Linda Tyler
Curator of Pictorial Collections
Hocken Library, Dunedin

Contemporary art never interested the founder of the Hocken Library, Dr Thomas Morland Hocken. He acquired his 400 paintings of 'old New Zealand' for their information value, and was an early advocate for didactic labels, usually writing his own in ink across the top of artworks. 'The value of a picture in itself is but little if there is no full description of that to which it refers', he instructed his trustees from his deathbed in 1910. He would have found the interpretation of Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906) a challenge, just as visitors to the Hocken Library now are puzzled by the annual exhibitions of work by the incumbent Frances Hodgkins Fellow. This was no doubt Charles Brasch's plan when he set up funding for the Fellowship and linked it to the Hocken, knowing that to bring contemporary artists into the orbit of the Library's readers would be quietly revolutionary.