Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
YOU WILL APPRECIATE THIS
PAINTING AS YOU ARE TOLD TO
It doesn’t keep
me awake at night, but I am sometimes put out by the way modern art galleries
often feel obliged to hector viewers about how they are meant to respond to
paintings. Placards and notices don’t just identify who the painter was, when
the painting was painted and what its inspiration was. They also wish to
correct any erroneous or heretical thoughts we might have about the painting.
I am put in the
way of these thoughts by what we are now told to believe about a particular
painting. Louis J. Steele’s and Charles Goldie’s 1898 painting The Arrival of the Maoris hangs in the
Auckland City Art Gallery, where I have viewed it many times since I was a
child. It is often acknowledged to be New Zealand’s most famous “historical”
painting and it has been reproduced innumerable times as a book illustration or
as a book cover.
But of course it
is not “historical” at all.
How Maori first
arrived in this country is a matter of informed speculation, not of verifiable
historical fact. The anthropological and historical consensus now suggests
planned settlement from other parts of the Pacific some time in the 13th
century, after earlier voyages of exploration following ocean currents and
guided by the stars. But Steele’s and Goldie’s painting, with its wide-eyed,
emaciated Maori being driven crazy with hunger, suggests the notion of their
arrival in New Zealand as an accident, not as a planned and organised
migration. It could even be said to play to the earlier (and
no-longer-countenanced) European notion that Maori arrived only after having
been inadvertently driven out to sea, from their islands of origin, by storms.
The art gallery’s official website now calls the painting a “romantic
fabrication” and notes that the type of waka depicted in the painting didn’t
develop until hundreds of years after Maori were settled in the new country.
So far, so
unexceptionable, I suppose, although I do rebelliously mutter that nearly all
“historical” paintings of the nineteenth century are equally “romantic
fabrications” and the eagerness to single this one out suggests the curators’
dread that they might otherwise be thought to endorse the type of errors the
painting encourages.
My hackles
really rise, however, when both the gallery placard and the website suggest
that Steele and Goldie simply copied and plagiarised Theodore Gericault’s 1819
painting The Raft of the Medusa. Both
Steele and Goldie studied in Paris and both of them had seen and made copies of
Gericault’s masterpiece, which depicts the aftermath of a notorious shipwreck
with both corpses and the living drifting helplessly at sea.
There is no
doubt at all that Goldie and Steele were influenced
by Gericault’s painting. (Incidentally, the Gericault painting is many times
larger than Steele and Goldie’s painting, as I can confirm after viewing it in
the Louvre earlier this year.) As well as their kinship of subject matter
(desperate people at sea), both The Raft
of the Medusa and The Arrival of the
Maoris are designed along a diagonal axis, rising from left to right,
capped by a figure signalling to something on the right hand side of the frame
– a distant sail in The Raft of the
Medusa and the distant coast of New Zealand in The Arrival of the Maoris. In both, a sail billows on the left hand
side of the frame. So Goldie and Steele took a major part of their conception
from Gericault.
And yet they are two quite distinct paintings.
Goldie and
Steele were strongly influenced by, but they did not merely copy, Gericault.
The tonal values of the two paintings are quite different. The skeletal bodies
of the Maori voyagers bear little relationship to Gericault’s more muscular
figures. To see the one painting merely as a copy of the other is to miss what is unique about each.
There is
something else that niggles at me in the way we are now asked to respond to The Arrival of the Maoris. It is quite
conceivable that first Maori settlement of New Zealand was orderly, planned and
methodical, and that voyagers were well supplied with provisions and knew no
hunger en route (“conceivable”, but
of course not provable). It is conceivable that this land’s first discoverers
undertook their voyages in a calm, rational, scientific spirit. And yet I find
it hard to believe that there would not have been an element of fear and terror
in setting off into vast and unknown seas on such small craft, and not being
sure that the goal would actually be reached. No matter how much of a
“fabrication” it may be, The Arrival of
the Maoris does at least dramatise this terror, which seems to have been rationalised
or wished away in more “correct” narratives determined to show that Maori did
not merely blunder into this country.
I have not
thought about this matter only in the last few minutes. Some time ago I wrote a
poem drawn from viewings of Steele’s and Goldie’s painting – and my reaction to
current wisdom thereupon. The poem appears in the November 2014 issue of Broadsheet – New New Zealand Poetry.
Here it is:
ARRIVAL
Enlightened
story of the swaying raft
that gripped an
ocean current for a drift
left-side of
sunset, south-west by the stars
until the
clouds and sea-birds spoke of cliffs.
No accidental
voyage but the work
of priestly
forethought, founded on the spheres,
roots under
rushes, hooks to trail for fish
and chanted
prayers to make grey waves a bridge.
This is the
story that the placard tells,
denying mad
starvation and the sweat
of storm-forced
sailors, lost, Medusa-like,
in oceans of
ungovernable salt.
True tale,
perhaps, and mild: mystery shot out
to calm us with
the certainty of plans.
There is no awe
in oceans, just a route
as routine as
timetabled train or bus,
no bound hulls
creaking, no coarse woven sails,
no angry
white-caps and no hunger groans,
no sharks as
scavengers, no ache for home,
no sailors
spitting fear of the unknown.
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