Colour notes

Rita Angus, Colour notes, 1950s, watercolour, 324 x 290mm, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, on loan from the Rita Angus Estate.

I had coffee this morning with an old and very dear friend, in town to install an exhibition of his new sculptural work. We met at my suggestion at the art gallery cafe (he pulled me up on saying this: which gallery? he asked. There's only one with its own cafe, I answered) as the dealer space he shows at has a flight of stairs like Mt Everest which are completely impassable by baby buggy (and down which over the years I have seen many artworld luminaries take a nasty tumble after sampling a little too much of the hospitality up above). I won't be going to the opening tomorrow: at 5.30pm, exactly coinciding with dinner- and bath-time for tired small children, art openings are scheduled as if on purpose at the worst conceivable moment of the day for families. The Wellington-based trend towards Saturday morning dealer gallery openings (OK then, just the uniformly excellent Hamish McKay) is something to be warmly encouraged.

I got to the gallery a little early so I could spend some time looking at the Rita Angus show, which has toured to Christchurch from Te Papa. It's had an avalanche of well-deserved positive reviews, primarily for the excellent curation by William McAloon and Jill Trevelyan who have thoroughly researched the history, delineated clear chapters in the work in order to make its progression intelligible for the viewer, and included a few surprises as well as greatest hits. It's textbook curatorial practice, which should form a model for such things for New Zealand museum studies and curatorial courses.

Te Papa billed the show as a 'gift to the nation', as they decided not to charge an exhibition fee to the municipal venues who are hosting the show on its national tour. The costs of putting the show on the road (crating, loan negotiations, etc) were thus absorbed by Te Papa rather than being paid for by the touring venues, which enabled them in turn to put it on free of charge to the public. Of course, that's a good thing; but at the same time one might argue that:

a. the cultural heritage of New Zealanders, exhibited in public institutions, should as a matter of course be free of charge to the New Zealand public; and

b. Unlike the Auckland Art Gallery, whose NewGallery attracts an entrance charge, most of the other municipal public art galleries (Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington) habitually never charge for nationally-generated exhibitions of New Zealand art; and

c. Putting a major survey exhibition of one of the country's most significant 20th century artists on the road should be business as usual for New Zealand's national art gallery, rather than an extraordinary event worthy of 'gift' status.

But far be it from me to be churlish, etc. (I decided against titling this post 'A Gifthorse to the Nation', as (a) the show has excellent bite; and anyway (b) I have foresworn mean-spiritedness as a blogging platform.) Rita Angus is a great show, and a big one; I'm delighted to see it in Christchurch; it's of such substance that it would take an hour or more to get round, if one had the luxury of doing it properly and didn't have a fifteen-month-old in tow with an attention span even shorter than mine. Because I know many of the works so well, on this occasion I was able to spend more time with the strangers-to-me, like this:

Rita Angus, The artist’s studio, c. 1962, watercolour, 390 x 284 mm, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, on loan from the Rita Angus Estate

and this:
Rita Angus, Timmy, 1952, watercolour, 449 x 350mm, Private collection

as well as my all-time favourite painting by Angus, AD 1968 (I have personal reasons for this -- an excellent year, 1968 -- as well as thinking it one of New Zealand's finest modernist works).

Rita Angus, AD 1968, 1968, oil on hardboard, 587 x 595 mm Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, gift of the Friends of the Auckland Art Gallery, 2004

The inclusion of Angus's sketchbook material was a fantastic surprise, as was the inclusion of the preliminary study Colour Notes above from the 1950s, framed as a work and hung with other nature studies. The little washes of watercolour looked like Gretchen Albrecht's largescale abstractions on canvas from the early 1970s, and gave me an insight not only into Angus's technical prowess but also a quick vision of her as an abstractionist, in another time or place.

