aspects of contemporary new zealand painting

ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY NEW ZEALAND PAINTINGAuthor(s): P. AE. HUTCHINGSSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 125, No. 5256 (NOVEMBER 1977), pp. 793-816Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41372719 .

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ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY

NEW ZEALAND PAINTING

I A paper by I

II] P. AE. HUTCHINGS , MA(NZ), В Litt (Oxon) I

Associate Professor of Philosophy Ç Aesthetics ), University of Western Australia , given to the Commonwealth

Section of the Society on Tuesday iyth May 1977, with Donald Bowenb Curator of the Commonwealth Art Gallery ,

in the Chair

The Chairman: It is a great pleasure to be asked to introduce our lecturer this afternoon. Professor Hutchings was born in New Zealand and in his early experience the thing which really made him aware of the meaning of art in life was colonial painting. On two occasions I myself have had the pleasure of speaking in this impressive room, and in both lectures I made extensive references to New Zealand painters. In spite of modern communications New Zealand is for most of us a distant country, and my guess is that its art is even more remote. In this country there have for long been living a considerable number of artists from overseas, including the Commonwealth, but in recent years the numbers have tended to decrease, partly because of eco- nomic conditions. Understandably, those from New Zealand have not been particularly thick on the ground. I am responsible for a gallery which,

over the years, has included the work of many New Zealand artists, and I don't doubt that some of them will be illustrated and discussed by Professor Hutchings. Two of them most certainly will - Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston. Their work is also to be seen in an exhibition which I am putting the finishing touches to at the moment, called 'Commonwealth Artists of Fame 1952-1977' which is by way of being a Jubilee exhibition from all over the Commonwealth. But I dare to guess that there is one very distinguished New Zealand artist in this country who probably won't figure in Pro- fessor Hutchings' lecture ; I refer to John Hutton, a very well known glass engraver who was responsible for the great screen window in Coventry cathedral, and who has done many public works here and overseas. He too will be represented in our exhibition.

The following paper , which was illustrated , was then given. ir TTHEN John Keats visited the Lake

%/%/ District with his friend Charles ▼ V Armitage Brown in 1818 he found it

splendid. He wrote to his brother Tom ťI shall learn poetry here'.1 When, twenty years later, Brown emigrated to New Zealand, then just one vast Lake District, he was hardly there before he regretted the whole enterprise. His son wrote in a memoir: Brown . . . left England about the middle of 1841 for his new home. For a short time, he rather enjoyed the change, but when he realized the want of congenial society; of new books and

periodicals, with not even a newspaper, and that he had destroyed his son's prospects to no purpose, he determined to return to England, leaving his son in New Zealand; before however, he could complete his arrangements, he died on his birthday, in June 1842, of apoplexy . . .2

Cultivating a taste for scenery in the Lakes and in Scotland was one thing when Brown had Wentworth Place to go home to. It was another when he had not. Landscape is poetical only when 'framed' by civilization ?

Charles Heaphy's watercolour Mount Egmontfrom the Southward (1839), (Figure 1)

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOVEMBER 1977

Figure i. Charles Heaphy, Mount Egmont from the Southward (by courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library , Wellington)

shows us what Brown's Taranaki would have looked like. Beautiful, cool, inimical. What it felt like we may infer from Brown's apoplexy. How it looks now you can see from Michael Smither's Alfred Road Bridge (1971) (Figure 2). This picture is in one way bland and reassuring. But it is cool and tough under that blandness. The hard New Zea- land light revealing the forms of those beautiful boulders, and the mountain profiles sharp against the sky, are exactly recorded. They read off as metaphor: nature here is benign, but even so, quite indifferent to man.3

Smither's manner is linear, like the manner of our High Colonial painters, such as Fox and Kinder. And he records feelings, still, which those Colonials felt. Time has attenuated but not cancelled the sense of the remoteness and the loneliness of New Zealand, and empty landscapes read, still, not only as topography but also as metaphor.

We know from the early parts of Samuel Butler's Erewhon how the New Zealand landscape felt in the 1860s to someone just out from England : 'Never shall I forget the utter loneliness of the prospect - only the little far-away homestead giving sign of

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human handiwork; - the vastness of mountain and plain, of river and sky.'4 And Erewhon itself may be seen, at one level, as an attempt psychologically to fill an empty landscape. The description of the stone statues on the mountain pass can be read as a way of introducing into the bare country the sorts of ancient, man-made things that Butler felt ought to have been there. Here is his description of the statues: 'They were barbarous - neither Egyptian, nor Assyrian nor Japanese - different from any of these, yet akin to all. They were six or seven times larger than life, of great antiquity, worn and lichen grown . . Л5 The famous comparison between the wool-shed and the cathedral sums it all up for us : A wool-shed is a roomy place, built somewhat on the same plan as a cathedral, with aisles on either side full of pens for the sheep, a great nave, at the upper end of which the shearers work, and a further space for wool sorters and packers. It always refreshed me with a semblance of antiquity (precious in a new country), though I very well knew that the oldest wool-shed in the settlement was not more than seven years old, while this was only two. 6 What Butler yearned for was not mere



NOVEMBER I977 ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY NEW ZEALAND PAINTING

Figure 2. Michael S mit her, Alfred Road Bridge (by courtesy of the artist)

antiquity, but the whole tradition of settlement and civilization which antiquity implies. What Butler wanted was the landscape, and the being at home in a landscape, that we find for example in Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs . Andrews in the National Gallery, London, Collection. As Smither shows, it is not like that even yet in Taranaki. Nor is it in Canterbury.

A colonial born poet, William Pember Reeves (1857-1932), tells us how he felt about New Zealand in the latter part of the nineteenth-century :

. . . Pent by that drear and shipless sea Round lonely islands rolled: Isles nigh as empty as their deep, Where men but talk of gold and sheep And think of sheep and gold.7

Butler, who after all came out only for the sheep and the gold, could not escape the colonial loneliness. And there is a sketch by Butler of his hut at Mesopatamia, Canterbury (Figure з),8 which ought to tell us as much as the first chapters of Erewhon do about his feelings towards New Zealand. It is instruc-

tive to compare Butler's drawing with a nineteenth-century photograph of the same scene (Figure 4). Butler's rather 'Gothick' line of hills and mountains is more hectic than are the lines of Nature as recorded by the lens, and we can sense at least some of what Butler was trying to express in this rather deliberate looking fantasticalization. However, he was an indifferent artist, and one cannot rest too much on this drawing: how far the mannerism is sufficiently under control for the drawing to count as a true record of feeling one cannot quite tell. More accurate, and more expressive of somewhat the same sentiments towards the country, is Don Binney's 1975 view of a different landscape, Man's Heady Te Henga (Figure 5). The technique is far, far better than Butler's, but the emotions conveyed are curiously comparable. And the headland happens to look like one of Butler's mythical statues. At Man's Head nature has copied, as it were, from art, and Binney has pointed up the copy.

Binney's line, like Smither's, is analytical : and the analytical style is absolutely charac-

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Figures 3 and 4. Samuel Butler's sketch {above) of his hut at Mesopotamia in about 1862 and (below) a photograph taken of the hut in the previous year

teristic of the contemporary New Zealand landscape school. The line resembles, though it does not necessarily derive from, the notations of what I have called our 'High' Colonial artists. As my paradigm of a High Colonial I have selected Miss Longueville. Her drawing of Church Hilly Nelson (1845, Bett Collection, Nelson Provincial Museum) (Figure 6) can have influenced virtually no-

body, since it has only very recently been put on public show. What it exhibits is the style, the 'vision', which the contemporary New Zealand landscape school has rediscovered for itself.

