Current Dr Joseph Brown AO Fellowship Recipient - 2009

The following recipient received funding for six months.

Mr Benjamin Thomas
Acquired taste: WR Sedon as the Shaping of Melbourne’s Commercial Art Patronage
Book manuscript

Drawing on the personal and commercial papers of WR Sedon and his Sedon Galleries, this project will explore Melbourne's between-the-war commercial art market, from the emergence of Sedon Galleries in the mid-1920s through until the beginning of the World War II. The decades of the 1920s and 30s in Australian art witnessed the rise of Australia's engagement with modernist art, culminating in the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Modern Art. Buying by public art institutions was a regular point of media coverage and often at odds with the growing movement of modernist painters.

This project will situate a prominent Melbourne commercial art gallery within this changing artistic and social milieu. WR Sedon's interest in art was founded through the collecting interests of his maternal grandmother. A private collector himself, Sedon had established himself as one of Melbourne's leading art dealers by the late 1920s. In this position, he played an influential role in shaping Melbourne's commercial patronage of the arts and Australian artists of the 1920s and 30s.