Something New

 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.

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“COLIN McCAHON: THERE IS ONLY ONE DIRECTION. Volume 1, 1919-1959” by Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, $NZ 75); “MOPHEAD” by Selins Tusitala Marsh (Auckland University Press, $NZ 27:99)

2019 is the centenary of the birth of Colin McCahon (1919-1987), regarded by many as New Zealand’s most iconic painter. The most significant event related to this is likely to be the publication of Peter Simpson’s two-volume survey of McCahon’s life and work. The first volume is Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction. 1919-1959. The second volume, Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land? 1960-1987, is scheduled to appear in May 2020. 

With this publication, Peter Simpson again confirms his position as one of the most distinguished chroniclers of our artistic and literary history, as already evidenced in his Bloomsbury South and his editing of the Charles Brasch Journals1958-1973 (both reviewed on this blog). His author’s preface to Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction gives a detailed account of his long connection with McCahon’s work, as both curator and author of catalogues and explanatory books about the artist. He tells us that the book’s title comes from McCahon’s comment that a poet or artist needs “one direction” – a clear vision or concept to guide his work, even if the subject of that vision changes.

To make one clear bibliographic comment, this is a large and capacious book, just shy of 360 pages (including index, bibliography and scrupulous notes and references). I’m sure Simpson wouldn’t take offence at the remark that, while his text is excellent, among the book’s chief attractions are the large reproductions of McCahon’s work, often spread over two broad pages. In effect, the book itself becomes an accessible gallery of McCahon’s major paintings. Spending time with them is as important as spending time with the text.

Simpson’s prose style is clear, clean and unambiguous. Unlike some writers on the fine arts, who appear to be addressing a coterie or in-group, Simpson is aware that he is writing for a wide audience. As he says in his Introduction, “this book is intended not only for the already knowledgeable but also for those reading about McCahon for the first time.” (p.21) As well as glossing some art-related terms in his text, he does not hestitate to explain who certain well-known artists and writers were. This does not mean writing down to the reader. It means that there are none of the wilful mystifications one finds in some works on art (especially postmodern ones), which seem designed to put up barriers against the hoi-polloi.

Simpson is at pains to note that Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction is not really a biography. Though it is arranged in chronological order, and though it does give an account of the artist’s life, its focus is on the man’s career and it is primarily an exploration of his work and development as an artist. Simpson reiterates this sentiment in his “Conclusion”. This volume finishes when we are almost two-thirds of the way through Colin McCahon’s life, because that is almost exactly halfway through his career as an artist. Hence the second volume will explore just as much artistic ground as the first.

Nevertheless, the biographical contents are important. Born in Timaru, Colin McCahon spent most of his younger life in Dunedin and Oamaru. He hated being a pupil at Otago Boys’ High School and managed to persuade his parents to send him to the Dunedin School of Art instead. Although Dunedin was where his parents lived, and although he visited them often, in later life he came to loathe Dunedin. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he moved between Nelson, Dunedin and Wellington, often following seasonal labouring jobs, as painting in itself did not provide an income to support a family. In 1942, when he was 23, he married fellow-artist Anne Humblett, and they settled in Christchurch for a number of years. In the 1950s he made the major shift to Auckland’s westernmost, semi-rural suburb of Titirangi, in the Waitakere Ranges.  He held an important position at the Auckland Art Gallery. He did not become the gallery’s director (although he considered applying for the post) but he did deputise before the arrival of the new director Peter Tomory. Simpson notes all the various residences that McCahon and his family occupied, and notes the worries they often had about making rent. But McCahon’s wife and children are left very much in the background and are the subject of passing comments only. The biographical narrative fades out in 1960, when McCahon and family relocated to the inner-city Auckland suburb of Newton.

What is more dominant is Simpson’s careful account of how McCahon’s style changed, and the way different artists influenced him at various stages of his career. Toss Woollaston was an important early influence, when McCahon was almost exclusively a landscape painter, interested in geomorphology (the basic shape and structure of the land) and stripping landscapes down to unpopulated and treeless images. At that stage there was the strong influence of Cezanne and the earlier impressionists. A major change in McCahon’s artistic focus came when in he was in Nelson in 1948-49. In place of the people-less landscapes, he painted New Testament scenes of the Crucifixion, the Annunciation and the Resurrection, all placed in recognisably New Zealand settings. He now claimed as his masters the (religious) painters of Renaissance Italy. Simpson is very careful to note this was no sudden religious “conversion”, as McCahon had always had some sort of religious sensibility. After his move to Auckland, and after visits to Australia where he received some tuition, McCahon had greater awareness of cubism and a new way of conceiving of physical forms. There followed his Titirangi paintings of kauri  and of French Bay and his move into abstraction.  His paintings had always been “symbolic” rather than “representational”, but this was a major change.

Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction ends at the point when he had been for four months in the United States in 1958, and had seen art with which he was previously unfamiliar. He was moving to the greater use of words and script as part of his artistic expression. This was to lead into those stark black, white and grey canvases with verbal statements – but wording was not entirely new in his paintings as he had already made much use of speech bubbles in his earlier religious art.

As Simpson documents it, McCahon was very reliant on a close circle of friends and correspondents when he needed moral support, especially as his work was so often controversial and attracted much loud, and public, negative criticism. The first such controversy was in 1939, when the Otago Arts Society rejected the 20-year-old McCahon’s first well-known painting, “Harbour Cone from Penny’s Hill”. In solidarity with him, some other artists withdrew their work from the OAS exhibition. Later, A.R.D. Fairburn and Denis Glover loathed his religious paintings, and wrote barbs against them. McCahon’s sometime mentor and patron Charles Brasch was, at first, also very negative about the overtly religious works, but he later changed his mind. Most condemned of all were the text-dominated canvases that came later.

It is hard to explore McCahon without at some stage discussing the religious element in his work. In his Introduction, Simpson considers McCahon’s religious art and the matter of whether he was, or was not, a Christian. McCahon had a conventional Presbyterian upbringing and was for a while associated with the Quakers. A crucial point in his life was when, as a young man he “found his own god”. As Simpson notes  “Landscape and religion were never entirely separate in McCahon’s imagination.” (p.39). God, or belief of some sort, was implicit in landscape itself. Yet this could suggest a vague sort of pantheism, and the obvious fact is that, in two major phases of his career, McCahon’s terms of reference were specifically Christian ones. This is apparently an embarrassment to some commentators; and non-believers who wish to see McCahon’s work in purely aesthetic terms can point to a few letters and comments where the artist disavowed any specific form of belief. This rather ignores the fact that doubt is, and has always been, an essential part of religious faith. Few thinking believers have “blind faith”, and questioning God or dogma has always been part of the religious experience (check out sometime “dark nights of the soul” from Augustine to John of the Cross to Therese of Lisieux and others). Simpson says “Such questions of belief and disbelief were never finally settled for McCahon, but – to the undoubted benefit of his painting – were matters of continuous ongoing self-exploration and struggle.” (p.57) Quite so. If all the Elias paintings (there is a generous display of them at pp.308-313) are about “misunderstanding” and “doubt”, they are still firmly in the religious tradition.

Both visually and in terms of its commentary, Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction is a rich and rewarding book. I hope this judgment is implicit in all the above comments. I’ll conclude with a couple of minor matters.

First, as a barbarous philistine, I found it endearing that McCahon apparently loved watching Westerns when he went to the movies (Chapter 3) – their horses and sweeping plains and music. Without being precious about it, I would say this chimes with the man who loved landscapes – and especially naked and underpopulated landscapes waiting for some human imprint.

Second, a little gulp of sorrow comes to the throat  in reading this statement early in the book: “Throughout much of his life, McCahon was an indefatigable letter writer, a practice that with the advent of personal conmputers has virtually disappeared.” (p.20) Simpson isn’t the first to note this, but it does at once suggest how hard it will be for future biographers to get at the intimate thoughts of people from our own era.

Some purely personal responses:

I’ve already finished my review of Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction; but I thought I’d add a few purely subjective remarks.