It is difficult to put into words what makes Miss Longueville's drawing so much a classic of New Zealand manner. But one may come at the problem of defining the manner

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NOVEMBER 1977 ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY NEW ZEALAND PAINTING

Figure 5. Don Binney, Man's Head, Te Henga (by courtesy of the artist )

Figure 6. Miss Longueville , Church Hill, Nelson, 1845 (Bett Collection , Nelson Provincial Museum; by courtesy of the Curator)

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOVEMBER I977

ostensively and begin by suggesting that you notice the line. This is at once naïve and observant. Miss Longueville takes a careful, almost a geomorphologisťs look at the rounded shapes of the hills. She does not fall back, as, alas, Butler does, on rather ready- made looking notations and on easy exaggera- tions : as a result she fuses hill profiles of the sort that we see in the foreground of the photograph of Butler's adopted landscape with an emotive calligraphy more full of feeling than is the slightly uncertain line of Butler's sketch . Then notice the in-feeling. There is a sense of empathy for the rather feminine hills. And what we have here is a kind of native expressionism kept within the bounds of topographical realism. Finally notice how this shrewd, affective, expressionist realism then cashes out as metaphor. The soft but heedless hills dominate the angular little houses. Only the stockaded church, on its natural mound, has any air of having come to 'belong' among these elegant little mountains.

This drawing is a metaphor for feelings that are still sometimes had in that very landscape. Robin Healey's Immigrant , written 'At Nelson, Labour Day, 1961',9 resonates emotionally, 116 years later, with Miss Longueville's drawing. This is the first section of the three part poem : We sat marooned in the blue gloom Of that hotel room, dazed By weeks at sea, ballasted with doubt. The baby mewled in afternoon heat, Muzzing her eyes with small soft fists. We ate malt biscuits, uncorked champagne That was warm, flat, sour. It was Saturday night, closed, Foreign and suddenly all a mistake. In a small hour Kath began to bleed The fall of a tiny comma of a child. She was echoes away through strange streets. Sunrise, the landscape reared up, bushj Hill, rock, quite still, and repeated Over and over and over and over Between me and the numb Antarctic. The rhythm of Mr. Healey's 'over and over', the 'over' four times repeated, recreates in words the rhythm of Miss Longueville's sketch, and the recession of her hills. Smither's Requiem for an Old Road (1970) reworks in a twentieth-century way a manner close to Miss Longueville's. And as Mr. Healey's 1961 poem shows, such a manner may still be freighted with the old feelings.

Smither, born in 1939, and Binney, born

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in 1940, did not have to make this redis- covery of a High Colonial manner on their own. And we must consider for a while three men who have profoundly influenced the painters of the younger generation, namely: McCahon, born 191 9, Woollaston, born 1910, and Sutton, born 1919.

As a background to the notion of a redis- covery, though, it may be useful to show you three paintings of the kind that were in vogue in New Zealand when McCahon's generation began working. These pictures, Spring 1915 by Nugent Welch, and two undated watercolours from Nelson's Bishop Suter Art Gallery, are in their own way beautiful things. But they make New Zealand look reassuringly like England, or anyhow like Europe. Such reassurance is false, however. And until painters put it aside, they could not hope to produce in their art any sense of national identity.

Colin McCahon (b. 1919) McCahon's painting Takaka - Night and Day (Figure 7) is as analytic as Longueville, and psychologically bleaker. The native, perhaps naïve expressionism of Miss Longueville's sketch is now explicit. The formalization of land forms is extreme, but the horizon with its accurate and subtle observation asserts the basic shapes from which the formal patterns derive. McCahon balances the acute, geomorphological, observation of this horizon off against a conscious symbolism. The hills in the foreground are made to look like khaki tarpaulins, and are artificially lit, on one side for day, on the other for night. The effect is almost that of a stage set, or of a model landscape. But it is anchored, the whole structure and complex of feelings, by and to that subtle, accurate sky-line. The foreground and strong middle distance are bleakly lyrical; reality holds firm on the horizon.

The later North Otago Landscape after Professor Cotton's ' Geomorphology' is more ironic than expressionist, but it is based on the same tension between accurate repre- sentation and extreme formalization, as any- one can tell who takes the trouble to consult figure 231 in Professor C. A. Cotton's Landscape .10

The North Otago Landscape (1967, National Gallery of New Zealand - here- after NGC) is as formal and as metaphorical as Miss Longueville, and it lies close to




Figure 7. Colin McCahon , Takaka - Night and Day (by courtesy of the artist)

twentieth-century notions of absolute painting. Note its masterly texture - a texture that is almost, but not quite, the whole topic of the work.

In Easter Landscape (1966) religious feelings are given a largely abstract expression. In the earlier King of the Jews (1947), the line is expressionist in the full European sense of the word. Will He Save Him ? (1959) is almost naïvely expressionist, Dedication (1963) almost totally abstract; but both are unmistakably from the one hand.

As might be expected in a small country, far from the world's art centres, McCahon's work has been the occasion of much contro- versy - most of it needless and silly. The importance of his painting can be seen from these slides, and from the influence that his work manifestly has on the work of other New Zealand artists : on the Realists Smither, Wong and White. And on the abstract painters as well.

At the Commonwealth Artists of Fame Exhibition (at the Commonwealth Gallery) Londoners will have a chance to see three recent McCahons. All are in his symbolic mode, and not in his landscape-manner. The texture of the paint and the looseness of the calligraphy both exhibit McCahon's careless mastery. The paint seems casually put on, the words and numerals simply scrawled. But underneath one senses a tightness, a control, which is absolute. The 'rocks in the sky' can only, one suddenly feels, be the Ten Commandments, or certain of the Stations of the Cross.

Mountford Tosswell Woollaston ( b . 1910) Woollaston is the exception who proves the otherwise fairly watertight rule of New Zealand painting that : 'hard light gives hard profiles : and paintings must be hard-edged'. His Bayly's Hill (NGC) is a near abstract landscape, executed in chalky, clayey, oil paint. But it, like the rest of WooÜaston's works, builds towards the kind of line that McCahon and Smither set down and build from . More plastic than McCahon, Woollaston is as concerned as he to find the apt hill profile, and to produce the exact concrete metaphor of place. A little older than McCahon, Woollaston is no less radical a painter: and, for all that he constructs rather than delineates his forms, he is no less a characteristic New Zealand painter. He is, indeed, one of the most important artists that New Zealand has produced, and a brilliant one by any standards. His surfaces are masterly, his design strong, His Seated Woman (Figure 8) at the Commonwealth Gallery exhibition shows us a head and shoulders as friable as Woollaston's earth, as crumbling as his landscape. Everything seems about to collapse, slide, disintegrate: but it, nevertheless, holds. This work and the two landscapes recall the lines of Michael Jackson's Tastel mediaeval; to Toss Woollaston' : Pastel mediaeval : purple earth and clouds Like river boulders resting on a stoic's shoulders . . '

The structure and the powdery texture are

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Figure 8. Mountford Tosswell Woollaston, Seated Woman, Í955 (by courtesy of The Commonwealth Institute)

part of a very powerful metaphorical state- ment. The paintings have the asthetic self- containment that, since Cézanne and Matisse, we have come to expect: but they are still, manifestly, about the world, and about people's situations in, and people's feelings towards, this particular piece of the world.

