Alan Boxer, public servant, academic and art collector, was schooled in Melbourne and gained his economic qualifications in Melbourne and Oxford. Living in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, he was editor of the Economic Record, and published on foreign aid and tax reform. At the beginning of the 1960s, while living in Melbourne, he began to buy art works from Tam and Ann Purves at Australian Galleries. Initially, it was the work of Melbourne artists, including Tucker, Blackman, Boyd and Perceval that he bought; as Sydney artists began to be represented in Victoria he acquired works by Lynn, Lanceley, Rapotec, Olsen and Whiteley. Living in Sydney in the early 1970s he acquired Fairweather’s Fishing and various other works. After he moved to Canberra in 1975, he lent his collection for shows at the Albert Hall (1977) and the Nolan Gallery (1981-2). Having stopped buying art for a while, after 1985 he began to concentrate on artists from Yuendumu, Utopia, Papunya and Balgo, who were represented by Judith Behan at Chapman Galleries in Griffith, Canberra. In due course he acquired many Indigenous sculptural works, also. The exhibition Crossing Cultures: Art from the Boxer Collection showed at the Drill Hall in 2000. Curated by Morris Low and Nancy Sever, comprising the Melbourne, Sydney and desert strands of Boxer’s collection, it included four major Boyd pictures, acquired in the 1960s, and eight major Kngwarreys, acquired in the 1990s.
