Spendours of Civilisation with text by Michael King
Eastern Southland Gallery/Longacre Press

Over the recent holiday weekend we visited the Eastern Southland Gallery in Gore in order to view The John Money Collection which is housed there.
What an extraordinary and eclectic collection of art - from New Zealand artists Rita Angus and Theo Schoon to Aboriginal artists and contemporary American artists along with an astonishing array of African initiation masks and statues.

John Money, who died earlier this year, was an internationally renowned and somewhat controversial sexologist who was based at John Hopkins University in Baltimore for more than 50 years.Although New Zealand born and educated, he had two masters degrees by the time he was 23 years old, Money moved to a position in the U.S. while in his late 20's and lived there for the rest of his life.

In this most attractive publication we learn from curator Jim Geddes how The John Money Collection from Baltimore,Maryland ended up in a remote corner of New Zealand and the doyen of New Zealand biographers, Michael King,(who came to know Money will researching his biography on Janet Frame) ,provides a highly readable, stylish and entertaining biographical essay.
The book is generously illustrated with colour plates featuring art from The Collection along with black and white photos of John Money and friends