I've written before about the way in which access to the artist's preparatory material greatly informs a view of their work. There was something intimate, and private, and I suspect entirely memorable about being able to see the way in which Angus logged and developed her ideas, sketchy images surrounded by hasty pencilled notes, some of which later became paintings. I'll go back and spend more time with Colour Notes and the sketchbooks another day, if I can.

I was intrigued by a label on the case of ephemera which said something like 'Please respect the artworks'. While I think it was meant as a nice way of saying don't touch, it was kind of odd, as the sketchbooks were entombed in a perspex case, and you couldn't touch them even if you wanted to. (I did want to, of course; there's something so terribly frustrating about being only able to view a single page of a book.) The odd notice immediately made me think of Angus's much-storied sensitivity to criticism of her work. I trust visitors to the show have been duly respectful, and have only made positive comments in front of the work.

Although it really is a terrific show, I thought, not for the first time, that Angus's work is as good in reproduction as it is in real life. It's not something you can say of all artists: my experience of Angus's contemporary Gordon Walters, for example, whose strongly graphic works look great in reproduction, is that a real-life encounter can be breathtaking and quite different from looking at the work in a book. I don't mean this as a criticism of Angus's practice; maybe it's just that so many of the works are quite small, and quiet, and intimate in tone; and the book format, where you can sit down comfortably and look at the images in good light over time does as well for them as viewing in the gloomy spaces of the gallery, when you're on your feet and best behaviour.

(Just on this, I really wish Christchurch Art Gallery would turn the jolly lights up a bit. I know, I know, conservation values and all that: but I would just like it to be a little brighter in there so I could see the art better. I'm hoping that Nicholas Serota's conservation taskforce might change the rules of the game for the better for us all.)

Access to art's an important thing; whether or not like me one's in charge of a small anti-art protester and can only poke one's head briefly into an exhibition, barriers to full engagement with our visual culture are presented not only by dull lighting and steep stairs, but perhaps also more seriously by the absence of an actual National Art Gallery in New Zealand -- though the curators of Rita Angus: Life and Work sensibly haven't let that hold them back. I've said it before, but I will again: more like this, please.

Drab but strangely cosmopolitan

George Kohlap, Harry Seresin's Coffee Gallery at Parsons Bookshop, Massey House, Lambton Quay, c. 1957, Alexander Turnbull Library


I came across this description of Wellington in the 1950s the other day, in poet Peter Bland's autobiography Sorry, I'm a Stranger Here Myself. The city changed a lot over the ten years we lived there, but when we arrived in the mid-1990s I fancy there was still the faintest smack of what Bland describes.

"I shared a flat on Mount Victoria with a bunch of English immigrants and a Polish painter who later turned out to have copied everything he did from the work of a minor German expressionist. Wellington in the '50s was a drab but strangely cosmopolitan town, full of post-war European exiles, escaped Nazis (minor Jew hunters and concentration camp officials -- the big boys went to Brazil) and a gaggle of budding poets who aped Dylan Thomas and drank huge flagons of sweet, cheap local sherry that rotted their brains while fuelling both a heady romantic rhetoric and a strange hatred for someone called Sidney Holland. Dark fugged-up coffee bars slowly appearing throughout the city were full of sexual, political and poetic liaisons... It was, I thought at the time, a fairly Bohemian existence but -- looking back -- it was probably closer to Gorky's Lower Depths than it was to the Parisian cafe society we admired from afar."


The "unusually delicious" menu for the French Maid Coffee House, 1940s, where Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters and other progressive New Zealand artists exhibited, and Wellington's artists and writers gathered. Image from the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Very dim and brown

Christopher Perkins, Wellington Harbour, undated (c.1929-1934), oil on canvas, 406 x 508mm, Collection of the Auckland Art Gallery, gift of the artist, 1967


Surrounded by "very dim and brown" oil paintings and their makers at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington in the early 1930s, British painter Christopher Perkins unpopularly remarked that he seemed to be expected to be "some kind of missionary for modern art".

