Over the past three decades, Edmund Capon has transformed the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Before he arrived, you could have swapped the contents of the Sydney gallery with Ballarat’s and nobody would have noticed the difference. How a city of that size, wealth and international ambition could have wound up with such a provincial collection puzzled the mind. No more. Capon has thrown out new wings, created a distinguished Asian collection virtually ex nihilo, attracted the generous benefaction of some remarkable old master paintings from James Fairfax, and acquired major twentieth-century and contemporary works. As importantly, he has made the AGNSW the liveliest of the state galleries. Even a wet Tuesday morning sees the central court thronged. Often Capon installs a medley of works there which would look inchoate in most other galleries but which emerge as resounding and triumphant. I once saw the big Kirchner Three bathers hung with the august Max Beckmann’s Mother and daughter and Picasso’s crackling Seated nude from the mid 1950s. Collectively, they gave off the whack and weight of modernity more excitingly than any other display in Australia.

There has been substance and ambition behind such key acquisitions as Braque’s 1908–09 landscape, the most important cubist picture in Australia and, more recently, the fine Cézanne, which must be the most expensive work of art acquired by an Australian art gallery since Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles.