Eventually, after Australian tax laws became more favourable for philanthropy, the Besens decided to establish the TarraWarra Museum of Art, which opened in 2003, at their Yarra Valley vineyard. Their collection is being given to the museum in instalments. TarraWarra is the first private museum to be firmly established in Australia. It has delivered a lively exhibition programme, but the collection has seldom been extensively displayed. Encounters with Modern Australian Art tells us about the Besens’ collection. Does their collection deserve to be more often displayed, and does TarraWarra justify the taxation incentives it must have received? Yes and yes.

The 1950s to 1980s − the recent past in Australian art − are a dwindled presence in our principal art museums. The available literature, too, is inadequate and out of date. Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting (1962) and Robert Hughes’s The Art of Australia (1966) are still read but were first published forty-five years ago and are unfair to the TarraWarra period. Encounters with Modern Australian Art includes plenty of contemporary works up to 2006, but recent art is well covered elsewhere. The book is therefore a fine memorial to Maudie Palmer’s time as founding director at TarraWarra.

The title is carefully worded. ‘Encounters’ (plural) hints at the personal tastes of private collectors. Thus, within a familiar area of Melbourne art otherwise well represented, Robert Rooney’s outstanding Abstract Pop is a conspicuous absence. Also, private collectors have fewer opportunities than art-historian curators of knowing the full range of Australian art. Major modernists missing are Hossein Valamanesh from Adelaide, Bea Maddock from Tasmania, Robert MacPherson from Brisbane and Howard Taylor from Western Australia. There are two late paintings by Margaret Preston, but the book title allows leeway to ignore early-modernist work by Preston and others of that early-twentieth-century generation. Never mind the absences. More than 200 colour plates constitute a feast of late-modernist Australian art, much of which came from Melbourne anyway. Particularly enjoyable are the ten works each by John Brack and Fred Williams. Moreover, ‘Modern’ is a term that signals paintings and sculptures of the recent past. We are unsurprised to find postmodern mediums − Conceptual Art, Indigenous Art, Installation, Performance and Photomedia − largely absent. By major artist Mike Parr we have only a bronze, not documentation of performance or installation; by Susan Norrie only a painting, not a video installation. There is only one straight photograph, a cloudscape by Bill Henson. There is only one installation photograph, by Patricia Piccinini, who also scores a fibreglass sculpture. The only paintings by indigenous Australians are by the city-based Ben Pushman, Judy Watson, and Richard Bell.

It is a great treat to encounter as many as five paintings each by Ian Fairweather, Tony Tuckson, Godfrey Miller, and John Olsen. There are four sensuously heaving landscapes by Lloyd Rees, the Besens’ only true conservative, doubtless included as a source for Brett Whiteley.

Many artists seem as remembered, but some seem better. Trevor Vickers’s assembled canvas-modules from 1970 look outstanding. So do Robert Jacks’s three abstracts, including a three-metre canvas painted in 2006. So do Dale Hickey’s six paintings, either deadpan realism or near-Pop studio interiors. (Jacks and Hickey, and the excluded Rooney, should probably be added permanently to Australia’s canonical best.) Howard Arkley’s three Psychedelics are terrific.

The whereabouts of a key work, Olsen’s exuberant Salute to Cerberus (1965), recently repatriated from the Mertz Collection in Texas, is a welcome discovery. Similarly, at a time when the history of Australian Abstraction is receiving close attention, it is good to find that Balson’s large 1963 panel, a very rare reversion from poured enamels to classic Constructive Painting, is now at TarraWarra.

New images added to the corpus of significant Australian art are the most useful contribution made by ambitious art books. However, what about the texts?

Encounters with Modern Australian Art is issued by a Paris-based publishing house: ‘Hermann ƒditeurs depuis 1876’. Besides this edition in English, produced by Macmillan in Melbourne, there is also a French edition. I suspect that some of the texts were written for a French readership. Maudie Palmer’s introduction explains:

The idea for this publication was prompted by the enthusiasm with which the TarraWarra Museum of Art has been received by Australian and international visitors, and the many questions that have been asked about Australian modern art and how it is distinct from the twentiethcentury modernism that developed in Europe and the United States.

Those international visitors to the Yarra Valley were probably winemakers from California and France.

Patrick McCaughey’s chapter ‘Affinity and Antimony in Australian Painting 1960–1985’ makes laboured contrasts between pairs of star artists Fred Williams and Brett Whiteley, John Brack and Roger Kemp, John Olsen and Jeffrey Smart. ‘Affinity and Antimony’ follows ‘In the Spotlight’, where McCaughey presents contrasts between fewer works by other big-name artists Margaret Preston, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, William Dobell, John Perceval, Arthur Boyd, and Charles Blackman. The obtrusively formalist literary structures, dotted with critical-theory terms such as ‘Edenic’ and ‘dystopic’, might be intended to comfort French readers. (Sensible warnings not to seek crocodile hunter Steve Irwin’s idea of Australia might be intended for Americans.)

Sarah Thomas’s chapter ‘Shifting Grounds 1985–2007’ is a brisk run through particular works of art that illustrate contemporary issues. Indigeneity, ethnicity, feminism, environmentalism, bioengineering and the body, as well as the persistence of formalism and expressionism, lead to a few well-chosen final sentences about the end of ‘the tyranny of distance’, the end of provincialism as a problem, and instead a rousing affirmation that Australian art remains entirely distinctive. We embrace our indigenous art as no other nation does; historical necessity has created an unusual confidence with appropriation of mediated ideas and images from across a globalised world; a continuing concern with our own isolated and peculiarly fragile natural environment makes Australian art uniquely able to deal with issues of global climate change.

Christopher Heathcote’s ‘Reconstruction Culture 1945–1962’, the first chapter, is a subtle account of particular paintings in the postwar years when we still felt provincial but nevertheless made wonderful art. He is especially good on the materiality of Nolan’s and Drysdale’s paintings and Vassilieff’s limestone sculptures. He reveals fruitful linkages between Blackman and De Chirico. He knows his subject intimately and therefore writes about it with consummate ease. Australian art writing could do with much more from Heathcote.