Perkins, who somewhat romantically saw himself as "a kind of respectable Gauguin" on his journey to the south seas, had accepted a job in 1929 teaching life drawing and painting at Wellington Technical College under a governmental programme which brought in working artists from overseas to lecture in the fine arts. The La Trobe scheme attempted "to counteract the effects of isolation and indifference to the arts that prevailed in New Zealand at that time," wrote Perkins's daughter, Jane Garrett, reflecting on her family's five-year sojourn in New Zealand.

"All New Zealand historians of the period agree that the 1920s were a time of almost complete stagnation as far as the visual arts were concerned," continued Garrett.

"There were several good reasons for this state of affairs, of which perhaps the most important was the remoteness and isolation of the country from the art centres of the world. Another was the scarcity of talented young artists, most of whom had left to study abroad before World War I, or had been swept into the armed forces. Most of those who survived had preferred to remain and practice their art in Europe rather than return to starve in a cultural wilderness. The few painters who did stay at home tended to produce insignificant or derivative work, interpreting the New Zealand landscape in terms of a Scottish loch or Cornish beach."

"As to the general public, it was as indifferent to art as it was ignorant of it, an attitude shared by the authorities of the day, who showed little interest in anything that did not directly affect the production of sheep, butter, and apples."

Re-reading Jane Garrett's sometimes very funny account of the Perkins family's experiences in New Zealand, I've been struck, not for the first time, by the sheer intensity of the claims of hardship faced by early and mid-20th century artists in this country. Not that I disbelieve Garrett's description of New Zealand society's general indifference to the visual arts in the 1930s; I'm sure it was exactly as she says. Neither do I discount Gordon Walters's much-quoted accounts of the particular difficulties faced by the abstract painter in the 1950s and 60s, nor dispute the justifiable bitterness McCahon felt on being confronted by ridiculous barrages of hostile criticism from the late 1940s onwards.

What I've been wondering about is whether the difficulties faced by modernist artists in New Zealand were much worse (more harsh, more indifferent, generally less professionally congenial) than those faced by progressive artists working in other western countries at the same time, or even in Britain itself. The extreme difficulty of being an artist in this country is a constant theme in New Zealand histories and memoirs of the period, yet I've found nothing to test it against.

Was the problem primarily one of lack of patronage -- that until comparatively recently there were no major private collectors of progressive art, nor any state support for it? (Garrett notes that the only state-subsidised artist in Wellington in the early 1930s was the City Organist, "whose chief official business was to play See the Conquering Hero Comes whenever the All Blacks returned to Wellington.") Or was it simply a matter of scale? Perhaps with a population of just over a million, spread over an area as large as the British Isles, there just wasn't the critical mass of people around to enable the development of a self-sustaining intellectual coterie, like the Bloomsbury crowd or the Seven and Five Abstract Group, for example.

I'm thinking aloud; I'm not sure of the answer; but I'd like to be able to work out whether the hardship experienced by artists between say about 1920 and 1970 (which has defined the way much of our art history has been written) was a specifically New Zealand problem, or -- as I suspect -- a wider one.

Vision and perception

Gordon Walters, Untitled, 1952-1953, oil on canvas, Auckland Art Gallery

Following a trip to Europe where he researched contemporary abstraction, Gordon Walters produced more than 200 works between 1953 and 1956. Yet with only a couple of exceptions, he waited until 1974 to exhibit them publicly. On the occasion of his show at the Peter McLeavey Gallery in October 1974, Walters commented:

"They were not shown at the time I did them because I considered the artistic climate to be unsympathetic, if not downright hostile, to abstraction. Some of the themes still interest me and I frequently take up and rework ideas which were not fully realised at the time."

Something that's always interested me about these works are their similarity to the visual perception exercises used by psychologists and neurologists. Academic psychologist Arthur Schapiro has a great website, Illusion Sciences, in which he discusses the mechanics of the visual illusions he creates to study visual perception. Several recall Walters's compositions. Strikes me I'd like to read a really good essay looking at Walters's work from this perspective.