Leon Paroissien AM | 1937 - 2024

It was at the University that Leon and Bernice Murphy, his partner in life and work, conceived and realised the Museum of Contemporary Art, our first major public institution dedicated to the collection and display of contemporary visual arts in Australia. In Leon’s words the MCA was envisaged as ‘a facility of national cultural significance which the University of Sydney is justly proud to have brought into being, fulfilling the founding aspirations of the Power Bequest.’

When appointed in late 1983, as co-curators of the University’s remarkable Power collection the artworks were stored in the Fisher Library Stack, with a modest exhibition space in the former CSIRO library in the Madsen Building. They abandoned biennial purchasing trips “in favour of developing acquisition opportunities in other ways … especially in connection with research on exhibitions”. They initiated other, more controversial, changes, the most decisive being to shift the Power Collection off campus to Tallawoladah/Circular Quay. The announcement in November 1984 unleashed impassioned debate and news headlines over the intervening period. A less public though no less significant change concerned the acquisition of Australian art, and in particular Indigenous art. In less than a decade with the backing of the University, and particularly Professor Virginia Spate from the Department of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1991 with Leon as Director and Bernice as Chief Curator.

Leon possessed exceptional negotiation and diplomacy skills, which he used to guide the interests of the University as trustee of the J. W. Power Bequest, through years of negotiation with the State Government, private philanthropy and public patronage. Always outward looking, at the time of their appointment, Leon and Bernice were the only two Australian members of the International Committee for Museums and Collections Modern Art (a committee of the International Council of Museums, Paris.) Leon had been a member since 1976. His skills and knowledge of contemporary art had been honed as founding Director of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council (1974–1980), and Director of the fifth Biennale of Sydney (1984).

One of their first appointments, Linda Michael recalls:

I was lucky enough to have the pioneering and passionate duo of Leon and Bernice as my curatorial mentors. I remember Leon as man of vision, intelligence and sensitivity who brought an international outlook and openness to his role as the first director of the MCA, a person who held his many skills lightly and who was adept at juggling the multiple roles of a museum director while ensuring that art and artists were always at the centre. He understood that risk is essential to creativity. Leon created the idea of Primavera – still going strong after more than three decades – by steering together the interests of potential donors, curators and artists with his characteristic diplomacy and grace.

And Julie Ewington:

Of Leon Paroissien’s many achievements in his long purposeful life, perhaps the founding of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, together with his partner Bernice Murphy, has made the most profound effect on the country’s cultural life. It was an heroic visionary project, the manifestation of JW Power’s bequest to the University of Sydney in support of contemporary art. I say heroic because of two episodes I witnessed: the resistance Leon was obliged to overcome in the mid-1980s amongst his University colleagues, who decried his vision of the MCA installed at Circular Quay, its home now since 1991. And again, because of the backbreaking efforts required to keep the Museum alive though the first tenuous decade of the 1990s, the time when I worked with Leon and Bernice at the MCA. Leon’s irrepressible optimism, sustained by his tenacity, was the foundation on which the MCA was built through these tough early years. Leon Paroissien was a builder, in so many ways:  to borrow Christopher Wren’s epitaph, ‘If you seek his monument, look around you.’

Among the many artists who worked with Leon and Bernice in the formative days, were Jenny Watson and Imants Tillers, their reflections follow.

Imants writes:

Nothing in my world is possible if one works alone. A solitary wandering plume. I was very lucky that someone like Leon recognised my potential as an artist, very early on. I first met him with Jennifer, my wife, when he knocked on the door of my studio/residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris sometime in 1976 and a friendly face introduced himself as the director of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. Since that time Leon has supported me as a believer and friend at important crucial moments in my life. Leon and Bernice creating the Museum of Contemporary Art changed the art world in Australia forever, and his legacy will be enduring. I give thanks to Leon!

Jenny writes:

I was very sad to hear of the passing of Leon. He was a significant supportive influence for me as a young artist, overseeing the acquisition of Dream Palette (1982) a difficult work at the time comprised of thirty-six panels for the Power Collection now held by the MCA Sydney. He and Bernice were a couple very much on the same page. Bernice wrote a catalogue essay for my first exhibition in Europe at Galerie Hilger, Frankfurt in 1990. Both were important contributors to the Australian art world building lasting connections internationally. Vale Leon, you are very sadly missed.

Mark Ledbury
Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture
Director of the Power Institute
The University of Sydney

Michael Dagostino
Director, Chau Chak Wing Museum
The University of Sydney