In his Introduction, Simpson notes, correctly, that people who like one phase of McCahon’s artistic development often do not like another. He sees the great divide in opinion relating to the change in McCahon’s techniques after his 4-month trip to the USA in 1958. In other words, people who like the earlier McCahon landscapes and (more-or-less “representational”) religious paintings, tend not to like the later abstractions, cubism and text paintings – and vice versa. Personally, the text paintings interest me, as do the Titirangi kauri paintings. But irremovably embedded in my mind are the early landscapes, and I think it has to do with my early exposure to them in childhood. McCahon’s masterly “Otago Peninsula 1946-49” slapped me in the eye as soon as I first saw it on display in Otago, and for years a postcard reproduction of it has been pinned, by a thumb-tack, to my study wall. It’s a masterpiece. I saw “On Building Bridges – triptych” (painted in 1952) on dsplay in the Auckland City Art Gallery as a child, and of course, having a logical child’s mind, couldn’t figure out why the three pieces did not neatly fit together. Now I think I get it. But the really iconic painting for me (and I’m sorry that it comes so early in McCahon’s career) is “Takaka, night and day”, painted in 1948. Again, this was a childhood encounter in the Auckland City Art Gallery. I recall an adult saying that the hills looked like upraised knees, and ever since, I’ve detected an implicit anthropomorphism in much of McCahon’s early, people-less, landscapes. Even more mysterious was the concept of night and day in one canvas. This is still the painting I first think of when I think of McCahon. All three of these paintings are reproduced in Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction.

Here’s a second, unrelated, comment. I’m surprised Simpson does not make more of the French artist Georges Rouault. I grew up in a house where there was a framed print of Rouault’s “The Old King” hung at the entrance to our playroom – a very daunting image which I remember thinking was a representation of King Herod. When I looked at “Fifteen Drawings for Charles Brasch” (pp.174-175 of Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction) they struck me as being in exactly the same style as Rouault’s work on similar themes. I viewed a gallery of Rouault’s work, in a side-room of the church of Saint Severin, when I was on a trip to Paris 2017; and McCahon immediately popped into my mind. The similarity is unignorable. But Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction has only one passing mention of Rouault (p.129).

            *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

            I’m dealing very briefly with Selina Tusitala Marsh’s enjoyable picture-book Mophead not because I’m giving it the flick, but because I can say very briefly what it is and who its prime auduence is.

Mophead is a sturdily bound hardback telling an inspirational story in pictures as much as in words. It was both written and illustrated by Samoan-Palagi poet Selina Tusitala Marsh, New Zealand’s first Pasifika Poet Laureate.  As a kid, she was often ridiculed by others at school for her huge mop of frizzy hair, and she earned the nickname “mophead”. Embarrassed, she tried to tie up and control her hair until a talk at school by Sam Hunt told her that it was best to be herself. So now she rejoices in her mop of hair as an expression of who she is (a bit like Cyrano de Bergerac and his proud nose). And she has carried her trademark mop confidently into the various adventures of her adult life.

The pictures are lively and expressive, the text is bold and the message is clear. I can see Mophead going down very well with schoolchildren who need a bit of encouragement and confidence, and that is the book’s target audience. I am happily passing it on to one of my teenage grand-daughters.

Any misgivings? Much of it is self-promotion (I sang before the Queen, I met President Obama etc.). But I guess that’s part of the self-confidence the book is promoting.

Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“BLOOMSBURY SOUTH – The Arts in Christchurch 1933-1953” by Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, $69:99)

            I have just spent two full days reading and thoroughly enjoying Peter Simpson’s Bloomsbury South, and I am in danger of gushing. To restrain myself, I will therefore begin with two comments that are not directly about Simpson’s fine text.

First, a comment on Bloomsbury South as a piece of book production. It is a sturdy, almost-square-shaped hardback produced with generous margins around its double-columned text. Just as important, it is very generously illustrated. This is important when so much of the book concerns the visual arts. We would feel cheated if Rita Angus and Toss Woollaston and Colin McCahon and many others were treated in such detail without the illustrations to reproduce the specific art works that are discussed. It is also illuminating to have photographs of the stage productions mounted by Ngaio Marsh and reproductions of the work of Caxton Press, given that drama, poetry and printing figure as largely as painting does. Text and visuals work beautifully together in this book.

Second (and here I might be treading on trickier ground), I suspect that much of what Bloomsbury South has to say will not be news to anyone reasonably versed in New Zealand’s literary and arts history. As I read it with great pleasure, I found a good part of it traversing ground that has been covered in Lawrence Jones’ Picking Up the Traces and Stuart Murray’s Never a Soul at Home and Gordon Ogilvie’s capacious biography of Denis Glover and even Rachel Barrowman’s A Popular Vision with its political emphasis on left-wing influence in the arts. Perhaps all I’m saying is that many of the people Simpson discusses have been discussed elsewhere, and I was not at all surprised by most of the things that Bloomsbury South says about individuals and about the varieties of “nationalism” in New Zealand culture in the 1930s and 1940s.

