Those for whom the landscape tradition constituted
“real” New Zealand art resolutely, even patriotically,
defend their position; those sympathetic to Modernism
regard the tradition as conservative and dated. Many of
the artists in both camps still burn with resentment, the
Modernists regarding the landscape painters as empty
daubers, the landscape painters rejoining with accusations
of charlatanism, lack of real skill and the commonly
expressed view that abstract paintings in particular
could be done by anyone in their garage.
During the last thirty years the landscape tradition as it
was practiced during the Kelliher years has been
relegated almost to obscurity while the work of Colin
McCahon, Gordon Walters, Sir Mountford Tosswill
Woollaston, Milan Mrkusich and others has received
constant critical attention and public exhibition. Of the
landscape painters only Peter McIntyre has received
any significant reassessment. A dichotomy still exists in
the public mind: the landscape tradition constitutes
accessible “low” art while non-objective or abstract
painting is seen as difficult “high” art.
This exhibition brings the two opposed traditions
together in direct juxtapositions so that the distinctive
qualities of both can be re-evaluated. It includes works
drawn mainly from the collections of two Trusts, the
Kelliher and the Fletcher, each one devoted to a single
aspect of the debate.
The first exhibition of the Kelliher Art Competition was
held at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1956. Three
judges, Mrs Annette Pearse, Curator of the Dunedin
Public Art Gallery; Peter Tomory, Director of the
Auckland City Art Gallery and Australian painter,
Ernest Buckmaster, chose Leonard Mitchell’s Summer
in the Mokauiti Valley as sole winner of the £500 prize
from 201 entries, 72 of which were displayed at the
Auckland Art Gallery.
The entry conditions had called upon artists “to paint
the visible aspects of New Zealand’s landscape and
coastal scenes in a realistic and traditional way”.
Paintings were to be in oils and measure not less than
seven and a half square feet and completed within the
previous year. This, with only slight variations, was to
remain the thrust of the competition until it came to an
end in 1977.
To a large extent the competition reflected the artistic
taste of one man, Sir Henry Kelliher, who in 1961
founded and funded it and who endowed the Kelliher
Art Trust in order to ensure that representational
landscape painting should continue to be encouraged.
The Kelliher Art Award was intended to be a bulwark
against Modernism and a shaper of national consciousness
through artistic endeavour.
A New Zealand Herald editorial of 3 August 1961,
headed Art and the Average Man, gives support to the
then Mr Kelliher’s views, observing that “art in many
countries shows a tendency to drift off into forms which
are meaningless to all but the cultists. In such
circumstances the ordinary man decides that art is not
for him and turns to other things. National life thereby
becomes the poorer.”
Kelliher openings were black-tie affairs, extensively
reported in the press. The work of individual prizewinners
was illustrated in newspapers and magazines
throughout the country. At the 1961 opening held at
Wellington’s National Art Gallery the public received
from Mr Kelliher himself the message that landscape
paintings were a healthy and stimulating influence on
traditional art in New Zealand and that the faithful
portrayal of the beauties of nature were the gift of an
all-wise creator.
Not everyone agreed with these sentiments. On August
21st 1961 the New Zealand Herald reported the
remarks of John Steegman, a visiting English scholar,
writer and art lecturer:
“It is deplorable that that kind of competition should be
encouraged publicly. Competitions like the Kelliher
prize set the clock back for years to come for
progressive art. It is completely wrong-headed. Instead
of affording support for artists it is putting them in
chains by binding them to restrictive conditions of what
they should paint.”
Wellington art critic Russell Bond drew attention to the
“extraordinary uniformity of outlook of the exhibitors”,
accusing them of simply painting to fit the mould from
which previous winners had emerged and making
works devoid of imagination and depth of perception.
So the battle lines were drawn.
The Fletcher Collection had been founded by Sir James
Fletcher in 1962 and was initially devoted to collecting
historic New Zealand watercolours. In 1967, designer
Peter Bromhead, in charge of the refurbishment of
Fletcher House at Penrose, Auckland, advocated the
purchase of contemporary paintings to hang in the new
spaces. One of the first of such works, Gordon Walters’
koru painting, Tahi, is included in this exhibition.
The purchase of contemporary paintings gathered
momentum when, in 1973, the art dealer and
commentator Petar Vuletic was appointed artistic
advisor to the Fletcher Collection. Working closely with
George Fraser and a number of Fletcher employees
with an interest in contemporary New Zealand
painting, he put together a highly innovative collection
by younger artists including Milan Mrkusich, Geoff
Thornley, Robert McLeod, Ian Scott, Max Gimblett and
Gretchen Albrecht, among others. The work of these
painters was wholly abstract and non-representational,
yet it was hung with landscape paintings mostly chosen
for their innovation rather than their ability to create a
topographical record or capture the moods of nature. In
succeeding years, under the guidance of Lady Trotter in
Wellington and John Gow in Auckland, the collection
continued to buy adventurously. Employees who lived
with the paintings had their imaginations stretched and
their horizons widened.
Artists such as Evelyn Page, Rita Angus, Louise Henderson,
John Weeks, Bill Sutton, Gabrielle Hope and May Smith
had been experimenting with form and technique well
before the Kelliher Art Awards were inaugurated in
1956. However, when Jean Horsley dared publicly to say
that “Art is not scenery” she felt that she had brought
herself into disrepute. She recalled that in the 1940s she
too had painted “Pretty pictures, blue skies, blue seas”
but now wanted to reach out. Rather than these, it was
her abstract expressionist works, inspired by New York
exhibitions of paintings by Philip Guston, Mark Rothko,
Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell that were to
form the basis of her reputation in New Zealand after 1960.
