DUNEDIN GROUPS AND GALLERIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 751, 4 December 1953, Page 8

DUNEDIN GROUPS AND GALLERIES

HE plain man in Dunedin reigns unabashed, as we found last November when Eric Westbrook sought to introduce us to contemporary British painting, and the plain man knows what he dislikes, whatever else he doesn’t know. Art at least evokes emotion here, which is no doubt something. Anyway, Westbrook s’en va-t-en guerre without perturbation, happily dogmatising, and his banner collects its followers for all its strange device. Incidentally, his welcome visit reminded us, amongst other things, of the unsatisfactoriness of some of our terminologythe word "modern," as applied to painting, has been virtually drained of any meaning whatever and covers with its threadbare mantle anything from Cézanne to Klee, from van Gogh toyes, Munnings. The Dunedin Art Gallery has its own historical collection. This has just been immeasurably enriched by the gift of an English donor of over 200 pictures of the great schoo] of British water colours, an event which raises the Gallery to a new level. It has become almost customary in some circles to attack its buying policy. Actually this has been. self-con-sistent, although it may well be vulnerable on the question as to whether value has always been obtained for money spent. The Gallery opens its doors generously to a, variety of outside exhibitions, and is the chief agent in Dunedin in the encouragement of the appreciation of art. In November we saw an exhibition in the Gallery of the work of Dunedin

artists, in December the gay pictures by Glasgow schoolchildren, This year we have had a Portrait Exhibition, the Florentine. School (in reproduction) on loan from Wellington’s National Gallery, the Early British Water Colours from the Empire Art Loan _ Exhibition Society, the Ganymed Prints (British Council in conjunction with Adult Education), and the interesting collection of signed lithographs, woodcutsy wood éngravings and -linocuts so generously presented to the Gallery by Mr. Rex Nan Kivell, whose own historical collection of New Zealand art we are promised on loan later. The most exciting of these exhibitions was the recently-ended showing of Contemporary British Art (British Council the fairy godfather again) with Frances Hodgkins’s twice-served luminous fish, David Jones, Gwen John (a tara avis too seldom seen), Ben Nicolson, Colquhoun, and Henry Moore, whose drawings do so much to explain -or excuse-his sculpture; an excellent drawing, too, by another sculptor, Barbara Hepworth’s Conceftration of Hands. At present showing in the Gallery is the British Council’s lively Sporting Prints Exhibition, 1790 to 1840 -Jorrocks plus. } The Dunedin Public Library has a gallery, too, recently enlarged, approached by stairs which evoke a mild sense of adventure, Many attractive exhibitions have been held here. Adult education showed the Unesco Old Masters Prints there early in the year, but it is more often used for showing original work. The Otago Art Society’s Spring Exhibition was held recently at

the Library. Many of the exhibitors seemed to have successfully curbed the reckless spirit of adventure. H. V. Miller’s small wash drawing, Leith Valley, was a work of finished distincttion. A Scots street scene was a treasure brought back by O. G. Cox from his year in Scotland. Greta Graezer’s monochrome portraits were gvod and. her Fish and Chips delicious. (Some of her debonair Chinese water Golour figure studies grace a bookshop here.) But Alan Howie showed the greatest spontaneity and vigour among the exhibitors, and his tree studies, with the colour reduced to blues and greens, marked a new step in his journey in search of himself. The Independent Group, six strong, are still the most exciting and rewarding group working in Dunedin. Their fourth exhibition in the Library showed them in a phase of maturity and essurance surpassing any previous performance. F. G. Shewell’s water colours of Otago scenery had magnificent energy and attack. I was much smitten ‘by his Otago Riverbed, Alan Howie again had some zestful landscape drawings in which colour was used with great deftness and subtlety-smal] dabs of red, yellow, blue or green wash applied with singular restraint and tact. W. J. Reed had returned to North Auckland for

Maori figures and new colour harmonies. Frank Gross had followed his own way again with characteristic determination, giving us the same strong rhythmic line in all his landscape oils. The versatile Rudolph Gopas (who has now shifted to Christchurch) again showed how many things at once he can compass successfully. Edward Murphy, another connoisseur of the new, presented us with a number of monoprints, a process which produces slightly unpredictable but nearly always elegant though fuzzy results. Another group of artists declared themselves in a joint exhibition this winter at the Library, the New Group. It should perhaps be explained that neither the Independent Group nor the New Group is a school. The members do not imitate each other. Their partnership is altogether untrammeiled except that they exhibit together and in practice no work has any element which clashes violently with that of its fellows. The New Group includes a good plain potter, Helen Dawson, and four paint-~’ ers. Alison Austen’s delicate drawings and water colours were exquisitely controlled. The Otago landscape for John Blackman abounds in giant forms scarcely tamed in his drawings and paintings. Rona Dyer presented work both distinguished and varied-wood engraving, lithograph, water _ colour, gouache, oil. Hef figures have a curiously nostalgic flavour of sad antiquity, John Middleditch’s oils were exhilarating explorations of interesting shapeshulls of fishing boats, wheels and implements. The New Group will be well worth watching. | We had the South Island Secondary Schools’ Exhibition showing recently in the Library, a credit to both pupils and teachers. The main misgivings created by this heartening show were the preponderance of narrative pictures and the complete incomprehensibility of the principles on which the various awards were made. An extremely interesting exhibition by a North Island raider, Geoffrey Fairburn, just concluded, introduced. Library gallery-haunters to an original talent which reassembled the motifs of Pacific anthropology to make pictures of considerable vigour and complexity. The Visual Arts Association, launched last year, has as its objective the improvement of standards of design in articles of common use. This year it held two film showings and a lecture, on painting, and one exhibition with a discussion of furnishing fabrics, all at the ee 2 he Association seems to have Y ee ee so far in stimulating interest among the aesthetes than among busy business tycoons who make or import, and thus there is still about its activities an element of preaching to the * converted. But every good intention must start somewhere. Dunedin artists are realists. They price their pictures so that the ordinary pérson can buy them, and the thirtyguinea touch is refreshingly rare. However, this makes it all the more unfortunate that it is still only the extraordinary citizen who buys. I feel constrained .to repeat the Westbrookian ‘tenet that. an original picture gives a Satisfaction to its owner that a print, even ofa great painting, cannot create,

David

Hall

The last of four articles in which writers from the main centres have discussed the year’s activity in art.