William Sutton (b. 1917) A gentler painter than either McCahon or Woollaston, William Sutton has probably been as influential. Autumn (NGC) from his Four Seasons series (1968) is at once topographical and formal. The hill lines are

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beautifully observed. And the shadows and the skies develop later into autonomous motifs, as do the grasses too, producing different kinds of pictures again, some highly abstract.

A central influence on the younger New Zealand realist painters is Sutton's Nor' Wester in the Cemetery (1950, Auckland City Art Gallery Collection): and suitable almost to found a school of Magic Realists on is Sutton's Dry September (1949, private collection). Versatile, gentle but remarkably sharp, Sutton's vision has profoundly and variously influenced his younger contempor- aries.




Figure 9. Robin White , Sam Hunt (by courtesy of the artist)

Michael Smither (b. 1939) We have taken Smither' s Requiem for an Old Road (1970) as a 'pair' to Miss Longueville's Church Hilly Nelson . As a pair to McCahon's bleak Takaka - Night and Day we might select Smither's Central Otago (1970) or his Karitane Bay , Dunedin of the same year. The Longueville parallel indicates no influences : the McCahon one does.

Smither's pictures are abstractedly realistic, expressionist, and often ironic. How Smither sees people in this landscape of his we shall consider briefly at the end of this lecture; his view is at once comic and compassionate. His notation for the landscape itself is at once accurate and formal.

Don Binney (b. 1940) Working often in a miniature landscape at Te Henga outside Auckland, in a pocket- sized New Zealand Lake District - a New Zealand within a larger New Zealand - Don Binney is the most abstractive though not the most abstract of his country's Realist Landscape painters. He builds up by

induction a number of hill profiles, falls of land, sweeps of water; these typical images suggest, beside their models, numerous other places in New Zealand. Binney discovers what Sir Joshua would have called 'central forms' of characteristic landscape. And he produces immensely stylish images of his homeland, images with a profound feeling for it: not coldly 'neo-classical' as one might expect, but often highly animistic.

In many of the paintings there is a great bird, echoing the shape of the countryside which it dominates ; bare landscape, or urban landscape as in Colonial Garden Bird (1965). The readings of the bird metaphor are always open: but the scale of the creatures makes them more than accidents in the place they inhabit. In his more recent works Binney's animism is implicit in his line: a line that is nervous and faintly 'Germanic'. In his earlier paintings the animism incar- nated itself in the vast avians brooding over bare and beautiful places,12 now it tends to control all the devices òf this painter's landscape notation.

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Figure io. Brent Wong, Colonial Summer, 1968 (by courtesy of the artist )

Robin White (b. 1946) Robin White is a landscapist who is concerned most with the placing of New Zealand's little wooden buildings seen against the fine flowing hills. She records the buildings (often from photos and field studies), both formalizing them, and stressing always their isolation in the large landscapes of her country. The isolation of the buildings recalls Butler's 'Never shall I forget the utter loneliness of the prospect . . .', yet Robin White's pictures have a calm familiarity with this cool and inimical landscape. There is a sense of a place lived in, a sense of comfortable acceptance, but never, never, of cosiness.

Recently Robin White has begun putting figures into her landscapes: the poet Sam Hunt seen across a bay, her mother seen against the Harbour Cone volcano in Dunedin; her mother seen, lonelier still, at the window of her suburban house. Robin White's paintings and prints express Butler's and Miss Longueville's anguish : the feelings of remoteness are come to terms with, but are still there as a strong undercurrent. The works are as cool and as clean as the country which they memorialize. The vision is at once affectionate and truthful.

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The image of Sam Hunt (Figure 9) sums up a whole segment of Miss White's work. The popular poet is caught in an attitude that might be characterized, without too much paradox, as one of laconic eloquence. And he is seen, set against just the hills that he writes of in his poems. If any image is central, natural, to the New Zealand icono- graphy it is the high hill sweeping into a bay. Here the scene is recorded almost casually, but the lines of objects, of the figure itself, are beautifully formalized. Robin White takes the momentary pose of a candid camera snapshot, the long journey from casual photo to representative image.

Brent Wong (b. 1945) Brent Wong records New Zealand hills and skies with the eye of a geographer. His Linear Aspect (1969, NGC) records the very cloud formations, though not the hills, that are in two slides of landscape sent me by Marilyn Webb. But the other things that Wong puts in his skies, knots and chunks of architectural ornament, are not to be seen in real life. They are not to be seen in the sky, and if we except curious things such as the Massey Memorial on its headland in Welling- ton harbour, they are not to be seen on the




Figure ii. Anna Caselberg , Hillside, Otago Harbour (by courtesy of the artist)

ground either. Wong sets them floating as seeds perhaps. He blows them in the wind in the hope that they will take root and flower; in the hope that in later Colonial Summers (Figure 10) we shall have grander things to look at than this tiny, but beautifully recorded farmhouse, with its false wooden key- stone set in its Italianate window frame and its delicate and fragile verandah.

Butler found a woolshed very like a cathedral; Wong seems, if we put a very public interpretation on his hermetic sur- realism, to be wanting real cathedrals. He does not get them: but he constructs their rationes seminales from the oddments of architectural ornaments that can be found on New Zealand's rather modest buildings.

Marilyn Webb (b. 1937) Marilyn Webb, who photographed those Wong clouds, is a print-maker not a painter, but I include her in this summary because she carries to elegant extremes the formalization of the New Zealand landscape. And she produces some of the bleakest images that there are of it : indeed bleak, but at the same time affectionate. And beautifully satis- fying as metaphors. Photographs and prints

by this artist show how the landscape looks, and how it feels.

Anna Caselberg ( b . 1942) Anna Caselberg is at first glance a more humanistic artist than Marilyn Webb. Her images are more immediately reassuring, though on examination they prove to be as tough. The fluidity of water colour has been made to record the hardness of landscape forms while suggesting strongly the forces which erode and shape these forms. The beautiful colours charm us : but they consti- tute and do not hide, the contours of a landscape not patched out into fields, not made comfortable to the eye. Mrs. Caselberg's technique recalls that of the English water- colourists, but her feeling is austere and Antipodean. Here in a study of Hillside , Otago Harbour (Figure 11) her hills fall, beautiful, muscular and bleak, into a cold sea. There is no sign of human habitation or handwork. One senses only the artist - or oneself - alone in this bright, bare, complex landscape, under a cool hard light which falls on the ridges of the hills in such a way as to stress their natural geometry. Mrs. Caselberg brings out at once the interest that

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Figure 12. Grahame Sydney , July on the Maniototo (by courtesy of the artist)

these landforms have for the observer, and their total indifference to human presence and human concerns.

Joanna Paul ( b . 1945) It is not surprising perhaps that New Zealand has few serious intimiste painters. One might be happy to go inside a Wong Colonial building, or into a Robin White house in order to shelter from the elements and the bleak beauties of the landscape. But inside any real New Zealand house one would be tempted to become all too cosy. And the New Zealand galleries are full of all- too-cosy still-life pictures. One of the younger generation of New Zealand painters, Joanna Paul, achieves the precise tone, the very feel, of New Zealand domestic life. She collects, as it were in a slightly convex glass, the plain, comfortable, almost elegant scene before her: and sometimes she shows us the outside world through open airy windows, linking her intimate interiors to the landscape. Joanna Paul has no studio: her paintings are simply part of the life that goes on in the rooms that she paints.

