The Collector

Prologue: The Suit Jacket

Saturday, 25 March 2017

He dressed with care. The pale striped old shirt, white collar. A Choi suit jacket from the 1980s, cut in a style that had come back around and gone again. And the tie, of course. There was always a tie.

His name was Peter. He was eighty-five years old, and today his art collection was opening at the university gallery. He had been preparing for this moment for three months — clearing paths through rooms where you could barely walk, wet-wiping canvases, hauling enormous framed works through narrow doorways single-handed in the January heat. He had done it all with the methodical ferocity of a man who had things to accomplish before time ran out.

A friend collected him at 1.30. He noted in his diary that he rode the bus to the university. This seems important: that on the day his life’s collecting was finally displayed for the world, he took the bus. That was Peter. The suit jacket, the tie, the bus.

The crowd was goodly, if fewer than hoped. Many thought it a most interesting show. There were speeches. Then, finally, Peter himself spoke. Afterward: a Thai restaurant, cheap wine, a large table. The café owner pulled a bottle from behind the bar for him. Matt gave him fifty dollars for a cab home.

He wrote in his diary at the end:

Quite a day and night.

♦

Chapter One: The House

To understand Peter, you had to understand the house.

Not the building itself — a terrace in an inner suburb of Newcastle, New South Wales, unremarkable from the street, the kind of house that would not detain a passing eye. What mattered was what was inside. What had accumulated, over decades, room by room and shelf by shelf, until the house had become something else entirely: a labyrinth, an archive, a record of one man’s fifty years of looking.

There were paintings in the front room and the back room and the hallway and the bedroom and the veranda. There were ceramics on every shelf and in every cabinet, and more ceramics in boxes under tables and stacked behind doors. There were prints wrapped in tissue paper stored in the cupboards, sculptures in the garden that the plants had grown around, found objects, strange objects, objects of no particular monetary value but considerable personal significance. Moving from room to room required navigation. Paths had been worn between the stacks.

Peter knew where everything was, or had been. When he began clearing the house in January 2017 for the university gallery show, he kept discovering works he had forgotten he owned. Seven large framed pastels by an artist called Kelly Nilsen, found in Bedroom 2, all unsigned. A piece by Glenn Murkett, uncovered during the clearing of the dining room. A large oil by Guy Brown, retrieved from behind other works and hosed outside to clean. A 1966 canvas he had thought lost. A tie-hanging quilt, located at last after months of searching. A pair of white plinths holding bronze perspex sculptures, needed to present the work properly.

Each discovery was recorded in the diary with a mixture of pleasure and mild exasperation, as if the objects were old friends who had chosen an inconvenient moment to reappear. He noted titles, dimensions, artists, conditions. He noted what needed varnishing, what needed wet-wiping, what needed a frame. He noted, with a kind of fond exhaustion, how much there still was to do.

Still so much more here to display.

He wrote this on the 9th of March, 2017. The show was a fortnight away.