Gallery Prints Closure

Last week saw the unexpected demise of Gallery Prints' in gallery kiosks and their online store.  They closed for the Xmas/New Year holiday at the end of 2017 but the update "Sorry, orders are now closed for the Christmas period" remained in place well into the new year.

Co-owner Reuben Price recently told me that the business will not  in fact be re-opening at all and the ordering functionality had been removed from their website.  The official closure date was 31 March 2018.

Gallery Prints promised to stock "Fine Art Prints from New Zealand's finest Museums and Art Galleries" and they had partnerships in place with Te Papa, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland War Memorial Museum  and the National Library of New Zealand where prints could be ordered in store via a kiosk or online via a shopping link from the gallery/museum website.

They had a good selection of prints from some great NZ artists such as Robin White and Rita Angus, together with Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon and Gordon Walters images that were available due to the gallery having purchased the copyright to reproduce images along with the original paintings. Gallery Prints also had a rather eclectic range of botanical and historical material from their partners which might not have been hot sellers but it was good to see a distribution channel for less mainstream images.

It was an impressive effort to co-ordinate a business model like this and here at NZ Fine Prints we were excited to see an example of our nationally or locally owned galleries working with the private sector to promote the artistic heritage of Aoteaora to people interested in buying prints. 

Shame to see it didn't work out, hopefully some lessons can be learned as it seems to make sense to marry the possibilities of short run digital printing with the wealth of our shared cultural resources held in NZ's museums and galleries in some form of public/private partnership.

Prints of Maori Portraits painted by Goldie, Lindauer - Should they be allowed by New Zealand Galleries?

Maori portrait by Goldie

Faced with the dwindling supply of prints of paintings by Charles Frederick Goldie we were talking in the office today about the problems publishers of prints are having with the publication of Maori portraits that are held in some major New Zealand public galleries.

For a long time paintings of Maori subjects have been reproduced as prints. Goldie himself did a handsigned print of "A Good Joke" in the 1920s (which now sell for around $1000 each on the rare occasion they come up at auction). However during a major Goldie exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery in 1997 some Gallery staff became nervous about the use of Goldie's Maori portraits (on a large calender) after they were questioned about their right to do so by at least one descendant. Since then the idea of seeking permission from descendants of a [Maori] portrait's subject before a painting is reproduced has taken hold at at least two major New Zealand public art galleries. We have heard the term "moral copyright" being used to describe this new idea that if a print is being made of a painting with people in it there is an obligation to trace descendants of the subjects to ask their permission.

Because we stock all Maori portraits available as prints we have descendants of Goldie (and Lindauer) subjects emailing or calling on at least a weekly basis who want to purchase prints of their ancestors that are not currently in print. Print publishers are facing a gallery policy that is inventing a new form of copyright that is not recognised outside of a couple of institutions in New Zealand. We would love to hear views from all sides of the debate about the publication of prints of Maori Portraits - please add your comment to the discussion below.