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Alvin Pankhurst (b. 1949) The surrealist interior by Alvin Pankhurst Maybe Tomorrow (Dunedin Public Art Gallery) shows us what it might be like inside, not a Wong house, but rather inside one of those knots of architecture. Pankhurst is almost, but not quite, alone among New Zealand painters in concentrating on this claustrophobic kind of motif. He is without peer as a draughtsman, and the feelings which he generates are as intense as they are uncomfortable.

Grahame Sydney ( b . 1943) As meticulous and as devoted to a fine finish is the young New Zealand magic realist Grahame Sydney. Sydney's buildings-in- landscape are photographic, but in a sense they are more neutral than camera images. Contrasted with, for example, the splendid New Zealand photographs by Kenneth Griffiths which appeared in the Sunday Times colour supplement of 6th March 1977, they seem less, not more romantic. Con- trasted with Robin White's abstracted realism they seem altogether literal. Seen as




they are in themselves, these fine egg- ! tempera paintings move from local docu- | mentation and local feeling into the international mode of magic and celebrative realism. The particular is being recorded and Platonized simultaneously. His July on the Maniototo (Figure 12) is as literal an account as Sydney can contrive of the Weddeburn rail siding under a fall of snow. The state- ment that this image makes is implicit in its very reticence. Like the Canadian painter Alex Colville whom he much admires, Sydney celebrates the everyday fact by recording it with a heightened vision, by stressing the reality of the object to the point of producing a hyper-real image of it. This is, as it were, the visual analogue of a Frost poem (though New Zealand has no poet who writes in quite the Frost manner). Sydney's problem as a painter is simply to reaffirm, in the New Zealand context, a kind of twentieth- century realism that has asserted itself in other places. And the solving of this problem is not as simple a matter as it looks. The international style must always be made to hit the exact local tone. Here it does, perfectly.

I have dwelt at length on the New Zealand landscape as motif of New Zealand painting. And I have expatiated on the theme of loneliness and isolation, because it is very central to the New Zealand sensibility. Furthermore, by being so central to art in a new small country, such a theme reminds us what art is at bottom about : its purpose is to show man his situation as a way of making him face it more affectively and effectively. All colonial painting is a splendid reminder of what art is, and what its deep functions are. Art makes us feel at home in our world. The mimesis of anything 'doubles' it, and involves recognitions, both literal and metaphorical. Some of the metaphorical recognitions have an existential value and force.

The manner of analytic, expressionist, realism typified by Miss Longueville's Church Hilly Nelson seems to me the one most apt for recording the facts, and the feel of the New Zealand landscape: the most apt both for topography and for metaphor. It is, endlessly adapted and reworked, the manner of our major contemporary landscape painters.

II We must turn our attention now to painters represented in the recent exhibition in the National Gallery, Wellington, Formal

Abstraction in New Zealand , and to New Zealand abstractionism in general.

Between the Formal Abstractionists and some of the severe McCahon paintings there is only the kind of difference that a cataloguer might find convenient. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, abstractionism is continuous with more 'realistic' modes, and each comple- ments the other.

The first exhibition of almost exclusively abstract works by New Zealand painters occurred, as far as one can tell, at an impro- bably late date, the Summer - that is Christmas - vacation of 1955-6. Melvin Day - now Director of the National Gallery of New Zealand - and Don Peebles - now a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Canterbury - put on a mixed show of work by some ten or so painters on the lawn behind the Wellington Public Library, and they included some of their own current work as well. I wish that I had the documentation on this exhibition, slides and press notices - if there were any press notices. But I haven't, and can show you only the present work of these two painters, and the work of some other abstractionists not involved in the historic 'manifestation' of '55-6.

Melvin Day (b. 1923) Melvin Day's painting is very learned. He is a graduate of the Courtauld Institute, and much of his work uses, as sources of allusion and as receipts for construction, Renaissance ideas of proportion. Allusion and receipt can be traced in his Mazzochio , 1970, in the Goblet from his Uccello series (1969, NGC), and in The Discovery of the True Cross (1972).

Day is also a landscapist, very formal, and influenced equally by Renaissance theory, and by local idiom - particularly by McCahon. Day's Makara series, studies of a marvellously bleak sea-and-landscape outside Wellington, provides some particularly fine images. And in the immensely formal and brilliant T arras we see the local landscape idiom laid out on a very Renaissance scheme. The picture analyses out as a series of neat exercises in the classic five to three proportion scheme of the 'golden section', and there is a sense here of high tradition imposed on a new, traditionless, place.

Don Peebles (b. 1922) An austere but lyrical painter, Peebles has moved across a spectrum of styles, from abstract landscape expressionism in his Wellington series (i960), through a very hard

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edged kind of painting, to his present style which constitutes, as he himself writes: 'a movement away from the more essentially visual towards a concern for the "process" '

Peebles is, as well as a painter, a contriver of abstract constructions, and the current movement from the visual and the hard edged to the softer can be seen in the contrast between Reliefs 1970) and Painting (1976-7).

There is nothing obviously local and allusive in Peebles's work, unless we take its clarity and purity of finish as a deep - not surface - metaphor for the clear, clean, hard light of New Zealand. His work is always, and above all, lucid. His concern is as he himself insists, with structure, and not with merely pictorial elements, endlessly repeated. A painter of fastidious taste and austere style, Peebles eludes any easy critical categorizations. The quality of his work is evident, description of it otiose.

Ralph Hotere (b. 1931) The allusion to light possible in Peebles is centrally made in Ralph Hotere's works. Hotere's black on black manner, as in the concrete poem/picture Malady (1970, NGC) refers explicitly to the hard, clear, even New Zealand light which casts black rather than blue or purple shadows. The light lies on the black pictures as it does in the umbra or penumbra of an object in Hotere's studio : it lies like cold black water.

When he uses colour - red for example - Hotere takes it as a foil to his central black; a black which is, used so largely, not shadow but in these pictures, light. Hotere's work explores a central image, and a given natural 'metaphor' in the New Zealand situation. The light is even, necessarily, more ubiqui- tous than the hills. And it is in its own way quite as characteristic of the country. The hills and the light together give the key local forms. Hotere rejects form in favour of a play of texture and illumination, but he controls the colour range in such a way as to have the surface of his picture throw back the light. Thrown back from black on black surfaces it alludes to the true blacks that ordinarily mark its absence: to the cold blacks of New Zealand shadows, to the cold line that makes the transition from lit to dark side of an object seen, outdoors, in New Zealand.

Gordon Walters ( b . 1919) Allusion of another kind is at the root of pictures such as Gordon Walters' black and

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Figure 13. Gordon Walter s > Genealogy (by courtesy of the artist)

white painting Genealogy (c. 1966) (Figure 13). The 'line and coin spot' motif derives from the formalized koru - fern bud - of Maori art, and pictures of this kind come out of a study of the painted rafter patterns of Maori meeting houses. A detail from a rafter in the Whare Rimanga, Waitangi, shows the typical sources: Walters' Makaro (1969, NGC) shows what can be done with them. By reducing the three colours of the Maori artists - black, white and red - to two, Walters intensifies the figure-ground ambiguity. It is this ambiguity which accounts for the planar quality of his pictures : their optical quality of looking at once quite flat and subtly bent and twisted. By choosing his pairs of colours, Walters gives the basic pattern different emotional charges. In pale blue and white the theme is remote : in black and red, as on the special cover of Ascent (November 1969), it is immediate. Coldly formal, Walters' pictures are, even so, capable of a wide range of emotional inter- pretations. And as exercises in uniting the traditions of Maori and European art they are of immense importance to New Zealanders.

