Given that the title’s emphasis on the present and its subtitle, the book’s initial focus on colonial Australian art is off-subject, and while the early chapters sketch Anna’s Polish Jewish migrant history, the multiple references to mid-century modernists Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan and nineteenth-century painters Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin (who punctuate later chapters) are extraneous.

Anna Schwartz with Akio Makigawa at his Fitzroy house shortly before his death. Courtesy Anna and Morry Schwartz Collection (photograph by Morry Schwartz)

Much of the discussion of the artists represented by ASG focuses on their resumés, offering abbreviated exhibition histories that read as reworked artist biographies, interfused with direct quotes by the artists. In his preamble to the text, Hall refers to the extensive interviews he conducted with the artists, yet these are unsourced and undated, which makes it impossible for the reader to situate the artists’ thinking in a broad chronology. The discussions are uneven; a lengthy text appears on the artist Mike Parr, while the chapter on Ian Burns is a single paragraph, and the one on Shane Cotton fewer than a hundred words.

There is little substantive critical engagement with artworks, and brief passages that describe an artist’s practice use a fogeyish vernacular. The conceptual sound artist Marco Fusinato, known for high-amplitude noise installations and non-objective line drawings made over twentieth-century experimental music scores, is curiously described by Hall as ‘classicising human form and action’ and applauded for being international rather than provincial. Callum Morton’s sculpture and public art practice, based on modernist architecture, is cast by Hall as having a ‘soft grandeur’ and ‘humanist romanticism’, while a later chapter conflates these descriptors by attributing Daniel Crooks’s videos with a ‘soft romanticism’.

Hall’s text often betrays a conservative bias, describing the notoriously hidebound John McDonald as the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘trouper art critic’ or punctuating the text with his own moralising. His discussion of the postmodernist artist Maria Kozic admits her work’s brashness but leaps to invoking the artist’s ‘personal humility and reserve’, as if the brazenness of the art needs to be redeemed by the artist’s embodiment of the tropes of femininity. Fiona Hall’s work in the Australian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 is dismissed as a ‘scatty yet well-crafted arrangement of the obvious … a reminder that notwithstanding the best of intentions, if you wish to save the planet, be a scientist’. Hall often valorises artists simply by praising their work for not being ‘didactic’, an adjective used liberally throughout the text.

In spite of his advocacy of contemporary art, Hall’s pronouncements are often patronising or bombastic. ‘Too often a technical command of new media overwhelmed works of unoriginality and marginal interest,’ he opines, in loose reference to contemporary video art; ‘a style council of threadbare content and theatricality in unison’, approximating the arch tones of the American art critic Hilton Kramer chastising Bruce Nauman’s 1973 retrospective at the Whitney Museum as ‘boring and repugnant’.

Hall frequently reiterates Anna’s commitment to supporting abstract and conceptual art, yet he never develops this into a sustained discussion of the art-historical genealogies of geometric abstraction, or conceptual or post-conceptual art. In spite of taking swipes at ‘provincialism’, he seems incapable of discussing the represented artists with any critical acumen or in terms of their correlation to the movements and discourses of international contemporary art.

Several of the author’s assertions are contestable; in lauding the early achievements of the Ewing and George Paton galleries (attached to Melbourne University), Hall claims that in recent history it’s difficult to find a similarly innovative institutionally aligned gallery, bluntly disregarding the salient example of the Monash University Museum of Art, currently directed by Charlotte Day and formerly under the helm of Max Delany, now artistic director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Hall is at his most buoyant when discussing architectural commissions: an elaborate section on Denton Corker Marshall’s design for ASG’s Flinders Lane premises, with a parallel section devoted to the firm’s redesign of the Schwartz’s Carlton residence (named Zinc House), which segues into a summary of projects by Morry Schwartz’s development company Pan Urban, featuring commissions by artists represented by ASG. Hall is attuned to the vicissitudes of urban development and the relocations of gallery spaces, and happily trails into overviews of state gallery or museum redesigns, including ACCA and the NGV, proffering forthright opinions on their architectural merit.

Anna Schwartz at 45 Flinders Lane in April 1988. The window reflection captures an exhibition by Elizabeth Newman, which was to be the last United Artists show before the space became City Gallery. Courtesy Brightspace (photograph by Martin Kantor, commissioned by Tension magazine)

The book mostly reads as a social history, filled with photographs of Anna over her lifetime. At times, this mode of history works; the chapter on the emergence of art magazines in the 1970s and 1980s, which focuses on Paul Taylor’s Art & Text and glints with a sense of the 1980s Zeitgeist. The brief chapter on the artist-run gallery Store 5 – whose founding artists were later represented by ASG – also captures a sense of the era. One particularly engaging anecdote stands out: an exhibition of young Russian artists curated by Anna in her early days at City Gallery. Titled Made in Formani: Current Soviet Avant-Garde Art (1990), the exhibition was nearly derailed by the obstructionist bureaucracy entangling the transport of the artworks out of the Soviet Union.

It’s hard to know the publication’s target audience: if for a general readership, this doesn’t subdue Hall’s glee in decrying its philistinism; if for an art-educated audience, the text provides a paucity of critical insight. Unlike other recent publications on consequential Melbourne museums and galleries – When You Think About Art: The Ewing and George Paton Galleries 1971–2008 (2008), edited by Helen Vivian, Kiffy Rubbo: Curating the 1970s (2016), edited by Janine Burke and Helen Hughes, and Pitch Your Own Tent: Art Projects, Store 5, 1st Floor (2005), edited by Max Delany – Present Tense falls noticeably short of comparative standards of art-historical scholarship.

Quite simply, Hall often seems more beguiled by museum architectural commissions and building renovations than by contemporary art, which makes him a flawed choice as the author of what might otherwise have been a rigorous art-historical account of the significance of the artists represented by Melbourne’s pivotal commercial gallery.