Victory

Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock is on exhibition in London and there’s no sign of Giambattista Tiepolo at the Australian National Gallery, but Colin McCahon was there. Victory over death 2, controversially gifted to Australia in 1978, was in display accompanied by two Constantin Brancusi Bird in space sculptures, a black one and a white one. They are later versions of similar works made by Brancusi in 1923 and refused entry by US Customs in 1928 because they were not considered to be art and were therefore subject to duty. A court case sorted that out. As the ANG is more like a turbine hall than a regular museum, McCahon’s work (and everything else from three painting by Agnes Martin to a terrific Anselm Kiefer) is diminished when hung low on the immensely high walls. That aside, the Australians have never doubted its importance. The ANG’s first director James Molllison considered McCahon to be Australasia’s most important artist and the NGA’s current catalogue entry refers to Victory over death 2 as ‘one of the treasures of the collection’.

To be perfectly Francis

If your faith in contemporary New Zealand art was wavering, last night would have settled your nerves. The Tim and Sherrah Francis collection on sale at Art + Object in Auckland never looked to be anything other than a benchmark for the marriage of serious money with serious art. The first signs were when two Andrew McLeod paintings sold for $36,000 each, and that's the hammer price without commissions. By lot number 48 of the first night's 122 lots, over half a million had gone under the hammer and eight lots later the tally was at $1.5 million. By the end of the evening around (#notthatgoodatadding) $5.5 million dollars worth of art had been knocked down.The big ticket item of the evening was Colin McCahon's eight part painting The Canoe Tainui which sold to a Hamilton collector for $1.35 million making McCahon the top artist at auction (#sorryaboutthatgoldie). Among the big prices were a 1956 koru drawing by Gordon Walters for $66,000, Shane Cotton's He Pukapuka Tuatahi for $252,000 and and Rita Angus's Tree Cutting Hawkes Bay at $255,000. And these prices will all be boosted by commissions. Overall seven paintings sold for over $200,000 and 12 over $100,000.

True to form, Te Papa didn't even bother to show up. This meant of course that it missed out on the opportunity to buy many significant works including Tosswill Woollason's The Poet which obviously belongs in the national collections. Still, the Auckland Art Gallery was there showing that it at least is still an art museum serious about its collections.

Looking up at looking down

‘I started working on a painting initially called Paddocks for sheep. This was to be a large work based on some wonderful aerial photographs of North Canterbury where the plain is slowly devoured by the hills and where the paddocks with their safety give way to wilder hill country.’ That was Colin McCahon writing about his 1951 painting North Canterbury Landscape. The photographs he was talking about were almost certainly taken by Whites Aviation.

Artists have always been attracted by the high view but, of course, until the invention of hot-air balloons they had to make do with climbing hills and mountains. Then came the invention of aircraft and with it aerial photography and suddenly we all got to see the vast scale of our world. Once we had our first view of the earth from space in 1972, it was hard to imagine how evocative those early aerial photographs were. They changed the perspective of not just artists like McCahon but of everyone who wondered about the geography of their own back yards and the vast landscapes we are part of.

Now Whites Aviation’s amazing archive of aerial photographs has been presented in a book, and a book that does it justice. Over 408 pages in the large format you’d expect for a project that set out to photograph most of New Zealand from the air. And it’s not just a black and white view of the country either. Many of the images were patiently and delicately colour tinted by hand inspiring this book’s title, Hand-coloured New Zealand. Little wonder that Whites Aviation’s photographs are so highly sought after by collectors.

This is one of a number of elegant and substantial books produced by Peter Alsop. He has already delivered books on the artist Marcus King (with Warren Feeney), images of NZ’s early tourism (with Gary Stewart and Dave Bamford), and the art of early NZ advertising (with Gary Stewart) all published by Potton & Burton. You can get more information about Hand-coloured New Zealand here and order an advance copy here with a 20 percent discount (use WHITES). And wait, there's more! A short doco on the book will be available here tomorrow.

Images: top Whites Aviation image collection National Library and McCahon's North Canterbury Landscape collection Auckland Art Gallery

Size matters

OK, we’ve done this sort of thing before but this is a great one: Colin McCahon’s Victory over death squeezed into $1.85 million apartment kitted out for Auckland’s ‘empty nesters’. Forget for a moment that the McCahon family owns the copyright on this painting and that it was a gift to Australia from the people of New Zealand, you’ve got to raise an eyebrow at the size thing. You’d think for just South of two million you could expect the scale of the art to work with the size of the room and furnishings. But hang on a minute maybe given that price it is in scale. So that makes the couch around 10 meters wide with each cushion coming in at 3.3 meters square. Makes sense. And while it’s a plus to see McCahon recognized as the million dollar man (there are two other works by McCahon pasted onto the ‘walls’ of this apartment) it’s ironic that the whole engorged affair looks out over Grey Lynn, the suburb where the artist lived in a smallish villa in Crummer Road. 
(...and thanks to you M)

In Budapest...

