Multi-million dollar gift goes on show at the Auckland Art Gallery

John Daly-Peoples

The Robertson Gift: Paths through Modernity

Auckland Art Gallery

February 9 – February 2026

Opening at the Auckland Art Gallery on 9 February and running for two years will be the exhibition “The Robertson Gift: Paths through Modernity” comprising fifteen major artworks valued in excess of $250million. The works are a long-promised gift from the collection of New York philanthropists Julian (1932– 2022) and Josie Robertson (1943–2010).

The collection features influential modern European artists, including Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Paul Cezanne, Salvador Dalí, André Derain, Henri Fantin-Latour, Paul Gauguin, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso.

Director of Auckland Art Gallery, Kirsten Lacy says that the Gallery could not realise such a selection of artworks without Julian and Josie’s vision.

“Patronage of this scale is unprecedented, and the collection of modern masterpieces is unique. The Robertson’s gift is unquestionably the most transformative bequest of international art to the country in the past century,” says Lacy.

The couple divided their lives between New York and Aotearoa New Zealand ever since their first visit to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 1978–1979. The Robertson’s extraordinary gift acknowledges the lasting connections the couple formed with Aotearoa New Zealand and their passion for modern art. Robertson was an investor and developer in the US and New Zealand. He owned three lodges including  Kauri Cliffs Lodge and several wineries. He was also one of the few non-New Zealanders to receive a knighthood.

Beginning with post-Impressionist works of the late 19th century and ending with a monumental colour-field painting from the 1960s, the exhibition takes visitors on a journey through the major art movements of the modern era, including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, and post-war abstraction.

Included in the 23 mainly works on paper  by Matisse is “Espagnole (buste) [The Spanish Woman]” painted in  1922. The work was purchased at Sotheby’s in 2007 for between  USD 12,000,000 – 16,000,000 .

The auction house described the work as one of the finest portraits from Matisse’s Nice period of the 1920s, when his skills as a colourist were at their most expressive.   This is one of his more intimate compositions that allows for a close engagement with the young model, who is dressed in the exotic costume of a Spanish women.  Matisse’s best pictures of this period focused on light-filled, and often profusely decorated interiors, with seductive models.

The work is very similar to “Espagnole: Harmonie en bleu (Spanish Woman: Harmony in Blue)” of the same period which is in the collection of the MET in New York.

Derain’s  “Estaque Landscape” of 1906 was painted when the artist and Henri Matisse, spent the transformative summer of 1905 in Collioure in the south of France. Together, they painted similar views of the coastal village, encouraging one another to adopt brighter colours, bolder brushstrokes, and flatter compositions in their depictions of the surrounding landscape. This style of painting, became known as Fauvism

A recent Christies Auction featured a similar work which sold for USD $5,580,000

Georges Braque, said of works such as  “Le Guéridon (Vase Gris et Palette). Pedestal table (Grey vase and palette)”, “No object can be tied down to any one sort of reality. Everything, I realized, is subject to metamorphosis; everything changes according to the circumstances. So when you ask me whether a particular form in one of my paintings depicts a woman’s head, a fish, a vase, a bird, or all four at once, I can’t give you a categorical answer, for this ‘metamorphic’ confusion is fundamental to what I am out to express”

Fernand Léger’s, Les Pistons (The Pistons), of 1918, is from a series  which references  contemporary urban life and features many abstract shapes including mechanical, tubular forms, discs, vertical, horizontal and diagonal bands of colour as well as other less clearly definable shapes that coexist with glimpses of modern urban architecture and the anonymous citizens who animate it.

Salvador Dalí’s, “Instrument masochiste (Masochistic Instrument)’ shows a nude woman shedding a part of her skin in the form of a violin. The violin is the protagonist and the woman is an antagonist in the painting. Symbolically, it identifies Dali’s strong resistance towards music. The bow hitting the cypress tree adds his imagination of equating music with mortality and despair. It also represents Dali’s impotence obsession and overall neurosis. The cypress trees reminded him of the Pitchot estate, where he would spend long, happy hours in erotic daydreams.

Another of the works from this series sold recently 2019 for GBP 611,250

Paul Gauguin’s “Cow in meadow Rouen” is part of a group of interrelated paintings, where he focused his attention on rural views such as a stream where cows came to water, selecting a different vantage point for each composition
Three or four canvases from this experimental group were among the nineteen paintings that Gauguin showed at the eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition in 1886.

A similar work from the period sold in 2019  for USD 783,750

Pablo Picasso painted “Femme à la résille (Woman in a hairnet)” in 1938, at the height of his relationship with the photographer Dora Maar

A similar work from the series but twice the size of the Robertson work sold at Christies in 2015 for USD67million.

The other Pablo Picasso in the collection, his “Mere Aux Enfants A L’Orange” was sold at Sotheby’s November 2002. for USD 3,639,500

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