Streets. Geoff K Gray and Lawson’s had set up shop there, “shop” being the word used by Bob for an auction house. In the 1970s auctions which were then held during the day because of trade practices laws, and penalty rates which were only just coming in, and occasionally the big hotel ballroom events they were to become in the 1980s.
He donated more than 100 paintings, as well as Chinese and New Guinea artefacts to the City of Wollongong. His gift precipitated the opening of the city’s regional gallery in 1978. NSW did not have the same network of affluent galleries Victoria enjoyed so it helped accelerate some modest catching up on the network in that state, and stimulate gifts to other NSW regionals.
Auction companies like Norton Huband Smith and Colman Page were then enjoying their heyday. Dealers were then much more powerful. I remember Frank McDonald bidding from the wings in an auction melee a huge price – I think it was $19,000, for a John Glover oil painting at Huband Smith’s.
It was in Sydney’s Castlereagh Street, then home to a row of buildings housing auction companies, that Bob had the epiphany that was to lead to the creation of the WAG. He told Karen Lasteo that a watercolour by Sid Long came up which no-one wanted for £2 and finally opened at one guinea. It was at Colman Page’s, the auction house where a ceramic bust of a German postmaster by German modeler Kandler, was spotted by Sydney antique dealer Bill Bradshaw. It now forms part of the collection of the Powerhouse Museum. In Bob's words, ”Castlereagh Street was one big shop open, plenty people there and I said this painting for one guinea I can buy it – the labourer from the Steelworks! I bid my hand. One guinea, one guinea, nobody more. ‘Sold. What is your name?’ ‘Bob.’ "
“And I bought my first painting for one guinea. I came home and I looked – Syd Long, who is this artist? I don’t remember this artist I saw in art gallery few paintings but I don’t remember this artist.
“Next time when I got roster I gone to Sydney gone in art gallery and I found this Syd Long there in art gallery a painting. Oh my goodness it means it’s possible to buy here good paintings for a song, for nothing, for pennies.
It gave Bob a life…and saved him from plunging into alcoholism. As he put it, without it “I would start to look in the bottle. I don’t want to look in the bottle. I saw many people destroyed by the bottle so I start to collect paintings as a hobby.”
The Wollongong Art Gallery inherited the receipts for many of Bob’s purchases, all mostly made out simply to “Bob.” The artists include many who for the time being at least have gone into the Culture Bin although many inevitably will be revived in future revisions of taste. A purchase at Lawson’s on June 7 for a total of $705 comprised oils by A J Murch and James Gleghorn who have a modest but firm place in the story of Australian art, and a work by Millett which has a place in international art although it is “only” an etching. The Gleghorn and several other abstracts show that he was by no means simply a traditionalist.
Now 40 years old the gallery moved to its present position in 1991 in the former art deco council chambers.
Photo from the collections of the Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society, as provided by Michael Bach.
