ANGUS ALEXANDER GEOFFREY TRUMBLE
October 6, 1964 – October 8, 2022
Angus Trumble was a man of great talent – as an art curator, a gallery director, a writer and a speaker, he combined extraordinary erudition with a rapier wit and an appetite for absurdity.
He died suddenly on October 8, at the age of 58, leaving a void in his family and a huge number of bereaved friends and former colleagues across three continents.
Angus Trumble in 2014, while he was director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
In 2010, on the publication of his second work of popular art history, The Finger: A Handbook, he was asked to complete a lighthearted questionnaire for The Age. “If you wrote a novel/your life story, what would the first line be?” he was asked. His response: “I am bad at making choices, but the first and evidently the shrewdest was my choice of parents.”
Angus was born in Melbourne in 1964, the youngest of the four sons of Helen and Peter Trumble. He was proud of his pioneering Scots and Irish forebears and very close to his brothers Nick, Simon and Hamish. Their upbringing combined affluence with a frugal outlook, full of games and holidays at Metung where the extended family gathered every year. He loved his family deeply.
Angus’ career in letters could be said to have started in 1981, when he won the Barry Humphries Prize for the Liberal Arts as a schoolboy at Melbourne Grammar. At the University of Melbourne he transformed from a shy, awkward teenager into a debonair young scholar, famous for his wit and natty dressing, and formed a close friendship circle that he nurtured – and who nurtured him – throughout his life. After university came Rome and then Venice, where he was an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and where he developed the expensive habit of getting his favourite paperbacks re-bound in leather.
The friends he made at the time, including myself, were in awe of his vast knowledge of art and history, which included bizarre anecdotes about obscure aristocrats, defunct religious orders and a connoisseur’s appreciation of Italian aperitivi.
Angus Trumble in 2014, while he was director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
This polish and scholarship stood him in good stead when he returned to Melbourne and took up the position of aide-de-camp to the Governor of Victoria, Dr J. Davis McCaughey, between 1987 and 1991, a position he relished.
In 1994 he headed to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship before returning to Australia in 1996 to take up the position of associate curator, then curator, of European art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. While there he curated and wrote the catalogue for a number of exhibitions, including Bohemian London: Camden Town and Bloomsbury Paintings and Love & Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria.
He headed back to the US in 2003 and stayed for 11 happy years as curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. It was there that he wrote the highly praised A Brief History of the Smile (2004), an idea that came to him when he gave an after-dinner talk at a dentists’ conference.
He was lured back to Australia in 2014 to take up the position of director at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, in Canberra, which he filled until December 2018. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Angus oversaw the gallery’s 20th anniversary celebrations, including the ambitious 20/20 exhibition. Other exhibitions included So Fine: Contemporary Women Artists Make Australian History; The Popular Pet Show; and Dempsey’s People: a Folio of British Street Portraits 1824–1844. In 2016 he also got the gallery staff shaking their booties in the international Museum Dance-Off competition (they didn’t win).
In 2016 he acquired for the gallery British artist Graham Sutherland’s oil painting Helena Rubinstein in a Red Brocade Balenciaga Gown (1957). This nurtured his fascination with the Polish cosmetic queen’s obscure early career in Australia and New Zealand, selling overpriced pots of face cream to sun-damaged locals. It was a typical Trumble project – a subject rich in both trivia and profound social and cultural commentary, with international scope yet microscopic and sometimes dotty anecdotes. At the time of his death, he had written a manuscript of the secret Rubinstein years and secured a book deal with Melbourne publishing firm Black Inc.
Angus’ last position in Canberra was as a senior research fellow in Australian History at the National Museum of Australia, but he had plans to move back to Melbourne, a city he had left almost 30 years previously. The last time his Melbourne friends saw him was at a big dinner in Lygon Street, in September, to celebrate the fellowship he had been awarded by his alma mater, Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. He will be sorely missed.
Fiona Gruber is a writer and radio producer. In 2015 she made the 10-part series Australian Portraits with Angus Trumble for Radio National.
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