Walters' most recent work is exceptionally abstract and severe, and sometimes the picture plane is reduced to a few areas-




minimally, to two- of paint, divided only by the rectangular shapes, or by the butt line between areas. Walters has taken 'absolute painting' as far as he can, and has produced austere but curiously attractive works of 'silent art'. This phrase of Susan Sontag's springs to one's mind when one looks at the recent paintings both of Gordon Walters, and of our next painter, Milan Mrkusich.

Milan Mrkusich (b. 192 5) As formal as Walters, and absolutely, deliberately, unallusive is the Auckland painter Milan Mrkusich. In his Dark Painting , 1967 (NGC), Mrkusich does not particularly want his blacks to be read, as are Hotere's, as light-allusion; his pictures are intended, rather, as the title of his 1965 red picture indicates, as Contemplative Diagrams . The large suite of paintings Untitled (1970- 1) can be read, if you insist, as the four seasons. But as Painting Red (1971) indicates, and Painting Purple (1975), Mrkusich is more concerned with absolute painting than with allusion.

One New Zealand critic writing on Mrkusich's earlier period quotes Susan Sontag's remark: 'Traditional art invites a look. Art that is silent engenders a stare'. In his recent Project I Four Areas (1975), Mrkusich has produced a very beautiful and much more extreme instance of 'silent art' : it consists of four vertical, pale, hard-edged areas of paint, topicless, but compelling in their sheer presence. This kind of art 'engenders a stare' if for no other reason than that it does not, as does traditional art, invite the eye to 'go for a walk' in it. There are no walks. Four 'pales' of painted canvas, set up the irresistible suggestion that, though inimical, they are, somehow, meaningful. And we take that suggestion, and stare back at the object which Mrkusich has constructed to make us do just that.

Ray Thorburn (b. 1937) Quite as unallusive as Mrkusich, as optical as Walters, and as formal as formal paintings can be, Ray Thorburn's 'modular' paintings are executed on panels, so that their owners can rearrange them from time to time according to their own taste. Meticulously executed in automobile paint, Thorburn's works are dazzlingly optical. His Modular 1 series 3 (1970, NGC), shows two panels of splendidly contrived shadow-tartan dazzle arranged as a matching pair: the whole

optical tension changes if, as one might, one reverses a panel.

In the painting illustrated (Figure 14) one can get, even in a black and white repro- duction, some of the visual impact of the original, a dazzling yet spare work.

Michael Eaton (b. 1937) Very cool, constructivist and optical, the paintings of Michael Eaton represent the International style in abstractionism. There are no local allusions, unless one counts allusions - and these are contestable - to the work of other New Zealand painters. Eaton's Continuum VI (1971, NGC), is as absolute as he can get it : and his Set of //, nos. 1 and 2, are perfectly formal exercises, without anec- dote. Eaton contrasts interestingly with:

Gerry Nigro (b. 1919) who in the lenticular Island Series , 1971 (NGC), quite literally bends formal abstraction back towards landscape allusion, giving us hills, horizons, seas, and even a pool of black shadow seen, as it were, through the centre panel of a landscape window. The local shapes, the local light, obtrude themselves into an essay in pure abstraction.

The tension between absolute abstraction and allusion to motif is always interesting: and the tendency of the allusion to become - if very flickeringly - local, adds to the excitement. Aesthetic modes are comple- ments, and not absolutely exclusive one of another.

Patrick Hanly (b. 1932) Not all New Zealand abstract painters are hard-edge men - and Patrick Hanly represents, rather splendidly, the organic tradition in New Zealand abstraction. His earliest Figures in Light Series (1964), acclimatizes the Fauves to the New Zealand light. In Figures in Light 36 the line is softening, and this picture looks forward to the more recent work.

Between the recent work and the Figures in Light comes the Molecular Series where the topic is at once light and the notion that light and what it lights are in constant motion.

The softened lines of the figures are taken up - as it were - in the Spring Condition series, and in the Pacific Condition series of 1976 - pictures that one New Zealand critic has called 'sexuberant'. 'Absolute painting' here retains biological overtones : paint recalls a life outside art.

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Figure 14. Ray Thorburn , Modular 1 series 3, 1971 (by courtesy of the artist )

Philip Trusttum (b. 1940) Soft edged, and full of light, Philip Trusttum's high bright paintings cut across the New Zealand predilection for sharp outlines. His Miro9 s Bed (1970, NGC), both acknowledges and repays a debt to its source: his Birth (1965) and Woman (1974) look to Kokoschka, Soutine and de Kooning rather than to any of the linear painters. Here is affective colourism in an international mode, devoid of any particular, local, reference.

Robert Ellis (b. 1929) The painterly abstractions of Robert Ellis are always allusive and ambiguous: net-

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works of lines readable as 'street maps' are often set off against frontal views of rather minimal looking buildings, and the bird's eye and the full face views, refusing to be reconciled, accentuate for us the flat planes of the picture. The paradox is that what the eye cannot quite reconcile, the feelings accept at once: and the visual ambiguity of Ellis' pictures is a never ending source of interest. The present illustration, Te Rawhiti VIII (Figure 15), lacks the excitement of colour, and the contrast between rich paint texture and assertive whites, but the spatial 'shifts' occur quite satisfactorily, movements are set up : the composition vibrates.

A colourist with a tremendous feel for the




Figure 15. Robert Ellis , Te Rawhiti VIII, 1974 {by courtesy of the artist)

tactility of paint, Ellis represents the organic aspect of New Zealand abstract art: but across this softness cuts, always, a certain linear accent.

John Drawbridge (b. 1930) Versatile, and cool in style, John Drawbridge exhibited in the Day-Peebles exhibition of 1 955-6. He has done a considerable amount of work for New Zealand High Commission offices and there is a mural by him in New Zealand House, London. He has recently finished a very large drum-shaped mural, painted on both sides and the edges of a series of projecting fins, in the new 'Beehive' extensions to Parliament Buildings in Wellington. This is a vast and extremely complex work of great interest and subtlety and would require a lecture to itself.13

Here in his Bluescape (1973, NGC), we see the precise colours of a slightly overcast day in Wellington, in the uncertain Spring or Autumn, reduced to an almost total abstraction. But reduced, the motif remains, insistently if minimally, a landscape.

Don Driver (b. 1930) Completely abstract, unallusive, absolute but witty, the constructions of one of New Zealand's younger abstractionists, Don Driver, belong to the International rather than to the local, or even to a locally acclimatized, mode. These things look out firmly towards the twentieth-century idiom, of 'art about art' and 'art about its own materials and possibilities'.

Richard Kileen (b. 1946) Richard Kileen is a realist who has abandoned realism for abstraction, maintaining that this is the only valid mode for a New Zealand painter now. His Hanging Lace shows the present direction of his work, while his Painting (1975), derived fairly obviously from a comb in an ethnographic collection, illustrates, one would guess, the influence of Gordon Walters' middle period.

Ian Scott (b. 1945) Another realist who has now switched to abstraction is Ian Scott, and we shall see one

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of his earlier, realist, paintings in the third part of this lecture when we come to the figure. The current trend of this painter's work is well illustrated in City of Auckland , Untitled , and Works on Paper I and 2, minimalist works exploiting the inter- relations of bars of colour on a neutral surface.

Two young realists of great ability have turned to the most formal kind of abstraction. And of the senior New Zealand abstractionists, Gordon Walters and Milan Mrkusich have moved into the most uncompromising kind of ťsilent arť.

