New Zealanders Hold Their Own in Art World

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 1 September 1928, Page 26

New Zealanders Hold Their Own in Art World

(Written for THE SUN

R. J. BRETT.)

W

E have been unusually prominent in recent London art exhibitions. Miss Frances Hodgkins held at the Claridge Gallery a show which was much discussed by the

intelligentsia. Mr. Owen Marton filled a room of the Leicester Galleries with his water-colours. At the Abbey Gallery Miss Jenny Campbell and Mr. Roland Hipkins showed New Zealand landscapes in oils and water-colours. And Mr. Frederick Porter took a noticeable part in the retrospective exhibition of the London group (of which he has been vice-president for the past four years), and also in the annual show of the Modern Water-Colour Society. Miss Hodgkins was an immensely brilliant student, who rather scandalised Dunedin, twenty-odd years ago, by the passion of her colour and the freedom of her drawing. She went to Europe and visited New Zealand about 1914 to show her mature work. It is a thousand pities that the Auckland Gallery has no examples of this splendid middle period, which is amply represented in Wellington and the Southern cities. Since then Miss Hoclgkins’s manner of working has radically changed. In the earlier days she used _ only water-colours; the recent show included a score of oils, but these, with a few remarkable exceptions, seemed much less successful than the others. It is not only a matter of medium, however. The painter appeal’s to have lost her happiness of vision,

her joy in pure colour and sunlight. Some of the later pictures have a strange beauty and significance, but in others the strangeness is predominant. Miss Hodgkins has become, in fact, a modern of moderns, and only a keen student of “advanced” art can fully appreciate her work. Some twenty-two years have passed since Mr. Owen Merton left Christ-

; church, where his father, Mr. A. J. : Merton, is a -well-known musician. Owen Merton’s drawings, sent out from Sussex or Brittany or the Pyrenees, j were among the most artistic features :of our pre-war shows. He, too, like I Miss Hodgkins, has changed and mod-

| ernised his manner, but be has not gone nearly so far. His were formerly “coloured drawings,” flat and decorai live in scheme, and with a definite i basis of line. Of the new paintings, many appeared to be done entirely with the brush—sketchy and a little tentative, and often rather weak in foreground. But they are still touched with a true and unaffected poetry. In essence, Mr. Merton is the same painter, and moved by the same impulse to record his quiet moods. All the subjects of this show were found j in France, where he has lived much. His work is best known in America, where he has exhibited regularly since 1918. Four years ago a large drawing was bought by the Brooklyn Museum, and there are two good examples in the Wellington Gallery—but none in Auckland. A very interesting affair was the retrospective exhibition (1914-1925) of the London Group. This is the society with which Epstein and Frank Dobson, Nevinson and Duncan Grant first caught the public eye. Not all of its members are revolutionaries, however, least of all its vice-president. Mr. Frederick Porter, once of Auckland, is not a maker of “pretty” pictures. But he is untinged with eccentricity, and seems to strive toward a complete honesty of state-

ment. A certain roughness and lack of surface charm is in the nature of these paintings. But Mr. Porter has a notable gift for landscapes, and examples of his work should certainly be bought for New Zealand galleries,

Paintings at this predk. porter show were on loan from the collections of the Earl of Sandwich and Mr. Sainwell Courtauld, two of the most famous living connoisseurs. Miss Campbell and Mr. Hipkins are obviously painters of much less experience. There is odd division of style between Miss Campbell’s oils and water-colours. In some of her oils, like the large “Sketching in the Bush,” she essays a bold and masculine manner, with hard lighting effects mor.e suggestive of Australia than New Zealand. But in water-colour hers is distinctly a gentle art, with soft atmospheres and flowing contours. Mr. Hipkins is strangely unsettled—three painters, at least, appear to have used his signature, and two of them are rather crude. But some of his slighter things were very pleasant, and these are both painters who may develop notably R. J. BRETT. London.