NEW ZEALAND'S OLDEST ART GALLERIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 429, 12 September 1947, Page 6

NEW ZEALAND'S OLDEST ART GALLERIES

por many months now THEO SCHOON, a Dutch artist domiciled in New Zealand, has been employed by the Canterbury Museum copying the prehistoric drawings in the limestone caves Of South Canterbury and. North Otago. In this article he offers an explanation of these ancient relics, F all the conquests of man, someone has said, those only endure that embrace his dreams. That may be a hard saying for some people to undelkstand, but in art every picture, drawn on rock by prehistoric man, drawn by a child or painted by Rembrandt, is alive with a certain definite spirit. It has been a moving experience to me as an artist to become gradually initiated into the spirit of a new antl little known form of art which belongs; to the very early history of New Zea-/j land. It has been most absorbing to gain a gradual insight into those essential features which determine a distinct and unique style-unique as all those styles are which have developed independently among isolated communities all over the world. These rock drawings are notable not only for their art and their antiquity, but also for the fact that they belong to a period prior to the extinction of the moa. The practice which gave rise to these drawings deserves special attention, too, for it represents the very core of an ancient spiritual life which so far has received scant treatment. These products of a dream life, so intimately bound up with the waking life, arise out of a religious concept which centred around a spirit-bearing world, in which every tee, every animal and insect, and even the rocks, sand, and water had their spiritual counterparts. Though lives were spent in placating these spirits, no place would grant safety or hospitality unless favours had been secured from its local spirit with due ceremony. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous psge) Would it be in any way surprising, therefore, if the artist-priest had a positive function ‘in these labyrinths of limestqne valleys? Like the priest, the artist was in such communities a link between man and the supernatural world. Modern research among~ those neolithic people in the world who still practise this form of art has found that it was invariably done for magic ceremonial purposes. I find no difficulty in believing that this was true of — Zealand as well. Besides, there is ample evidence in the work itsélf. No other cause could have been responsible for such a distinct set of generally obeyed conventions in the use of ingredients of design, ‘and with it we encounter that strange parallel in other primitive religious art, where the artist has drawn his very strength from such limitations as to us would spell the death of art. Again and again I have found the most surprising and ‘original creations — major artistic feats-which border on the uncanny: frozen music in which the very soul of the mythopoetic Polynesian has been crystallised.