The extensive Xipell Collection was built over six decades by Dr Jos Xipell and his wife Thecla. Jos provided his own account of his motives for making such a broad collection, dedicating his reflections to the artist Ian Bow, employed as an art teacher at Camberwell Grammar during Jos’s senior years at Camberwell Grammar, 1945-49. Jos conceded that Mr Bow had stimulated his growing interest in the world of art during those school years - Ian Bow’s 1954 oil painting Gaol Breakers is part of the Xipell Collection. When addressing the issue of “Why collect?”, Jos recalled and endorsed the observation made by the Polish-born Melbourne artist, collector, dealer and philanthropist, Joseph Brown AO, CBE (1918-2009), that ‘art collecting is instinctive and universal, an impulse that has been present for thousands of years although it affects relatively few people’.[1] His reflections were also dedicated to Brown, for Jos and Thecla accepted that they were amongst those few.
Dr Xipell informed his extended family that he had developed a liking for drawing and painting as a small child, an outlook that was fostered in his Camberwell Grammar art classes. Jos recalled those classes fondly.[2] A similar love of Australian history led to an early desire to acquire works reflecting the evolution of Australian art. Whilst a student of medicine at the University of Melbourne, Jos would walk downhill to the National Gallery in Swanston Street to view works of art – he was particularly drawn to the Australian collection. His first acquisition was made while still a university student. Jos later gained the concept of forming ‘a collection of one’s own’ following his attendance at an auction of the ‘Sedon Collection of Australian Paintings’ at Camberwell in December 1960. The parameters of a collection evolved slowly and with some confusion, but ‘early Australian’ works within his budget were his original targets. Increasingly he developed an interest in the ‘early moderns’ of Sydney and Melbourne from the 1920s and 1930s, Jos being able to meet some of the artists of this period, including Arthur Boyd, and corresponding with curator Alisa Bunbury. Contacts with the authors of artistic monographs and with the descendants of artists such as Frederick McCubbin’s daughter Kathleen, allowed Jos to pursue his research, which even where it ended in a ‘dead end’ nevertheless formed what he called ‘the fun of the chase’. His early collection consisted mainly of figurative works, but in later years he came to enjoy and acquire non-figurative, modernistic works with increased abstractive elements. The collection duly included works extending from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century with few exceptions. Over time, personal attendance at auctions was replaced by the employment of an art advisor and absentee bids at sales in Australia and overseas, a process which Jos referred to as ‘a more disciplined approach’.
Collecting afforded Jos intense emotional satisfaction, always his primary ‘driving motive’ rather than any pursuit of profit or favourable investment: ‘I have never sold a painting with the intention of gain.’[3] By the time that Jos built 41 Victoria Avenue, Canterbury, with the intention of withdrawing his collection from a bank vault and displaying it in a suitable gallery-style environment, he had collected a body of works that included examples of different periods in Australian art; colonial, academic, impressionistic and early modern. The Xipell Collection also includes three examples of Indigenous art. He noted that as a private collector he could, unlike a public gallery, be idiosyncratic in his choices and that he was free to avoid the temptations of ‘fashion’. It was never possible to buy everything that he wanted owing to cost, but ’one may buy what one can afford to like, always recalling Joseph Brown’s dictum that liking a work should be the over-riding factor’.
Reflecting on his extensive collection in later years, Jos concluded that: ‘A collection is not a static but a dynamic concept evolving as one’s appreciation broadens and one’s taste changes and new opportunities present’. The whole enterprise had provided him with ‘not only emotional and intellectual satisfaction but also endless entertainment’. By 2015, in accordance with a decision made over a decade earlier, Dr Xipell offered the bulk of his unique, ‘gold-mine’ collection, over 130 paintings, to Camberwell Grammar on the condition that it be maintained as a single Australian art collection. It was his desire for young people to learn about the history of their country, to share the ‘Australian story’ as he called it, through these works of art.[4] The School accepted this generous offer, confident that it would make ‘a lasting contribution for the benefit of future generations of students at Camberwell Grammar School, enabling them to learn about, admire and appreciate Australian art’.[5] The Xipell Collection would also serve as a suitable, enduring tribute to the philanthropy of Dr Joseph Michael Xipell and Mrs Thecla Xipell. Shortly before offering his collection to the School, Jos had reflected on what had been a life-long passion: ‘I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.’ He felt that he had learned a great deal from his art works and library through a life-long process of education.[6]
Other Grammarians too may now share both that posie and that thread, also learning from art in a similar way, just as Dr Xipell intended.
Dr David Bird,
School Historian and Archivist,
August 2023.
[1] Jos Xipell, “Paintings at 41: Annotations, reflections from the late sixties.” Unpublished document, Xipell Collection, CGS Archives, revised and amended, 2014.
[2] Interview with Sister Mary, February 2023. CGS Archives.
[3] Xipell, “Paintings at 41”, CGS Archives.
[4] Interview with Sister Mary.
[5] Dr Paul Hicks, Headmaster, to Dr J. Xipell, Canterbury, 13 March 2018. CGS Archives.
[6] Interview with Sister Mary.