Clearly, though the first New Zealand abstract exhibition was mounted only in 1 95 5-6, the abstract mode has established itself firmly as part of the national sensibility. An international style, it may be seen as looking outward to the larger world beyond New Zealand, though the sensibility brought to bear on the style must be, as ever, local.

It is probably significant that, abstraction having come to New Zealand, certain painters have taken it to its remotest logical conclusions : Walters' and Mrkusich's recent works are as abstract, and as minimally abstract, as can be imagined. This fact is worth recording. To interpret it - if that is even possible - would take more time than we have presently at our disposal. The facts noted, one may speculate at leisure. But we have not that necessary leisure now.

Ill We have seen the high contemporary New Zealand landscape idiom, and we have looked at some of the abstract painters : what we have missed is the figure. The figure is not, and never has been, a very central motif in New Zealand art. Why, it is difficult to say. But considering the title of the picture by Wong Sing Tai (b. 1942), Man in the Mountains , 1972 (NGC), we may take the suggestion that it is because man cuts a tiny figure in the landscape of New Zealand that he cuts so small a one in New Zealand painting.

This lecture will be rounded off, as well it may be, with a brief series of images of figures in the New Zealand landscape: and with a set of slides of pictures by a young painter, Jeffrey Harris, who is having his second one man show about the time this lecture is given.

First the miscellaneous images : the tendency to expressionism can be seen in Tony Fomison's (b. 1939) Portrait of a Lag

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Kitchen (1972, NGC). The tendency to savage, manic, caricature comes out in the work of the older painter, Illingworth, in his Mr. and Mrs. Piss- Quick or in his terribly bleak vision of Adam and Eve. A tendency to more compassionate caricature is apparent in Garth Tapper's (b. 1927) Southdown Boy , 1966-69-70 (NGC). Melancholia comes through in the figure from Louise Lewis's Riverbank Series , 7 (1969), and the beautifully formal, almost abstract composition of the park bench simply compounds the sad- ness. Alienation seems to be the theme of Jan Nigro's (b. 1920) Man from the City (1971, NGC); and alienation is very much the theme of Annette Isbey's bleached- looking images, suggestive of big blow-ups of enigmatic newspaper action photos.

There is joy, perhaps , in the slightly surreal riding boy in Ian Hutson's Ride III (1970, NGC). But the exuberance in Ian Scott's (b. 1945) Leapaway Girl (1969, NGC), is manic, and not quite reassuring. The girls are out of pin-up magazines, and the landscape is parody Binney. The metaphor disturbs. Scott has abandoned this kind of painting for an absolutely formal mode, as we have noted. He has, it would seem, exhausted his realist metaphors, and their ambiguities. But what he did in his earlier style remains valid, and important as a record of a certain mode of feeling generated in New Zealand and recognizable by New Zealanders as true to the way we sometimes feel out there.

Irony rather than satire, and a compassionate irony, seems to be expressed in Michael Smither's Family in Truck (1971). And Thomas's First Stand up Pee says more than Samuel Butler ever said about the situation of people in this landscape. Binney's Two Fat Birds (1965) is witty and charming. But Illingworth's Rainbow records no Divine Covenant.

Disturbing, and meant clearly to be so, are the expressionist figures of Jeffrey Harris (b. 1949)3 seen against New Zealand landscapes. His people are set against back- grounds which derive not so much from life, as from life seen through the spectacles of the various contemporary New Zealand landscape painters. His Two Women (1975) are backed by a harsh Smitherish hillscape, the Three Sisters (1975) are seen against a kind of parody of a Woollaston on the right and a Doris Lusk on the left: two views through the one set of windows. Sutton backs Grandparents at Okains (1976). Only




Figure 16. Jeffrey Harris , Brother and Sister (by courtesy of the artist)

Figure 17. Gainsborough , Heneage Lloyd and his Sister (by courtesy of the Trustees of the Fitzwilliam Museum , Cambridge)

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the intellectual-looking Two Women in a Field of Flowers (1975) reassure us, and the flowers are pure Harris and quite unallusive.

Early in this lecture I set up as an image of the Colonial's lost England Gains- borough's Mr. and Mrs . Andrews . I want to close with a comparison: with a contrast, instructive and perhaps sufficiently synoptic, between Gainsborough's Heneage Lloyd and his Sister (Figure 16) in the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Jeffrey Harris' Brother and Sister (1976) (Figure 17). If you wondered at the beginning of this talk why so much attention was given to Miss Longueville's manner of 1845, and to her lost but lyrical feeling, then this image at present on show in Wellington should tell you why. Harris' style owes something to modern abstract art, and a great deal to recent New Zealand painting, but equally it looks back to Miss Longueville and the High Colonials, as does almost all contemporary New Zealand landscape painting.

The feelings of the old colonial painters have been attenuated by time, but not done away with, and this is precisely the point that Harris makes for his New Zealand audience, now in 1977.

REFERENCES IN TEXT i. Letter 25th-27th June 1818. 2. xl. a. Komns tea.;, treats ana Mis Circle, warvara

UP, 1948» Vol. I, p. lix. 3. The prosaic facts of twentieth-century Taranaki are

presented without any emotional colouring and with exemplary realism in a very fine model assembled by the National Publicity Studio, Wellington, for the Commonwealth Institute. Kensington.

4. Penguin edition, p. 42. 5. Ibid., pp. 66-7. 6. Ibid., p. 46. 7. From 'A Colonial m His Garden . 8. In Samuel Butler at Mesopotamia , by Peter Bromley Maling, Wellington, NZ, R. E. Owen, Government Printer for the National Historic Places Trust, i960, inset 4. 9. Published in the New Zealand Listener , 22nd-28th

January 1977. 10. C. A. Cotton, Landscape , Cambridge UP, 1941, Whitcombe and Tombs, 1948, p. 307. и. From Latitudes of Exile , by Michael Jackson, Dunedin, NZ, John Mclndoe, 1976, p. 36. 12. Binney's Kotare over Rataua Churchy Te Kao was reproduced as an illustration to Donald Bowen's 'An Artist's View of Some Contemporary Common- wealth Painters' in this Journal for October 1971 (Vol. CXIX, p. 783). The Rataua movement was an important Maori religious and political force, particularly in the late nineteenth-century, and this picture has a number of layers of allusion.

13. See 'The Beehive', an assessment by John Roberts, in The New Zealand Listener , 7th May 1977, pp. 34-7

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To the artists for loans of slides and photographs; to the National Gallery of New Zealand for a set of slides; to the Hocken Library and Art Collection, University of Otago, Dunedin, and to the Alexander

Turnbull Library, Wellington, for the loan of slides; to the Peter McLeavy Gallery, Wellington, and the Barrie Lett Gallery, Auckland, for the loan of slides; to the Librarian, New Zealand House, London ; to Mr. Donald Bowen of the Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery, and to the Sunday Times .

For permission to reproduce Miss Longueville's Church Hill , Nelson , I am indebted to Mr. A. Steven Bagley, Curator of the Nelson Provincial Museum.

NOTE It is impossible fully to illustrate a talk of this sort, and in the printed version of it allusions will, inevitably, be made to works not reproduced. In order in some degree to get over this difficulty the author has put NGC (for National Gallery Collection) after the name of each painting referred to which is included in the set of slides 'Contemporary New Zealand Painting' currently on sale through the Education Officer, National Gallery of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand. Reproductions of all the artists mentioned in this lecture, and of many more excluded simply by limitations of time, or by the limit on possible plates in this Journal , can be found in the publications listed below.

