Art in Otago's First Century

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 463, 7 May 1948, Page 10

Art in Otago's First Century

A CENTURY OF ART IN OTAGO. Edited by H. H. Tombs. Harry H. Tombs Lid., Wellington. :

(Reviewed by

Charles

Brasch

HIS recent addition to the ; works published in honour of Otago’s first century is a book of rather more than one hundred pages, containing 60 reproductions of paintings, drawings, etc. seven of them in colour, about a dozén other illustrations, a history of art (or. rather of art societies) in the province by H. V. Miller, and chapters by various writers on Frances the Dunedin Art Gallery, Maori art, the Dunedin School of Art, Letters, and Music. I give the list because while the book includes an index of artists whose work is reproduced, it has no table of contents, and the would-be buyer cannot readily see what he {is getting. The foreword states that other chapters were written, but then excluded owing to lack of space, which suggests surprisingly amateurish editing. The: illustrations take up more than half the book’s space, and the chapters on painting more than three-quarters of ‘the text; the other subjects might, indeed, have been better left out. On the whole the book gives a fair sample of the kind of work which has been done in Otago and is now to be seen there. We are not likely to get another on a comparable scale for many years, and we may be grateful once again to Mr. Tombs for an enterprise of a kind which he is the only publisher in the country able or willing. to undertake. I want to say this now, because I shall have a good ‘many criticisms to make later. N his history Mr, Miller attempts no _. generalisations and there is of course no "Otago art" as such. Most painters have moved about too much for any local style to grow up or for any of the diverse landscapes and climates of the province to produce a recognisable temperament or impose a common attitude. One might hazard a guess that figure painting is practised less there than in other provinces. Excepting O’Keeffe’s self-portrait and the early studies of

— Frances Hodgkins, the portraits and figure paintings reproduced here are of little interest; the current exhibition in the Hocken Wing of the Otago Museum suggests that figure painting was commoner, and better, about the turn of the century. The general disintegration of styles in western painting duting the past 50 years has made it almost impossible for later painters of taste and accomplishment but without exceptional gifts to produce work that could stand beside the cool and charming landscapes of Hoyte and O’Brien (the latter poorly represented here: why was the fine col. lection of his work in the Early Settlers’ Museum not drawn on?) or the colder ones of W. M. Hodgkins. There are signs of the re-establishment in England of a tradition in the shadow of which good but modest painters may again work; the four volumes entitled Recording Britain, now being published by the Oxford University Press, provide one piece of evidence for it; and in time that may have an effect here. In the recent past, painters both in New Zealand afd abroad have had to hammer out everything for themselves amidst the contemporary. flux; naturally most of them were unequal to the task. Excepting that of Rita Angus (Rita Cook), a Canterbury painter who has also worked in Central Otago, there have so far as I know been only two serious attempts during the province’s first century to forge an adequate individual style, those of John Buchanan in watercolour in the sixties, and of Colin McCahon in oil to-day. Buchanan’s noble Milford Sound is reproduced here, but nothing by McCahon. That is the most damaging omission from the __ illustrations, for McCahon is one of the few painters in the country with a fresh personal vision and the courage to follow where it leads him, and his Otago Peninsula landscapes will form, I believe, a landmark in New Zealand painting. The first of them was rejected by the Otago Art Society in 1939 (Mr. Miller makes an oblique reference to this discreditable episode in the society’s history), but another has been shown publicly in Dunedin. To ignore this work

A of McCahon’s and give three plates to art school work was a gross error of judgment. F the nine paintings by Frances Hodgkins reproduced, four come: fromy private collections in Otago, two from the Dunedin Art Gallery, and three, the only late ones, from the Lefévre Gallery in London where she exhibited in recent years. The accompanying text consists of a half-awed, halfpuzzled note introducing an article reprinted from the English Listener. There seems no good reason for giving so much space to Frances Hodgkins. Her mature work has no more to do with Qtago, or New Zealand, than Low’s, and Low gets only one brief mention in the book. Mr. Tombs seems to have been bemused because she, like Rutherford and Katherine Mansfield in other fields, was the New Zealander who made good overseas in a big way. The article which he reprints, apart from the information it provides, is only a quick provisional impression of her, work which does not explain what she tried to do or the nature of her achievement. We should be clear about that if we are not to be misled by the uncritical praise which has been showered upon her in the last few years. She was a painter who built up an exquisite world of rich and subtle colour-colour, not light-a world entirely her own. . Her interest was in nearly flat-and often nearly abstract colour schemes, which were nevertheless always based on real objects. She did not care to explore the relations of objects in space, and her later work is primarily two-dimensional, She was in the best sense an original artist, but she is not quite in the main stream of western painting and she has not the stature of, say, a Stanley Spencer or a Matthew Smith. It is to be hoped that when the present boom in her later work subsides a little the Dunedin Gallery can buy some examples of it to set beside those of her early work which it possesses, HE dozen pictures from that Gallery illustrated here include two of its worst, the vapid de Glehn and the vulgar Russell Flint, but not quite its best. (continued on next page)

To show those might have been misleaaing; as it is the selection gives a rather too favourable impression, for the Gallery’s good pictures-and it has good ones-are lost in a waste of mediocrity. I have not left myself much space to discuss the text of the book. All the chapters suffer from scrappiness, owing less perhaps to the fault of the writers than to the intractability of their subjects. Mr. Miller has assembled a lot of information about the history of the Otago Art Society; the tiresome overlapping between his chapter and those on the School of Art and the Art Gallery must be laid at the editor’s door. Mr. Miller’s notes on the painters are not of much value, and he writes lamentable English, managing to suggest in his finest phrase that among the arts practised in Otago was witchcraft: "The president became Dr. Clarke Hanan. ..." Margaret Campbell on music is a good deal livelier than the other contributors. J. C. Reid, writing from Auckland, does not communicate much enthusiasm about letters in Otago; that is understandable; and at least his approach-his alone-is a critical one. Dr. H. D. Skinner is given one-and-a-half pages in which to write about Maori art in Otago, which is absurdly inadequate. But it was a mistake to drag in the subject at all, for it has no relation to the European arts of the period. Dr. Skinner does not state whether the ornaments and amulets to which he confines his attention (they are illustrated by four plates) belong to the European period; and he does not mention the cave paintings, a surprising omission. The drama is ignored completely. A chapter on it ought to have taken the place of that on Maori art. Another mat~ ter which should at least have been touched on is the criticism. of the arts, particularly of painting, music, and drama. The book, it must be said, has been very badly edited, and it contains too many misprints: But with all its defects, the plates alone make it worth having, and the paper is good, the print pleasantly clear.