We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
SPECIAL NOTICE: THIS BOOK WAS ORIGINALLY SCHEDULED TO BE LAUNCHED IN EARLY APRIL. BECAUSE OF THE CORONAVIRUS EMERGENCY ITS LAUNCH HAS BEEN POSPONED TO JUNE. I HOPE READERS - AND AUTHOR - WILL STILL APPRECIATE THIS NOTICE AS A WELCOME PREVIEW.
“COLIN McCAHON: IS THIS THE
PROMISED LAND? Vol.2 1960-1987” by Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press,
$NZ 79:99)
When
I reviewed on this blog the first volume of Peter Simpson’s authoritative
survey of the work of Colin McCahon, Colin
McCahon: There is Only One Direction. VolumeOne, I made some obvious points that are worth repeating for the second
volume, Colin McCahon: Is This the
Promised Land?: Volume 2. Peter Simpson is concerned primarily with the
artist’s work, not with the minutiae of his life. This is not a biography, but
an appreciation. In the same format as the first volume, Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land? is a robust hardback with
wide pages allowing text to be in double columns but, more importantly,
allowing for the very many coloured reproductions of McCahon’s work to be
displayed in large size. It in no way belittles Simpson’s words to say that
this book is a gallery as much as a text, to be viewed as much as read. And, as
was true of the first volume, Simpson’s clear prose is informed, his analyses
of individual works are detailed, and he nowhere strays into the sort of
artspeak that would alienate informed, but non-specialist, readers.
Despite
the non-biographical intention of this book, it is nevertheless worth giving a
summary of Colin McCahon’s life from 1960 to his death in 1987. (Here I largely
cannibalise Peter Simpson’s Introduction). In 1960, McCahon, his wife Anne and
their four children moved to inner-city Auckland and were to stay there for the
rest of McCahon’s life. But McCahon also for some years had a studio on the
wild west-coast Auckland beach of Muriwai. McCahon became deputy director of
the Auckland Art Gallery and remained so until 1964. He then accepted a post as
lecturer at the Elam School of Art and held that position until 1971. As
Simpson tells us later (in Chapter 2)
McCahon got on well with some colleagues, especially Garth Tapper, and was
esteemed by many students. But he was hard on those who did not take their art
seriously and was rough on students, like the very talented Don Binney, who
came from upper-middle-class backgrounds. At this time, he also found more
supportive art-dealers. In 1971, he resigned from his Elam lectureship and
devoted himself full-time to his painting.
His
approach had changed markedly in the early 1960s, with a starker simplified
angularity signalled in “Here I Give Homage to Mondrian” in 1961, though there
were elements in his paintings consistent with earlier work. For example, he
never entirely lost his affinity for landscape. The 16 frames of “landscape
theme and variations” (reproduced on pp.60-61) and his series of stylised
waterfalls, from the late 1960s, prove this. Despite “text” canvases, landscape
dominates his “South Canterbury” (reproduced on p.123) from 1968. In
commissioned works commemorating Parihaka, “Monuments to Te Whiti and to Tohu”
(reproduced on p.191) there is some form of representationalism with Mt.
Taranaki in the background.
In
his Introduction, Simpson makes some general comments on the direction in which
McCahon’s art was now moving: “In a
sense, his paintings only began to take off and become airborne when he moved
away from recording direct perception and allowed memory, thinking, belief and
imagination to come more fully into play”. (p.13) Visiting the South Head of
the Kaipara Harbour had a huge impact on him; he painted many landscapes from
memory; he rejected the idea of “pure” abstractionism, saying his art was
“impure” art as it always pointed to something beyond itself. Hence he headed
towards what Simpson calls a “variable
mix of abstraction, landscape, text, number, symbolism and signification”
(pp.14-15)
As
I have noted, Simpson’s survey keeps many aspects of McCahon’s private life in
the background, as his main focus in on the art. We do hear of colleagues,
fellow-artists and art dealers and of some fractious relationships. As Simpson
records in Chapter 3, McCahon admired much about James K. Baxter, but had a
serious falling-out with him when Baxter criticised him for being too
“bourgeois” in accepting a university position (p.161). Nevertheless, Baxter’s premature
death in October 1972 shocked him and he made many artistic memorials to
Baxter. Only late in the text are we told “Increasing
ill health resulting from alcoholism meant that McCahon was no longer able to
drive himself to Muriwai and painting there was gradually phased out. A new
studio was built behind the house at Crummer Road [in Grey Lynn] where many of his later works were painted.”