There are three main standard references on New Zealand painting : I. The three short monographs: New

Zealand Art , Painting 1820-1890 by Hamish Keith, Painting 1890-195° by P. A. Tomorey, and Painting 1 9 $0-1967 by Mark Young, Wellington, A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1968, published as separate booklets and now available in paperback as a single volume.

2. New Zealand Painting: an Introduction , by Gordon H. Brown and Hamish Keith, London & Auckland, Collins, 1969.

3. Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Painting by Gil Docking, Wellington, Reed, 1971.

There are two survey articles in Art International (Lugano, Switzerland), 'Young Contemporary New Zealand Realists', Vol. XVII, 3rd March 1973, and 'Eight New Zealand Abstract Painters', Vol. XIX, ist January 1975, both by P. AE. Hutchings.

A very important article by Michael Dunn, 'Present Performance : Sculpture and Paint- ing', can be found in the New Zealand journal Islands y Vol. 2, No. 4, Summer 1973, pp. 369-80.

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Of great interest is 'Nineteen Painters and their Favourite Works', illustrated and with statements by the artists, in Islands , Vol. 3, No. 4, Summer 1975.

Small reproductions of works by Garry Tricker, Don Binney, Colin McCahon and Robin White illustrate the article 'Painfully Upright Among Lost Hills' by Patrick Hutchings in The Literary Half Yearly , Volume XVIII, Number one, edited by Professor Anniah Gowda, guest editor Peter Alcock, University of Mysore, January 1977.

An extremely useful conspectus of current New Zealand art is available in the illustrated catalogue New Zealand Drawing 1976 (120 plates) published by the Auckland City Art Gallery, with introductions by Ernest Smith and Gordon H. Brown.

New Zealand has a number of artists working in the fields of 'happenings', con- ceptual art, etc. Things of this sort cannot easily be discussed in a lecture on easel painting, but ought to be written into the record, if only in a note. In 1975 - in the Christmas/Summer vacation - David Meal- ing mounted a Jumble Sale Project at the Auckland City Art Gallery. That is, a jumble sale was held in an art gallery, and so became, under the post-Duchamp rules, an art work. For an account of this event, and of 'crater-drumming' inside Mount Eden's volcanic cone, see Auckland City Art Gallery Quarterly y Nos 62-63, December 1976, and No. 64, May 1977.

DISCUSSION Sir John Lawrence, Bt, obe, ma: Is there much Maori painting ?

The Lecturer: There is a group of contemporary Maori painters ; and Hotere is to my view the best Maori painter. Traditionally Maoris did not go in for mimetic art, so they did not have the starting point that our culture has for painting. There are a few late - that is nineteenth-century - carvings of ancestors done for meeting houses which, though largely executed in the traditional, stylized manner, do attempt what we would call portraiture in the heads.

If what will count as 'Maori painting' is painting based on Maori motifs, then the most 'Maori' painter in New Zealand is Gordon Walters, who has taken over the koru forms from rafter patterns and transferred them to abstract art.

Hotere has, largely but not entirely, ignored traditional Maori patterns, and taken up his own concrete-poem and black-painting thing. This is influenced partly I would think by the black New Zealand light, and partly by the black paintings which the Americans invented a few years ago.

Maori art consists in weavings, incisions on gourds, rafter patterns, etc. ; and this, as pattern, all leans to what we would call abstract art. The tiki alludes to and presumably derives from the human embryo form: and ancestral figures, etc., are tiki-ish in style, and not in our sense of the word 'mimetic' - except for the late heads which I mentioned.

Painting based on mimesis is not a Maori tradition, and in the twentieth century Maoris who have taken up painting, in our sense of that thing, have had to make radical new beginnings.

Sir John Lawrence: Do they have the same feeling about the landscape ?

The Lecturer: One has great difficulty in telling: evidence is hard to come by on this point. We know about, learn, our own culture's

attitude to landscape from poetry of a certain kind, and from landscape painting. The Maoris had no landscape painting, of course, and their poetry did a different kind of thing from, for example, Wordsworth's.

There was a very short period at the end of the nineteenth century when Maori chiefs and tohungas or priests who had learned to read and write, wrote to one another on 'purely' Maori topics. Gordon Walters' wife, Margret Orbell, is doing some very important work on these letters. I once asked her, rather idly, whether there was any reference to landscape in them and, as I recall, she said that there was none. But an absence of evidence isn't evidence. Presum- ably an anthropologist could give you a better answer than I can. One could, of course, go through all the extant Maori poetry there is and see if there are landscape images in it. This I have not, myself, done.

But I suppose that for Stone Age men who came from higher up in the Pacific to New Zealand there was not the kind of culture shock that we felt going out there. There might have been some other kind of culture shock than ours - of course. But, again, one does not know where to look for evidence of it. Or I don't. Certainly the motifs in Maori art don't seem to derive from landscape forms, or even to allude to them. The allusion, for example, of the koru, the little line curling at the end like a fiddle head, is, if to anything, then to vegetable forms, the uncoiling fern bud. (You'll have noticed in the Heaply Mount Egmont slide, how big New Zealand tree ferns are, and how they loom on the horizon.) But that the koru derives from the fern bud - as opposed to alluding to it - is now contested. The shape is found on Chinese pots, for example, and there is no particular reason to suppose that Chinese motifs were influenced by tree ferns.

Maori art is based on a number of geometric forms, and these may be 'self-generating'. There

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is one spiral, found on canoe prows, for example, which is said to be related to the custom of tying knots in pieces of string to give a mnemonic for the number of generations in a tribal history. Some Maori spiral forms have little nodules on them, the knots of uncoiled string, and were used for counting-back the number of ancestors. Art with these patterns, serving these kinds of function, does not always provide answers to the kinds of questions our art provides answeis to.

The most important thing that colonial art brings home to a colonial like myself is that you get back to the roots of what art is about. It is about adjusting people to the human situation in which they live. The kind of adjustment that Pakehas made coming out from Europe is different from the kind of adjustment the Maoris made. We have got plenty of documentation on ourselves, but not much on them. We came out all set up for self-documentation, in a way in which a pre-literate culture didn't.

Mr. T. Rus sell- Cobb: Much of what has been shown is entirely two-dimensional. Is this owing to a failure of the plastic sense amongst these artists ?

The Lecturer: I think this two-dimensional effect has to do with the tendency of the light to produce hard edges. And that is the way you write it up as an authentic metaphor; you can relate it to the conditions of the place. Or one could take another tack again; our art galleries have very little European art in them and very few things of anything like the first quality, and New Zealand painters don't really learn how to paint in the way in which continental painters learn. New Zealand painters go to art schools but they don't go to the enormous galleries which you have in Europe and learn the trade. New Zealand painting is still rather in the High Colonial mode. I think of those chaps from the Woolwich Academy, and other soldiers and land surveyors who went out there; in England they had been told how to draw outlines so that they could do geographical recognition sketches, tactical maps and so on. You could colour these sketches in if you liked. New Zealand painting is still to a degree in the coloured-in drawings mode and this is (i) because there is no major collection of European painting closer to New Zealand than Melbourne (and by the standards of the National Gallery in London, Melbourne is not a major collection), and (2) because the High Colonial style has a tradition behind it, which matters to New Zealanders, (3) and it matters because the light makes it a hard-outline country. This is a mixed answer. The elements one can vouch for: the mixture is contestable. Put I, 2 and 3 in the reverse order to the one I have just given, and the mixed answer comes out truest - or so I think. Though I may be wrong.

