Vale Robert Bell AM

Dr Robert Stewart Bell AM
29 December 1946, Perth WA – 28 July 2018, Canberra ACT

Robert Bell completed a 50 year career in the arts, serving with insight and passion as Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the National Gallery of Australia, following long terms as Curator of Crafts and Design at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Senior Designer at the W.A. Museum. As an artist working in ceramics and textiles, his work was exhibited in Australia and internationally, and is held in public and private collections.

He was awarded the 2001 Australian Centenary Medal, the 2005 Australia Council Emeritus Award and in 2010 was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for service to contemporary craft and design.

An unfailingly generous and gracious man, Robert was loved and admired by his family, friends, colleagues and the many artists whose work he encouraged and supported.

Close friend and colleague Helmut Lueckenhausen led the private cremation service which was held for Robert and delivered the following eulogy.

Robert’s view of himself was: agnostic, with a sense of wonder.

He was never agnostic about his sense of wonder in respect of the built environment, the capacity and more than that, the obligation, of members of our community to celebrate the contribution of creativity, design and the additions we make to the world.

His career played itself out in a trajectory that could not perhaps have been otherwise, given how he thought, how he felt, and how he was in the world.

One thinks of his childhood interests, his early education and training, his progress through various jobs and an almost inevitable professional progression presents itself. It was not a life readily indicated, or possibly even easily recognised, by those closest to him as a youth.

He was always on a mission, always a man apart.

It sounds easy.

Of course one doesn’t, perhaps one can’t, know the private thoughts and doubts given to all of us that he may have experienced in the quiet of his private emotional space.

That he presented for so long as a sort of lighthouse to so many in his sphere of influence is a clear indication that he could transform any such doubts, any emotional and professional challenges, into determined progress.

It’s as though he was waving us on: “this way – I see a way though”

And those of us who shared his professional space know how hard at times it was (and is) to see the way through and we will miss his friendly stewardship.

He was a man of natural, effortless grace.

I always felt he was completely grounded and when gaps presented themselves between how he knew things should be – and how they were, as they inevitably do for all of us, he kept the faith, worked harder and with more determination and re-affirmed his trajectory.

Here is where this discourse arrives at obligation. Robert loved architecture, cars, beautiful objects.However, for him, these were, in their most successful manifestation, expressions of human obligation to commit, to improve, to leave more behind than one is given.

He understood the primacy of human experience, of love, of friendship, of social obligation. He never sublimated human experience with things, he saw and celebrated things as icons of the best of human experience.

If he could hear me now, he might think it was time to avoid mawkishness and redirect, lighten, the conversation a little with humour. He had a wicked sense of humour.

As with most successful people he did have moments where he wondered if professional life was a kind of fraud and whether he would be found out. We shared a joke where after greeting each other and speaking about what opening, lecture, conference, project or other activity we had recently been involved with one or other of us would ask: “have you been found out yet?” And the other would say something to the effect of, “not yet, I got away with it again. I’m safe for a little while longer”

At openings, we also joked, about standing near the exit so if there was an interminable, worthy, performance one could edge quietly and unnoticed, out the door.

I doubt he ever actually did that, he would not have been comfortable with displaying disrespect and, not unlike with the Queen, he was required to develop the skill of standing and paying respectful attention for great amounts of time without buckling. Perhaps unlike the Queen (I imagine, I can’t know in respect of her modus operandi) he was fortunate in that the events he attended were more uniformly likely to be of real interest to him. He was genuinely passionate about the privilege of working in the realm of human ingenuity – in that space where quiet contemplation is followed by assertive statement – and something wondrous has been formed.

So many of us are fortunate to have been in his life, to share a little of the space that was rightly dedicated to his wife, Eugenie Keefer Bell.

That these two people found each other, shared their lives so completely is an affirmation that much remains well with the world.

A world that is somewhat poorer for our loss of Robert, but infinitely richer for everything he was to us, for the tangible difference he made to us, a difference that will go with us through “all of the days of our lives”.

Rest well my friend.

Read also an obituary to Dr Robert Bell on the National Gallery of Australia website.