Masters Of Fare

Capital magazine - Jan/Feb 2005

After the success of the National Portrait Gallery’s Australians in Hollywood exhibition, the gallery was keen to find another industry to focus on. With such enormous interest in food and wine, the hospitality industry was a natural choice, according to the gallery’s assistant director, Simon Elliott. Elliott is the curator of Masters of Fare, featuring the portraits of chefs, winemakers and providores. Running until March 28, 2005, the exhibition celebrates those who have championed Australian produce and enriched our lives with new ideas and new flavours.

“We wanted to show the people side of the industry,” said Elliott, who thought it was a simple concept but found it growing into a “much broader and deeper story”. One of his aims was to make people realise how big the industry actually is. While names like Stephanie Alexander and Neil Perry might come readily to mind, the industry extends “all the way to the producers, the people who are making pizzas” and beyond. The exhibition focuses on the last 40 years, a period which had seen massive changes in the way Australians eat and drink, with people embracing different flavours from Asia and proudly adopting their local produce.

But sometimes it was “hard to see where the triggers were”, he said, citing the popularity of King Island produce which no-one seems to be able to pinpoint the origins of. “Remember the time when people entertained, it had to be French champagne and French cheese, and then King Island came along and in a minute and a half we went from ‘it must be imported’ to ‘it must be local’.” In chronicling this revolution, the exhibition tells a “nice little community story within a big national story” through its portraits of a handful of key local figures.

Bruno Ehrensperger, of Bruno’s Truffles, wine retailer Jim Murphy, and Joe Giugni, who was instrumental in establishing the Fyshwick markets, feature alongside a multi-panelled Leanne Crisp painting of Marion Halligan with food and flowers. A Geoff Pryor cartoon brings together a group of Canberra restaurateurs including Fiona Wright and Alby Sedaitis. Yet the exhibition has a clearly national focus, each portrait accompanied by a 10-line caption on the subject’s contribution to the industry. Not all the portraits were intended to make the viewer go “wow”, Elliott said, but they had to be eye-catching enough to make people want to read the captions.

One of his favourite photographs is that of the late Bernard King, the debonair television chef who was one of the country’s first celebrity chefs. “It’s a beautiful shot of him. It really grabs the whole moment.” The photograph of another television chef, Ian Parmenter, surrounded by chooks and with a fried egg painted on his head, was chosen purely for fun. There’s a Rennie Ellis photo of a serious-looking Dan Murphy, glass of red wine in hand, and another Ellis photo of Melbourne restaurateur Gloria Staley, dating back to the 1980s when there was still such a thing as a free lunch.

Elliott loves the way the photo of Staley wearing a bright yellow jacket over a black outfit talks about “power dressing … big hair”. An elegant plate of nouvelle cuisine is in the foreground, while in the background is a blackboard listing a bottle of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc for $18 and a glass of house wine for $1.50. There’s a lovely Max Dupain photo of legendary winemaker Maurice O’Shea and a Lewis Morley photo of Margaret Fulton with a grand buffet, the sort of food that was cutting edge 30 or 40 years ago.

Perhaps most striking of all is a photo of Sydney chef Matt Moran, an abundance of food set against his naked skin like a Caraveggio painting. While most of the portraits are photographs, there are some paintings, including one of Leo Schofield, who will open the exhibition. Elliott said it was “not meant to be an encyclopedia” of Australian cuisine but rather an attempt to present “the dynamics of the industry.” “The show’s such a simple concept. It’s just that in trying to tell the story you realise how many stories there are to be told.”

© Christine Salins

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