...we were thinking about Colin McCahon's cloud paintings.

We am

Content is not usually your first thought when you look at Carl Andre’s famously reductive sculptures, but no one familiar with New Zealand art could walk past Andre’s Tau and Threshold (Element Series) without giving a thought to Colin McCahon. And it was not only a connection made by the Tau Cross that McCahon has made his own in NZ. There was also the Roman capital letter I  that is the basis of McCahon’s Necessary Protection series. To add to the zeitgeist jitter these two works were both made in the same year of 1971.

Images: left, Carl Andre Tau and Threshold (Element Series) and right, Colin McCahon The days and nights in the wilderness showing the constant flow of light passing through the wall of death

Think piece

In Mexico City we were thinking of Tony Fomison, Ronnie van Hout and Colin McCahon.

If it’s broke, fix it

For around 15 years now the Colin McCahon online catalogue has had pretensions to being to a catalogue raisonné of the artist's work setting out to ‘catalogue McCahon's complete works’. An alternative attempt to research and publish a print catalogue was superceded by the current digital project with the understanding that professional cataloguing standards would be followed. Initially the site was to include commissioned essays and commentary on McCahon’s work but that never happened and eventually essays from a survey catalogue were dumped to bulk things up. For years the information in the Colin McCahon online catalogue has been scrappy at best. In 2010 an attempt was made to put it into some sort of order and improve the quality of the records but it was short lived and inconsistent.

Does this even matter? Given that the catalogue is hosted by New Zealand's national art institution, provides the document of record on McCahon and is the primary source of authentication for both institutions and the market, yes it does. Recently, when we were writing about McCahon’s waterfall mural held in the University of Otago, we looked up some details in the catalogue and also checked out how it was developing.

And it has to be said, it is not developing well at all. In this one entry we found -

•  The title of the painting is wrong. Whoops! It’s Waterfall Theme (and variations) not Waterfall theme & variations

•  The date is incomplete. It’s May–August 1966 not 1966.

•  The number of hardboard panels the painting is made up of is not noted.

•  The dedication to Mary de Beer which can be seen in an inscription on the work is not noted nor is the fact that the de Beer's and Charles Brasch funded the work for the university.

•  The inscription ‘As there is a constant flow of light and because of perceiving, the power of light with uninterrupted force, we are born into a new land’ is not noted.

•  The illustration of the work, as you can see above, is so poor it's barely worth publishing. There are no detail images available.

Pedantic? Sure and probably only of interest to a small number of people, but if this Online Catalogue is to be the primary record of McCahon's work it really is time to take it seriously after so many years of neglect.

Image: Colin McCahon Online Catalogue illustration of McCahon’s 7.3 x 3.31 metre mural Waterfall Theme (and variations)

Alarming

The popularization of the art museum experience and the consequential need for heightened security has had two dramatic and damaging effects on the art: the glazing of oil paintings and the use of barriers. One of the great pleasures of seeing art in studios or in private houses is that neither of these two constraints get a look in. Strangely the most extreme form of security we have ever seen was in a library last week. 

The University of Otago is fortunate enough to own one of Colin McCahon’s most romantically lavish works. It is the commissioned painting Waterfall (theme and variations) 1966 dedicated to philanthropist Mary de Beer. Currently it is attached to a wall in one of the study halls in the library. It's a very large painting and certainly not the sort of thing you'd want anyone to lean a chair against, so a small glass barrier has been installed in front of it. While this isn't optimal, it does feel fair enough with a lot of people moving around the area who are not thinking about art. 

But wait, someone obviously thought that this barrier needed back-up. Maybe students would get their grubby fingerprints all over the glass and then where would we be? And so elaborate decorate stanchions to keep a rope barrier airborne were put in place. OK, enough? Not a bit of it. To stop anyone leaning over the two barriers there is a electronic eye that sets off a very loud and aggressive alarm. The sort of alarm specifically designed to humiliate the offender rather than just warn them to back away. Public art. Gotta love it. 

