Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land?

Vol.2 1960-1987

Peter Simpson

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781776710560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

The second of an extraordinary two-volume work chronicling forty-five years of painting by our most important artist, Colin McCahon. Colin McCahon (1919–1987) was New Zealand's greatest twentieth-century artist. Through landscapes, biblical paintings, abstraction, and the introduction of words and Maori motifs, McCahon's work came to define a distinctly New Zealand modernist idiom. Collected and exhibited extensively in Australasia and Europe, McCahon's work has not been assessed as a whole for thirty-five years. In this richly illustrated two-volume work, written in an accessible style and published to coincide with the centenary of Colin McCahon's birth, leading McCahon scholar, writer, and curator Dr Peter Simpson chronicles the evolution of the artist's work over McCahon's entire forty-five-year career. Simpson has enjoyed unprecedented access to McCahon's extensive correspondence with friends, family, dealers, patrons, and others. This material enables us to begin to understand McCahon's work as the artist himself conceived it. Each volume includes over three-hundred illustrations in colour, with a generous selection of reproductions of McCahon's work (many never previously published), plus photographs, catalogue covers, facsimiles, and other illustrative material. These books will be the definitive work on New Zealand's leading artist for many years to come.

1

NEWTON I, 1960–64

In 1960 McCahon and his family moved from Titirangi to the inner-city suburb of Newton, in those days a predominantly working-class and Polynesian neighbourhood. The award of the first Hay’s Art Prize to McCahon for Painting (1958), a radical abstract, caused a furore in newspapers and much unwelcome negative publicity for the artist. After a year of little painting, he embarked on the Gate series (including Here I give thanks to Mondrian, p. 10), an important new series of geometrical abstractions, exhibited at The Gallery (Symonds Street, Auckland) in 1961; a further extension of the series was the sixteen-panel The Second Gate Series (1962, pp. 51–53), a collaboration with John Caselberg (who supplied the Old Testament texts) which addressed the threat of nuclear annihilation; it was exhibited in Christchurch with other work in 1962. Lack of critical enthusiasm for this abstract/text work led McCahon to reconsider his direction, resulting in a ‘return’ (his word) to landscape painting in a large open Northland series (1962, p. 33, 59) and Landscape theme and variations (1963, pp. 60–61), two eight-panel series, exhibited at The Gallery simultaneously with a joint Woollaston/McCahon retrospective at Auckland City Art Gallery. In 1964, after twelve years at Auckland City Art Gallery, McCahon resigned to join the staff of Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts, where he taught from 1964 to 1971. His first exhibition after joining Elam, Small Landscapes and Waterfalls (Ikon Fine Arts, 1964), proved to be both aesthetically and commercially successful.

Colin McCahon helping to install Jacob Epstein’s bronze Rock Drill (1913–16) at Auckland City Art Gallery, 1961.

E. H. McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Colin McCahon Artist File

10 Partridge Street

The McCahons’ move from Titirangi to inner-city Auckland in March 1960 was welcomed by the whole family. Colin told O’Reilly:

Anne and all well & flourishing and all pleased to be in town after so long in the bush. No doubt will miss the beach & bush in the summer but there will still be compensations.

We are right in the middle of a Maori & Islander district – lots of people & activity & a lovely view of Mt Eden (the mountain not the other thing).¹

The ‘other thing’ was Mount Eden Prison. Prior to later ‘gentrification’, Newton and nearby Grey Lynn were working-class and student neighbourhoods with a large Polynesian population which McCahon actively enjoyed. Number 10 Partridge Street was a small villa on the Arch Hill side of Newton Gully close to Newton Central School. The house was compulsorily acquired and demolished in the 1970s for the school’s expansion. The McCahons moved to 106 Crummer Road in Grey Lynn in December 1976.

Writing about Here I give thanks to Mondrian (1961), an early Partridge Street painting, McCahon commented:

The painting reflects the change I felt in moving from Titirangi with its thick native bush and the view of French Bay to that of the urban environment. This picture belongs to a whole lot of paintings that were, believe it or not, based on the landscape I saw through the bedroom window. This also applies to the Gate paintings …²

Before the Gate series arrived, however, McCahon experienced one of those unproductive spells which occurred when he moved to a new place. He told O’Reilly: ‘Have had one of those periods when I couldn’t break through at all.’³ The Online Catalogue lists only a handful of works for 1960.