By contrast, many of the Kelliher judges carefully chosen
by Sir Henry Kelliher for their sympathy with traditional
landscape painting commented on the artist’s ability to
depict a scene. In 1960 the Australian judge, painter
Rubery Bennett, drew viewers’ attention to the sea mist
which floats before the headlands in the distance, and
the painting of the sea in 18 year-old David Barker’s
2nd prize winning work Beach Strays, Takatu. “Here is
water that looks like water,” he observed. Accuracy of
depiction provides the standard of judgment.
Nothing could be further from the mind of Colin
McCahon when he painted French Bay 1956. Its
starting point maybe indeed have been a small bay on
Auckland’s Manukau Harbour, yet McCahon’s strictly
geometric approach to composition results in a work in
which formal qualities are more dominant than scenic
ones. The colour is subdued, (no brilliant sea or sky
blues here), planes overlap, perhaps suggesting light
reflected off water.
Peter McIntyre’s Manuherikia, Central Otago 1956
demonstrates a similar sharp contrast with
McCahon’s Rothko-esque Painting 1958. The title
alone indicates that McCahon regarded the work as an
abstract exercise without figurative reference of any
kind. In 1960 he entered the painting into the Hay’s
Art Prize in Christchurch where it occasioned fierce
controversy after the judges failed to agree that it
should be the sole first prize-winner. They eventually
announced two co-winners, Francis Jones’s Kaniere
Gold Dredge and Julian Royd’s Composition. In 1961,
after heated debate, the Christchurch City Council
declined to buy the McCahon work for the Robert
McDougall Art Gallery and it was passed around
various large companies before being purchased at
auction in 1987 by Lady Trotter for the Fletcher
Challenge Art Collection.
The relationship between Owen Lee’s Evening
Shadows, North Auckland and Don Binney’s Southern
Journey is perhaps more direct in that both artists
retain a sense of topography; Binney simplifying and
abstracting the landforms of Mill Creek, Rakiura
(Stewart Island) and Lee making much of shadows, as
his title indicates. The same could be said for Robin
White’s Hooper’s Inlet in comparison with Ernest
Buckmaster’s Warrington Station, included here
because the Australian artist was the first Kelliher
judge. Although he worked without fee, Buckmaster
painted extensively throughout New Zealand with Sir
Henry Kelliher’s support and encouragement as
evidenced by the large number of his works that hung
in DB hotels throughout New Zealand.
A comparison between Milan Mrkusich’s The Contained
Waters and Graham Braddock’s In the Stillness reveals
a still sharper distinction. Braddock’s painting is an early
homage to American Photo-Realism while Mrkusich’s
non-objective canvas, one of his most resolved Emblem
paintings, binds fluid gestural areas within nearly
symmetrical geometric shapes. A number of these works
have titles which allude to water yet the association is
always metaphorical rather than real.
Sir Mountford Tosswill Woollaston’s Bayly’s Hill and Leonard
Mitchell’s Summer in the Mokauiti Valley reveal other
aesthetic differences. Woollaston, always scathing about
the Kelliher artists, creates a vertical landscape with his
characteristically vigorous brushstrokes rapidly applied,
ever determined to say more about laying on paint than
about depiction. By contrast, Mitchell’s carefully worked
surface, (Vernon Brown commented cruelly that the
work looked as if it had been “knitted”) aims to capture
and fix a remote portion of the King Country " where
the human heart is, on the grass where we build our
wealth and our substance and our life."
Yet not all of the Kelliher winners relied on tried and
tested formulae. In 1959 Sir William Dargie, one of
Australia’s most eminent artists and a frequent Kelliher
judge, awarded 3rd prize to Paul Olds for a Wellington
cityscape that exhibited a loose quasi-expressionist
technique quite unlike any previous or succeeding
entry. A similar thing occurred in 1969 when Rodger
Harrison’s Totara Flat Hut won the first prize. The
artist has taken as his starting point the verticals of a
dense pine forest to produce a composition emphasising
rigid vertical linearity. Robert McLeod’s Terrible Tartan,
forms an amusing abstract counterpoint. Its violently
contrasting colours, roughly applied to create an exuberantly
lurid grid, ironically reflects the artist’s Scots background.
Perhaps more than any other artist, Ian Scott
comments on both the landscape tradition and the
abstract. In 1965, while still a student at Elam where he
was taught by Colin McCahon, Scott entered Low Tide,
Anawhata into the Kelliher Art Award and won a
special prize. From the early 1970s he had started
experimenting with pure abstraction and in 1976
began work on the Lattice Series of grid paintings that
were to occupy him for the next decade.
Since 1990 Scott has worked on a series of “paintings
about paintings”, a significant number of which involve
the appropriative re-painting of Kelliher prize-winning
works. Images of figures such as Ernest Buckmaster,
Cedric Savage, Douglas Badcock and others are shown
at their easels painting outdoors. In many of them the
figure of McCahon looks disconsolately out of the frame.
A DB logo underlines the relationship between Sir
Henry Kelliher and his company Dominion Breweries,
and screen-printed ferns the strongly nationalistic urge
of the Kelliher Art Award and the landscape tradition.
These are witty paintings, designed to confront head on
the relationship between “high” and “low” art. In early
2002 Scott completed The Golden Past, a work that
includes a re-painting of Peter McIntyre’s Canterbury
Shearing Shed, a Kelliher prize-winner of 1961. The
artist’s ironic take on what is, after all, his own
background forms a fitting conclusion to an exhibition
that invites viewers to examine the very same issues.
Peter Shaw
August 2002 |