Fixtures and fittings

In 1997 when Colin McCahon’s Urewera Mural was hi-jacked from its possie in the Department of Conservation’s Te Ureweara's visitor center it set up a two year search. In HBO style it was eventually recovered thanks to Jenny Gibbs, Te Kaha and Tame Iti. In this extended search you can bet on one category of dwellings that weren’t turned over and that would be expensive apartments with names like 'The Lighthouse'. So it's odd to find the UM hanging in the dining area in a Trade Me ad for luxury living with ‘elegant modernist aesthetics that are timeless’. OK it's somewhat shrunk, the original is five and a half meters wide which is a bit on the large side even for Auckland apartments, but the aspiration is there. This isn’t the first time a work by McCahon has been cut and pasted onto walls for artistic effect. The architects of the Auckland Art Gallery rather unfortunately grabbed Victory over death from the Australian National Gallery’s collection to deck out proposed AAG spaces. But the Urewera Mural for décor, seriously? Whatever happened to Vladimir Tretchikoff and V van G.
Thanks H and you too M

Connected

Writer, curator and film maker Chris Kraus has had a long association with New Zealand kept up by her visits, talks and interviews. Her feature film Gravity and grace was largely made in NZ in 1995 and featured Ani ONeill (as Grace) along with Kirsty Cameron, Cushla Dillon, Denise Kum and Judy Darragh as art department stalwarts. More recently, she wrote the essay Here begins the dark sea for Simon Denny's Secret Power Venice catalogue. Kraus's reputation hinges on her 1997 novel I love Dick (largely on the strength of it Kraus is claimed to be the art world's favourite fiction writer) and it's about to get the full TV treatment (well a pilot at any rate).  Jill Soloway, creator of the TV series Transparent, is in charge so it's looking promising. While I love Dick is infused with NZ, we found an item in our files that directly connects with Kraus's personal history via James K Baxter and Colin McCahon. The cover of the 1973 James K Baxter Festival programme, now a sought after collectable, was designed by McCahon who also designed the sets for the four Baxter plays. The Kraus connection? At the time she was living in Wellington and was in the cast of Baxter's The temptations of Oedipus as Ismene, daughter and half-sister of Oedipus.

Image: Dougall Rolland and Chris Kraus in rehearsal for James K Baxter’s The temptations of Oedipus

Trio

Here’s a story we're sorry we missed when we were working up the timeline for the 1987 exhibition When Art Hits the headlines. It front-paged the Otago Evening Star on 26 October 1961 and comes via University of Otago researcher Ali Clarke who tracked down this tale of the Colin McCahon triplets (you can read her original version here)

Over 50 years after pulling the stunt, a couple of ex Otago students admitted to knocking up three copies of Colin McCahon’s Painting 1958. One of that work's claims to fame is that it had shared first prize in the Hays Art Competition in Christchurch the year before to almost universal distain. The co-winners were the more popular Francis Jones and Julian Royd whose reputations have not exactly endured.  Some time after being offered as a gift to the Christchurch Art Gallery and rejected rather publicly, McCahon’s work was put on display in the University of Otago University Student Union.  Some of the students were not impressed in the usual I-could-do-that way and two of them made three copies that they planned to hang with the McCahon. Viewers would then be challenged to pick which was the original.  They saw immediately that it was in fact easy to tell which was the McCahon so they hid it in a broom cupboard to keep the hoax alive.  Lots of laughs at the expense of contemporary art and artists followed until the painting was rehung and the students went back to work. Colin McCahon himself was less than impressed but as the perps were unknown, legal action was ruled out. Although childish, it's still a more benign stunt than the one pulled by the Director of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery 11 years later. He asked the public to paint their own McCahons in the foyer while the Colin McCahon survey show was on in the Gallery. The ‘good’ old days.

Image: the three 'McCahons' as published in the Otago Evening Star (...and thanks for the head's up Z)

Don Wood 1938-2016

In the history of art dealing in New Zealand the death this week of Don Wood is a big marker. In 1960, when he was in his early 20s, Wood opened The Gallery (shortly after renamed the Ikon Gallery) with Frank Lowe, a fellow architecture student. It was one of the very early dealer galleries in New Zealand focusing on the contemporary art of the time. As examples it was the Ikon Gallery that was the first to show Don Binney’s bird paintings and Pat Hanly’s iconic Figures in light series. 