As always, McCahon was very busy at Auckland City Art Gallery, in his role as keeper and deputy director, mostly organising exhibitions such as the first of a historically important annual series of touring shows, Contemporary New Zealand Painting and Sculpture (1960). McCahon was represented by six works from 1959, including Cross and four Elias paintings. He was excited about the exhibition, telling O’Reilly that it completely outclassed the gallery’s Auckland Festival show: ‘… a huge Australian exhibition which sadly flopped – but rightly – it followed immediately on our Contemporary N.Z. ex. and just didn’t measure up … This was (with the N.Z. show) the first time some real pride and enthusiasm seemed to develop around N.Z. painting.’⁴ This positive mood was sustained through the 1960s, especially in Auckland.

Hay’s Art Competition, 1960

During 1960 McCahon was at the centre of a newspaper furore when his Painting (1958) was made a joint winner of the first Hay’s Art Competition award in Christchurch. Three judges, John Simpson and Russell Clark from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts and Peter Tomory from Auckland City Art Gallery, could not agree on a winner and awarded the prize equally to Julian Royds for Composition (‘a reddish Gothic interior extravaganza’, according to one review),⁵ Francis L. Jones for Kanieri Gold Dredge (a naïve representational work), and McCahon’s Painting (1958; see Volume One, p. 268) – Tomory’s choice – works as different from each other as the proverbial chalk and cheese. But it was McCahon’s work which caused the controversy. J. N. K. (Nelson Kenny), an able critic, said of it: ‘It is not a picture of anything. It is not meant to be anything but what it is. It is simply a surface covered with paint of different tones and colours – as ultimately is any painting – and it must be looked at with this in mind if its stark austerity is to be appreciated.’⁶ Newspapers around the country, however, published sneering attacks on both painting and painter. McCahon wrote bitterly to Brasch: ‘I have about 100 quite devastating cuttings from all over N.Z. which I am keeping for when I eventually manage to leave N.Z. for good – to remind me in times of homesickness of what to expect should I return. (The Auckland Star reproduced the picture on its side.)’⁷ This ugly brouhaha interfered with his painting: ‘No painting to report[;] am having a long dry spell. For the first time ever I have been really depressed with constant bad reviews.’⁸

Alarmed by McCahon’s talk of wanting to leave the country, Brasch wrote a long, sympathetic reply, imploring him to ignore newspaper criticism: ‘It’s worthless, nearly all of it, as you know. I agree it’s infinitely depressing to read, and hurtful when you’re consistently misunderstood, misrepresented, sneered at. But, Colin, you must realise that in spite of it you have a large following and a reputation second to none.’ He was sceptical about the likelihood of McCahon’s succeeding abroad: ‘Will you really do better in another country (where – England? America?), as one among many, most of them better known and better established?’ Furthermore, ‘are you sure that you’d be able to paint in another country, do you realize how your work grows out of N.Z.?’ He concluded: ‘I should hate this country to lose you … Although I can’t always follow you, you’re still the first N.Z. painter to me’.⁹ McCahon was appreciative of such caring concern: ‘Thank you for your kindly & reassuring letter. I most certainly would be off tomorrow if I could but as you know am so well tied down I must remain here for years to come.’¹⁰

Troubled by the buckets of disparaging criticism being dumped on his friend, Woollaston published an impressive defence of the derided painting in the Press. He began: ‘In view of the unpleasant nature of much of the criticism Colin McCahon’s “Painting” has received, I feel the need to make some amends to the artist concerned’. After seven detailed paragraphs describing the forms, structure and colour of the painting, he continued:

I would say that, if the picture has a subject, a ‘meaning’ as people like to say, it would be of such a kind as to make necessary the extreme abstinence from representation that we find in it. It is too close to the unutterable for easy verbal communication: its subject is too disconcerting to allow many people to indulge in the easy response of ‘I like it’, which unfortunately is all that most people will allow of themselves for painting.¹¹

McCahon was grateful: ‘But thank you for the words on “Painting” … No, I object to nothing there. I just wish it wasn’t necessary for these things to happen at all and am certainly glad I’m not in Chch … New paintings are much more difficult. The citizens of Chch are lucky they can’t see these ones.’¹² By then the dry ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Newton I, 1960–64
• 2 Newton II, 1965–69
• 3 Muriwai I, 1970–72
• 4 Muriwai II, 1973–74
• 5 Muriwai III, 1975–76
• 6 Grey Lynn I, 1977–79
• 7 Grey Lynn II, 1979–83
• Epilogue
• List of Artworks
• Exhibition Record, 1960–2018
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Copyright