Miss Kathleen Browne, atd: Many years ago I was a student at Christchurch School of Art, Canterbury, New Zealand, when most of

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the masters were from Edinburgh or the Royal College of Art, and the basic teaching was splendid. When I came to England, I was very dis- appointed in the standard of the schools here, which were just beginning to be experimental, and I felt the students were not ready for this.

A well known Dutchman, called, I think, Van der Velden, came to Christchurch in my time and greatly influenced the teaching, where emphasis was on form. I, being young, and eager, and impatient, was asmonished by one of the most philosophical and gifted of masters, F. G. Gurnsey - sculptor - from England, who asked for my autograph book, and I remember to this day the quotation he wrote from Rodin, giving the definition of a true artist. It went something like this : 'A true artist must penetrate the primordial principles of creation. Only by understanding the "beautiful" does he become inspired, and then, not through a sudden awaken- ing of his sensibilities, but by slow progress and patient love'. Everything I have seen in the slides to-day leaves me cold; clever, but so lacking in spirit and inspiration. The human element too is missing. I should say this is generally so in art to-day. Sooner or later the return to man has to take place and the progress may be slow and painful.

The Lecturer: The most influential English- man as an art school lecturer in New Zealand in the 'middle period' was Christopher Perkins. I don't know what his style was like in England, but all the paintings he did in New Zealand were two dimensional. Certainly, if pressed, I should say that a weakness of New Zealand painting is its lack of tactility. Our most plastic painter is Woollaston, and by European standards I suppose he is not as plastic as he could be.

A Member of the audience: Could the lecturer tell us about the strong minimalist influence felt by New Zealand artists ?

The Lecturer: Everybody is influenced by everybody else nowadays. New Zealand's minimalist group grows out of what others are painting: New Zealand artists, like all other artists, are influenced by what they read in Art Inter- national. What strikes me as odd about New Zealand minimalist art is how quickly they have become minimalist. I don't know if you could tell a New Zealand minimalist painting from any other minimalist art in a test case, but there is in the New Zealand character a kind of stoicism to which minimalist art could appeal. In the case of the two important painters, Milan Mrkusich and Gordon Walters, it was clearly an exigency of the development of their own style. But the style, as such, has I think a certain attraction for New Zealanders.

Sir John Lawrence: I didn't think that all the paintings we were shown were two-dimensional. They seemed to me to be trying rather simply to express what they felt about their whereabouts.




The Lecturer: I agree entirely with you. I don't think there is a deliberate pursuit of cleverness or fashion as Miss Browne implied, in contemporary New Zealand painting. Many people in New Zealand have produced, for example, minimalist work, and since they are sincere persons one must suppose that they have done this for the right reasons, though they may have been mistaken in doing it. But I think you cannot do anything other than what the rest of the world does, and particular places must express themselves in terms of larger, more international, aesthetic languages. It seems to me altogether conceivable, not only as a logical but as a psychological possibility, that there should be an artist who hated abstract art, who hated the modern departure from mimesis and classical likeness-making and who wanted to do nothing but the kind of painting that was done in the nineteenth century, but who then could say to himself that 'This no longer counts in the twentieth century. It is like trying to speak Cornish, or to write a modern international-political novel in Gaelic. Perhaps it can just be done, but then to whom is it speaking ?'

If the international art language becomes the language of abstract expressionism (and/or all the other things which the Americans discover or collect or make fashionable) then the international language or languages become norma- tive even for remote countries like New Zealand. Art is like a natural language, and there are dominant natural languages for a particular period. If you wanted to make yourself heard in the Roman Empire you learned Latin, if you want to make yourself heard in the twentieth century you learn English. If you want to be an artist, whether your natural approach to art is abstract art or not, you will have to try and speak that language which is spoken in your time. I have an Indian friend whose favourite language is classical Sanskrit, which he studied at university. He tells of a colleague who became a judge in India and made a mess of his first trial because he spoke a classical Bengali to a jury in the depths of the country when what he should have been speaking was a more kitchen language which the jury and people would understand. I don't think you can be an artist nowadays and refuse to speak the demotic. You cannot even uncontroversially be a realist in the twentieth. If you do paint in a realist mode, as for example Grahame Sydney does, then it must be a twentieth-century realism that you work up.

If New Zealand artists want to express themselves to the world they must do it in terms of the mode which is being practised in the rest of the world. Then they can express the New Zea- land situation in a way that is intelligible to the wider audience. There have really been two issues raised: one is 'Why do New Zealand artists paint in the "cold" modern styles?', to which the answer is 'What else can they do but paint in modern styles ? - even if these seem to

some eyes to lack inspiration and humanity'. The other issue is the one about the two-dimensionality of New Zealand painting. And as to this it seems that one might argue, as I have, I think, both ways at once : that two dimensionality is a prima-facie fault of New Zealand painting, and/or that it has become, for valid historical and aesthetic reasons, an accepted mode, become a kind of local, and authentic local, style in its own right.

Sir John Lawrence: It seems to me that an artist cannot break completely away from the art of his time, but he can get a long way away from it. For example, Stevie Smith didn't conform to any school and therefore her work was for a long time neglected, but now it has become rather fashionable.

The Lecturer: Colin McCahon must have been the most inventive New Zealand painter we have so far had in New Zealand. He was painting his kind of pictures about twenty years before anybody else even attempted a style of this sort in New Zealand. He is now, I suppose, to New Zealand-image painting what Nolan is to Australian-image painting. He did his seminal work entirely out of an inner conviction that this was the only way in which he could speak. We know what the influences on him were, he was perfectly open about it, and he would tell you which books of art history he studied and which reproductions of famous European art work influenced him. But when he began he was speaking an unfashionable language in New Zealand though it was well established in a larger world. Getting closer to the art of his time involved McCahon in getting away from the art styles of his native land. And a good thing too! He changed New Zealand art - he switched it from one 'language' to another.

The point I want to make is not that there is at any one moment a single , unique high artistic language, and you either 'speak' in that or you are out. This seems to me to be a form of historical determination which is philosophically non- sense, and if you go to look at art history it is not true there either. But there is a tendency at any particular time for the young aspiring artist to be presented with an array of languages, and from these he must make his choice. The choice may be a fashionable one, or an unfashionable one, where the artist happens to live: but this is beside the point.

Lady Sayers: But surely the true artist doesn't care two hoots what other people think of his work as long as he is sincere within himself?

The Lecturer: Yes and no. The person setting up as an artist, unless he is a rare charis- matic genius like Blake, who didn't give a damn what counted as 'art', will ask what counts as art and what is the range of things which a man does

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and which other people more or less understand - he will then ask how he can be authentic within the terms of his choice among languages. There is always the outside possibility that you are a Blake or a Rossetti. But this is another thing. And if the man is not very good at what- ever he is trying to do all on his own, making a new style for himself, we tend to dismiss him as interesting but a bit cranky. If he tuins out to be a large intransigent monument in the history of art like Blake we admire him tremendously for sticking out from the rest. Blake will just not go away; even if you loathe Blake you have got togo and look at him from time to time. His stock in trade was a sincere individualism. But it seems

to me that your remark is overdetermined if what you want is for everybody to be like Blake - that is : to invent his own language and speak it. It is not possible and it's not clear to me that it is even desirable.

The Chairman: We are all very grateful for Professor Hutchings for parrying these questions so nimbly whilst answering them. So far as I am concerned Blake can go away ! I should like one day to be asked to give a lecture on why artists paint pictures.

The meeting concluded with the usual demonstra- tions of appreciation.

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aspects of contemporary new zealand painting

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