Wood was also an important early supporter of Colin McCahon who had three exhibitions at the Gallery in its Symonds Street location (it was rather wonderfully situated in the basement of Rationalist House). The impressive line-up included The Wake, the first showing of  Here I give thanks to Mondrian, the Gate painting Waioneke and the large banners Landscape theme and variations specifically designed by McCahon ‘to fill the Ikon'. In 1964 when the gallery shifted to Lorne Street as Ikon Fine Arts McCahon showed his Waterfall series there. 

When Wood sold 19 paintings by Colin McCahon to the American Edward J Danziger he also became a key player in one of the great art mystery stories of the sixties. Danziger, an ex movie producer (more Roger Corman that Goldwyn-Mayer) turned hotel owner, took the paintings out of the country to decorate his chain of hotels in the Gordon Hotel Group. The Bellini paintings vanished and became something of an El Dorado. Dealers would trawl the US in search of the lost mother lode until Australian based art dealer Martin Browne painstakingly located most of them. 

After a few brief years at the centre of NZ's emergent contemporary art world, the Ikon Fine Arts closed in 1964. Wood continued his involvement in art dealing most importantly working alongside Peter Webb, another of the heroes of art dealing in New Zealand. You can get a feel for Wood's architectural background, a field he worked in for most of his life, here in Wystan Curnow's account of his negotiations with Billy Apple over proposed changes to the Peter Webb Gallery in the 1970s. As well as being a patient man, Wood built up a collection of contemporary art and there is a rare opportunity to see his taste in action via this Art + Object catalogue that featured a good part of it.

Image: center, Rationalist House the site of the Ikon Gallery as it is today

A hanging offence

At the formal opening of the Christchurch Art Gallery last week (which by the way was a model for how to reintroduce a cultural institution to its diverse communities after a long break) there was one rather curious aside in the speeches. Neil Roberts, who was a long-serving curator at the Gallery and is now an art consultant, got a bit back at him. He had apparently dissed the current curators in a letter to the editor of the Christchurch Press. So what was his problem? Roberts was upset that the Petrus Van der Velden painting The Dutch funeral of 1872 had been exhibited without its frame. Emotions can run high in Christchurch, especially as the painting in question has always been one of the City's loved 'old masters'. For Roberts the de-framing of the work was an insult to the artist (though you’d think it was probably more of an insult to the framer). In reality, if anyone is to blame, it's probably the Italian architect and exhibition designer Carlo Scarpa. It was Scarpa who stripped elaborate large frames off historical paintings in an effort to bring them into the present so we could take a fresh look at them rather than rely on the usual masterpiece signals of gold and carving. While it may have been been provocative to remove the Van der Velden frame and hang The Dutch funeral next to Colin McCahon’s Blind V, it’s a provocation of the best kind and brings both works into an interesting and useful dialogue. Besides nearby are enough other paintings with elaborate gold frames to remind us how the abandonment of close hanging and the rise of the white cube has removed much of the reason for creating them in the first place.

Image: left, Colin McCahon Blind V and right, Petrus Van der Velden The Dutch funeral hanging in the Christchurch Art Gallery

Unbread

At the Gluten Free Museum the mixture of proteins found in wheat and related grains, including barley and rye, is removed from works of art. More here.

Images: top to bottom, Vincent Van Gogh La méridienne dit aussi La sieste (d'après Millet), Wayne Thiebaud Cake slice and Colin McCahon A grain of wheat (thanks L, very droll)

Blame Canada

The Canadian artist Lawren Harris was being given some serious attention in LA when we passed through recently. He was a member of the Group of Seven who in the 1920s set the tone for modern Canadian painting in the same way that Colin McCahon and Rita Angus did here later. Looking at Harris’s paintings McCahon certainly came to mind and there may well be a direct connection too because in 1938 The Exhibition of Contemporary Canadian Paintings toured New Zealand proving very influential. We know, for instance, that the 30-year old Rita Angus was very taken with the painter Emily Carr. And you have to wonder whether the 19-year old McCahon saw the works by Lawren Harris in the exhibition. Leo Bensemann certainly became a fan boy, but perhaps McCahon found Lawren's striking landscapes an inspiration. In 1939, a year after the Canadian exhibition toured, McCahon turned up with his stripped down painting Harbour Cone from Peggy's Hill. Surely the spirit of Harris is walking on those Dunedin beaches. Onto the research agenda with it.