Having said all that however, I have to note that Simpson is as much concerned with place and with relationships between individuals as he is with the “progress” of the arts in New Zealand.

In his preface, he asks why Christchurch was such a vital centre of the arts in the twenty years he covers (1933-53), and why its influence thereafter faded as Wellington and Auckland became more artistically alive. His conceit is that Christchurch in its arts heyday was like London’s Bloomsbury in the ‘20s and ‘30s, where “both scenes were marked by the presence of a group of talented individuals of varying sexual orientations, all closely linked by friendship and similarities of aesthetic and intellectual outlook.” (Introduction p.3) As he remarks, in Christchurch nearly all the significant painters, printers and poets in the 1930s lived within walking distance of one another (and within walking distance of Cathedral Square), with many of them cohabiting. He is also aware that, for all their “nationalism”, the leading young talents of those years were essentially Modernists patterning their work on models from overseas, which their elders spurned:

“ ‘Bloomsbury South’ also points – admittedly somewhat loosely – to the tendency of New Zealand artists in this era to model themselves on what was happening in London, Europe and occasionally the United States, and to bring these imported models to bear on the physical and social realities of their own time and place, a daring fusion of imported modernism and home-grown nationalism.” (Introduction p.8)

Dividing his text into three parts, Simpson first covers the “boom” years for emerging artists and poets in Christchurch, the pre-war years 1933-38. Although haughty, devoutly Anglican, patrician and many years older than those she influenced, the poet Mary Ursula Bethell (Chapter 1) is seen by Simpson as the “godmother” of younger, and mainly male, talents whom she encouraged and who came to appreciate her influence in wedding landscape to questions of New Zealand identity. Charles Brasch, Denis Glover, Allen Curnow and (the composer) Douglas Lilburn all acknowledged her influence. Meanwhile (Chapter 2) the friends, poet and printer Denis Glover and poet Allen Curnow, were working out their own “nationalist” identity in close correspondence. The setting up of the Caxton Press by Glover (and Leo Bensemann) was a turning point, as it meant the work of younger writers would now be published. Simpson is fully aware that not all innovative work was then being done in Christchurch. R. A. K. Mason, A. R. D. Fairburn and Frank Sargeson, leading figures in emerging literature, were all Aucklanders, but they came to rely on the Caxton Press in Christchurch “partly because of [their friend, radical Auckland printer Bob] Lowry’s unreliability”. (p.47). Simpson is also fully aware that ‘progressive’ left-wing theatre was happening in Auckland, but it was in Christchurch that Tomorrow magazine reviewed the Aucklanders’ efforts and became the focus for arts and political commentary at odds with established pieties. Here, however, there is an important reminder that, even if a younger generation was asserting itself, they were not all of the same mind. The more politically-oriented were often at odds with the artists. The left-wing H.Winston Rhodes in Tomorrow took a very negative view of Allen Curnow’s Not in Narrow Seas. Says Simpson: “A growing tension was evident…. between Rhodes’ socialist utopianism in Tomorrow and the critical nationalism of the Caxton poets.” (p.71)

When he turns to the painters (Chapter 3) Simpson chronicles the work of “The Group”, those Christchurch artists who (from 1927) separated themselves from the conservative Canterbury Society of Arts (CSA) and hung their work in separate spaces, circumventing the CSA’s selection committees. Here, however, there is again the fact that not all the younger talents were of one mind. Most of them were scathing about those who ran Canterbury University College’s art department. But Rita Angus “all her life… spoke warmly of her art school education under [conservative] teachers rejected by [Toss] Woollaston and [Leo] Bensemann as stick-in-the-mud old fogies.” (p.82). Even more tellingly, Woollaston and Bensemann never liked each others’ work – the point being that whatever else was being produced in Christchurch art in these years, it was not a “school”.