(p.287) Shortly thereafter we learn more about boozy parties with the younger
artists “Philip Clairmont”, Tony Fomison and Allen Maddox (pp.297-298), which
led McCahon deeper into drink. The Epilogue to Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land? tells us of McCahon’s
last years when he had stopped painting and dementia, exacerbated by
alcoholism, led to episodes where he got lost and didn’t recognise familiar
places.
Also
only towards the end of the text are we told much about the artist’s wife: “Anne
McCahon died in 1993. As time has passed, there has been increasing recognition
of the sacrifices she made to support her husband’s career” After noting a
2017 exhibition of Anne McCahon’s work, Peter Simpson continues “McCahon valued her critical intelligence
highly and regularly consulted her about his work.” (p.350) Occasionally I
wondered if, without compromising the emphasis on the art itself, Simpson could
have told us more about the domestic situation which is, after all, a major
factor in every artist’s inspiration.
How
McCahon’s works were received is a major theme of this book. His style was
often ridiculed or reviled. Just before the period that Volume 2 covers,
McCahon was alarmed and depressed by negative reviews of his “Painting” (1958).
The negative reaction to his “Gate” series almost drove him back into representationalism.
In the early 1970s, the director of the Dunedin Public Gallery ridiculed
McCahon’s work and set up the crass stunt of inviting visitors to “paint your
own McCahon”. In 1978, when one of his paintings appeared in the Dowse Art
Gallery in Lower Hutt, a city councillor said it could have been knocked up in
a meal break. That same year, when “Victory Over Death 2” was gifted to the
Australian government, there was much public derision. Publicly McCahon ignored
all this. Privately he was very depressed. And a failure to connect with what
McCahon’s work was about continued after his death. Simpson points out the
irony that the very anti-materialist painting “Storm Warning”, which McCahon donated
to Victoria University of Wellington, was later (in 1999) cynically sold by the
university, for profit, to the private sector (p.330).
One
of Simpson’s most painstaking accounts of a controversy surrounding McCahon’s
work is his narrative (in Chapter 5) of the contested Urewera mural, which was
commissioned by the board of the Aniwaniwa Visitors Centre. They hoped McCahon
would simply celebrate the picturesqueness of the Urewera – but McCahon chose
to celebrate the Tuhoe people. In telling this story, Simpson helpfully gives
detailed background information on both Rua Kenana Hepetipa and Te Kooti
Arikiranga Te Turuki, whom McCahon’s mural recalled. After having trouble with
the (mainly Pakeha) board which had commissioned the mural for touristic
purposes, McCahon then ran into trouble with the Tuhoe people, who thought his
mural was inappropriately honouring one person. Only after lengthy negotiations
did McCahon alter his mural to their satisfaction. (The mural is reproduced at
pp.268-269) There is the coda to this story (on p.350) when, in 1997, years
after McCahon’s death, the mural was “kidnapped” by Maori activists and
returned only after negotiations with an art-lover as go-between.