Images: Top, left Lawren Harris Lake Superior 1928 and right detail. Bottom Colin McCahon Harbour Cone from Peggy's Hill

Panel work

The Hiroshima panels by Iri and Toshi Maruki were shown at the Auckland City Art Gallery in September 1958. The show was hugely popular, one of the best attended ever at that time, although the media gave it no coverage, much to the annoyance of Peter Tomory, the Director. Also on staff was Colin McCahon who four years later made his own set of panels protesting against nuclear war. This was The second gate series. There are also echoes of the Hiroshima panels in his 16-panel work The Wake.

Over 50 years later these NZ cultural touchstones are on exhibition at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, New York. So we went to see them. As it turned out just three of the sets of panels shown in Auckland were in the NY set. The work has grown. The entire suite now comprises 15 large screens of which five were painted after the tour to New Zealand. It serves as a reminder of how bold Tomory was in introducing art that dealt with contentious politics, ethics and memory into Auckland at that time. The trauma of the Second World War would have still felt close in 1958 and the reported high attendances show he got it right. With the Hiroshima panels he helped lift our sights to the rest of the world.

King for a day

First, the fulsome praise bit. Potton and Burton has just published another of their high quality art books. This time round Peter Alsop and Warren Feeney have dealt to the Wellington commercial artist and painter Marcus King who was hard at work from the 1930s to the 1970s. As with the other books from P&B, it's a stylish presentation of the artist's work, the context in which it was produced and an extensive selection of photographs and well researched information. If you want to get a sense of how NZ's tourist industry was shaped or how the idea of New Zealandness was forwarded, this is the book for you. 

Moving on.

What's going on with Colin McCahon? It is an embarrassment to anyone seriously interested in New Zealand contemporary art that a formidable volume on Marcus King is available and the equivalent on Colin McCahon is…um…not. The McCahon record is dispersed over exhibition catalogues, Gordon Brown’s book Colin McCahon Artist (published 31 years ago with primitive reproductions), a scattering of slimmer volumes following individual interests, and an online catalogue database with deficiencies that we've written about before. The most substantial recent effort was Marja Bloem and Martin Browne's A question of faith produced over a decade ago and published by none other than Craig Potton (now Potton Burton) with the Stedelijk Museum. Producing the fundamental tool of a catalogue raisonné still seems to be beyond the ability or interests of NZ art institutions or academics, but even so, how about a serious publication delivering Colin McCahon on the same footing as Marcus King? Come on.

Takes two to tango

It’s not too often that you walk into a public art museum and experience a bout of hyperkulturemia #stendhalsyndrome. Yet in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery last week we saw two very familiar paintings in an unexpected juxtaposition of great personal meaning. One was Julian Dashper’s large painting Rural Sheraton. As we'd lent this painting to the Gallery ourselves there were no surprises there (although we were pleased to see it hanging again) but it was the company it was keeping that caused the reaction. The last time we saw Colin McCahon’s Series D (Ahipara) it was hanging on the far wall of the smaller room at Peter McLeavey’s Gallery in Wellington. That was over 40 years ago. Back then we had placed a hopeful second option on it, but it was never going to happen. As far as we know it went overseas with its new owner who many years later put it on loan to Dunedin. 

To see these two works together showed just what public art museums can do that is so particular to them: putting great things together to create new ways of seeing and thinking. The chances that Julian’s painting would ever sit next to this great McCahon were never high and if it were to happen it could only ever be via a public collection. In a couple of weeks at Wellington's City Gallery there's going to be another pairing of McCahon and Dashper in another public institution, Wellington's City Gallery. This one will be something that Julian always hoped would happen: his Here I was given alongside Colin McCahon’s Here I give thanks to Mondrian. Now that is going to be something to see.

Images: Left  Colin McCahon’s Series D (Ahipara) and right Julian Dashper's Rural Sheraton at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery

White noise

Anyone who knows OTN knows we're suckers for a CEO sitting in front of an artwork. OK this one is a Vice Chancellor but, as we say in the in the fact-checking hell that is blog land, same difference. Anyway, Victoria University’s VC Professor Grant Guilford unintentionally (or, more brilliantly, intentionally) showcased a fine painting from the University's collection and at the same time sent a subliminal message to viewers during a recent TV interview. Victoria students were being criticised for what neighbors living near halls of residence claim is extreme (read obnoxious) alcohol-inspired behavior. The VC thought the university authorities were doing all they could and the complainers should probably chill out. 'It’s often kids just having fun….' To reinforce his key message he sat himself down in front of Colin McCahon’s 1968 painting Landscape with waterfall  that reads in part Dona Nobis Pacem. Grant us peace.
Image Stuff.co.nz