OBITUARY: James Agapitos
James Agapitos, OAM
1929-2007
The Agapitos-Wilson Collection of Australian Surrealist Art is the lasting legacy of a quiet, modest, elfin-like man - James Agapitos. With his partner Ray Wilson, the Egyptian-born son of a Greek merchant family who came to Australia in 1952, amassed an unparalleled treasure trove of a hitherto neglected area of Australian art.
Many of the works are on display in their elegant, deceptive Bellevue Hill home, which was designed - by Alex Popov - specifically to exhibit art, and where Agapitos died this week (January 2007).
Viewing these pictures and sculptures in that setting, in the beaming presence of Agapitos's passionate enthusiasm, is enough to convert the least surreally inclined viewer to curiosity and growing understanding of a genre which has remained a neglected secret for decades.
Agapitos and Wilson met in 1967 and collecting soon became a mutual obsession. But it wasn't until 1990 and the purchase of James Gleeson's The Attitude of Lightning towards a Lady Mountain (1939) that they began to concentrate on surrealism, and Australian surrealism in particular. At that point they sold virtually everything that didn't belong in this new interest and began the process that eventually reached a kind of fruition in the 2004-5 touring exhibition entitled Australian Surrealism: The Agapitos/Wilson Collection. It took a representative selection of the hoard of more than 300 works on a national trip initiated by Ron Radford, then director of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Displayed at Sydney's S.H. Ervin Gallery in June 2004, the Agapitos/Wilson Collection opened the eyes of a new generation to paintings that had rarely - if ever - been seen together. Limiting themselves to works made between 1925 and 1955 (with the exception of Gleeson whose work they have championed and collected throughout) the collection features works by a wide range of artists including Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, Robert Klippel, Russell Drysdale, Dusan Marek, Jeffrey Smart, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Donald Friend.
More recently, Agapitos and Wilson have turned their attention to contemporary Aboriginal art and also to the question of what will happen to their collection in the long term. Its importance - as Agapitos has said in the past - rests not so much in individual works but in the collection as evidence of what a generation of Australian artists were thinking and how they experimented with the genre.
The Art Gallery of NSW will benefit from a pledged $10 million upon the eventual death of James Wilson but the final destination of the Australian surrealist works has yet to be announced. The National Gallery in Canberra has the seminal Gleeson, The Attitude of Lightning towards a Lady Mountain (1939), on permanent loan and Adelaide's state gallery is thought to have a claim because many of the artists were South Australians.
Meanwhile, the AGNSW director Edmund Capon described James Agapitos (to the Sydney Morning Herald as a "benefactor of enthusiasm. He had an unbridled enthusiasm and passion; he was a pretty rare individual, an inspiration."