When Simpson moves onto the war years 1939-45, he at first speaks as if Christchurch’s artistic golden weather was continuing. The early career of Douglas Lilburn (Chapter 4) is recorded almost as a triumph, with Lilburn at his most productive [there is a detailed account of his collaboration with Curnow on Landfall in Unknown Seas]. After James Shelley left for Wellington, Ngaio Marsh (Chapter 5) took over at the Little Theatre, producing imaginative stagings [often with music by Douglas Lilburn] of Shakespeare with student casts. Her Hamlet in modern dress, Othello and other productions were greeted enthusiastically by the general public. Says Simpson: “Metropolitan standards were brought to bear on local practice, in ways that paralleled achievements in other arts such as poetry, painting, musical composition and printing.” (p.157) The “Group” (Chapter 6) acquired new members in the 1940s, including Colin McCahon, Doris Lusk and Molly Macalister. But the war years were beginning to disperse what had been a cohesive arts community in Christchurch, the first major departure being Denis Glover’s going off to war service in 1941. He did come back to post-war Christchurch and was around when Caxton Press published Allen Curnow’s influential anthology of New Zealand poetry and the first work of the teenaged James K. Baxter. But in 1946 there was what Simpson calls “the first signs of decline in Christchurch’s cultural leadership” (p.131) when Douglas Lilburn and Evelyn and Frederick Page all moved to Wellington.

So to the chapters on the end of “Bloomsbury South” in the years 1946-53. In 1947, Dunedin-based Charles Brasch set up Landfall (Chapter 7), which was published by Caxton Press in Christchurch and did establish itself as the country’s most influential literary periodical. But in what Simpson calls “a clear sign of generational shift in poetry and other arts towards the North Island cities in the post-war era” (p.210), most of the new poets introduced by Landfall were Auckland- or Wellington-based (Ruth Dallas being the only South Islander). Restiveness with the Christchurch scene is shown in the early careers of poet James K. Baxter and painter Colin McCahon (Chapter 8). Both at first found a patron in Charles Brasch, both were at first linked by religious themes and South Island landscape, both moved through periods of alcoholism towards Catholicism (never formally accepted by McCahon but still a major influence on him). And both left for the North Island. Baxter came to see Landfall as staid and conservative and began to reject the oppressive theme (promoted by Curnow) of New Zealanders as identity-less strangers lost in a vast and alien landscape. In the post-war years (Chapter 9) the Christchurch artistic scene disintegrated. In the visual arts, the city’s conservatives were able to exert themselves to the extent of making an issue out of the purchase of a painting by Frances Hodgkins. There was “the disarray at the Caxton Press from 1949 to 1951, brought on by [Denis] Glover’s disintegration.” (p.255) Back from the war, Glover was “binge-drinking with increasing frequency.” (p.273) At the Caxton Press “overproduction, declining sales and the mayhem caused by Glover’s absenteeism and alcoholism led to a financial and management crisis.” (p.274) Caxton still produced creditable work, but it now had rivals in the Pegasus Press (also in Christchurch) and the Pelorus Press in Auckland. The Little Theatre, where Ngaio Marsh’s productions had been staged, burnt down in 1952. In 1953, Rita Angus followed Lilburn, McCahon and Baxter to the North Island. The Auckland Art Gallery proved more receptive to both McCahon and modern art than its Christchurch equivalent. Although Peter Simpson doesn’t stress the point, it is clear that “the Group”, once representative of innovative art in Christchurch, was itself becoming more conservative.

By the mid-1950s, younger poets were refusing to accept that there was “never a soul at home” as Curnow had said, and were asserting their identities as New Zealanders fully attuned to New Zealand. The main literary squabbles were between Auckland and Wellington, which were now the major centres of high culture. According to Simpson “Progressively a sort of literary gang warfare had broken out, involving a complex pattern of personal, generational, regional and aesthetic disagreements that became increasingly ill-tempered on both sides as the 1950s continued.” (pp.278-79)

Christchurch’s day as “Bloomsbury South” was over.

In giving you this bald summary of Simpson’s book, I have failed to make many comments assessing it. I will now, like a literary accountant, tot up some negatives and positives.

There are just two, relatively minor, things on the negative side.

First, I think that Simpson underplays contemporary political pressures on artists and writers in the decades he is writing about. Although the Depression and the War are mentioned, they don’t figure greatly in this narrative. We are told that Denis Glover’s peers were surprised when he joined the British Navy in late 1941 because “he seemed to be a pacifist.” (p.180) But surely Glover’s pacifism was really the left-wing “anti-war” feeling of 1939-41, when Hitler and Stalin were in alliance and many left-wingers were persuaded that a war against Hitler was a mere shindy between rival capitalists. Once Adolf double-crossed Joe in mid-1941, the war suddenly became a holy war. It was then that Glover signed on. Pacifism? Not really.