As
well as focusing on the artist’s work, Simpson chronicles the rise in McCahon’s
reputation, in spite of the attacks upon him. There were a growing number of
retrospective exhbitions of his work in his lifetime, and growing respect from
serious art critics. By the late 1960s, he was becoming the dominant
contemporary New Zealand painter. Simpson notes that in 1969, when Gordon
Brown’s and Hamish Keith’s New Zealand
Painting – An Introduction was published, McCahon was one of only three
artists awarded a full chapter and “The
choice of McCahon to design the book’s cover – a waterfall motif – emphasised
his increasing domination of the contemporary scene; it implies that in a sense
the history of New Zealand painting was viewed through the lens of his work, a
point made by Francis Pound and other critics.” (p.103)
Only
rarely was McCahon’s work “protest” art or directly related to political
causes. His “Gate” series in the 1960s referred to nuclear weapons and he
joined the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). When some of his work was
part of a group exhibition in 1971, McCahon commented on his recent painting of
Muriwai:
“My paintings in this exhibition are all about the view from the top of
the cliff at Ahipara and Muriwai. I am not painting protest pictures. I am
painting what is still there and what I can see before the sky turns black with
soot and the sea becomes a slowly heaving rubbish tip. I am painting what we
have got now and will never get again. This in one shape or form has been the
subject of my painting for a very long time.” (p.151)
If
his art was only rarely political, however, this does not suggest artistic
quietism. McCahon was, as he had been since the late 1940s, engaged in a
certain sort of spirituality which always implied a critique of accepted
values. Religious belief, and a questioning of religious belief, were major
parts of this critique. The very title Peter Simpson has chosen for this
volume, Is This the Promised Land?
points to the centrality of such concepts in McCahon’s later work. The Biblical
journey to a promised land was often suggested in McCahon’s earlier landscapes
and was alluded to in his letters. He had produced a painting called “The
Promised Land” in 1948, and the very
last multi-panel sequence he painted included “The Flight from Egypt” – the
Hebrews heading for the promised land.
In
the later 1960s, when he was freed to paint full-time as he was no longer
lecturing at Elam, McCahon accepted a commission to paint glass windows for a
Catholic chapel in Auckland. This, says Simpson, “had a profound impact on his imagery, which was increasingly informed
by the iconography of Catholicism” (p.75). At about the same time, he was
impressed by the Protestant-sponsored New
English Bible, a new translation which rendered the text with “dynamic
equivalence”, making it more colloquial and accessible. From this point on, all
the written Biblical texts that appear in McCahon’s work were taken from the New English Bible. Even so, Catholic
imagery prevailed. The “Visible mysteries” series was informed by Catholic
liturgical works and McCahon often adopted an image of the heart influenced by the
traditional Catholic image of the Sacred Heart. There were renderings of the Stations of the
Cross, sometimes reduced to Roman numerals counting from I to XIV. Rosary-like
beads appeared. And very often the Cross, even if sometimes a Tau cross. Specifically
Catholic imagery persisted right up to “Five Wounds of Christ” in the late
1970s, by which time “text” paintings had become dominant in McCahon’s work.
In
the earlier 1960s, in a letter to a friend who was also a painter, McCahon wrote:
“You see I don’t paint places. I paint
“thinking about God”. But I hope he knows it & likes it. You, my dear, do
this too & sometimes I feel place overcomes his beauty.’ ” (p.13) By
the late 1970s, in another letter, he wrote “Beauty is only looking for God. And as a lot of us find He can be a
real SCARE” (p.286). This last phrase suggests there was much ambiguity in
McCahon’s belief, as Simpson points out when commenting on McCahon’s “Victory
over Death 2” with its (AM I) / I AM “It
is far from being a clear, unambiguous affirmation of faith. On the contrary
the prevailing tone of the work is as much conveyed by the expression ‘now my
soul is in turmoil’… [it] dramatises
existential conflict and uncertainty…” (p.147) In a biographical note for
an exhibition in 1981, McCahon wrote “I
think I am a Christian – perhaps I am. I think I am a good guy – but I’m not…”
(p.328). Ambiguous or not, faith remains a major element in McCahon’s work. As
a personal comment, I think the degree to which Chistianity influenced him is
evidenced best in the photograph (on p.342) of McCahon in the mid-1980s, ravaged
by alcohol and dementia, sitting with a young granddaughter under the Chi-Rho
Christogram over his fireplace.
Simpson
refutes the claim [made in a catalogue for an exhibition in Sweden in 2002]
that McCahon’s very last paintings, quoting Ecclesiastes,
were yielding to despair and therefore rejecting faith. Putting the Ecclesiastes quotations in context,
Simpson concludes “Truer to the shape of
McCahon’s career than to give Ecclesiastes the last despairing word, is
to see the final burst of activity as an artist in 1979-82 as articulating a
never-ending dialogue between Ecclesiastes and St Paul, despair
and hope, doubt and faith.” (p.333) Backhanded proof of the religious
intent of much of McCahon’s work comes in Simpson’s account of an exhibition of
McCahon’s work in the Netherlands, which clashed with that country’s very secularist
sensibilities. (I also speculate mischievously how much English-language-text-loaded
canvases could have been a barrier to non-English-speaking people). While
noting that McCahon’s high reputation now is largely limited to New Zealand and
Australia, Simpson remarks in the very last page of his text: “A further factor in constraining the spread
of McCahon’s reputation is the challenge his religion-inflected work presents
to a largely secular Western world.” (p.359)
Here,
however, is a great defect in the review you have just been reading. Peter
Simpson’s two volumes are as much about the artist’s style as they are about
the artist’s beliefs or intentions. In detailed but accessible prose, they
examine how the paintings are conceived and constructed, what materials are
used, what type of paint applied and what effects are achieved. For all but the
specialist, this is the definitive publication on the subject.
Personal Note:
My
review of Colin McCahon: Is This the
Promised Land? ends above. What follows is a purely personal reaction to
McCabon’s later phases. Without wishing to be decried as a philistine, I am not
greatly drawn to the period of texts, numerals and signification. I am not
necessarily in bad company. Peter Simpson notes that Charles Brasch stopped
collecting McCahon’s work post-1958 (p.103). When he considers the “Numerals”
series, Simpson also notes that they require of the viewer “patience and faith” (p.78). Indeed they
do – and maybe faith more than anything.
Why
my resistance to much [not all] of McCahon’s later work, with which this second
volume deals? I am not opposed to non-representational painting, but too often
I sense that whatever meaning many of McCahon’s later paintings have derives
from things outside the painting itself. I stop long and linger over the
reproduction of McCahon’s “Easter Landscape Triptych” (1966 - reproduced at
p.111). I more-or-less get the deliberate contrasts of darkness and light,
suggesting the emergence into daylight of the Risen Christ; I see the contrast
of straight lines (horizontal and diagonal) with the more organic curved lines
in each of the three panels. The curved lines are reminiscent of both the hills
that McCahon had painted in his earlier phase and the stylised waterfalls he
had painted more recently. And of the stone rolled away from the tomb. Of
course I recognise that the three panels take us from Good Friday to Easter
Sunday – with the strong diagonal line in the centre panel suggesting death. The overall composition is reminiscent of a cross…
But am I reading all of this into the painting because of the title? Would it
actually have these meanings for us at all if it were presented “cold”, with no
title to tell us that it was related to Easter? Read the painting without the prior cue and it
would be an interesting design. [As soon as I think this, I of course have to
acknowledge that it would take many viewers a long time to associate Broadway
with Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” without the title to tell them.]
I
could raise the same objection with so many other canvases, for example “Walk
Series C” from 1973. You would have to have prior knowledge of the Stations of
the Cross to understand what the Roman numerals from I to XIV meant.
As
for so many of the text paintings – doesn’t the text itself get read first to
make meaning? In fact, wouldn’t the text itself have largely the same meaning
if it were read in a Bible? “A Letter to the Hebrews (Rain in Northland)”
(1979) appears on six sheets of Steinbach paper and presents most of the
letter’s Chapter 11 (almost 1000 words).
One could argue that placing this text on paper isolates it and
heightens it. But, assuming that we read the text on the canvas, we have a
literary experience and not an artistic one.
I’m
sure there are McCahon-ists who could answer my objections… but I am not sure
that I would be persuaded by them. I am saying none of this in a reaction
against McCahon’s religious purpose or beliefs – certainly not – even if they
have apparently annoyed some commentators and alienated them from his work.
Perhaps in the end I am saying that McCahon’s texts and numbers are attempting
to depict metaphysics that simply can’t be depicted in this form.
I’ll
leave it there before I start stumbling over my own tongue.
None
of my comments in this coda reflect on Peter Simpson’s excellent work. De gustibus non disputandum est.
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