Second, perhaps I’m a little more sceptical of some things than Simpson is. It is impossible to recover exactly what stage productions were like [unless they are filmed]. But I keep wondering what Ngaio Marsh’s stage productions would really look like if a time-machine could take us back to see them. Reading between the lines of positive reviews, which Simpson quotes, I note how a number of critics at the time noted the declamatory way in which dialogue was conveyed. I also note Marsh’s strict insistence on English voices and her refusal to cast anyone who sounded the slightest Kiwi. Obviously her productions had a great impact on people starved for quality live theatre, but would they now seem antiques and alienating, rather than great theatrical leaps forward? But then this is a case of my scepticism – not really of any shortcoming of the book. It’s the same way I feel about both Monte Holcroft’s three long essays on New Zealand’s cultural identity and Bill Pearson’s “Fretful Sleepers” (both discussed in Bloomsbury South). To me they are overstated arguments about defunct cultural questions, which were probably not as their authors conceived them anyway. And in Holcroft’s essays there is much barely-disguised yearning for a home like Mother England. I keep thinking of C.K.Stead’s comments in his latest collection of essays, Shelf Life [see review on this blog], that much of Curnow’s early “nationalism” was disguised Anglocentric yearning for “Home”.

Okay – that’s as negative as I can get. I may be a little surprised that Simpson saves for his last chapter his clearest arguments for Christchurch’s brief cultural dominance, but he makes his case lucidly. I am also interested positively in other surprises. Perhaps with good reason, Walter D’Arcy Cresswell – not the greatest of poets – tends to get a very bad press now, especially from gay writers who see him as the villain who dobbed in a fellow gay (see my comments on Paul Diamond’s article in How WeRemember). But for all his many shortcomings, Cresswell is revealed in Chapter One of Bloomsbury South to have been a shrewd and capable critic of Ursula Bethell’s poetry and is also later revealed to be the first person to discuss openly the coded homosexuality in Sargeson’s stories, when others were reading them simply as assertions of New Zealand identity. Another surprise – a rather sad one – is when Simpson discusses Louise Henderson’s influential paintings and then tells us “unfortunately the whereabouts of only one of these paintings is currently known” (p.89).

While Simpson lauds Brasch’s achievements in setting up Landfall, he is not blind to the publication’s shortcomings, noting “Brasch… paid lip-service to classic Maori culture… though the periodical never [i.e. under Brasch’s editorship] fully transcended its strongly monocultural character. Maori culture figured only as an object of occasional Pakeha attention.” (p.202) Simpson is also aware that “Inevitably in such a small culture, there was a somewhat incestuous intimacy between author and reviewer: indeed in 1948 Curnow reviewed Baxter’s latest book and in 1949 Baxter reviewed Curnow’s.” (p.221)

What I would most praise Simpson for, however, is his avoidance of gratuitous gossip. Bloomsbury South briefly notes that, as among London’s Bloomsberries, there was quite a bit of unorthodox homosexual and bisexual coupling within Christchurch’s arty set in the 1930s and 1940s. But once stated, this is not dwelt upon. Simpson states that some have speculated on the sexuality of Ngaio Marsh or Mary Ursula Bethell, but he does not pursue the matter. He notes in very few words the brief sexual liaison of Douglas Lilburn (not yet certain of his homosexuality) and Rita Angus, and her resulting miscarriage (pp.116-117). He then leaves it at that. His focus is on the city’s cultural achievements and that is as it should be.

So how do I round this over-long review off? I thoroughly enjoyed the sane and calm way that Simpson negotiates his way through all the clashing personalities while still conveying his enthusiasm for the city and its culture. Despite my blasé comment at the top of this review, I learnt much. Above all, I enjoyed it. A good read and an urbane view of a time and its art.

Purely personal and irrational footnote: Oh very well, then. I have refrained from commenting on some of the snobbery that is implicit in much self-consciously high culture, and that was certainly present in Mlles. Bethell and Marsh. But it is a small matter in the overall impact of this book. More importantly for me, Bloomsbury Self helped me renew my platonic love affair with Rita Angus and her art. She was beautiful, she didn’t hold grudges and among other masterworks she did paint Cass, which remains one of the real question marks concerning New Zealand Pakeha identity. I note it is treated as such in Roger Horrock’s essay collection Re-Inventing New Zealand.